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HOW THE HINDU RIGHT TRIUMPHED IN INDIA
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Isaac Chotiner
January 24, 2024
The New Yorker
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_ A razed mosque, a new temple, and the rise of Narendra Modi. _
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the opening of the Ram Mandir,
in Ayodhya, India., Rajesh Kumar Singh / AP
On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the
opening of the Ram Mandir—a Hindu temple—in Ayodhya, a city in the
northern state of Uttar Pradesh; this has been a long-standing dream
for both Modi
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the Hindu-nationalist movement he leads. “It’s the beginning of a
new era,” he told a crowd of thousands at the temple’s inaugural
ceremony. Several decades ago, he was a young Hindu activist helping
raise funds for the temple, and now he is a Prime Minister in his
second consecutive term.
India’s decisive break with secularism as a semi-official state
ideology could be said to have begun in Ayodhya. It was there, in
1992, that the Babri Masjid, a four-hundred-year-old mosque, was
destroyed by a mob aligned with both Modi’s political party, the
Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a
paramilitary organization he belonged to. (Mahatma Gandhi’s
assassin, Nathuram Godse, was also a member of the R.S.S., which has
been involved in numerous cases of communal violence throughout its
history.)
The B.J.P. and the R.S.S. conceive of India as an explicitly Hindu
nation, despite the fact that the country has a population of more
than two hundred million Muslims. (Both the B.J.P and R.S.S. consider
the Congress Party, which ruled India in the decades after its 1947
independence from the United Kingdom, as overly committed to
secularism.) In 2019, several months after Modi’s reëlection, the
Supreme Court of India—after a prolonged legal dispute—allowed for
the construction of a Hindu temple on the site, which many Hindus
believe is the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. (Many Hindu
nationalists also claim that the mosque was built on the ruins of a
previous temple to Ram.) The conclusion of the saga this month,
highlighted by Modi’s remarks, will almost surely be a centerpiece
of the Prime Minister’s campaign in the spring, when he is expected
to win a third term.
I recently spoke by phone with Mukul Kesavan, an essayist and
historian who lives in New Delhi
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During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity,
we discussed the roots of Modi’s popularity, the violent history of
the Ayodhya dispute, and what makes India different from other
countries experiencing right-wing political movements.
DO YOU THINK IT’S OVERSTATING THINGS TO SAY THAT WHAT WE SAW THIS
WEEK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SYMBOLIC MOMENT IN THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES
IN INDIA?
No, no, it’s not overstating things. Basically, there is and was a
nationalist project other than the anti-colonial one that began in
1925 with the foundation of the R.S.S., an organization which
explicitly had a kind of Hindu majoritarianism at the center. The
R.S.S. always felt alienated from the Congress Party and anti-colonial
nationalism, because it tried to create a unifying ideology for what
is essentially a subcontinent that’s as large as Europe. And it did
so by standing European nationalism on its head. Instead of arguing
that there’s a kind of prior homogeneity which constitutes the
nation, the Congress Party nationalism argued that the Congress
represents the Indian nation because it represents its diversity.
It’s a kind of zoological nationalism that says, Look, India is a
human jungle. We are the zoo. We, in a sense, are representative of
all these different communities.
It’s this peculiar, pluralist nationalism that’s detested by the
R.S.S. and Hindu-majoritarian movements, which actually wanted to
model themselves on a certain kind of conservative mid-European
nationalism based on notions of homogeneity.
The reason that this is symbolically so important is that the Ram
Mandir was the ramp which brought the B.J.P. to power. It allowed them
to create this astonishing mobilization of Indians for political
purposes. It helped the B.J.P. get into government, in the late
nineteen-nineties, and then Modi ran with it. And, while he has
achieved and consolidated his political power through two elections
and an absolute majority, I think it’s always been the larger
ambition of the R.S.S., which is in a sense Modi’s progenitor, to
literally reconstitute the Indian Republic. There is a sense in which
they think of the period between 1947 and 1950, when the constitution
was written, as one where the soul of India was suppressed, and they
would like to do it over again.
CAN YOU TAKE US BACK TO THE EARLY NINETIES AND THE DESTRUCTION? MY
SENSE, AT LEAST FROM READING ABOUT IT, IS THAT IT TRULY CONSTITUTED A
SHOCK. AND NOW IF YOU FOLLOW NEWS IN INDIA, SOMETHING LIKE THIS WOULD
NOT SEEM SHOCKING AT ALL.
