The criticism of the writers who have returned their Sahitya Akademi awards to protest against the rising tide of intolerance is largely on two counts, often posed as questions. Why didn’t they adopt this mode of protest against the 1984 anti-Sikh and the 1989 Bhagalpur riots? Did any of them return the Akademi awards to protest the imposition of the Emergency in 1975?
The first question, which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley posed in his blog, echoes the belief of the Sangh Parivar followers that tension or riots sparked by its politics are more severely scrutinised and criticised than those arising from the politics of the Congress. As an example, it is claimed that the nation is often reminded of the 2002 riots in Gujarat, but not of the communal mayhem of 1984 in Delhi, and in Bhagalpur, Meerut, Moradabad, etc in other years. It is the Left-liberals, so goes the theory, who are to blame for this hypocritical attitude towards riots.
Perhaps the more relevant questions Jaitley and the others should have asked are: Why is it that a large chunk of Muslims still votes the Congress despite the many grisly riots occurring under its past regimes? Why is it that the Sikhs in Punjab voted the Congress to power in Punjab, say, in 2002?
Core ideology
The answer to these two questions is that riots and communal politics do not constitute the ideology of the Congress. The party believes, however falteringly, in the equality of citizens regardless of their religion.
By contrast, the idea of a Hindu rashtra constitutes both the ideology and the political project of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It seeks to unite the Hindus under the overarching ideology of Hindutva, for which it becomes imperative to fan their anxieties through the creation of the "other", "the enemy".
The Sangh’s ideologues of the past defined “Indian” as one whose holy land and fatherland was India, effectively excluding Muslims and Christians from the nationhood. In other words, the feeling of loyalty to India is possible only among those who share a common cultural heritage – the Hindu culture.
This impulse continues to drive the Sangh, as is evident from Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat’s endorsement for reconverting Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. He said last year: “We will bring back those who have lost their way. They did not go on their own [to other religions]. They were lured into leaving [Hinduism].” You will not hear a Congress leader mouth such words.
This is why riots or communal incidents linked to the Congress are perceived differently from those ascribed to the BJP. The riots the Congress is accused of fomenting are for instrumental, not ideological, purposes. These riots, barring that of 1984, were mostly confined to a constituency or two, often engineered by a politician to win a forthcoming election. They were almost always followed by attempts at reconciliation between battling communities, and national leaders of the Congress condemned them explicitly.
A politics of riots
Even a horrific incident such as the Dadri lynching couldn’t prompt the BJP to condemn it without reservation or equivocation. It isn’t a stray example of thoughtlessness. It is because the BJP’s brand of communal politics is aimed at realising the dream of creating a Hindu rashtra. To condemn Dadri unequivocally is to betray its own ideology, its dream.
It is the pivotal role of the tension/riot in the BJP’s politics, their very ideological nature, that the writers perhaps find perturbing. From this perspective, the communal tension is forever kept simmering, increased or decreased depending on the exigency of circumstances, to ensure normalcy is never restored, and the boundaries between communities persist.
For instance, compare the outbreak of communal episodes and debates during the 18 months of the Modi government to their absence in the same period of the previous government and you can’t but agree that the abnormal has tended to become the new normal. The social divisions over the last year have deepened as never before, perhaps matched by only what was experienced between 1989 and 1992, during which the Ram Janmabhoomi project had reached a crescendo. But the BJP was in the Opposition then.
It now wields power, not circumscribed by its coalition partners, as the Vajpayee government was. Perhaps the writers are alarmed now because Dadri, or the stoking of issues such as love jihad, ghar wapsi and a blanket ban on cow-slaughter, are a harbinger of what life could be in a full-blown Hindu rashtra. From what we have witnessed so far, the path to Hindu rashtra will be littered with dead bodies, imposition of regressive social codes, squashing of rights, and even the erosion of normative values as articulated in the Constitution.
Congress and 1984
From this perspective, the 2002 riots in Gujarat were horrifying not only for their barbarity, but also because they seem, in hindsight, a rite of passage to achieve the Hindu rashtra. This has tainted the lens through which we see the world, precisely why even a minor communal incident in a remote corner of India acquires resonance countrywide and dominates media headlines. It is looked upon as a conscious experiment, a thought-out step, to make India Hindu.
