Making India Hindu:

Community, Conflict, and the Politics of Democracy.

 

Preface to the Second Edition.

Oxford University Press, Delhi. Fall 2004.

(prepublication semi-final draft)

 

Conceived in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, Making India Hindu compiles writing by thirteen scholars in various disciplines that elucidates genealogies, politics and affects of Hindu majoritarianism. This edition reprints the original volume exactly as it appeared in 1996, but its context has changed dramatically since then. We had composed the volume to help explain how Hindutva rose to prominence after 1980, but now the book can also help to explain how Hindutva operates inside India’s political mainstream.

In 1999, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the leading party in a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government that held power until May 2004. By leading India’s first major non-Congress national government, Prime Minister Vajpayee and colleagues opened a new political era. The BJP outgrew its underdog identity. The Sangh Parivar came center-stage in national life. The NAD included as many as twenty-four parties, so the BJP was not as dominant as Congress had been for thirty years after 1947. The BJP was in fact a new kind of dominant party as a pivot of national coalition building. Its Sangh brethren the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) also moved from margins to mainstream by occupying the Prime Minister’s office and all national ministries. Hindutva acquired official respectability as a national party ideology.

This volume indicates that Hindutva was here to stay in 1996, despite its precarious fortunes, small minority backing, and long history on the sidelines. When we compiled the book, we could not have known how Hindutva would fare in the future.  Now we have a better idea.  Since 1996, our topics have become more complex and challenging. Themes, analysis, arguments, and information in this book have acquired new value amidst the national and international mainstreaming of Hindutva and the capture of institutions by its devotees and collaborators, which makes it academic study more difficult and more critical. 

Our new context includes many old trends and patterns. The upward trend of BJP power continued into the new millennium, with one dip following Ayodhya violence and another larger dip at the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, which may mark a shift in the trend, but only time will tell. Essays in this volume (by T.Sarkar, M.Hasan, R.Fox, and S.Sarkar) show how Hindutva’s spreading and deepening influence has draw sustenance from cultural trends that permeate modern Indian history and from multifarious media that propagate Hindutva (R.Davis, V.Farmer, W.Pinch, and P.Manuel). The Sangh Parivar has attended especially to cultivating Hindutva public culture.  The Rath Yatra now seems but one episode in an epic Sangh media blitz, where Ram, kar sevaks, rioters, police, judges, sadhus, journalists, movie stars, novelists, publishers, priests, scholars, politicians, and even the Archaeological Survey of India -- which claimed to have found remnants of a temple under the Babri Masjid -- all play parts. Hindutva is media-savvy and hi-tech; it floods the worldwide web.

With the BJP in power in New Delhi, the media’s professional penchant for quoting people in high office propagated Hindutva ideas on every subject of public interest, while Sangh researchers and communicators worked the gamut of information venues from ministry briefings to broadsheets, bestsellers, and academic tomes. Public and private sponsors finance academic research, teaching, and publishing, to give Hindutva with many voices, in many languages, in India and abroad.  The Sangh took control of countless government agencies and offices, doling out public as well as private funds.  In New Delhi, in all Indian states, and in districts, towns and villages, RSS cadres educated, inspected, recommended, promoted, and assigned public servants. The Sangh captured the Indian Council of Historical Research and Ministry of Education to make government schoolbooks and exams require students to learn that Hinduism is indigenously Indian and that Islam and Christianity are aliens. Government schools enforced the idea that Muslims and Christians conquered and exploited Hindu India. Official Hindutva gave communalism cultural validity that made Hindu violence against Muslims seem a natural manifestation of Hindu rage.

