In a climate of cynicism, hope for the young

By Swapan Dasgupta

Only the most audacious of astrologers would presume to anticipate the course of politics. Even the most discernible of trends can often be overturned by either events or accidents of history. So it is with the run-up to the next general election scheduled for April-May 2014.

A few weeks ago, dispirited Congress loyalists were celebrating Rahul Gandhi’s angry young man act at the Jaipur conclave where he was formally anointed heir-apparent. For nearly a week, the Congress believed that the apparently reluctant Gandhi had finally decided to take the plunge and commit himself to rejuvenating the party. The party’s optimism also stemmed from the belief — by no means unfounded — that the BJP was in the throes of internal disarray, with the heart of the party and the organisation pulling in different directions.

In less than a month, events have conspired to change reality. Rahul is still very much in the reckoning, working assiduously at his long-term plans to build a secure foundation for the party he will inherit from his mother in due course. However, it is now plainly apparent that the Congress and its allies will not be the default choice of the Indian voter. Rahul will be challenged every inch of the way by Gujarat CM Narendra Modi who has been catapulted to the very top of the BJP pile by popular acclaim.

It is the manner of Modi’s rise and rise which makes the political story enthralling. In emerging as the first among equals in the BJP hierarchy, Modi had to overcome many seemingly insurmountable obstacles. There was, first, the vexed issue of the Gujarat riots of 2002, an event that continues to polarize public opinion. Then there was Modi’s assertive leadership style that offended a section of the RSS establishment. And, finally, there was the visceral opposition to Modi from an intellectual establishment that feels Modi is too radical and challenges something called the “idea of India.”

It is not that Modi has overcome all these obstacles . However, what he has successfully done is to expose many of his detractors as paper tigers. Contrary to initial expectations, he hasn’t engaged in frontal combat with the sceptics: he has bypassed them by appealing to an untapped constituency and letting them do the talking on his behalf.

In choosing India’s most well-regarded Commerce college to deliver his first vision statement for the nation, Modi was not merely playing to his strength as the great moderniser. He was also doing what Indian politicians are loath to do: link the future of India to the lives of the best and the brightest students. In other words, rather than use a public platform outside Gujarat to launch into a diatribe against the nine wasted years, he delivered a positive political message: that India will be the land of hope and opportunity as long as we can fix the problems of governance. Amid a climate of cynicism and despondency, Modi proffered a dream for the young.

Modi’s dream will undoubtedly by challenged by what a former US Vice President in the early ’70s called the “nattering nabobs of negativism”. Yet, there is no doubt that in invoking youthful aspirations and positive energy, Modi departed significantly from the caricatured portrayal of him as the proverbial ‘merchant of death.’ This adroit positioning is certain to put his opponents (including those in the loony fringe of the Sangh parivar) in a quandary. This may be a reason why Modibaiters are desperately hoping that the likes of Pravin Togadia continue to deliver hate speeches and derail the aspirational agenda.

Modi cannot hope to disregard the alternative nightmare scenario painted by those who both fear and hate him. Sooner or later he will have to come down hard on those who cannot look beyond hateful identity politics. Modi’s appeal rests on his no-nonsense leadership style and his ability to make the Togadias of India redundant. If these divisive noises from within the Sangh Parivar don’t cease, Modi will have no choice but to flex his muscles and ask his colleagues to choose between him and the Hindu counterparts of Akbaruddin Owaisi.

It’s a battle he can’t lose because he has public opinion on his side. More important, it is a battle that he cannot afford to opt out of. To win India, Modi must also reshape his own ideological family in his own image. Making the likes of Togadia irrelevant may well make Modi’s journey to Race Course Road that much easier. India will have a better idea of what he stands for, something that can hardly be said for his challenger whose appeal rests on privilege and entitlement.

Sunday Times of India, February 10, 2013

Rape is rape, in India as in Bharat

By Swapan Dasgupta

In the late-1980s, and for a time between 1987 and 1991, Devi Lal became a prominent player on the national scene. Deeply rooted in the politics and rural ethos of Haryana, he was known for his earthy wisdom and disdain for all things that didn’t fit into his ‘kisan’ experience. A particular target of his derision was that section of the country that has come to be known as ‘India’—as opposed to ‘Bharat’. The true representative of this land, Devi Lal used to say, were those whose addresses would be prefixed with the name of the VPO—Village Post Office.