There is no denying the fact the Congress milked the 1984 riots to win a brute majority in the Lok Sabha elections of that year. It is also true that then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi seemed to justify the killings through this shocking statement: "When a big tree falls, the earth shakes." A good many from the Congress were accused of fomenting the riots. It is also unconscionable of Rahul Gandhi not to apologise for the 1984 riots, as he refused to in an interview with Times Now anchor Arnab Goswami last year.
Regardless of these shameful facts, the Congress did indeed symbolically atone for the 1984 riots by making Manmohan Singh the Prime Minister. And he, on August 12, 2005, apologised to the entire nation in Parliament “because what took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept of nationhood in our Constitution.”
Contrast this to what Modi said about the 2002 Gujarat riots: “[If] someone else is driving a car and we are sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will [it] be painful or not? Of course, it is.” It is not that Modi can’t offer an apology because he is stubborn; he can’t because his repentance will represent to his Hindutva supporters an abandoning of the Hindu rashtra project. Singh could tender an apology because the ideological core of the Congress isn’t communal. His apology represented an attempt to correct the course of the Congress ship.
More pertinent questions
For Jaitley and the others, though, a more pertinent question to ask of the writers would have been: Why didn’t they return their awards following the Gujarat riots or at the demolition of the Babri Masjid?
Perhaps they thought these episodes were aberrations and the BJP in due course would abandon its extreme position because of the compulsion of power. Or perhaps they presumed the BJP would not acquire the heft to threaten India’s plurality or appear a step closer to realising the Hindu rashtra. The BJP’s dominance of polity is a reality now.
In returning their awards, the writers are telling the Sangh that its goal doesn’t have their consent and are warning us of the threat it poses to our future. Over the decades, they have seen the religious-driven politics create havoc in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ethnic conflict had ripped apart Sri Lanka. It is this fate the writers don’t want for India.
Protests erupt when a society senses the tipping point is reached. To ask the writers why they are protesting now is like asking the Germans why they broke the wall in 1989, not before; it is like asking the Americans why they didn’t protest the war in Vietnam when it began; it is like asking the Tunisians why they didn’t fight for democracy decades earlier.
Many of the writers who have returned the awards have also been asked whether or not they spoke against the Emergency. Some of them did through methods they deemed fit; some of them were too young to have even won an award. As Hindi writer Uday Prakash, who was the first to return the Akademi award, told Outlook magazine, “In 1975, I was hardly 20 years old. In 1984, I had no award, how could I return it? In Dinmaan, I wrote a long report about what I witnessed in 1984 – you can check.”
Jaitley wants the opposition to the Emergency to become a touchstone for judging protesting writers today because his own role in it is known – and praised. But not all from his party played an exemplary role.
None other than Subramanian Swamy wrote a piece in the Hindu newspaper, dated 13 June 2000, saying,
Swamy also took a swipe at Vajpayee in the same Hindu piece:
Did Jaitely cite Vajpayee’s role in the Emergency to oppose his government’s decision to bestow the Bharat Ratna on him?
Forget the Emergency, even during the national movement, VD Savarkar, who coined the word Hindutva, and from whom the BJP draws inspiration today, wrote apology letters to the British from the Andaman Jail promising he would eschew political activism. Might we ask Jaitley why his party has named places after Savarkar?
Such arguments apart, there is little doubt that many writers and academicians played a fundamental role in opposing the Emergency. A good many of them didn’t belong to the BJP, which has sought to convey that it was the principal organiser of the protests against the Emergency. That role was undeniably played by the socialists, who subsequently split into too many smaller outfits to provide a parallel narrative of the Emergency, challenging the BJP’s.
It is the participation of the non-Right activists in the anti-Emergency movement which spawned the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties and the Peoples Union for Democratic Rights, both of which the Sangh Parivar often derides. Perhaps what Jaitley has in mind is the support the Communist Party of India offered to Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, conflating the Leftism or anti-Right outlook of the protesting writers with the communist ideology. There is decidedly a difference between the two.
Such subtle ideological differences the BJP leaders should know. After all, it is they who often labour the point that Nathuram Godse had left the RSS to join the Hindu Mahasabha a few years before he assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. It is they who forget that Godse considered Savarkar his political guru.
