The
Social Engineering Of Gujarat
By Hemant
Babu
Himal Magazine,
06 July, 2003
The winter moon had already
risen over the Taranga hills, when a group of men and women stopped
our vehicle on the road from Ambaji to Baroda in the western Indian
state of Gujarat. The women were dressed in brightly coloured half sarees,
worn in the typically western Indian tribal style. A man in the front
was carrying a photograph of Hanuman, the monkey god and lieutenant
of the Hindu deity Ram. The light of the full moon bathed the hills
on both sides of the road, and the exchange that followed was as pleasant
as the surroundings.
Donate some money,
said a woman from the group. In the tribal districts of Gujarat it is
customary to stop passing vehicles and collect money around the time
of Holi and other festivals that western Indian tribals celebrate. Only,
this was not the month of Holi, or of any other festivity. Queried about
the purpose of the collection they replied, We are collecting
money for the bhajan mandali (the collective singing of hymns
celebrating deities). The bright red image of Hanuman that they carried
was most certainly not native to their original spiritual repertoire.
Neither was the idea of the bhajan mandali, which is a characteristically
Hindu institution. The image and the ritual had come from somewhere
else. This was in early 1993 when several parts of India, including
Gujarat, were burning in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri
Masjid at Ayodhya. But, the violence had not yet touched the tribal
belts of Gujarat.
A month ago, in the aftermath
of the Godhra incident and the subsequent riots, a friend, who sports
a vandyke beard, was accosted on the same road by a group of men who
live on the gentle slopes of the Taranga hills. But, there was nothing
gentle about these men. Armed to the teeth, they snatched his wallet
and then grilled him about his religion. He was allowed to proceed unmolested
only after he furnished proof of his Hindu bona fides. Newspapers the
next morning reported the killing of Muslim highway travellers, who
were perhaps fleeing the riots.
An end to the violence of
the last two months is not in sight, and, the end of it will not be
the last of it either. The first incident of 1993 was not the starting
point of a process that culminated in this second incident, almost a
decade later. Both events and all that happened in the interim are merely
stages in the acceleration and amplification of a process that has been
in the making for some decades. In Gujarat, where it is today imprudent
to wear a beard and a misfortune to be a Muslim, a pervasive communalisation
has been cultivated even among communities marginalised by Hindu society.
The participation of tribals in the brutal enterprise of Hindutva is
an index of this communalisation. The collection for the bhajan mandali
was only the more benign aspect of a development whose logical intent
was the killings on the road from Ambaji to Baroda and elsewhere.
The arrival of Hanuman in
the Gujarat hills has a cultural and political significance. It is also
a mytho-logical metaphor for the arrival of tribals in the militia of
Hindutva. The military prominence of Hanuman and his army in the epic,
Ramayan, has been understood to signify the martial services rendered
by some forest dwellers for a Hindu purpose of the remote past. Likewise,
the adoption of Hindu symbols and rituals by the tribals of Gujarat
suggests their subordinated absorption, as a regiment of foot soldiers
detailed by the Hinduised polity to kill on command its enemy
of the moment. And as in the mythology, all they get in real terms is
an honourable mention for services rendered. In both the myth and the
current reality (a distinction that often has no meaning in the recent
politics of India), the labours of the aboriginal under-class are directed
towards the almost exclusive benefit of the caste-Hindu leadership that
commandeers it.
Normalcy in a
normal state
Both the violence and its expanding social base have been commented
on at length. What is forgotten in all the rhetoric for and against
the politics that engineered it is the historical-political context
in which this engineering took place. The context may not be the direct
cause of the psyche that produces such extreme forms of violence but
it nevertheless merits description, if only because it may help identify
and explain the direct cause, besides dispelling misconceptions about
both Gujarat and the riots that seem to have found purchase in the media.
Ever since the outbreak of
violence, there have been frequent expressions of surprise that such
events could ever happen in the land of Gandhi, in a state
that is the most industrialised after Maharashtra, in a society with
such a strong mercantile mentality, and in a polity that
has seen such stable governments. These vaunted attributes
are not a necessary impediment to organised violence and in any case
this is not the first, worst or longest riot recorded in the state.
In fact, any or all of these factors could cohabit with or even produce
such violence. Perhaps the idea of riots in Gujarat will be less bewildering
if it is kept in mind that during a riot organised under an extremely
stable government with resources garnered from industrial and mercantile
sources among others, the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, founded by
Mahatma Gandhi, no less, shut its gates and turned its back on Muslims
fleeing certain death. If the political process can so easily erode
the historical legacy of ahimsa in the ashram in which the concept was
elaborated, optimistic assumptions about the restraining influence of
Gandhi, commerce and industry do not place Gujarat under a special compulsion
to be less violent than any other state in Indias degenerating
polity. As Achyut Yagnik, the well-known social worker and researcher
from Ahmedabad, notes: Gujarat is as normal as any other state.