The Ram-temple movement was activated in the eighties. The idea that
the site of the temple was the birthplace of Ram, that there was a
temple buried underneath it, that Hindus should be allowed to worship
here, is an old argument going back to the nineteenth century. The
organizations that lead the Ram Mandir movement are all formally
affiliated with the R.S.S. And this includes the B.J.P., which was
invented in the late seventies. And the history of the Ram-temple
campaign is basically the history of provocations that aren’t
addressed by the state either because dealing with them seemed to be
too much trouble, or the matter seemed too sensitive.
In 1992, when the building is in fact demolished, it’s a shocking
business because nobody actually thinks it’s going to happen. And,
in any case, nobody actually knows what will bring down a large
mosque. As it happens, it’s incredibly efficiently demolished with
people using the crudest of tools. Essentially, it is brought down by
hand, as [the B.J.P. co-founder] L. K. Advani and other luminaries of
the B.J.P. and its affiliates watch. It’s a massive communal shock
because the kind of violence it unleashes, both in North India and in
Bombay, is just massive. It’s a shock to the extent that the
principal perpetrators of this, the leadership of the B.J.P., all sort
of fake shock that they didn’t want to do this because it was
clearly a criminal act and none of them actually want to go to jail.
But, historically, the shock is that its resonances are so deep.
SEVERAL DECADES LATER, THE SUPREME COURT GAVE ITS BLESSING TO THE
BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE. WHAT DID THAT RULING DO, AND WHAT DO YOU THINK
IT SAYS ABOUT CHECKS AND BALANCES IN INDIA TODAY?
There were two separate legal disputes about Ayodhya. One was the
criminal action for the destruction of the mosque. But the dispute
that was settled in favor of the Hindu party by the Supreme Court a
couple of years ago was what is called a title suit. There were Hindu
and Muslim parties who sued for control of the site where the mosque
was. This pre-dated the demolition of the mosque, and it went on
rumbling through. The title suit was decided by this unanimous verdict
by the Supreme Court, and, in the course of their judgment,
interestingly, the justices say that the destruction of the mosque is
a criminal act and, therefore, it’s to be condemned and so on. But
then, through a series of not-so-legal arguments, they came to the
conclusion that all of the land of the temple, of the mosque, should
be given to the Hindu party. Essentially, they make some of the right
noises about the demolition of the mosque being a bad thing. But,
nonetheless, they say, For the following reasons, we think that it
should all go to the Hindu party, and we’ll give the Muslims five
acres elsewhere. I think it’s basically the court capitulating to
Modi and the movement. And, also, courts often think, What if we give
a judgment that’s unenforceable? What if there is a sense in which
what is just will not apply?
WE HAVE SEEN THE RISE OF RIGHT-WING POPULISM AROUND THE WORLD, AND ONE
QUESTION PEOPLE HAVE IS: WERE THESE IDEAS ALWAYS THERE, WAITING TO BE
UNLEASHED, OR DID MATERIAL REALITY CHANGE TO ALLOW POLITICAL SUCCESS
FOR THESE MOVEMENTS? HOW DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT IN THE CONTEXT OF
INDIA?
After independence, Congress nationalism was based on three pillars.
One was a kind of pluralism that the Congress called secularism, even
though it’s not quite what Americans might mean when they say
“secularism” or the French might mean by “_laïcité_.” But
the second pillar is the notion of economic self-sufficiency: the
sense that India, to be politically independent, has to be
economically independent—the kind of old-fashioned notion that you
should be industrially autonomous and not rely on the West for the
tools of modern production. The third one has to do with India’s
place in the world and foreign policy, the idea that, past the Cold
War, we map our own destiny. The three ideas are sort of
interconnected in the sense that you want India to be an internally
inclusive country. You want it externally to embrace the world without
taking sides. And you also want your newly found social independence
to be boosted by economic independence, which is understood in a
fairly narrow way as a planned economy and industrial capacity.
But, fundamentally, this promise breaks down because the new Congress
governments don’t address the principal task of creating jobs. So,
basically, India needs to produce industrial jobs to shift people over
from agriculture. And this failure led to the collapse of the Indian
economy in the nineteen-sixties. By about ’67 or ’68, Congress
popularity was ebbing. And, by the eighties, you had Indira Gandhi and
the Congress Party dabbling in opportunistic sectarianism. So Mrs.
Gandhi even patronized the Shiv Sena, the very party that, in 1992,
rampaged through Bombay, killing Muslims.