International trends have continued to inflect Hindu majoritarianism. Indian politics are increasingly sensitive to India’s experience of globalization. WTO negotiations and world markets now affect Indian politics along with the US war on terrorism. Hindutva seems to have benefited particularly from the inflammation of Indian relations with Pakistan after Kargil and terrorist attacks on Indian Parliament. US wars in Muslim countries enhanced US support for the NDA and BJP support in America, where Indian lobbyists found the BJP a natural ally as the NDA claimed Kashmir was under attack by the same Muslim terrorists who threatened America.  Ethno-religious chauvinism in other countries has made Hindutva seem more credible and Hindu-Muslim conflict part of a global clash of civilizations.  On the other hand, mounting desires in India for peace with Pakistan, for a peaceful world business climate, and for India to play a constructively independent leadership role -- for example, in poor country WTO alliances -- would seem to diminish the desirability of ethno-chauvinist Hindutva ideology among India’s national leadership.  

Inside India, Hindutva long ago settled into the bumpy roller coaster and dizzying vote calculus of the world’s largest, most diverse democracy. Hindutva’s political geography continues to distinguish the BJP northern heartland states -- toured by the Rath Yatra in 1990 (R.Davis) -- from southern and northeastern states, which remain BJP frontiers. Most media analysts of Indian politics continue to focus on the national opposition of BJP and Congress, but head-to-head battles between Congress and BJP typify elections only in eight states (Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and Chhattisgarh) plus Delhi, while other patterns of party competition typify twenty-one states with three-fourths of India’s population.

2004 elections established a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in New Delhi. But six months earlier, the BJP toppled Congress in Legislative Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. Thus in December 2003, the number of BJP-run states increased from four to seven; the percent of India’s population in BJP-run states increased 47%; and the percent of the population under BJP regimes in the states with head-to-head BJP-Congress battles jumped from 19% to 70%.  In May 2004, the percent of voters living in Indian states with BJP (25%) and Congress (27%) governments was about equal, while almost half (48%) of the Indian citizenry lived in states run by neither Congress nor BJP, in northeast (Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, Sikkim), south (Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu) and north (Bihar, West Bengal, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh). 

In aggregate national voting statistics, BJP and Congress are evenly matched.  Both depend on allies to win. In 2004 Lok Sabha polls, each alliance received about 35% of the total vote, and total votes for NDA and UDA parties declined compared to 1999 (by 3.62% and 2.36%, respectively), while non-aligned parties increased their vote share, most notably the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in UP. The 2004 change in national government came not from a voter shift away from the BJP but from a few key Congress victories and many good Congress alliances with victorious regional parties, which together with “outside support” gave the UDA over 320 Lok Sabha votes, more than the NDA ever had, and drove the NDA into Lok Sabha minorities in all but five Indian states.

The UDA is much bigger than Congress is strong.  Congress remains marginal in major states -- Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu -- while its votes continue to dip in Karnataka. The only big Congress victories in 2004 were in Andhra Pradesh and Delhi. Shifty allies swell the UDA.  Several partners had joined the non-BJP, non-Congress United Front government in the 1990s, and one, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam (DMK), had joined the NDA. Alliance shifting makes sense for regional parties that care more about regional rivals than about national leadership, as most emphatically in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. Communist parties in West Bengal and Kerala disdain both BJP and Congress, but more so the BJP, and thus can live with Congress as outside supporters to bolster the UDA.

The UDA government, like its NDA predecessor, depends on decisions by voters an politicians who seem to respond most visibly to short-term assessments of practical self-interest. Expert analysts attribute electoral success increasingly to effective promises of good government and now typically argue that ideologies are of decreasing importance compared to perceptions of politicians’ competence to serve voters. For example, when Sheila Dixit’s Delhi government won, in 2003, experts attributed her success to her reputation for the efficient provision of public services, earned by keeping onion prices in line at election time and by launching the Delhi Metro (a project begun under the BJP). In 2003, successful BJP candidates in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh castigated Congress failures to deliver development, but the BJP also adorned voter self-interest with resplendent saffron. Holy men sermonized that the RSS guaranteed good government. Hindutva superstars Uma Bharathi and Vasundhara Raje rallied voters and became BJP Chief Ministers in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Sangh Parivar cadres covered Chhattisgarh to convince Adivasis that tangible pay-offs would reward BJP votes. The BJP promise that good government serves the Hindu majority has acquired a viable niche in Indian politics. L.K. Advani duly proclaimed that 2003 election victories endorsed good governance by the BJP and NDA. 