A sign of this normalcy is
the number of incidents of communal violence in the state as recorded
officially. Judicial commissions of inquiry, the Justice Reddy Commission
and the Justice VS Dave Commission, were instituted after two major
riots, of 1969 and 1985 respectively. Both commissions referred in some
detail to Gujarats history of communal violence. The Justice Dave
Commission traced the history of communal violence in Ahmedabad as far
back as 1714 when a bloody riot was sparked off during the Holi celebrations.
The city then was still under Mughal control. Subsequent riots broke
out in 1715, 1716 and 1750. The Marathas, who succeeded the Mughals
in Gujarat, were described by the Commission as being instrumental
in creating a riot in Ahmedabad after the city was occupied by
them.
Hindu-Muslim violence continued
in the centuries that followed, with the pace and intensity picking
up in the second half of the twentieth century. When communal riots
broke out in 1941, curfew had to be imposed for over two-and-a-half
months. The Justice Reddy Commission identified as many as 2938 instances
of communal violence in the state between 1960 and 1969, that is, an
average of approximately three riots every four days during this ten-year
period. It is perhaps more than just a coincidence that this was the
period when the Jan Sangh, the first overtly political front of the
Rashtrya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), and the organisational precursor of
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which by all accounts is responsible
for sustaining the current riots, became active in the state. During
this period, riots began to spread over a much wider geographical area
of the sate, affecting towns like Veraval, Junagadh, Patan, Godhra,
Palanpur, Anjar, Dalkhania, Kodinar and Deesa, all of which have been
hit by the ongoing violence.
Immunity of social conscience
Violence of the communal variety staged in urban and semi-urban venues,
besides rural violence directed against agricultural labourers, particularly
dalits, was thus as routine an aspect of Gujarat as it is of most other
states in the country. But violence of a different, more systematic
and sustained order was inaugurated in 1969. The Hindu-Muslim riots
of that year mark a major break with the hitherto prevalent pattern
of steady if unspectacular social conflict. More than two years of hectic
Muslim and Hindu fundamentalist activity preceded the outbreak of these
riots. Communal violence in the state acquired a more organised form
against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan war of 1965. The Jana Sangh
stepped up the level of patriotic mobilisation and secured a toe-hold
among the urban middle class. This mobilisation cashed in on the shelling
of the area near the Dwarka temple in Gujarat by the Pakistan Navy,
and the death of the incumbent Congress chief minister of the state,
Balwantrai Mehta, when his plane was brought down by the Pakistan air
force.
Muslim mobilisation too was
simultaneously taking place. The Jamiyet-Ulema-e-Hind tried to rally
Muslim support, perhaps with the tacit consent of the Congress Party,
which was then going through a phase of organisational and political
crisis. In June 1968, the national convention of the Jamiyet was organised
in Ahmedabad. Though it professed to be a nationalist organisation which
supported the Congress, the convention showed very clearly that the
Jamiyet was drifting towards communal politics. Its firebrand leaders,
Maulana Asad Maad and Yunus Salim delivered provocative speeches. A
booklet called The communal riots and the harm that they have done to
the country and Hindu religion, authored by the president of the Jamiyet,
Maulana Aqualak Husain, was circulated during the convention. The booklet
gave grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities on Muslims in communal
riots elsewhere in the country. This spurt of Islamic activity prompted
the Jan Sangh to found the Hindu Dharma Raksha Samiti. It also brought
the RSS chief MS Golwalkar to the city. At a rally in Ahmedabad in December
1968 Golwalkar attacked Muslims as invaders who the country could not
tolerate for too long. The idea of Muslims as invaders has been repeatedly
used by Hindu fundamentalists to a point where it has become the received
wisdom, all cogent arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. The riots
that ensued in 1969 left some 1500 people dead.
A riot of this magnitude,
unprecedented in both scale and duration, had a foundational significance
for the politics of the state and the techniques of mobilisation and
orchestration that increasingly came into use. The discrete and scattered
violence of the preceding period can be presumed to be manifestations
of everyday class, caste and community struggles arising from socio-economic
conflicts of a more or less local nature. To that extent, their individual
histories and repercussions were confined to the respective localities
of incidence. The 1969 riots had the critical mass that lent it state-
and nation-wide visibility and gave it a prominent place in the historical
inventory of community grievances. This riot could now be invoked at
will, not just in Gujarat but wherever else tension had to be engineered.