This is why the BJP’s and Jaitely’s criticism of the writers seems a shallow justification to justify a frightening dream.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
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The first question, which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley posed in his blog, echoes the belief of the Sangh Parivar followers that tension or riots sparked by its politics are more severely scrutinised and criticised than those arising from the politics of the Congress. As an example, it is claimed that the nation is often reminded of the 2002 riots in Gujarat, but not of the communal mayhem of 1984 in Delhi, and in Bhagalpur, Meerut, Moradabad, etc in other years. It is the Left-liberals, so goes the theory, who are to blame for this hypocritical attitude towards riots.
Perhaps the more relevant questions Jaitley and the others should have asked are: Why is it that a large chunk of Muslims still votes the Congress despite the many grisly riots occurring under its past regimes? Why is it that the Sikhs in Punjab voted the Congress to power in Punjab, say, in 2002?
Core ideology
The answer to these two questions is that riots and communal politics do not constitute the ideology of the Congress. The party believes, however falteringly, in the equality of citizens regardless of their religion.
By contrast, the idea of a Hindu rashtra constitutes both the ideology and the political project of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It seeks to unite the Hindus under the overarching ideology of Hindutva, for which it becomes imperative to fan their anxieties through the creation of the "other", "the enemy".
The Sangh’s ideologues of the past defined “Indian” as one whose holy land and fatherland was India, effectively excluding Muslims and Christians from the nationhood. In other words, the feeling of loyalty to India is possible only among those who share a common cultural heritage – the Hindu culture.
This impulse continues to drive the Sangh, as is evident from Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat’s endorsement for reconverting Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. He said last year: “We will bring back those who have lost their way. They did not go on their own [to other religions]. They were lured into leaving [Hinduism].” You will not hear a Congress leader mouth such words.
This is why riots or communal incidents linked to the Congress are perceived differently from those ascribed to the BJP. The riots the Congress is accused of fomenting are for instrumental, not ideological, purposes. These riots, barring that of 1984, were mostly confined to a constituency or two, often engineered by a politician to win a forthcoming election. They were almost always followed by attempts at reconciliation between battling communities, and national leaders of the Congress condemned them explicitly.
A politics of riots
Even a horrific incident such as the Dadri lynching couldn’t prompt the BJP to condemn it without reservation or equivocation. It isn’t a stray example of thoughtlessness. It is because the BJP’s brand of communal politics is aimed at realising the dream of creating a Hindu rashtra. To condemn Dadri unequivocally is to betray its own ideology, its dream.
It is the pivotal role of the tension/riot in the BJP’s politics, their very ideological nature, that the writers perhaps find perturbing. From this perspective, the communal tension is forever kept simmering, increased or decreased depending on the exigency of circumstances, to ensure normalcy is never restored, and the boundaries between communities persist.
For instance, compare the outbreak of communal episodes and debates during the 18 months of the Modi government to their absence in the same period of the previous government and you can’t but agree that the abnormal has tended to become the new normal. The social divisions over the last year have deepened as never before, perhaps matched by only what was experienced between 1989 and 1992, during which the Ram Janmabhoomi project had reached a crescendo. But the BJP was in the Opposition then.
It now wields power, not circumscribed by its coalition partners, as the Vajpayee government was. Perhaps the writers are alarmed now because Dadri, or the stoking of issues such as love jihad, ghar wapsi and a blanket ban on cow-slaughter, are a harbinger of what life could be in a full-blown Hindu rashtra. From what we have witnessed so far, the path to Hindu rashtra will be littered with dead bodies, imposition of regressive social codes, squashing of rights, and even the erosion of normative values as articulated in the Constitution.
Congress and 1984
From this perspective, the 2002 riots in Gujarat were horrifying not only for their barbarity, but also because they seem, in hindsight, a rite of passage to achieve the Hindu rashtra. This has tainted the lens through which we see the world, precisely why even a minor communal incident in a remote corner of India acquires resonance countrywide and dominates media headlines. It is looked upon as a conscious experiment, a thought-out step, to make India Hindu.
There is no denying the fact the Congress milked the 1984 riots to win a brute majority in the Lok Sabha elections of that year. It is also true that then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi seemed to justify the killings through this shocking statement: "When a big tree falls, the earth shakes." A good many from the Congress were accused of fomenting the riots. It is also unconscionable of Rahul Gandhi not to apologise for the 1984 riots, as he refused to in an interview with Times Now anchor Arnab Goswami last year.
