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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.





 

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