In effect, this was the first explicit politicisation of both communalism
and public violence in the state.
Most importantly, the riots
of 1969 took Gujarati society past the psychological threshold of normally
tolerable public violence, and this not just of the communal variety.
Once the barrier to the use of violence in inter-party conflicts was
crossed, its repeated use acquired a tacit legitimacy as the social
conscience became gradually more immune to the incremental doses of
it that the polity administered. The two instances of extended public
ferocity that Gujarat witnessed after these riots, the 1974 Nav Nirman
movement, launched by the opposition parties to oust the Congress state
government, and the 1981 riots against public policy designed to benefit
lower castes, involved a high level of violence, including in the latter
instance, the burning alive of dalits. Both these instances of extra-parliamentary
politics were remarkably successful in their objectives.
Violent street politics had made an impressive debut in Gujarat and
presented itself as a model worth investing in and emulating.
Making of a pattern
There were two aspects to these agitations that had long-term social
and institutional consequences. One was the induction of middle class
youths into a form of politics not normally associated with them. The
other was the emergence of the incipient social and financial networks
that sustain prolonged violence. The issues involved in both the 1974
movement and the 1981 riots, though they affected a much larger segment
of the population, were articulated most vigorously by the middle class
through its traditional channels. But the urgency of the objective,
particularly in reversing affirmative state action in favour of the
lower castes, caused dissent to spill out of the traditional channels.
Middle class, upper caste youths played a leading role in the anti-reservation
riots, and the focus of conflict here belonged solely to the matrix
of Hindu social relations and its hierarchies of caste. A middle class,
consisting predominantly of caste Hindus who saw themselves as the true
repositories of merit, was defending its privileged access to professional
education and government service. The high level of violence was justified
as a legitimate expression of thwarted merit and one more barrier to
muscular Hindu middle class street politics was crossed. The BJP was
active in the 1981 riots as were its professional front organisations,
notably the university and secondary school teachers associations. The
classroom, the family and many other institutions which crucially shape
social and political values had succumbed to the pressures of protecting
the elite monopoly of state privileges and public resources.
The 1981 riots were replayed
in a more drastic form in the 1985 anti-reservation movement. In many
ways, this sequel marked the beginning of a new phase. Although it partook
of features of all the antecedent riots, it also had a novel dimension.
The roots of Gujarats radical communalism can be detected here.
Methodical violence from now on became a more regular instrument and
expression of electoral politics, recurring with increasing frequency
and refinement of technique and exhibiting remarkable similarities of
character. Soon after it commenced, the riot of 1985 was annexed to
the exigencies of the BJPs political constituency-building drill.
The seemingly undirected riot from below was given a purposeful
leadership by the present dispensation in the state, notably the current
Chief Minister Narendra Modi, acting then in his capacity as a senior
functionary of the RSS. By 1985, the Hindutva cadres had acquired considerable
experience in disruptive politics, many of its leaders having participated
in the 81 agitation.
The BJPs active influence
on the 1985 agitation explains many of its more curious features. The
riots began on 19 March, the day after the newly-elected Congress government
assumed office, and was directed against a policy measure declared more
than two months prior. In January, the Congress government had announced
an increase in the quota of jobs in government and seats in public educational
institutions reserved for backward castes. The riots lasted six months,
much after the policy had been revoked by the government. The fact that
a riot could start two months after the cause that provoked it, and
end as suddenly as it started, points to a high level of coordination
by an existing command structure. It cannot be a mere accident that
the violence extended beyond Ahmedabad to smaller towns and villages,
particularly in those areas where the BJP had acquired influence, notably
in central Gujarat and some tribal belts. South Gujarat, which had previously
been unaffected, now found itself on the riot map of the state. The
social base of the violence expanded to include gangsters, bootleggers
and professional killers. Various reports of the period quote doctors
who described the stab wounds they attended to as the work of trained
hands. The agitation finally degenerated to a point where sections of
the state constabulary abandoned their uniforms and relin-quished their
responsibilities to join the riots.
