Past and Future of Hindutva

I found Raghu S. Jaitley’s post on the Ayodhya ceremony on 22nd January interesting. He starts with the late 80’s, when Hindu assertiveness started off – slogans like “Garv se kaho hum Hindu hai” (say with pride that we are Hindus).

“In about a year from then, the Ram Janmanhoomi movement began dominating the Indian political landscape. The door-to-door collection of bricks for the shilanyas, the daily reports of the L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra and the trail it left behind and lumpenisation of Jai Shree Ram and Jai Bajrang Bali all followed soon after.”

While it increased the Hindu assertive footprint, it was still limited to pockets of the North, nothing more. But eventually, it led to huge political wins:

“To those who grew up in the 80s, the events on the 22nd of January… will bookend a political issue that dominated all our adult lives.”

 

While the timing was deliberate (close to the next Lok Sabha elections), it raises a new question, says Jaitley:

“The temple movement has been the beating heart of political Hindutva. Which raises the question, what next?”

Is that why the BJP’s focus on the event is less about what has been “achieved”:

“This is the reason there is a clear shift in narrative from celebrating the construction of the temple itself to imbuing it with meaning and symbolism for the new India. That the temple represents a revival of India, its civilisation and a wresting back of its history and its image from the stereotypical portrayal of the western elites. This awakening will further build the self-belief of our people in what we believe will be India’s decade. Or, so we’d like to believe.”

 

Jaitley then looks at the Sematic perspective of the “role” of religion:

“Religion is a… social institution. It exists out of nowhere, and it is the most fundamental of the social institutions. To deny its social features in how it is observed or in its agency to drive social change is futile... Religion gives us a sense of belonging.”

Conversely:

“History has shown the more you drive it (religion) into the background, the stronger, and often in a more virulent form, it comes back… A vacuum of faith is often filled up with another dogma of some kind.”

 

Until recently, that wasn’t true of Eastern religions. They considered religion to be a personal matter, not a social matter. But now, he wonders, has Hinduism begun the turn to become like Christianity in the West? While the religion doesn’t rule the country in the West, its role is not limited to the personal domain either. It influences society and the kinds of laws framed. Given the Western experience, is that necessarily a bad thing? Is it right to assume that any move in that direction can only end up in Islamist-style outcomes?

“The question is, what form of religion should we stand for? That’s not an easy question to answer.”

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