Khaki-clad Hindu extremists have hung at the margins of India’s political culture for more than half a century. Until recently, though, the sangh parivar–the constellation of Hindu groups that includes the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council; its militant youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, and the RSS, an umbrella group of 32 social, cultural and political organizations including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–has been a strident voice in the wilderness, causing scenes rather than substantive changes in Indian society. These are the people who try to ban films and art works they deem anti-Hindu, who protest bikini-clad Miss World contestants and trash McDonald’s restaurants.
Now the Hindu right’s tactics have grown more subtle–and more dangerous. Hindu chauvinists have begun to infiltrate academic, cultural and government institutions, hoping to spread their message to the nation’s young. Critics warn that the changes they are putting into place there will have a far deeper and longer-lasting impact than the antics of their lunatic fringe. “The education system will take centuries to recover and regain the quest for inquiry, the zeal for truth,” says John Dayal, secretary-general for the All-India Christian Council. “They’re trying to alter the psyche of this country.”
Politically, the sangh parivar seemed to have mellowed since the BJP came to power in New Delhi in 1998. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has championed a liberalized economy and closer ties with the West–positions that have drawn shrieks from hard-core RSS members. Just last weekend Vajpayee hosted Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at the Taj Mahal; in the run-up to the summit, the Indian government proffered several confidence-building concessions, including the release of 400 Pakistanis from Indian jails, lowered trade tariffs and scholarships for Pakistani students. The silver-haired P.M. could not have reached out to Musharraf without his impeccable nationalist credentials. But the fact that he did, without great protest in India, would seem to indicate how neutered the right wing has been by power.
At the same time, support for the Hindu right continues to spread beyond the shopkeepers who once formed the sangh parivar’s base to prosperous urban professionals. Their enthusiasm draws upon a mix of past slights, present political and social chaos and fears for the future. The defeat of the secularist Congress Party in 1998 left the Indian political landscape fractured and uncertain. Tensions with Muslim Pakistan continue to blur the distinction between religious and national enmity.
Great changes in the Indian economy have spooked traditionalists. Condemning the forces of globalization, RSS pamphlets decry economic entanglements with the West and prize “self-reliance” instead. The admiration for a Golden Age of the Vedas, some of Hinduism’s ancient Sanskrit texts, is matched by fear and loathing of the creeping Westernization of the past decade. “Anti-Hindu national and international forces appear to be determined to finish off the Hindus… and everything for which they can be proud of,” says a typical RSS pamphlet.
As with Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, the radically changing roles of Indian women are a key issue for the Hindu extremists. RSS literature extols women as mothers, while colleges in BJP-majority states stress training for women as dutiful wives. In several colleges, RSS student groups have insisted that female students be banned from wearing jeans or skirts in favor of “Indian dress.” “Women are asserting themselves, Dalits [formerly known as untouchables] are asserting themselves and the old fold is breaking up,” says Roop Rekha Verma, head of philosophy at Lucknow University.
The backlash can be violent. The Bajrang Dal–whose 30 training camps teach Hindu youths self-defense using karate, lathis and, in recent years, air rifles–is growing in strength. The 1.5 million-member organization has repeatedly claimed responsibility for mobs and unrest, but still has support in high places: earlier this month Sports and Youth Affairs Minister Uma Bharti announced she was joining the group.
But the true measure of the Hindu right’s spreading power is not in its overt political presence. The number of RSS advocates in India’s government is widely debated, since only Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, states with BJP governments, have lifted bans on government officials joining the organization. Dr. Suresh Chandravajpayee, secretary-general of the RSS Delhi Unit, says that the organization helps in meetings “at the consultative level,” and lends experts to assist the national government. A recent investigation in the Indian magazine Outlook charged that a range of RSS organizations have also been enriched by funds and contracts from the Indian government.
Where the sangh parivar’s influence is most striking is in the government’s overhaul of national education. “To infect a public through education is very easy,” says Subramanian Swamy, a Harvard-trained politician who was once associated with the sangh parivar, but quit because “I saw too much similarity with Nazi Germany.”
Spearheaded by Minister of Human Resources Murli Manohar Joshi (who refused to be interviewed for this article), the newly proposed curriculum would make Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Vedas, compulsory for every Indian schoolchild. Students would study more Hindu-centric Indian history and less European history, as well as Vedic mathematics based on ancient texts. India’s University Grants Commission recently earmarked funds for university courses in Vedic astrology and priestly rituals. And a new regulation from Joshi’s ministry demands that foreign scholars dealing with “sensitive” issues like history and social issues get government clearance before they can attend conferences in India.
Indian scholarship in the humanities has itself been tainted, say academics. Textbooks introduced since 1998 denigrate minorities and glorify Aryans, or upper-caste Hindus. While Muslims and Christians are depicted as hostile invaders, Aryans are portrayed as India’s indigenous inhabitants, a point disputed by many historians but held dear by the Hindu right. Archeological scholarships and exhibits stress the glories of the ancient Vedic civilization. After reading the ancient Ramayana epic, a director of the Indian Council of Historical Research announced he knew precisely where the god Ram had been born–on the site of the Babri Masjid, a mosque destroyed by Hindu fanatics in the town of Ayodhya in 1992. In Gujarat, a BJP-majority state, textbooks now teach that “Muslims, Christians, and Parsees are foreigners,” and that the caste system was “an ideal system of building the social and economic structure of society.”
At the same time Hindu nationalists are taking steps to ensure that their reforms will not be stalled or overturned. Since 1998, sangh parivar supporters have been appointed to key posts in universities and scores of academic institutes, including the powerful Indian Council of Social Science Research. (ICSSR). “The RSS told me that they wanted to do precisely what the leftists had done during the ’60s and ’70s,” says the ICSSR’s chair, M. L. Sondhi. “They want their people in.” The RSS also exercises influence through its own 17,000 schools. In Goa last month, 52 government primary schools were closed on grounds of insufficient numbers of students and their management given to an RSS-affiliated group. The VHP has opened 75,000 one-teacher schools in central India’s tribal belt. Curriculum in such institutions is not regulated.
Those who would question the Hindu right’s interpretation of history have been threatened. Before Romila Thapar, a prominent historian who challenges the Hindu right’s interpretations of ancient and medieval history, recently gave a lecture in Kerala, posters appeared on the streets cautioning that a “leftist” historian was coming to “whitewash Muslims.” Last year, when she was asked to give a convocation address at Delhi University, a mob of RSS students broke into the hall shouting, “Death to Romila Thapar.” “There are many academics who would speak out, but who perhaps sit quiet because it’s too risky,” says Thapar, who like other professors gets threatening phone calls in the middle of the night. “That sense of intimidation has certainly started.”
Ironically, secularists might benefit the most if the sangh parivar returned to its radical roots. The BJP, which has been plagued lately by charges of corruption and incompetence, is debating whether to revive its original galvanizing issue–the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. Hard-liners have continued to build on the site where the Babri Masjid was razed, sparking riots that killed 1,200 people; party ideologues argue that supporting the project would re-energize the party’s Hindu base. But at the same time the BJP must rely upon the support of various caste-based parties that do not share its ideological bent. Even much of its mainstream support comes from voters who are more disillusioned with the sclerotic Congress Party than enamored of its religious fervor–and who could just as easily withdraw that support if the party swings too far to the right. The question is what disturbing lessons the next generation of Indians will be forced to learn between now and then.