The beginnings of social
engineering
But there is another compelling aspect of this riot that overshadows
all others. The 1981 riots sharpened the conflict within the Hindu
community, between the upper and lower castes, the victims being primarily
dalits. By contrast the 1985 agitation, though initially directed against
caste-based affirmative action, transformed itself very quickly into
a gratuitous attack on the Muslim community, which had nothing to do
with the reservation policy of the government. In the final reckoning,
an extended riot led by upper caste Hindus that succeeded in revoking
a policy that benefited lower caste Hindus eventually managed to inscribe
itself into the social memory as one more gory episode in the deteriorating
history of Hindu-Muslim relations. Perhaps the danger to a conceptual
and potential Hindu unity from a conflict internal to the
community was being minimised by quietly diverting the focus of the
agitation. If its similarities with the Sangh Parivars current
modus operandi are anything to go by, then the 1985 riot was the real
crucible of Hindutva politics in Gujarat. A kingpin of that agitation
is the kingpin of the current spate of pogroms; the only difference
is that today he officially rules the political roost with a popular
mandate of 55 percent.
There are many crude calculations in the social engineering formulas
of the RSS, but the last 15 years have proved that, given a polity degenerating
in the appropriate manner, these calculations can yield the desired
outcome. From 1990 on, Gujarat has witnessed riot after riot, varied
in scale, but similar in character and equal in significance for the
BJPs rise to political power. The late 1980s witnessed an escalation
in the tempo of the Ayodhya movement and this furnished the climate
for the orchestration of events that would culminate in the partys
emphatic electoral victory in 1995.
The pattern of the first
riot of 1990 is interesting, though not necessarily symptomatic. LK
Advanis rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar
Pradesh came in the immediate aftermath of widespread and violent upper
caste agitations across north India against the affirmative action principles
in favour of backward castes, adopted at the national level by the United
Front in New Delhi. These agitations had intensified socio-economic
conflict between upper and lower castes at a time when the plural constituency
of a potential Hindutva was being assembled through the politicisation
of Hindu symbols and myths. This was the period when imagined grievances,
culled from an imagined history, were being assiduously broadcast, accompanied
by the shrill denigration of parties which allegedly indulged Muslim
treachery. The rath yatra did manage to rally large numbers, particularly
from the lower castes, and the arrest of Advani en route to Ayodhya
provoked riots in many states, including Gujarat.
Gujarat again witnessed riots
in 1992 when the disputed Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was razed to the ground
a few hours after kar sevaks stormed the monument. Surat experienced
intermittent disturbances over a six-month period. In 1993, more riots
followed, after the blasts in Bombay, allegedly masterminded by the
Muslim underworld. Perhaps these riots were attempts at forging a Hindu
unity that, on the face of it, seemed impossible. Whatever the intention,
there is no denying that the rath yatra precipitated a political crisis
in which the existing intra- and inter-party equations began to break
down. And, there is no getting away from the fact that, though not uniformly
successful across India, the BJP from the 1991 general elections has
secured more than 50 percent of the votes cast in the state. Remarkably,
for three years following its assumption of office in Gujarat in 1995,
the state was free from communal riots. The BJP was clearly living up
to its boast of ensuring a riot-free administration, prompting critics
to cite this as proof of the partys monopoly of organised public
violence. At any rate, this peaceful interim was part of the established
pattern of violence erupting and subsiding according to the clearly
discernable designs of politics. The inference, therefore, that violence
had become a crucial raw material of electoral politics controlled by
a cartel is unavoidable.
New tribe of kar sevaks
The brief interlude of social peace came to an end in 1998, with the
attacks on Christian missionaries and establishments in the Dangs, a
forested tribal belt on the southern edge of Gujarat bordering Maharashtra.
This was a new theatre of conflict in terms of both the region and community
involved. This was the first instance of organised violence after the
BJP came to power and the context once again is instructive. Cracks
had developed in the carefully crafted socio-economic balance in the
BJP soon after it came to power in the state. Hindutva once again confronted
a crisis of caste. An influential segment of backward castes in the
BJP legislature party had revolted against its upper caste leadership,
on the lines of what was subsequently to happen in the Uttar Pradesh
unit too. Social engineering had failed in the face of an old caste
conflict and a substitute social group had to be found to take the place
of the departing backward castes. Tribals make up 14 percent of the
states population. Christians, who are largely concentrated in the tribal
districts, add up to less than 1 percent of Gujarats population.
Even in the Dangs, they do not exceed 5 percent.
On the night of 25 December,
under the auspices of an RSS front organisation called the Hindu Jagran
Manch (HJM), churches, educational institutions and houses were attacked
in Ahwa, Subir, Jamlapada, Gadvi, Divan Temrun, Madagkhadi and Padalkhadi.
