Emergent
Challenges Before
The New Government
By Goldy M. George
19 July, 2004
Countercurrents.org
Praveen
Togadia's announcement on Doordarshan that VHP is aiming to build organisations
in 100,000 villages of the country based on Hindutva agenda and Hindu
Nationalism is a serious matter. Prior to this the BJP, in its recently
held Mumbai meet, had already declared that it is going to strengthen
its Hindutva agenda. In a resembling move RSS in its annual meet in
Raipur had cofirmed that it will be forcing BJP to stride its Hindutva
agenda. In the view of RRS, VHP's step to build up Hindutva political
force is more acceptable since it is already infuriated by the BJP and
had expressed its displeasure. The argument put forward by the RSS is
that BJP has diluted its Hindutva agenda and that is why the people
had expressed their confrontation through the ballot. Hence the Sangh
Parivar is looking forward to a more concrete Hindutva program.
All sections that
believed in non-communal democratic means of governance have warmly
welcomed the overthrow of the BJP government. The majority of this section
believes in a secular democracy.
The question of
conversion and re-conversion was a major feature that was propped up
by the BJP-RSS twin. Misinformation campaign was on a high scale against
the minorities, particularly the Christians and Muslims. Slightly different
but a higher degree of a similar character was the propaganda against
the Dalits and Ambedkarite groups in different parts of the country.
This went to the level of questioning the authenticity of the reservations
allocated to Dalits and also the review of the Constitution Yet another
tactics applied was the direct confrontation with the Dalit communities
and the DYFI-CPI (M) activists.
Turning India into
a Hindu nation is the prime agenda of RSS and undoubtedly BJP alongwith
all other tributaries of the Sangh Parivar subscribes to this. However
the present socio-political scenario is not as conducive to make such
an announcement. This was the effort of BJP in their last tenure with
the review of the Constitution, saffronisation of education, toppling
the ICHR, ICAR, etc. communalising the police and military, appointment
of hardcore personnel on high offices and so on.
RSS thinktanks assess
that BJP lost its edge on the Hindutva vote banks, as it diluted it
during the last one year of its tenure. If we look closely on the BJP
regime, all that BJP did was establishing of Hindutva Raj by taking
up all the agendas of RSS. Invention of new forms of Hindutva and implementing
it was the prime agenda along with speeding the globalisation process.
This had two grounds - one was to attain the complete support from the
hardcore fascist Hindus and second was to accomplish a rapport with
US imperialists.
Both fascism and
imperialism are two inter-dependent and inter-linked facets of capitalism.
While globalisation is supposed to capture the global economic and political
power by cutting the national boundaries and establishing/capturing
the market, fascist forces acts as their local agents in its approaches
and attitudes with a bonus of suppressive socio-cultural and religious
domination.
The global governance
can afford to accommodate and promote fundamentalist and fascist regimes
as long as they are useful weapons in their hand because they have several
things in common. That is why despite the State's crucial role in the
Gujarat genocide, Washington never intervened with any principle disagreement
strong opposition, but when there is any reposition to challenge the
global capital regime it is met with war as it was the case of Afghanistan
and Iraq.
The major challenge
now is how the UPA government reverse these trends at the national level.
It is to be remembered that these are the two aspects based on which
the BJP was out thrown from power - imperialist globalisation and Hindutva
fascism. The economic policies that fostered the rich investors, while
the poor farmers committed suicide. Media and other agencies publicised
ensex and share market as a major feature of growth, which in fact is
known to less than 2% of the population but crores of people are bearing
the yoke of agriculture debt. While uncountable amount of money is flowing
into investment, there is no water for drinking purpose or to the fields
of the farmer. The question is how is the Manmohan Singh government
adopting new strategy and tactics to turn the current state of affairs
into a welfare state and the one with fraternal norms and values.
In the past the
Communists and Ambedkarites have taken the challenge against these two
outgrown trends, both during the Congress and RSS led BJP governance.
Could they continue to resist and combat the challenges of economic
globalisation and communal fascism? If yes! what are the strategies
of educating people from the grassroots.