THE ENTIRE CONCEPTION OF THE INDIAN STATE, INDIAN SOCIETY, INDIAN
RELIGION—IT FEELS LIKE SOMETHING LARGER HAS HAPPENED THAN JUST THE
WEARING AWAY OF CONGRESS SECULARISM AND ITS POPULARITY.
In his book on India, Perry Anderson argued essentially that the
Congress was always a Hindu majority party, and that it represented
upper-caste Hindu interests. He also argues something that is
routinely argued by the Hindu right, which is that there was a kind of
cumulative resentment over the centuries of the suppression of Hindus
and their culture, and that it was inevitable that a nationalist
project in India, especially after Partition, would in fact be a
principally Hindu enterprise.
I think this is a facile argument. If you were to ask Muslims both
rich and poor, north and south, whether they think that India in 2013
just before Modi’s ascension was a different place in terms of their
place in it than it is now, I think they’d say yes. So I don’t
think that’s a good historical explanation, because I can tell you
existentially, and I speak as a privileged middle-class Hindu, but
even I can tell, regardless of where your political sympathies are,
you can tell that the tenor of India ten years after Modi has taken
over is radically different.
The question is, How did he become so popular? What is it that allowed
him to win an absolute majority? That’s the fair question. If you
take 1984 as a kind of starting point, because it’s the first major
pogrom in a big city, to argue that between 1984 and 2024, there was
some inevitability about a gathering Hindu project, I would argue that
you could certainly see the milestones. [_In 1984, following the
assassination of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards,
thousands of Sikhs were murdered in communal violence in New Delhi and
other Indian cities_.] But, if there is a joker in the pack, it is
Modi. Have you read Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy?
I HAVE NOT.
There is a character called the Mule, who’s kind of a maverick, who
throws predictions off course. Modi is that maverick, because, if you
look at what he does after the Gujarat pogrom in 2002, what’s
interesting is that he doubles down on it, unlike Advani, who’s
always covert about these things. [_Modi was the chief minister of
Gujarat when hundreds of Muslims were killed in ethnic violence by
mobs of Hindus; he was never convicted of allowing the attacks on
Muslims, but he was banned from the United States for his role in
letting it occur_.]
Advani helped start the Ram Mandir movement, but he was constantly
trying to retrofit what he did within the four corners of some
interpretation of secularism or constitutional propriety or something.
Modi does none of this. There is an interview in the BBC documentary
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incredibly intimidating and rude to this female BBC journalist. And
you can see in him, even twenty-two years ago, a willingness to see
this to the end in a kind of unapologetic way. And I think what is
interesting about Modi is that he never backs down from the most
brutal enunciation of what he’s doing. It’s either silence or
reaffirmation of his project.
MODI COMES ACROSS QUITE DIFFERENTLY TO MANY AMERICANS THAN A LOT OF
THESE POPULIST FIGURES, SUCH AS TRUMP OR BOLSONARO. I DON’T THINK
THAT’S HIS IMAGE HERE.
I’m always a little shocked by that. Most of the time, Modi’s
careful to project an image of gravitas. That partially passes within
the Western media establishment as sobriety. As opposed to Trump or
Bolsonaro, or people who are happy to shoot their mouths off because
they feel it rouses the base. The problem here is this really
radically misleading term “populism.” Essentially, what passes for
right-wing populism, I think, sitting in Delhi, is majoritarianism.
Whether it’s Bolsonaro or whether it’s Trump or whether it’s
Orbán or Putin, essentially all of these people feed off a political
environment in which they convince a nominal majority that they are
under threat.
The reason that people don’t see the menace of Modi is because they
look at him as a kind of organizational person. That he’s the head
of a party—unlike Trump, who had to remake the party in his own
image. Or Macron, who is not the same kind of person, but, again, who
invented a party for himself. Modi sits at the head of a
hundred-year-old organization and its affiliates. He is an
organization man, but he’s also a charismatic demagogue. So he can
out-Trump Trump when he’s on the campaign trail. If you hear him
speak in Hindi when he’s campaigning, he’s much more demagogic and
much more menacing than Trump is. Trump makes really bad, rude, and
effective jokes. He has a kind of shtick, which is on the border of
being funny. There’s nothing funny about Modi’s rhetoric when
he’s on the campaign trail.