Over the next four days attacks spread to other tribal areas in Bharuch,
Surat and Vyara districts of south Gujarat. This orchestration of violence
by the HJM had been preceded by a decade-and-a-half of patient mobilisation
by another RSS front organisation, the Samajik Samrasta Manch, founded
in 1983 to assimilate those segments of society marginalised by Brahmanic
Hinduism. Whatever else the RSS fronts have been doing, it is clear
that within four years of those attacks, tribals from both north and
south Gujarat have been recruited in large numbers as kar sevaks for
both the construction of the Ram temple and the destruction of the Muslim
community.
The similarities between
the broad context of the riots is striking. Any crisis internal to Hindutva
inevitably leads to violence against well-defined enemies.
If the 1998 violence was necessitated by the social crisis of Gujarati
Hindutva, the present and continuing violence comes on the heels of
a comprehensive political rout of the BJP across several states in India.
Gujarat is its last bastion, and reports and analysis in the media indicated
that defeat stared the party in the forthcoming elections in the state.
The prominence of tribal participation is the common element between
1998 and the ongoing violence. Perhaps, in the social engineering calculus
of the RSS, a fresh massacre of the old enemy by new recruits will add
to the prowess of Hindutva, enrich its folklore, expand its social base
and thereby forestall a defeat in the nursery of its politics. A tribal
population of 14 percent is electorally significant enough to justify
the slaughter of several hundred Muslims.
Secularism and silence
Clearly then, from the mid-1980s political violence in Gujarat had become
more organised and more numer-ous, had increasingly begun to manufacture
its own provocations, and was directed at minorities, particularly Muslims.
This last development coincided with the BJPs Hindutva agendas
in a period when the party was systematically cultivating overarching
Hindu nationalist sentiments. In 1985, the Congress party was at the
peak of its electoral strength, enjoying the support of 55 percent of
the electorate. By the 1991 general elections, the BJP had secured 55
percent of the vote and in 1995 rode to power in the state with an overwhelming
majority. In this violent ten-year period the Congress Party, which
ruled the state for most of the past four decades, had crumbled and
out of the ruins of the existing polity the BJP had emerged triumphant.
There seems to be a prima
facie correlation between the violent politics of the state and the
BJPs rise to power. Numerous studies, by the Centre for Social
Studies, Surat, by the sociologist Ghanshyam Shah, the historian Jan
Breman, the political scientist Atul Kohli and many others, have chronicled
some of the micro-level processes in the partys rise to power.
But there has not been any real synthesis of explanation, based on these
studies, that describes the precise mechanics at a state-wide level.
Perhaps, that exercise is precluded by a lack of uniformity, and even
an organic unity, in the strategies of the RSS and its offspring. The
intricacies of refabricating a complex socio-economic demography may
well require multiple, even mutually contradictory, local strategies
within an overall climate of communal strife.
But even if there are not
too many identifiable and overt statewide strategies, barring of course
the assault on minorities, the BJPs success has been statewide
and not all of it can be attributed to just the ingenuity of the partys
political techniques. After all, identical experiments by the BJP in
other states have not fetched the same dividends. It would seem therefore
that conditions specific to Gujarats history, society and politics
have facilitated the cultivation of Hindutva politics. These specific
circumstances may help penetrate the air of inscrutability that surrounds
the BJPs covert strategies and successes, if only by questioning
many well-meaning but untenable secular-ist assumptions about Gujarat
and the riots, which actually impede an understanding of Hindutvas
politics in the state.
In the secular intelligentsias
description of the gory events of the last two months, communal violence
is the handiwork of a violent minority of fundamentalists. In this view,
the secular majority is silent and can only watch helplessly as the
state administration actively abets the Hindutva lumpens. This is not
an entirely accurate description of the reality. True, there are many
who have actually gone to the aid of the victims and prevented more
unspeakable brutalities than have been committed. It is also true that
there are many localities where irreproachable community relations,
fostered by shared concerns of a more fundamental and material variety,
have ensured that provocateurs have been unable to incite murderous
passions. But it is equally true that there are many others who silently
approve of the carnage. The violent minority and silent majority of
Gujarat do not constitute separate and distinct social fragments. The
silence of a sizeable part of the silent majority is not the speechless
shock of numbed bystanders. It is the conspiratorial silence of willing
spectators, remote witnesses to a Roman holiday, whose public silence
is a private roar of approval that is clearly audible to the architects
of the violence. There are those who cannot speak and those who will
not speak.
