HUM HINDUSTANI: The farce and the tragedy—J Sri Raman

The urban-rural divide between the BJP and the Congress would seem to have only deepened over the years. To the traditional segments of the BJP's urban constituency have been added, in recent decades, a section of yuppies to whom the Hindutva represents profitable hypocrisy.




Move over, Mumbai, it's Mangalore's turn. At last, India's financial capital is off the headlines, which it has hogged for three long months. First, the terrorist strike of November 26, then Slumdog Millionaire. The focus stayed on the city, even if it shifted from star-studded hotels to shanties and hovels. A third event to get it more media attention was well on the way when, alas, this upstart town in the south took it all away.




This is not a tale of two cities. It is more the story of a farce that can turn into a tragedy.




Come February 14, the Shiv Sena of Bal Thackeray (and the Maharashtra Navnirman Samiti of Raj Thackeray) would hit the Mumbai streets every year on one of their crusades of "cultural nationalism". Celebrators of St Valentine's Day would replace Muslims and north Indians as the victims on this special occasion. This time around, however, all eyes were on a Shri Ram Sena going on a similar offensive in a till recently under-noticed town in the state of Karnataka,




Well, not quite similar. The Far Right phalanxes in Mumbai (and Shiv Sena units elsewhere) have never tried to play the loving fascist. On this day as well, they focus on what they are good at: street violence, mounting attacks on dating couples, with acid-throwing occasionally included among the punishments meted out to negators of "cultural nationalism".




The Mangalore Sena may have attracted nationwide attention for the first time by a Thackeray-type show of toughness against females who had roused its patriotic fervour by visiting a local pub and partaking of its liquid fare. Goons of the Shri Ram Sena had taken television crews along to record their glorious feat as the challengers of "Indian womanhood" norms were physically and fittingly chastised. Violence, however, had no place in the Sena's plan for Valentine's Day.




Sena chief Pramod Muthalik, making his debut as the latest in a lengthening line of "moral policemen", came out with a creative variant on the Far Right assault on freedom that had taken cruder forms before. Groups of his goons, he said, would go on their rounds on the day, accompanied by a priest and armed with two accessories, a "mangalsutra" (a sacred thread tied round the bride's neck) and a "rakhi" (a band tied round a brother's wrist). Boys and girls caught exchanging the mass-produced cards and gifts marking the occasion would become either brides and grooms or brothers and sisters.




The announcement was answered with a movement that mobilised women to smother Muthalik in a mountain of pink "chaddis" (underwear), sent as unsolicited gifts. If that was hitting below the belt, the high-minded Sena promised to hit back with saris for the damsels misguided by the mockers and detractors of Hindutva.




All this made up the farce. For its tragic potential, we must turn to politics.




To say that the Sena is part of the Parivar" (the Far Right "family"), of which the Bharatiya Janata Party is the political front, would be to state the obvious. Equally obvious to observers was the fact that what emboldened the Sena to embark on the offensive in the southern state was the promise of protection from the BJP in power there.




Like Sherlock Holmes' dog that did not bark, however, the BJP has not sided with Muthalik and his band of musclemen. It has not done so at the national level, at any rate. Karnataka chief minister BS Yeddyurappa has revised his initial stand on the Sena and its shenanigans with apparent reluctance. After the first incident of the Sena's muscle-flexing, he condemned "pub culture" more strongly than the violence against women. The Sena's announcement of its Valentine's Day plans, however, made him return home halfway from a national executive session of the BJP in Nagpur and order Muthalik's preventive detention.




Was the party line guided by a concern for law and order, for good governance? Few will buy this theory, given the BJP's record vis-a-vis Narendra Modi's famous pogrom in Gujarat. Even the party's plaster saint, the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, did not stop it from seriously considering "repetition of Gujarat" in order to reap electoral rewards. To the BJP"s current Shadow Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, Modi was and continues to be the model chief minister.




Was the party distancing itself from the Parivar? The BJP's objective, by all accounts, has been precisely the opposite in the recent period. It has revived the Ayodhya issue, belying the hopes of allies about the issue remaining on the party's "back burner", and has been on a quest for more communal issues from Kashmir to Kanyakumari at the country's southern tip.




Was the party influenced by the implications of the issue for the forthcoming parliamentary elections? If so, why? When it had plumped for pro-Parivar poll tactics, why was it making an exception in this instance?




The answer may lie in a less often noticed characteristic of its constituency. The BJP has remained an urban party. In a perceptive observation, Pramod Mahajan, former BJP fund-raiser who fell to a fratricidal bullet, once pointed out that Congress was more of a rural party since the times of Jawaharlal Nehru, who contested elections not from his city of Allahabad, but from the adjacent and largely rural Phulpur constituency.




The urban-rural divide between the BJP and the Congress would seem to have only deepened over the years. To the traditional segments of the BJP's urban constituency have been added, in recent decades, a section of yuppies to whom the Hindutva represents profitable hypocrisy, investing "superpower" ambitions with sacredness and enlisting mass support for militarism.




It is this constituency, to which the party's "Shining India" slogan of 2004 sought to appeal - and put off the poor and rural millions in the process. It is this constituency that can be alienated by Muthalik-style campaigns.




Conversely, campaigns of this kind can cater to the constituency that the BJP now lacks. Tragic consequences are inevitable if the Parivar influences the party into political tactics based on such a premise.




Even television footage of Shri Ram Sena rallies makes it clear that it draws support from the urban poor, the rural migrants. The Sena talks, in pseudo-religious terms, to the poor kept out of the pleasures of the pub and much else. The Sena's movement is a monstrous misdirection of the anger of the under-educated lumpens against their angrezi-lisping superiors, of "maidservants" against "memsahibs", and so on.




Nothing can further the Far Right designs better than "cultural nationalism" appropriating the class struggle of the deprived.




The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint