Some Notes on the Present Conjuncture

Sailen Routray

Common reed at the stream “Heubach” in Hausdülmen Germany (2019)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/Dietmar Rabich  
 

The upsurge of Hindutva in India over the last four decades has often been seen as paralleling the rise of Fascism in Europe in 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, the challenge in front of the country has been described as one primarily to the constitutional liberal state in India. But the time might be ripe for a reassessment where we ask whether the most obvious parallels to the growth of Hindutva have not been rather closer to home. Can we draw parallels to the rise of political Islam in the non-Western world and political Buddhism across Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia?

 

My sense, albeit a tentative one, is that we can answer this question in the affirmative. If that is the case, then perhaps the biggest challenge Hindutva poses in the Indian social formation is not towards the state, but towards ‘Hinduism’ which it deliberately wants to reshape in the image of political Islam.

 

Hindutva in a sense does not challenge the Indian liberal state, because a fiction can be used, but it cannot be ‘challenged’. Hindutva cannot challenge the constitutional, liberal state in India because it has never existed here in the first place. Many things changed with respect to the operations of the state in India during decolonization between 1945-52, including the social composition of the ruling elite in charge of the governmental apparatus. But the state that continues to exist after the British left was very much an empire, albeit without an emperor. The Indian social formation still continues to be administered as a ruthless empire.

This is borne out by the experiences of hundreds of millions of Indians – hundreds of children blinded by pellet guns in Kashmir, hundreds of Kui speaking tribal people in Odisa behind bars with false cases filed against them, lakhs of farmers across India who have committed suicides over the last two  decades, millions of tribals, dalits and bahujans, poor people belonging to upper caste groups, brutally thrown out from their homelands for extractive projects of one kind or the other, women belonging to all communities whose rights have been systematically denied – these are not aberrations produced due to faulty administrative processes. Rather, these people are victims of a ruthless, modern empire with all the twenty-first century weapons and surveillance gadgets at its command.

 

The constitutional, liberal state in India cannot be saved, because it never existed in the first place. The real fight in India over the last ninety years has been about the soul of Hinduism.

 

There are as many Hinduisms as there are Hindus. But two broad streams can be delineated. The  Hinduism of sacred groves vs. the Hinduism of temple complexes ; the Hinduism that celebrates female sexuality and feminine power vs. the Hinduism that is afraid of it; the Hinduism that sees differences in social practices as necessary part of life vs. the Hinduism for which differences are an evil; the Hinduism of conviviality and comradery vs. the Hinduism of hierarchy; the Hinduism of revering sacred trees, waterbodies and hills vs. the Hinduism of idol worship; the Hinduism of adhyatmic practice vs. the Hinduism of social identity;  the Hinduism that is accommodative of strangers and the others vs. the Hinduism that demonizes the others, such as Muslims. The former can be argued to coalesce into 'Yakshadharma' and the latter into ‘Devadharma.’ 

 

It is Yakshadharma that is being destroyed by Hindutva, as its project of creating a monolithic Hinduism at the service of power will not be fructified otherwise. Hinduism is in danger. But Hinduism is in danger from Hindutva and a rampaging capitalism working in gloves with it, that valourises every vice (e.g., greed and speed) that Yakshadharma despises. 

Hindutva, and its younger but stronger brother late capitalism, destroy the habitats and actors of Yakshadharma – deities residing in water bodies, forms of worship where the sacred physically descends into the flesh, modes of communality where the biggest celebration can be the ‘menstruation’ of the earth just before the monsoons, as is the case of Raja festival in coastal Orissa. 

 

Hinduism needs to be saved from Hindutva. But this cannot be done in the medium and long term by only 'politically' opposing Hindutva. We can foster Hinduism, rather Yakshadharma that is its most rooted, democratic, and transcendent form, only by becoming firm practitioners of the practices that are constitutive of it.

 

Yakshadharma can also be protected by denying resources to Devadharma whenever it is practically feasible to do so. For the foreseeable future, the model that early Buddhism followed, of practitioners pursuing their own adhyatmic lives, forming collectives of practitioners, and furthering dharma, might make sense.

The state, and the pursuit of political power, has to be shown its place. Negotiations with it have to be kept at a minimum, but it cannot be shunned. The only way one can deal with it perhaps, is by pursuing the ways Gandhi and his numerous co-workers demonstrated in battles with it - that involved both radical acts of non-cooperation with the state and the governmental apparatus, and at the same time constructive work that built communities around mutual aid, reciprocity and practices of care - and rethinking how we need to adapt these to our times.