The Hindu Right dates back to the nineteenth-century revivalist and nationalist movements in India, which sought to revitalize Hindu culture as a means of resisting colonialism. As it developed through the twentieth century, particularly in the writings of Vir D. Savarkar in the 1920s, Hindutva has taken on a distinctively right wing, anti-minority stance. The Hindu Right has sought to promote and spread this communalized discourse to an increasingly large segment of Hindu society, particularly with the creation of the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) in 1964. Founded at the behest of the RSS, the VHP was intended to infuse the politics of Hindutva with a specifically religious vision.
Unlike the RSS, which had functioned as an elite organization, the VHP was intended to popularize Hindutva identity among the masses and Hindus living abroad. The phrases of Ghar Vapsi and Love Jihad were coined to gain populism among the Hindu masses and have been called for itsincreasingly extreme and violent anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The Ayodhya campaign, in which the Hindu Right sought to have the Babri Masjid, a Muslim mosque dating back to the 16th century, replaced with a Hindu temple, proved to be enormously successful in generating broad-based support for the Hindu Right. The VHP and subsequently the RSS and the BJP stirred up a controversy of enormous proportion, alleging that the mosque was built on the site of the birth of the Hindu god Ram.
The Hindu Right demanded that the Babri Masjid be removed and that a temple commemorating the birth of Ram be built in its place. The campaign succeeded in mobilizing thousands of supporters, some of whom followed the marches to Ayodhya, many others of whom sent money and bricks to Ayodhya to help construct the new temple. After a steady escalation in the anti-Muslim political rhetoric and the demands for the destruction of the mosque, a mob destroyed the Babri Masjid on December 06,1992. The destruction of the mosque triggered massive communal riots around the country in which thousands were killed. Again, Muslims were at the receiving end of those riots.
While many of the political leaders of the BJP could not condone the violent destruction of the mosque, they did not condemn the action either. Despite the national outcry against the Hindu Right and the role of the BJP in the destruction and the violence that followed in its wake, the political momentum of the BJP continued to grow, as the state governments that were dismissed ultimately were re-elected.
The Temple/Mosque politics helped the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to gradually gain political power in New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s successful ascension to political power in New Delhi in May 2014 was the ultimate outcome of the destruction of the Babri Masjid by right-wing forces.
In February-March 2002, when the well-planned and organised carnage of Muslims occurred in Gujarat leaving over 2000 Muslims butchered in the wake of the pogrom, the then chief minister Narendra Modi(a former activist of the Sangh Parivar’s campaign to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya) consciously remained inactive and failed to seriously discharge his command responsibilities as Gujrat burned.
At the heart of the Hindu Right’s approach to secularism is a policy of assimilation. It is a policy that aims at denying and ultimately obliterating cultural and religious minorities and diversity
India’s ruling BJP, a part of the so-called Sangh Parivar, seems to have viewed the destruction of the Muslim monument, Babri Masjid, as a necessary political task keeping in view its own political and electoral prospects at the time. The present Prime Minister of India had been a volunteer in the campaign to construct a temple for the mythical Hindu god-King Ram at the very spot where the Babri Masjid stood. It was claimed that the disputed mosque stood at the very spot where a Hindu temple for Lord Ram had existed in remote past. Hence it was necessary to remove it to facilitate the proposed temple construction.
However, the cause of construction of a Hindu temple for God-king Ram at Ayodhya is still alive. The Supreme Court of India in April 2017 ordered the retrial of the two cases pending before it: one relating to law and order issues and the other relating to the issue of alleged conspiracy to demolish the mosque.
On the 9th November 2019,the Supreme Court Of India declared the final judgment on the Ayodhya Dispute. It ordered the disputed land (2.77 acres) to be handed over to a trust to be created by Government Of India to build the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. The court also ordered the government to give an alternate 5 acres of land in another place to the Sunni Waqf Trust for the purpose of building a mosque as a consolation.
The BJP, now the sole ruling party of India, has made enormous political and electoral gain from the massive religious mass mobilisation and violence during the 1990s and after. Both central and state governments in India who share a responsibility have failed to prevent and control communal riots. One of the main failures has been in the sphere of reforming and professionalizing the police force. Control over the civil and police administrations is at the heart of the broader struggle for power, since police are seen as instruments of the party in power, which uses them to harass their opponents/minorities, protect their supporters and deny protection to their rivals.Upholding the ideals of ‘Hindutva’, the currently in power BJP and the RSS have received immense flak for attempting to convert India into a fully Hindu nation-state, by often engaging in state backed ‘militant Hindutwa Terrorism’.
The Hindu Right has continued to use Hindutva to attack the legitimacy of minority rights. Hindutva continues to mean the assimilation of all minorities into the majoritarian way of life. Hindutva is an attack on the rights, indeed, on the very legitimacy of religious minorities. As a call to assimilate or otherwise undermine the very identity and integrity of minority com- munities, it is based on a total disregard and lack of respect for other religious groups. As a result, its political deployment can only be seen as promoting enmity, disharmony, and often hatred between religious groups.
At the heart of the Hindu Right’s approach to secularism is a policy of assimilation. It is a policy that aims at denying and ultimately obliterating cultural and religious minorities and diversity. It is a policy that is most specifically directed at the Muslim minority, but that also includes other religious minorities that pose any threat to, or are in any way different from, the dominant Hindu norm. The effort to defend secularism from the onslaught of the Hindu Right will thus require a direct confrontation locally as well as internationally, over the issue of minority rights and, a democratic revitalization of the principle of secularism.Failure to do so will only establish that, the claims of India being the largest democracy in the world was in fact, the greatest ‘Con’ played in modern history. The waiting game has now begun.
The writer is an independent analyst, with interest in International and Regional Affairs