Myths and
Dreams:
Hindutva
Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora
by
Angana Chatterji
Dissident Voice
March 10, 2003
The
mobilisation of Hindutva across the United States has damaging effects on the
business community, academy, and society at large. It impacts how culture is
shaped and community built in diaspora. It affects how decisions connected to
India are made, collapsing Indian issues into Hindu issues. It influences how
funding is allocated at universities, curriculum developed, temple organisation
undertaken, development aid disbursed, and hate campaigns mounted against
minority and progressive groups.
In the United States,
funding for Hindu extremism is lavish and contentious. Amidst the recent exposure
of the India Development
and Relief Fund’s collection of hate money for harmful development in India,
the Indian community is divided on the issue of supporting development through
Hindutva affiliated organisations. Development is increasingly a vehicle
through which the conscription for Hindu rightwing extremism takes place. The
actions of Ekal Vidyalaya, Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad, Vivekananda Kendra, Sewa
Bharati and other groups offer incriminating evidence of this. As Hindu
nationalism infects the grassroots across India, Indians in the United States
are questioning the consequences of financing Hindutva.
As we watch, L. K. Advani,
Praveen Togadia and Narendra Modi continue their outrageous crusade, building
support for an authoritarian Hindu nationalist movement. Intent on
demonstrating the incompatibility of according minorities equal citizenship in
India, the Sangh Parivar is popularising the contemptible idea of India as a
Hindu nation that “tolerates minorities even better” than democratically
challenged Pakistan or Bangladesh. In the nightmare of India’s present,
secularism is fast becoming a commitment that the nation is willing to betray.
It is prevalent to claim India as a Hindu nation, at least a nation of “soft
Hindutva.” Hindutva, soft Hindutva, moderate Hindutva – ideologies soft on
genocidee. India is a secular republic, inclusive of diverse faith and
non-faith groups. How can an India no longer committed to secularism remain committed
to democracy?
The acceptability of a Hindu
nation is predicated on the infidelity of non-Hindus, and assumptions of Muslim
and Christian betrayal are imperative to legitimating Hindutva. The Sangh is
assembling the political, social and economic conditions in which to be
non-Hindu in India is no longer tenable, offering genocide as a “rational”
response to the untruth of betrayal. What does loyalty look like when you are
disempowered, afraid, discriminated against? Have we asked ourselves that as a nation?
Diaspora Indians must
acknowledge the ascent of authoritarianism and tyranny in India and stop Sangh
apologists in the United States from justifying hatred in the name of cultural
nationalism. Organisations in the United States supporting India’s development
must recognise the necessity of secularising development, and be vigilantly
critical of development administered by sectarian organisations. Development
implemented by institutions affiliated with the Sangh Parivar only lays the
groundwork for hate and civil polarisation. It fundamentally violates the terms
on which disenfranchised communities wish to determine their right to life and
livelihood. Dalits, adivasis, Christians, Hindus and Muslims across India speak
of how their villages and watersheds intertwine, how crops are dependent on the
run-off water from each other’s lands, and how they cannot afford to hate each
other. In the guise of implementing development, Hindutva promotes malignant
fictions that Christian missionary activity is placing Hinduism at risk, that
Muslims are reproducing at a rate that threatens the Hindu majority of India.
Among adivasi communities,
such “development” inflicts their forcible incorporation into Hinduism. This is
unacceptable even if adivasis materially benefit from development because it
facilitates cultural genocide. Adivasi self-determination movements have been
struggling to rewrite the history of assimilation to which they have been
subjected. The interpretation that they are an “underclass” of Hindus, who,
with “necessary evolution,” may return to the fold is blatant ethnocentrism.
Hinduisation is a ruinous process of colonisation. Such practice is unethical
regardless of who undertakes it and how much economic development results.
Indians in America working
for India’s development must prioritise the self-determination of local
communities, and struggle against the institutionalised inequities of caste,
religion, tribe, class and gender. They cannot base their aspirations for
India’s future on the absurdly unsustainable development modelled by the United
States or support the frameworks of cultural annihilation through which
development is imagined and modernisation attempted by the Sangh. It is not a
matter of building wells or developing roads, it is also a matter of deciding
how needs and priorities are determined, access and decision making is enabled,
how cultural difference is affirmed and identity politics supported.
Development is the construction of political will toward rethinking inequitable
relations of power. It is a mechanism expected to produce equity and ensure the
human rights of the poor. This is possible only if we work with local movements
to develop secular frameworks for change.
Those affiliated with
Hindutva in the United States must be contested as they fashion an India of
their imagination. The intensity and power of becoming in this new world,
amidst vast differences, racism, assimilation, forces of homogenisation, is
compounded by a hollow disconnection from what is most meaningful -- culture,
home, identity, history. The greater the alienation, the greater the desire to
grasp at fiction. In this abyss of diaspora, myths originate of an India that
never was or should be. These myths nurture dreams where the Hindu prabashi
(ex-patriot) can return to purge the motherland from impurities, to cleanse
what is polluted, to restore honour and claim victory.
In the United States, the
fervour of long distance Hindutva nationalism is intense. Dangerous stories
circulate. Muslims are polygamous terrorists whose deliberate identification
and massacre in Gujarat is justifiable, even necessary. The campaign for
trifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir is logical. Ayodhya is a defensible
expression of cultural pride. In this unreflective chasm of proxy nationalism,
a substantial community is supportive of Hindutva or unconcerned with its
wretchedness. Others misrepresent that support for a Hindu India is not support
for Hindutva, only pride in the glory of India’s past, so from it one might
craft India’s future. To rail, as so many do, against the persistence of
structural inequities, of the horrors of history, of the politics of caste and
cows in the present, is only to bear incriminating evidence of one’s own
bastardisation, loss of purity, lack of faith and pride in “Indianness”. What
is this Indianness? Indic culture, chaste, beautiful, Hindu, despoiled by
conquest and colonisation. How is it manifest, fortified? A return to its
origins, a proclamation of its sanctity. What is left out? The reality of
India.
Angana Chatterji is a professor
of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral
Studies in San Francisco: http://www.ciis.edu/faculty/chatterji.htm Email: Angana@aol.com