Regardless of these shameful facts, the Congress did indeed symbolically atone for the 1984 riots by making Manmohan Singh the Prime Minister. And he, on August 12, 2005, apologised to the entire nation in Parliament “because what took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept of nationhood in our Constitution.”
Contrast this to what Modi said about the 2002 Gujarat riots: “[If] someone else is driving a car and we are sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will [it] be painful or not? Of course, it is.” It is not that Modi can’t offer an apology because he is stubborn; he can’t because his repentance will represent to his Hindutva supporters an abandoning of the Hindu rashtra project. Singh could tender an apology because the ideological core of the Congress isn’t communal. His apology represented an attempt to correct the course of the Congress ship.
More pertinent questions
For Jaitley and the others, though, a more pertinent question to ask of the writers would have been: Why didn’t they return their awards following the Gujarat riots or at the demolition of the Babri Masjid?
Perhaps they thought these episodes were aberrations and the BJP in due course would abandon its extreme position because of the compulsion of power. Or perhaps they presumed the BJP would not acquire the heft to threaten India’s plurality or appear a step closer to realising the Hindu rashtra. The BJP’s dominance of polity is a reality now.
In returning their awards, the writers are telling the Sangh that its goal doesn’t have their consent and are warning us of the threat it poses to our future. Over the decades, they have seen the religious-driven politics create havoc in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ethnic conflict had ripped apart Sri Lanka. It is this fate the writers don’t want for India.
Protests erupt when a society senses the tipping point is reached. To ask the writers why they are protesting now is like asking the Germans why they broke the wall in 1989, not before; it is like asking the Americans why they didn’t protest the war in Vietnam when it began; it is like asking the Tunisians why they didn’t fight for democracy decades earlier.
Many of the writers who have returned the awards have also been asked whether or not they spoke against the Emergency. Some of them did through methods they deemed fit; some of them were too young to have even won an award. As Hindi writer Uday Prakash, who was the first to return the Akademi award, told Outlook magazine, “In 1975, I was hardly 20 years old. In 1984, I had no award, how could I return it? In Dinmaan, I wrote a long report about what I witnessed in 1984 – you can check.”
Jaitley wants the opposition to the Emergency to become a touchstone for judging protesting writers today because his own role in it is known – and praised. But not all from his party played an exemplary role.
None other than Subramanian Swamy wrote a piece in the Hindu newspaper, dated 13 June 2000, saying,
“It is on the record in the Maharashtra Assembly proceedings that the then RSS chief, Balasaheb Deoras, wrote several apology letters to Indira Gandhi from inside the Yerawada jail in Pune disassociating the RSS from the JP-led movement…”
Swamy also took a swipe at Vajpayee in the same Hindu piece:
“In fact for most of the 20-month Emergency, Mr. Vajpayee was out on parole after having given a written assurance that he would not participate in any programmes against the Government.”
Did Jaitely cite Vajpayee’s role in the Emergency to oppose his government’s decision to bestow the Bharat Ratna on him?
Forget the Emergency, even during the national movement, VD Savarkar, who coined the word Hindutva, and from whom the BJP draws inspiration today, wrote apology letters to the British from the Andaman Jail promising he would eschew political activism. Might we ask Jaitley why his party has named places after Savarkar?
Such arguments apart, there is little doubt that many writers and academicians played a fundamental role in opposing the Emergency. A good many of them didn’t belong to the BJP, which has sought to convey that it was the principal organiser of the protests against the Emergency. That role was undeniably played by the socialists, who subsequently split into too many smaller outfits to provide a parallel narrative of the Emergency, challenging the BJP’s.
It is the participation of the non-Right activists in the anti-Emergency movement which spawned the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties and the Peoples Union for Democratic Rights, both of which the Sangh Parivar often derides. Perhaps what Jaitley has in mind is the support the Communist Party of India offered to Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, conflating the Leftism or anti-Right outlook of the protesting writers with the communist ideology. There is decidedly a difference between the two.
Such subtle ideological differences the BJP leaders should know. After all, it is they who often labour the point that Nathuram Godse had left the RSS to join the Hindu Mahasabha a few years before he assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. It is they who forget that Godse considered Savarkar his political guru.
This is why the BJP’s and Jaitely’s criticism of the writers seems a shallow justification to justify a frightening dream.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid.