CAA-NPR-NRC Represent the Culmination of Golwalkar and RSS's Vision
A
six-phase strategy of the Sangh explains many challenges that India
is facing today, but also leaves troubling questions for the future.
Its
the first few weeks of 2020, the young are out flooding the streets,
undaunted by stun guns and lathis, and the messages they carry are
powerful – doorstep kolams in Chennai;
tonsured heads in Guwahati;
human shields in Ahmedabad;
girls with tricolours in Malerkotla;
singing Jana Gana Mana to greet the new year. They need no sage
advice, nor do they need ‘leaders’; they are their own bristling
energy. But maybe it is time to remember 1973, 1978, 1983, 1992, 2005
– and 1946 too for that matter – when the young of that time were
also out on the streets.
1946
was when the Tebhaga
Movement,
the Bombay
Mutiny
and
the Telangana
Revolt
were
signalling the end of the British Raj. It was then that three
soft-spoken pracharaks
were
quietly sent by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) to Assam as
part of its strategy, systematically laid out seven years earlier in
1939 by ‘Guru’
Golwalkar
in
We,
or Our Nationhood Defined.
That book was a translation and elaboration of ‘Veer’ Savarkar’s
earlier Rashtra
Mimansa,
written in 1934, but that was an inconvenient truth to be
characteristically ignored, as were the veracity
of
the ‘facts’ it contained.
Golwalkar’s
vision,
however, was clear: a Nation comprises five constituent ideas of
country, race, religion, culture and language; such a Hindu Nation
flourished for thousands of years until the Moslem invaders came; for
ten centuries there has been an unflinching war by the Hindus against
the Moslems; the Congress consists of an ‘educated’ class of
Hindus who find flaws in the Hindu Cultural Organisation (of caste);
but the Race Spirit is re-awakening; and the true ‘Nationalist’
should aim to re-build, re-vitalise and emancipate from its present
stupor, the Hindu Nation.
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These
pracharaks constituted the first phase
of
setting up Sangh shakhas
to
promote Golwalkar’s teachings of imagined splendours and
constructed wrongs. They leveraged the existing conflict between
migrant Bengali settlers, Bihari and Marwari traders, and the local
population, mainly on issues of loss of cultural heritage and
employment. They were followed in the second phase by a Praant
pracharak,
who set up Vivekananda Kendras, Saraswati Shishu Mandirs, Kasturba
Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams, balwadis, tuition
centres, study circles, vocational training centres, and hospitals –
all for the cultural expansion of the Sangh’s Hindutva ideology
into the ethnic Ahomiya and tribal populations. What is significant
in the process is the ability of the Sangh to appropriate appealing
national and religious symbols. In three decades, by 1975, there were
shakhas
in
place in all districts
of
Assam.
The
third phase
This
patient brick-by-brick construction of a social and cultural milieu
for the Sangh by a generation of dedicated monastic pracharaks has to
be understood if one is to grasp its ideology and strategy. Because
what evolved in Assam post-Independence had already been put in place
in other regions since the 1930s. Thus, when student protests began
in Gujarat
in
1973, to be followed by student protests in Bihar
in
1974, it provided the opportunity for the Sangh to launch its third
phase by participating in those regional struggles. It is this phase,
lasting through and beyond a period of national Emergency declared by
an embattled Congress government led by Indira Gandhi, which
consolidated the Sangh’s student and political wings. The Sangh had
deliberately stayed out of (indeed, opposed
)
the national struggle for freedom, and these student protests enabled
it to win recognition as a legitimate political player in the shape
of the Jana Sangh (JS). The JS strategically merged with the Janata
Party to win the elections in 1977, its seats in Parliament jumping
from a dismal 22 in 1971 to 93, to form the government at the Centre.