It was an interesting formulation and perhaps something that even Mahatma Gandhi with his utopian notions of self-sufficient village communities would have tacitly approved. The problem was that it left a lot of people (including myself) with a feeling of being second-class citizens. Urban India may well be the Devil’s workshop but it happens to be the only place many Indians can call home.

Nor is it accurate to regard rural India as the natural epicentre of virtue and holiness. In his lifetime, Babasaheb Ambedkar was eclipsed by the larger-than-life influence of the Mahatma and the Congress. But it is worth remembering that the Dalit icon always regarded Village India as the citadel of prejudice and oppression against all those who were damned for being ‘untouchable’ by birth. The self-governing qualities of the local panchayat didn’t inspire Ambedkar. To him and to many who were concerned with caste-based oppression, rural hierarchies didn’t have space for those who were condemned to live apart. The stereotype of happy kisans harvesting grain, flanked by women in colourful clothes, didn’t always incorporate the brutal underbelly of an economic order where some communities were regarded as sub-humans, and their women treated as commodities.

Rape, the RSS chief asserted in Silchar last Friday, is essentially an ‘Indian’ phenomenon. He is only partially right. The brutalisation of women is more widespread in the ecosystems of Bharat—and has been so for centuries.

Mohan Bhagwat is also entirely right when he maintained that the respect for women is idealised in Indian culture. But he would be the first to admit that traditional society was less than welcoming and applied very different standards to those groups it regarded as being outside its social orbit—an attitude that has been transmitted into the widespread disrespect for white, women tourists. The deep reverence for ‘stree shakti’ in Bengal, for instance, didn’t prevent the cruel custom of sati and the social degradation and sexual exploitation of widows by ‘respectable’ sections of society. It also didn’t prevent collective sanction for the sexual exploitation of women from the ‘lower orders’.

A feature of the vibrant social reform movements that arose in the 19^th and early-20^th centuries was their willingness to first admit the shortcomings of Hindu society and then address the question of possible remedies. Some of the reformers—notably Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda—were modernists and had imbibed the intellectual currents of the West. But others such as Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar were steeped in tradition and approached the question of reform from a humanist perspective.

The point to note is that for the Hindu stalwarts of the past two centuries, there was a clear understanding that the Hindu, both as an individual and as a collective, wasn’t the epitome of perfection. In today’s context, going by the admission that cosmopolitanism has distorted the minds of ‘India’ and encouraged unwholesome attitudes towards women, the issue to be addressed is: what can be done to change society? After all, there must be glaring imperfections in the modern Hindu that facilitates the ready acceptance of misogyny—the utterances of the Congress MP from Jangipur and a senior BJP minister of Madhya Pradesh being two recent examples. (I am confining my remarks to Hindu society because it sets the tone for India.)

More to the point, the heads of cultural organisations such as the RSS must begin to ask why their unceasing activism over more than eight decades hasn’t altered things. Why have the samskaras they have sought to inculcate in their followers not had a wider effect on society? Maybe the fault doesn’t lie in the samskaras—although a little less patronising attitude towards women would help greatly—but in the priorities of groups that have sought to create a moral leadership for India. If there was greater emphasis on regenerating the institutions of what goes by the name Hinduism rather than on exercising control over a political party, the nation would have been better served.

There is little point celebrating the 150^th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda in style unless the grand speeches are complemented by serious attempts to cleanse the temples of venality, casteism and even the exploitation of women devotees by perverted priests. Vivekananda spoke and wrote at length of the Brahmanical religion’s cruel indifference to the plight of the Sudra and the Chandal. Was he exonerating Bharat and indicting India? Was he creating false binaries?  

Any rape, whether it happens in Delhi or rural Madhya Pradesh, is a collective blot on both India and Bharat. There is little point in saying that one is pristine pure and the other contaminated because it is just not true. We are the children of the same country and together we must hang our heads in shame. 

Sunday Pioneer, January 6, 2013