Hindutva’s ‘outreach’ to Muslim India
Lately, Hindutva vehicle, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been engaged in an outreach to the Indian Muslim community. Sarsanghchalak Dr. Mohan Bhagwat has toured a madrassa, had a meeting with a leading imam at a masjid and also met with a few members of the Muslim elite. This follows some conciliatory statements on his part in the recent past.
The outreach and its attendant publicity show that the Hindutva strategy thus far has worked. As intended in the strategy of maximum pressure (to borrow a Trumpian phrase) employed by Hindutva against Muslim Indians, the Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in. Muslims - sufficiently softened - are right for the picking. Overwhelmed, the imam – perhaps accurately – referred to the saffronite heavy-weight as rashtrapita.
However, the timing of the outreach suggests that it’s a tactical move and no change of heart is in the offing.
Timing betrays intent
Firstly, it is in wake of the Nupur Sharma episode, so is a continuing bid to stanch adverse fallout of her remarks. The coming year portends a vishwaguru bid by India. India chairs the G20 and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation groupings in the upcoming year, with back-to-back summits in Delhi next autumn. With India figuring among electoral autocracies and majoritarianism eroding Indian soft power, it has much homework to do. For its part, with its 100 years coming up, the mother ship of India’s right wing, the RSS, needs a whitewash to its image, tied up as it is with communalism, violent extremism and non-participation in the freedom movement.
Secondly, alongside has been an India-wide crackdown on the Popular Front of India (PFI), an operation touted as the National Investigation Agency’s biggest. If the incarceration of Bhima-Koregaon-16 is indicative, there couldn’t be much water in the evidence sloshed about by the godi-media. After all, developments in the Nanded case – on accidental detonation of bombs intended to be planted by Hindutva agents in false-flag operations across Deccan - indicate that the Patna blasts – allegedly by PFI - could also well have been false-flag operations. Perhaps, the Patna blast is now being papered over, just as accountability for the Gujarat pogrom is being judicially swept under the carpet. (Recall the implication that human rights defenders made up a false case that the Narendra Modi-led provincial administration was complicit in the Gujarat pogrom.) Under the circumstance of State sponsored subterfuge, an outreach is the carrot in a ‘carrot and stick’ approach.
Thirdly, it helps dilute potential Muslim angst from the outcome of the Gyanvapi Mosque case. The Sarsangchalak earlier reined in Hindu extremists, indicating that they should not go beyond the three sthans – one of which was judicially delivered by Chief Justice Gogoi (for which he was duly rewarded), the second - egregiously reopened by the judiciary – being well on its way and a third - Mathura - in the pipeline.
Like the Titanic, the RSS with 100-years of history weighing it down, cannot change gears swiftly. There are impending strategic moves by the regime that require preemptive conditioning of Muslims, a setting of the stage for the rollout of these moves. This belies a change of heart.
The famous ‘chronology’ – follow-on bugbears of Muslims to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) - was Covid-interrupted. The census has been delayed, likely in order to get the chronology implemented alongside. Bonhomie and expectations from a dialogue in the run-up would defuse Muslim wariness and dissipate pushback, allowing for easier wrapping up of the exercise.
Simultaneous, ridding the Muslim community of its activists and militants will prevent recourse to protests that embarrassed the regime during the anti-CAA protests. A defanged community will line up with its papers and the empty-handed will populate detention camps mushrooming across India.
Since stability on the social front is required till the two summits late next year are over with, the interim will be used to defuse tensions ratcheted up. The carrot and stick policy will be operational. The probability of Muslims succumbing to the carrot would be higher if the stick prevails over its militants. Thus, by when India is declared a Hindutva Republic in the centenary year of the RSS and the platinum jubilee year of the Republic, there would be consensus all round.
Dialogue by all means, but…
To be sure, dialogue has its uses. It can help both sides gain a measure of the opposite side’s thinking. For the RSS, if the dialogue gets Indian Muslims - held hostage in their own land –onboard the Hindutva enterprise, it would be a coup worth attempting. It helps RSS with legitmation. Hindutva’s vishwaguru-hood requires an Indian consensus to be in place. For the beleaguered minority, a dialogue could degrade negativity directed at them and allow them a place in the sun.
However, a dialogue can also be part of strategy to tire out, divide, hide and obscure. Further, peace studies insights have it that asymmetric dialogue is unhelpful. Power equations being awry, in such a dialogue there is little prospect of a win-win result. In such circumstance, the empowered wrest on the negotiation table what it cannot be gained otherwise - in this case willing subscription by the Muslim minority to its relegation in citizenship status.
Presumably, demands when met will lead to a letting up of the stick. The stick has been much in evidence comprising as it does micro-terror in the form of lynchings; violent extremism of processionists; the State’s bulldozer-terrorism; invisibalisation of Muslims through a cultural genocide; in-your-face threat from under-completion detention camps; information war through anti-Muslim misinformation; judiciary-sanctioned political detentions of Muslim Kashmiris and activists; judicial impunity for perpetrators for crimes against humanity; and public threats of genocide. Forcing compromise, even if conceded in a dialogue, would amount to extortion.
A dialogue examined
From the dialogue with the five Muslim wise men – they were all men - it turns out that, substantively, the RSS wishes Muslims to give up beef and accept Muslims are Hindu. Inter-alia, a juvenile demand is that Hindus not be referred to as kafir.
Asking Indian Muslims to declare their Hindu antecedents is triumphalism on the RSS’ part. In the event, the five elite Muslim interlocutors did not subscribe to the Sarsangchalak’s reasoning that Muslims are a Hindu subset. They rightly put the Sarsangchalak wise that Muslims are instead, Indian. However, the civic concept of Indian citizenship has a dwindling subscription. The Muslim elite - its Ashrafs of foreign origin - are liable to miss this churn. This explains Prime Minister Modi asking his party to reach out Pasmanda Muslims, who - duly incentivized - can appreciate their ethnic roots in fresh light, engineering a horizontal schism in Muslims.
Hindutva has it that Muslims are outsiders – professing devotion to an external holy land. Descendants of Hindus are part of the Hindu fold. Hindutva believes conversions were under duress and it magnanimously holds the door open for a return to the fold. The Sarsangchalak’s curious ask that madrassas also teach the Gita, along with the Quran, is thus explicable. It is the first – stealthy - step in Muslims being frog-marched to towards ghar wapsi.
As for giving up beef, it is a championing of an upper caste position. Muslims giving up beef in deference to upper caste sentiment is to buy peace. But, it’s also a step closer to upper caste fetish, vegetarianism, with demands ranging from no meat along kanwariya routes, no meat selling in vicinity of temple sites in Assam, no meat during navratri etc. (Strangely, the last has been absent this year compared to its stridence last year.)
It would be easy to concede that Kafir, having turned an epithet, can be excised from the Muslim vocabulary. The term is associated with jihad. Jihad has been odious since Islamists elevated it to being a sixth injunction in Islam. This misreading and indoctrination in it has seen untold suffering elsewhere in the Muslim world and has been comprehensively rejected everywhere. Hindutva asks that it be acknowledged there are many spiritual paths. Dogmatism of the orthodox on this score could in an internal dialogue be tempered by the logic in revelations such as ‘to each his own’; ‘there is no compulsion in religion’; and that all lands have been blessed by messengers, Hindustan being no exception. Dialogue is predicated on ‘give and take’ and sincerity. Muslims cannot have their cake and eat it too.
Preconditions of dialogue
On a Muslim response to the outreach, deserting a potential joint front with other likeminded political parties, civil rights groups and liberal proponents would not do. Hindutva would prefer Muslims are isolated from such synergistic meeting of minds. A dialogue must simultaneously be broached with others, at the very least for apprising them of developments on the Hindutva track. In light of the right wing dominance in political culture, opposition forces sink or swim together. Hindutva appears to have understood this, therefore its salami slicing approach – singling out Muslims for outreach attention.
Dialogue must also be proceeded with alongside and separately within the community. A takeover of the minority’s imagination by militants or various orthodoxies is best avoided. For its part, Hindutva will provoke militant backlash, so that its use of the stick can be justified. Hindutva is hydra-headed and gargantuan, capable of outpointing a piecemeal approach. Outreach responses can turn out as ineffectual as the successive missives fired off by the Constitutional Conduct Group.
It would be churlish to deny mobilization by Muslims in the gallies and mohallahs in anticipation of an existential threat. The State has been shown up complicit in incidents of violent extremism. There is a Statist push to neuter community self-protection by propaganda that these are ‘sleeper cells’. The State may argue for monopoly over force, but is selective on who it devolves force on to – foot-soldiers of the right wing ecosystem. Its militias parade in localities and join processions. With the State abdicating or absent, civilian protection is a community responsibility.
Inputs for strategising
Hindutva is working towards dealing Muslims a horizontal schism. ‘Divide and rule’ is a Chanakyan edict, adopted by colonialists with good measure. Ridding ourselves of colonialism – as the prime minister wishes - does not mean giving up on traditional practices of governance. The State is already busy with vertical slashes in Assam between indigenous Muslims and Bengali Muslims. Under the challenge, if events equivalent of those originating in the historical meeting in 1906 with the colonial power in Simla are to be avoided, due preparation is called for.
Firstly, Hindus have to wrest back their religion from its perversion by Hindutva, Hinduism appropriated for political ends. It is not a solely Muslim responsibility to save India. The hands of traditional and liberal Hindus have to be strengthened. Just as Muslims withstood Islamism, Hindus must reclaim their religion from political appropriation.
Secondly, a minority cannot exercise a veto if the majority wishes India to go saffron. Muslims can only insist on their space. Minimalist aims are better than ambitious ones.
Thirdly, displacing it can only be through a joint front, formed in face of Hindutva efforts to undercut it. This does not necessarily have to be political party-based, and certainly not on a Muslim political party. People’s movements provide heart, the success of the anti-CAA agitation proving the point. Hindutva has ensured association with Muslims as political suicide. If the political opposition is to be resurrected, Muslims must finally form a vote bank to offset Hindutva’s creation of a Hindu one.
Hindutva has had a head-start of a century. Its organizational capacity and capacity for subterfuge is unmatched. To believe that the supplications for discharge from jails by its icon, Savarkar, were out of funk of the colonial master is wrong. Instead, it was for propagating Hindutva, showing up the single-mindedness in the phenomenon Hindutva that does not balk even at murder, lies, ethnic cleansing and pogroms. To it, ends justify means. It has captured the State, seen in the State lending its foreign policy lately to Hindutva’s purposes. Internal contradictions alone can bring it down, such as a pracharak prime minister-gone-rogue, a Moghul-style fratricide or raitas wanting a piece of the action. When Hindutva is a spent force, such as from an economy in self-destruct mode, Indian Muslims are liable to be scapegoats. As cushion, a dialogue with Hindutva is useful, duly complemented by dialogue all round – within and with other stakeholders, political and civil society.