This
strategy was accelerated in Assam
when
the students there launched an agitation in 1979 to correct the
electoral rolls by deleting the names of all ‘illegal immigrants’,
based on Census data of how many such immigrants had entered the
state. This was a continuation of the outsider-local conflict which
the Sangh had leveraged earlier. Using its clout at the Centre, the
Sangh plunged into the student agitation in Assam with members
carefully positioned
within
to steer the agitation into their mould. The misgovernance by the
Janata Party caused it to lose power quickly and, in the 1980 general
election, the JS was back to 16 seats in Parliament. However, by
then, the Sangh had used its carefully cultivated propaganda to edge
its way into the social structure for its fourth phase.
This
fourth phase consisted of manoeuvring its apparatus to highlight the
issues that posed the Muslim population as the enemy. The Assamese
had begun their agitation on a non-communal basis, with equal
opportunity and anti-foreigner slogans. But the activists of the
Sangh began popularising the detection, deportation, and deletion
(the 3D policy) of the Muslim
‘Bangladeshi’
and
patiently constructed an image of the ‘foreign invader’.
By
1983, foot-soldiers in 300 shakhas of the Sangh had propelled this
imagery into the Nellie
massacre,
during which thousands of agitators surrounded the village of the
same name and in eight hours 1819 persons of Muslim origin were
killed. The report of the Tewari Commission into this massacre has
not yet been made public. But no less than Atal Behari Vajpayee, the
president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, the new avatar of the
JS) at the time, was quoted as saying in an election speech,
“Foreigners
have come here
and
the government does nothing. What if they had come into Punjab
instead? People would have chopped them into pieces and thrown them
away.”
This
phase of direct violence did not pay political dividends as the BJP
dropped to a historic low of 2 MPs in the 1984 elections. Hence, the
Sangh back-tracked a bit. It piggy-backed the Assam students’
agitation to pressurise the Congress government at the Centre, now
led by Rajiv Gandhi, to sign the Assam
Accord
in
1984, formally adopting the 3D approach.
Ram
Janmabhoomi agitation and 1992 Action Plan
The
Sangh then felt emboldened to take its social and cultural
engineering project further by re-launching the Ram
Janmabhoomi
agitation
based on an imagination of Lord Ram’s birthplace. A year later, the
Congress was easily persuaded to amend the Citizenship
Act
to
fix a cut-off date for granting citizenship to Bangladeshi migrants
in Assam. This also enabled the Congress in 1988 to order the
Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) to make a study
of Bangladeshi settlements
in
the capital city of Delhi. The consequent growth of the Sangh was
displayed in 1989 when the BJP again re-emerged in Parliament with 85
members.
When
the number further increased to 120 MPs in the 1991 elections the
Sangh began its fifth phase by using the 1988 FRRO study to draw
public attention to the growing numbers of ‘infiltrators’
(Bangladeshis) in Delhi – again a subtle mixture of numbers
pulled
out of nowhere and riding shadowy fears. The Congress under Narasimha
Rao was subtly coerced to announce an Action Plan in 1992, followed
by Operation
Pushback
in
Delhi’s slums in 1993. Powers were delegated to the Delhi police to
detect and deport Bangladeshis from the 11 bastis earmarked by the
FRRO study. The Action Plan specifically set a target of 2,000 to
2,500 foreigners to be evicted each month, with the aid of
‘informers’ in the bastis. This marks the outsourcing of
indirect, and demeaning, violence to a ‘revitalised’ state force
and agents within the basti. When the first batch of 132 detainees
were ready, it was the police who shaved their heads, burnt all their
belongings, transported them to Sealdah on the Prophet’s birthday,
and handed them over to the Border Security Force (BSF), who thrashed
them in public to mark a brutal no-return message before sending them
across the border.
Adverse
publicity caused the Congress government to suspend Operation
Pushback. But the spectrum of Sangh-directed activities continued
with the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, resulting in the
demolition-as-spectacle of the Babri
Masjid
at
Ayodhya by an inflamed mob of young people in 1992; the
transformation of Operation Pushback in Delhi into Operation
Flushout
all
over the country in 1993 – this time with the direct involvement of
the Sangh’s cadres; and the BJP’s electoral victory in Delhi’s
first assembly elections the same year.