WHY IS THIS MOVEMENT SO MUCH MORE POPULAR WITHIN INDIA THAN SIMILAR
MOVEMENTS SEEM TO BE IN OTHER COUNTRIES? MODI’S THE MOST POPULAR
LEADER IN THE WORLD IF YOU LOOK AT PUBLIC-OPINION POLLING, AND HE’S
ALMOST CERTAINLY GOING TO BE ELECTED FOR A THIRD TERM.
Modi adds a lot to the B.J.P.’s vote. He is the B.J.P.’s banker
when it’s a national election. If we had a Presidential form of
government, he would be a shoo-in. But, even in a parliamentary form
of government, he raises the B.J.P. vote by a margin that is sort of
staggering. I don’t think there’s any other political leader in
the world who makes such a difference to his party’s fortune.
Sometimes this causes internal tension, because people don’t
necessarily want a single charismatic individual to represent a
project. But it also seems that Modi is exceptional as the kind of
battering ram that they use to achieve what they’ve always wanted
to.
To return to when he was chief minister of Gujarat: he was enormously
popular within the business class, and he got a reputation for getting
things done. You might disagree with his philosophy or economic
development, but within those terms he was seen as a decisive economic
manager. What he does alongside that is even more important; he
essentially manages to convince the Gujarati electorate that his
decisiveness in being a strong politician is joined at the hip with a
nationalism that keeps troublemaking minorities in their place. And
2002 was really pivotal. The fact is that he first let this pogrom
happen and he then stared down the people who were criticizing him. He
had this combination of being a decisive, autocratic manager of
economic affairs, of making visible improvements in the
infrastructure, of being modern in a sense, and then he seemed to
embody strength and decisiveness. And that strength and decisiveness
were manifested both in the fact that he got things done and in the
fact that he put Muslims in their place.
THIS IDEA THAT INDIA WAS RULED BY MUSLIM INVADERS FOR TOO LONG AND
THAT, FINALLY, HINDUS ARE ASSERTING THEMSELVES SEEMS LIKE A MUCH
LARGER PART OF INDIAN PUBLIC DISCOURSE NOW THAN IT DID TEN OR FIFTEEN
YEARS AGO. AND THIS AYODHYA EVENT SEEMS LIKE A METAPHOR FOR THAT. DO
YOU SEE THIS AS SOMETHING THAT WAS ALWAYS SUBTERRANEAN AMONG HINDUS IN
INDIA, BUT JUST WASN’T TALKED ABOUT PUBLICLY? OR THAT IT WAS MERELY
STIRRED UP?
Notions of national community are made through mobilization, and made
through arguments and dreams and political victories and traumatic
events. There’s always been this political tendency within India,
even within the Congress in the fifties. There’s a kind of folkloric
way in which it’s always been a part of political conversation. And
I think, in any society, especially a society like India, which is
gradually very slowly drawn into the great mills of education and
syllabi and formal academic notions of history, the way in which they
meld with folkloric history—there’s going to be a kind of
unevenness in which people think of their past.
Here I’m going to be sort of reductive: nothing that you say will
actually work unless you produce employment, unless you produce
education. There was a sense in which Indian politics was ripe for the
plucking by the end of the century because you don’t have a program
anymore. You have parties marking time, making little coalitions. And
into this comes Modi, who has a coherent ideology, which he’s
willing to back up with decisive action and violence. So I think he
harnesses a bemusement and a frustration. I think what he does is he
turns a very modern and republican disenchantment with the republic
into an endorsement for what has been a long-standing, time-honored
ideological position. Except that he supercharges it.
YOU SAID IN AN EARLIER ANSWER THAT, WHEN THE MOSQUE WAS INITIALLY
DESTROYED, THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO, THERE WAS WIDESPREAD CONDEMNATION OF
IT EVEN AMONG PEOPLE IN THE B.J.P. WHO WERE WORRIED ABOUT THEIR IMAGE
OR NOT WANTING TO GO TO JAIL. AND NOW IT SEEMS THAT, LOOKING AT THE
CELEBRATION THIS WEEK, THERE WAS ALMOST NO OPPOSITION POLITICALLY AT
ALL.
It literally is the world turned upside down. Modi created a new
notion of what it means to be respectable or demonstrated that
respectability is not what you choose. What you choose is power and
the will to power, and I think that resonates with people. The people
who support Modi see him as a kind of redeemer. They vest in him
hopes, which from my point of view is terrifying.
_ISAAC CHOTINER
[[link removed]] is a staff
writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q.
& A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media,
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* India
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* Narandra Modi
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* populism
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* right wing
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* Hindu Nationalism
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