How else are we to explain
the seeming paradoxes of the riots in Ahmedabad? We have seen educated
girls and boys from middle and upper middle class families who do not
actually participate in the killings but follow in the wake to loot
Muslim establishments. We have seen couples on two wheelers bring home
consumer durables scavenged from the debris of retail outlets. The cell-phone
wielding rioters are not isolated elements who have taken control in
a social vacuum. They roam about so brazenly because they know they
have a silent social mandate. This is the clear conspiracy of silence
among many of the so-called silent majority and it has many manifestations
the son of a bureaucrat who gets away with murder, a government
official who demands bribe, the worker who looks at unions as an instrument
of personal gain, the trader who cheats at one go the marginal producer
and the small consumer. We have seen the faces of this silent majority
at various places. Sometimes they are at a safe distance behind the
rioting mob, sometimes they are in the air-conditioned cabins of newspaper
offices. They are always there where it matters and they are always
silent when it matters. We have seen them outside Gujarat too, in 1984
in Delhi when Sikhs were being butchered, in the 1992 Bombay riots,
in the Dangs, in Orissa, in Madhya Pradesh, in Uttar Pradesh and many
other places too numerous to be listed. And now we are told that the
VHP in Ahmedabad has a team of 50 lawyers who will, without payment,
legally defend the Hindutva rioters. Secular optimism should not blind
us to the reality of communalisms expanded social base.
Anatomy of a Hindu state
Gujarat is a visibly Hinduised state today, and not just because of
the 55 percent that voted the BJP. Even if that 55 percent were to vote
in other ways, the ideology of Hindutva that has sunk roots will continue
to pervade society. What this means in effect is that even if the Congress
were to return to power, it will have to mould itself more openly to
the agendas of Hindu politics. In fact, it is more than likely that
the state Congress unit has itself already been Hinduised. Reportedly,
Congress-run municipalities have extended infrastruc-tural and other
assistance to the rioters, particularly in destroying evidence of demolitions.
Even casual observers of politics have noted that the Gujarat Congress
has been less than tepid in its response to the riots, being more keen
to defend Sonia Gandhis credentials than to protect Muslim lives.
The state administration has been so extensively contaminated that even
if a Congress government were to allow some residual secular instinct
to surface, it is unlikely to get much support from the bureaucracy.
This is the most impressive achievement of fundamentalist politics
that it has recast even the opposition in its own image.
Some traces of how a caste-divided
state can achieve an overarching Hindu unity, even if only briefly and
at extraordinary moments of stress, are to be found in aspects of the
states social, political and demographic history. Gujarat came
into existence in 1960 after the States Reorganisation Act of 1957,
which carved out states on a linguistic basis. Two broad regions
mainland and peninsular Gujarat make up the territory of the
state. Peninsular Gujarat consists of Kutch and Kathiawad, now known
as Saurashtra. Prior to Indian independence, numerous kingdoms, principalities,
and jagirs dotted the territorial landscape of present-day Gujarat.
Saurashtra alone had 499 political units. Kutch was a princely state
while parts of mainland Gujarat were directly administered British territory
incorporated into the Bombay Presidency. In 1948, all these units were
consolidated and Kutch, Saurashtra and the mainland were added to Bombay
state in 1956, where they stayed until 1960 when, through linguistic
division, the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were created.
This territorial consolidation
gave the future politics of Gujarat several institutions, forms, values
and characteristics that made it easier for Hindutva to take hold. Among
the more useful heritages was the myth of the Somnath Temple. The temple
complex is located in the port town of Veraval on the southern coast
of Saurashtra just a little below Porbandar, were Gandhi was born. The
myth of Somnath left Gandhi untouched. But it excited many others who
formed the cream of the Congress leadership in Gujarat, mainly because
in AD 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni (in Afghanistan) raided the temple of Somnath
and broke the idol. The temple was situated inside a fortress in which
wealth accumulated from the brisk maritime trade of ancient and medieval
Saurashtra was stored. Before Mahmuds raid, this amassed wealth
had attracted the notice of many other rulers, some of whom, like the
Chudasama, Ahiras and Yadhavas, had attempted to make off with it. But
the attack of the Mahmud from Ghazni has been singled out for special
attention and presented as proof of Muslim insolence.
Eminent historians like Romila
Thapar have argued very eloquently against simplified narratives of
the Somnath raid. But the matter long ago passed from the hands of professional
historians and into the arsenal of practised politicians such as Rajendra
Prasad, the president of India in the 1950s, Vallabhai Patel, the first
union home minister, and KM Munshi, a senior minister in successive
union cabinets. Among the Congress leadership, Somnath was a Gujarati
preoccupation. It was only the objections of Jawaharlal Nehru and some
of his secular colleagues that prevented the repair of the temple under
state auspices, but that did not stop the president of India from participating
in the ceremonies of the privately funded restoration.
Somnath was the Gujarat Congress
Partys gift to Hindutva and is an early example of the politicisation
of temple related trauma. Such is the pedigree of the Somnath myth,
and the extent of its popularity in Gujarat, that it was absorbed and
given prominence in the politics of the Ayodhya myth. Thus it was that
the rath yatra that symbolised the spiritual conquest of India by vaishnavite
Hinduism began its journey from this shaivite monument.
Shackles of faith and caste
The appeal of such religious themes is not difficult to understand in
a society permeated with strong orthodox vaishnavite traditions. The
absence of a serious bhakti movement in Gujarats history is perhaps
a reflection of and reason for this potent institutional vaishnavism.
Mythological religiosity has been an integral part of Gujarat society
and continues to be fostered by bardic performances. Kathakars, who
recite stories from the Ramayan, have an important role in collective
social life and in recent years have been active in the BJPs political
cause. According to Ghanshyam Shah, in the 1991 elections kathakars
like Morari Bapu were involved in the partys campaign and attracted
a cross-section of society both in urban and rural areas.
Mass politics right from
the Gandhian phase has been unable or unwilling to break the shackles
of this public religiosity. In fact, as the historian David Hardiman
points out, Gandhi and his followers were themselves not above using
the idioms of caste and religion in political mobilisation. As early
as 1920, Gandhi was to appeal to fellow members of his bania caste to,
as good vaishnavites, abstain from courts and schools run
by the British government, whose rule he likened to ravanraj. Patel,
likewise, played on caste traditions, and laid stress on themes like
kshatriya martial virtues. It is not surprising at all that Gandhi should
have harped on ramrajya as a political ideal. Vaishnav, kshatriya, ravanraj,
ramrajya, all popular currency in the BJPs rhetoric, have a long
and respectable history in the mass politics of Gujarat. The state did
not really witness the emergence of a politics that seriously tried
to purge the public arena of its religious inflections.
As is to be expected, orthodox
faith and values were nurtured within the bounds of an entrenched caste
system. The mass politics that emerged in Gujarat could not escape the
dynamics of caste and so chose by and large to be confined within it.
Although caste divisions did not fully coincide with class divisions
in the state, socio-economic power was predominantly in the hands of
a few castes, i.e. patidars, brahmins and baniyas and to a much
lesser extent the kshatriyas. Caste associations, some of them active
in party politics, are a common feature of Gujarats public life.
They include the Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha and the Gujarat Kshatriya Sangh,
the Patidar Yuvak Mandal, the Khedut Sangh and the Khedut Samaj, which
are basically patidar organi-sations, the Prajapati Mandal and numerous
others. These caste associations, besides undertaking welfare measures,
function also as lobby groups seeking to influence politics in addition
to manoeuvring for control of resources. Of these organised castes,
the most powerful are the patidars, who in much of the state practically
control the rural economy. Brahmins and baniyas, though insignificant
as a proportion of the population, are economically and politically
powerful by virtue of their dominance in professional services, industry
and trade.
The politics of Gujarat has
been based on the alliance between castes. The Congress partys
near monopoly of power was based on a patidar-brahmin-baniya leadership
that brought together under a broad umbrella the dalit, tribal and Muslim
electorate. The weak opposition in the state in the early period, the
Swatantra Party, was primarily a kshatriya enterprise, allied to the
leadership of dissenting patidar groups. Through the 1960s, the state
legislature was dominated by a highly organised Congress party well-versed
in the practice of an accommodative politics that did not fundamentally
affect the socio-economic structure. As an efficient organisation that
functioned both as a civic institution and a political machine, it perfected
the technique of herding a large electoral constituency without altering
the overall status quo. The patidars, brahmins and baniyas continued
to dominate the economy while the dalits, tribals and Muslims continued
to vote the Congress.
The moment of accommodation
In 1969, by the time the Swatantra Party was beginning to make inroads
into the state legislature, the Indian National Congress experienced
a nationwide split. The two groups that emerged were the Congress (Organisation),
which inherited the partys organisation, and Congress (Requisition),
which had Indira Gandhi and a large part of the influential left-lean-ing
leadership of the parent party. A new political alli-ance slowly emerged,
with the Swatantra Party and the Congress (O), both with orthodox social
and economic programmes, align-ing with the Jan Sangh, which had no
real policy to offer other than Hindu Rashtra. The split in the Congress
is that moment when the public accommodation of Hindutva politics by
the larger polity begins. The existing caste-political equations also
began to break down. The two numeri-cally significant castes that were
politically influential, the patidars and the kshatriyas became internally
divided along political lines.
Over time, both the Swatantra
Party and the Congress (O) disappeared, having merged, along with the
Jan Sangh, into the Janata Party during the period of unstable politics
that followed the split in the Congress. With the political opposition
uniting against it and itself lacking any real organisation to combat
the trend, the Congress, under Indira Gandhi, adopted a populist economic
and political course. While that helped secure a wide base for the party
at the electoral level, the lack of an organisation meant that the Congress
was unable to deal with the growing forms of extra-parliamentary agitations
that commenced with the Nav Nirman Movement of 1974. That movement unseated
the Congress government and brought the combined opposition, including
the Jan Sangh, to power. Hindu politics had tasted office for the first
time in the country in the company of like-minded organisations.
The Congress returned to
power after the Emergency of Indira Gandhi, once again without any real
organisational structure, but with an infusion of new lumpen cadres.
The caste-leadership of the post-Emergency Congress changed hands as
the kshatriyas became more dominant. A peculiar aspect of kshatriya
politics in Gujarat is that in the course of political mobilisation
it redefined itself to include a large backward caste component, notably
the kolis. This was to be of some significance in the nature of Congress
politics, which in turn influenced to some extent the rise of Hindu
politics. By the 1980s the Congress social alliance was based on what
has come to be called the KHAM formula, ie an alliance of kshatriyas,
harijans (dalits), adivasis (tribals) and Muslims. (see page 24) Through
the period that the Congress held power this was the combination that
gave Gujarat its gov-ernments. And through the period that these gov-ernments
were in power the patidars, baniyas and brahmins continued to control
the economy and some crucial nodes of the public sphere, such as the
various levels of the state administration. And when the Congress, as
part of its welfare populism went through the motions of
announ-cing measures that would benefit its socially and economically
mar-ginalised constituency, the real managers of the economy and the
public arena drifted towards an opposition that was gradually being
dominated by
the BJP.
This was the period that
the agitational politics mounted by social groups increasingly backed
by the BJP, left the Congress governments in a state of political crisis.
Organisational weakness obstructed substantive civic response on the
part of the Congress to these agitations against benefits directed towards
backward castes. As a consequence, the government simply retracted its
policy measures. Welfare populism antagonised the elite. Its retraction
and failure disillusioned the dispossessed. The Congress could not herd
its own constituency. That constituency was now available to be politically
recruited, at a time when the flavour of Hindutva was being systematically
imparted to the society and polity by the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar,
through its numerous organisations.
The Gujarat polity had been
in an organisational vacuum from the time of the Congress split till
the rise of the BJP. The seeming stability of Gujarati politics was
to a large measure based on a stable sub-stratum of caste networks.
That stable network which enabled the Congress Party to recruit its
caste base also enabled the BJP to recruit its constituency. Welfare
populism had given way to spiritual populism, the crucial difference
being the latters level of organisational capacity. The BJP, through
the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, had created a dense complex of agitprop
organisations that could engage in sectional caste-specific propoganda
and simultaneously season it with the larger Hindutva ideology of the
caste-Hindu leadership of the RSS and the BJP. The process by which
a tribal population of 14 percent is conscripted into Hindutvas
ranks also renders an 8 percent Muslim population completely dis-pensable
to an electoral politics many of whose rules have been redrafted by
a vaishnavite orthodoxy. When reluctant Hindus become majoritarian enthusiasts,
minorities too large to be ignored and too small to make a difference
have no place under the protective umbrella of competitive politics.
In the 50 years after Indian
independence, Gujarat has been transformed. It has been the laboratory
of Gandhian politics, of civic institutions, the cooperative movement
and the Hindutva campaign. It has become more urbanised, more industrial,
has seen more social mobil-ity, and become more prosperous. It has also
seen the re-emergence of an organised mass politics. The earlier phase
of that organised politics, under the Congress, consciously divided
the polity of the state along caste lines. The second phase, under the
BJP, consciously divided the polity along communal lines. A state predominantly
of Hindus had become a state predominantly of Hindutva. In 50 years
a Hindu unity had been engineered in a caste-divided state,
and Muslim life had become as dispensable as the Muslim vote. The map
of Gujarat in 1947 and the map in 1991 tell a chilling story. The price,
paid and yet to be paid, cannot be counted.