By
1996, the BJP’s election
manifesto
not
only openly adopted the 3D policy for “an alarming growth of a
section of the population”, but placed the four Sangh-inspired
targets – constructing the Ram Mandir, abolishing Article 370 in
Kashmir, bringing in a Uniform Civil Code, and implementing Article
48 (cow protection) – at the heart of its political ambitions. It
won the 1996 elections with 161 MPs and formed an alliance
government; and again in 1998 and 1999 with 182 MPs (although it lost
the Delhi elections in 1998).
A
juridical twist
With
this gradual strengthening of its political manifestation, the Sangh
decided it was time for a sixth phase to return to its larger social
and cultural agenda, but with a juridical twist. It realised that
many of its targets in Assam were protected by the Illegal Migrants
(Determination by Tribunal) Act (IMDT)
passed by the Indira Gandhi government in 1983. Under the IMDT, the
burden of proof to establish nationality was placed on the state.
Contesting the pleas for their rights by migrants filed since 1998,
one of the Sangh’s Assam collaborators filed a writ
in
the Supreme Court in 2000 for repealing the IMDT. To make doubly
sure, another writ
was
filed in 2001 in the Delhi high court to take effective steps to
remove illegal Bangladesh migrants from Delhi. Following an interim
order in the latter, the home ministry formulated an Action Plan in
2002 to expeditiously detect and deport illegal Bangladeshi nationals
from Delhi. The target was set even higher than the 1993 Action Plan.
In
2004, towards the end of the BJP government, news began trickling in
that citizens from West Bengal and Assam, working as rag pickers in
Delhi, were being routinely arrested on the charge of being illegal
immigrants. An association of concerned
citizens
tracked
the news and discovered that the 2002 Action Plan had acquired a
vicious veneer over the 1993 one. The local police, and the informers
who led them to the alleged illegal persons, had become enmeshed in a
system of corruption and indoctrination. An ‘illegal’ person
would be identified on the basis of dress (lungi),
name (Muslim), and language (accented Hindi). The police would swoop
down on the bastis in the dead of night and selectively carry off
men, women and children. When documents would be offered by the
victims as evidence of citizenship, they would be routinely torn up
unless ‘Gandhiji’s note’ (currency above Rs 500) was produced
to attest to nationality.
While
police vans filled with these unfortunate people waited in the
compound of the FRRO office, their papers were taken in and duly
signed by a senior police officer acting as the registration officer,
and a Leave India Notice issued under the Foreigners Act, making a
mockery
of the law.
In the detention centre, blankets, milk for the children, etc. had to
be bought from the police; the detainees were not allowed to offer
prayers, there were complaints of physical assault, with slaps,
kicks, and punches being regularly meted out. When sufficient numbers
of detainees had accumulated, they would be put aboard a closed train
to Malda and then transferred to a BSF camp. Multiple incidents of
sexual harassment, physical violence, and extortion were reported by
those who managed to escape or buy their way out. Those still in
custody would be pushed across the fence into ‘no-man’s land’,
5 kilometres from the actual border, in the dead of night and at the
point of a rifle, without informing the Bangladesh Rifles on the
other side of the border. The state forces were clearly performing as
communal and committed agents of the Sangh strategy, but with an
embedded vested interest.
The
BJP government fell in the 2004 general election, but the sixth phase
continued as the Supreme Court announced its decision
in
the IMDT case in 2005. It was a curious decision, to say the least.
Comparing the numbers detained under the IMDT with those detained
under the Foreigners Act (FA), the Court arrived at the conclusion
that the FA “is far more effective in identification and
deportation of foreigners” as compared to the IMDT. Hence, the IMDT
“contravenes Article 355 (duty
of the Union of India to protect every State against external
aggression and internal disturbance)
of the Constitution is, therefore, wholly unconstitutional and must
be struck down”. The Court recognised that the difference between
the two Acts was that the FA places the onus upon the detained person
to prove his citizenship, and that there is no forum for appeal. This
is a fundamental departure from liberal jurisprudence, which deems a
person to be innocent unless proven guilty. Yet the court did not
take into account this argument and played right into the hands of
the Sangh.
Strengthening
hold over many states
In
the ten years that the BJP was out of power at the Centre, but
strengthening its hold over at least eight of the larger states in
the north, the Sangh has perfected this six-fold strategy and is now
moving towards the culmination of Golwalkar’s dream. He had
rhetorically
asked in 1939,
“What is to be the fate of all those, who, today, happen to live
upon the land, though not belonging to the Hindu Race, Religion and
culture?” His answer was chilling:
“There
are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge
themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at
its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so
…wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing,
deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment –not
even citizen’s rights.”
The
three instruments at the centre of the current storm of protests –
the Constitution Amendment Act (CAA), the National Population
Register (NPR), and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) – are
steadily moving in the direction of subordinating those whom
Golwalkar called the ‘Mlechchh’: “all those who do not
subscribe to the social laws dictated by the Hindu Religion and
Culture.” They need not be detained in prisons or pushed across
borders; confining them to the uncertain realm of non-citizens in
bastis across the nation will be adequate, provided those bastis are,
like Kashmir, hemmed in by a ring of steel and cultural
ostracisation.
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That
brings us to the implicit connection between the maligned ‘basti’
and the imagined ‘foreigner’. It is not just in the context of
the Bangladeshi that this link becomes clear; the experience of total
subordination, of jackboots trampling through imperilled lives, of
the twin blows of truncheon and teargas, of a continuous chain of
dispossession
and
disenfranchisement
,
has been the impact
of
‘development’ on the labouring poor since the last four decades
at least. Bastis in both urban and rural areas have seen many times
what the young students in colleges and universities in the cities
are seeing today. In fact, it is now the signature of the newest face
of surplus accumulation by the enormously rich, as they have learnt
that the more indigent and immiserised and disorganised the worker
is, the greater
the productivity
that
can be extracted out of his/her subordination. The march of the Hindu
Nation is in perfect goose-step with the march of Capital, as is
evident from the BJP’s 2019
election manifesto
that
lays extraordinary emphasis on modernising the Armed Police Forces,
investor-friendly growth, e-commerce, e-mobility, artificial
intelligence, robotics, self-organised groups, entrepreneurship, and
on-line courses.
It
is within this six-phased context that the future has to be imagined.
Clearly, the possible roll-back of the CAA / NPR / NCR will not stop
the Sangh in its tracks; nor an electoral defeat here or a change of
office-holder there – no matter how desirable and victorious it may
seem at the time. Since the entire fabric of the nation is being
‘emancipated’ (both by the Sangh and World Economic Forum), the
challenge is even deeper.
To
respond to that challenge needs a soaring imagination and
scintillating courage that probably only the young can have.
If
citizenship is under challenge then is it sufficient to try and
preserve the old concept of citizenship or to grasp that, apart from
birth, descent, residence, and registration (and now religion), work
should
be a fundamental marker of an individual’s recognition in a nation?
Or if the Constitution is under threat, is it enough to attempt to
save it, or to move beyond that to a document that promises economic
equality, justiciability of the Directive Principles, and eminent
domain of the people? If the investor-friendly economy is collapsing,
is it useful to fret about how to revive it, or should there be more
thought devoted to a labour-friendly one? If public education is on
the auction block then should one agitate to stop the auction, or
could there be a challenge posed to the right to auction itself?
Reflection
has always been harder than action – especially in the tumult of
spontaneous action – but reflect we must, for our future depends on
it.
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