The BJP believed Advani, the media believed the BJP, and the BJP believed the media; so the BJP called early 2004 Lok Sabha elections, and lost.  The NDA’s “India Shining” advertising campaign flopped among voters left in the dark by liberalization, globalization, and hi-tech development policies. In Andhra Pradesh, high unemployment rates led educated young urban voters into the Congress camp. In Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, shortages of drinking water and irrigation sent villagers to Congress and its allies.  In Bihar, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) alliance, led by Laloo Yadav, rallied lower castes by promising dignity, not “bijli, sadak aur paani” (electricity, roads, and water), but a victorious Laloo also demanded that government restore farm subsidies and lower kerosene and diesel prices.  In 2004, the voting majority apparently believed that the incumbent NDA had failed to provide adequate practical benefits, and so the UDA came to power as a collection of opposition candidates rallied around Congress.

Political economy wedged itself between Hindutva and voter interests. This poses a dilemma for those who would make India Hindu. Most poignantly, the BJP has lost more ground in UP, where the VHP dream of building a Ram temple in Ayodhya realistically requires a BJP government. In 1990, Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav stopped assaults on Ayodhya with police shootings, and two years later, Kalyan Singh’s BJP government let kar sevaks demolish the Babri Masjid, but then again, in 2003, Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav arrested 30,000 kar sevaks en route to Ayodhya.  In the early 1990s it seemed the BJP might win UP by making Ram an electoral force.  But ever since, the BJP has lost ground to regional parties representing numerically predominant agrarian castes.(Z.Hasan)  In 2004, the BSP and Samajwadi Party (SP) together won 54 of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats and BJP seats dropped from 25 to 10, one more than Congress retained from 1999, to maintain its minority status amidst BJP decline.  In 2004, the BJP even lost Thakurs and Brahmans who had previously controlled the UP sector of the BJP heartland, and who defected to the SP and Congress, respectively. 

Anti-incumbent victories tarnished the BJP’s saffron glow in 2004, but the Hindutva synergy of practical self-interest and religious passion may again do effective political work when the Sangh Parivar finds suitable targets.(A.Basu) Such targeting often entails violence. Indeed, saffron never looked more like political gold than in 2002 and 2003, when it colored communal violence, election campaigns, subsistence struggles, faction feuds, criminal gangs, and personal ambitions, all at once.

Once again, as in 1992, the targeting of Muslims in 2002 occurred in a BJP-run state, this time, Gujarat. On the morning of 27 February, a crowd of Muslim protesters surrounded the Sabarmati Express at the Godhra rail station and someone burned two bogeys, killing fifty-eight people, mostly kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya. Even now, the cause of the fire is unproven, but on that very day, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi came to Godhra to declare it a Muslim conspiracy. The next day, well-armed, organized gangs began raping, plundering, and killing Muslims across Gujarat. Several thousand Muslims died; many thousands lost homes and livelihoods. BJP governments in Gujarat and Delhi did very little to stop the mayhem as local officials colluded in attacks on Muslims. Police, lawyers, judges, and thugs then stymied prosecution of rapists, arsonists, and murders. In the famous case of Best Bakery murders, the Supreme Court observed on 12 April 2004 that, “When a large number of witnesses have turned hostile it should have raised a reasonable suspicion that the witnesses were being threatened or coerced … [and yet] … public prosecutors did not take any steps to protect the star witness….” Thwarting prosecutions that implicate government became easy as the BJP romped to victory in 2003 state assembly elections under Narendra Modi’s campaign slogan, “Gujarat Unlimited,” promising law and order and investment opportunities for jubilant business supporters. 

Gujarat killings represent a distinctively new cultural moment in the long history of Indian communal violence. (S.Freitag, P.van der Veer.)  Sikh massacres in 1984 were targeted politically, but quite limited by comparison.  In 1992, the Ayodhya assault was planned but the widespread violence that followed was not, and Hindus and Muslims attacked one another haphazardly across many Indian states, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. By contrast, Gujarat mobs targeted Muslims across the state and mass killings acquired a definite appearance of deliberate strategy. Human Rights Watch researchers quickly concluded that, "What happened in Gujarat was not a spontaneous uprising,” but rather, “a carefully orchestrated attack…. planned in advance and organized with extensive participation of the police and state government officials." Moreover, Ayodhya violence had cost the BJP dearly in 1993 polls in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh, but in 2002 and 2003, the BJP and allies won Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, where voters seem at that moment to have accommodated state-assisted killings in positive assessments of the BJP’s capacity to serve voter interests. Narendra Modi’s protection of Hindus made him a model of good saffron governance. Investor-friendly BJP leaders won praise from big business, for instance, at a Bombay gala celebrating “Gujarat Unlimited” where one tycoon reportedly dismissed Gujarat killings as “a storm in a teacup.”

Gujarat massacres again raise the question posed by Amrita Basu in this book of whether we should understand Hindutva as a top-down “elite conspiracy” or bottom-up “mass movement.”  As she argues, some combination of the two is required. Today, the top-down approach now has higher heights to climb, deeper depths to plumb, and more intermediary linkages to explore than it did in 1996. Consider the career of one RSS man, L.K.Advani.  In 1977-80, he served the Jana Sangh as Minister of Information and Broadcasting under India’s first non-Congress national government, led by the Janata Party. In the 1980s, he became BJP strategist for the Ayodhya campaign. In 1990, he rode the Rath Yatra on a route planned by RSS comrade, Narendra Modi. In 1992, he rallied mobs to destroy the Babri Masjid. In 1999, he became Home Minister, and in 2002, Deputy Prime Minister.  A man who rode a truck around India, posing as Ram, sparking riots and courting arrest to catch media attention -- who could have faced criminal indictment for instigating communal violence -- became the national minister responsible for law and order.  Soon thereafter, violence against Christians escalated and provoked murders of missionaries. His response was not to condemn or prosecute but to call for a national dialogue on religious conversion. The RSS justification of religious minority killing as a defensive response by an aggrieved Hindu majority thus entered the highest ranks of Indian state authority. This mode of moral reasoning seeped down to the grassroots under the NDA regime, most thoroughly in Gujarat, the state ruled longest by the BJP, where in 2002, Advani’s old RSS colleague, Chief Minister Modi, reportedly stopped police from suppressing what he called “the Hindu backlash,” declaring, “there would be justice for Godhra.”

Top-down analysis must investigate intermediate levels and linkages though which top-down mobilization activates the grassroots, as bottom-up approaches explore not only specific localities but also upward connections. Some pervasive cultural elements facilitate linkages from top to bottom. Nationalism is one. Ethnic and religious cultural identities are also active at all levels of politics. Globalization has spread the discourse of market freedom and consumerism during a worldwide replacement of state redistributive institutions by growth-centred, market-based economic policies. A new field of opportunity has thus opened up for competitive activists at all levels of politics. Who flourishes in this field of opportunity -- when, where, why, how, and to what effect -- is a pressing concern for scholars. Rather than imagining that obedient party funtionaries form links between India’s national elite and local grassroots, it is more realistic to imagine a floating population of acquisitive actors seeking opportunity from various sources at all levels.

In India today, the top and bottom levels of politics are intricately connected. Under BJP governments, local Hindutva shock troops swelled as elite Sangh Parivar leaders bought recruits among poor Dalits and Adivasis who played prominent roles in Gujarat. The BJP has used flexible top-down strategies to court local interests: it has tactically highlighted and downplayed Hindutva and deployed Sangh brethren who suit the task, according to local context. Its economic policy makers use Swadeshi to attract weak, defensive capitalists and farmers, and they use free-market globalization to attract aggressive capitalists and urban consumers. The contemporary development mantra of “growth above all” works at many levels: it suits most Indian parties, as well as the World Bank, IMF, major Indian capitalists, overseas investors, and India’s expansive urban middle class, whose share of national wealth has steadily increased along with its support of Hindutva. 

Voters, campaigners, and coalitions form flexible linkages between top and bottom levels of Indian politics, making any so-called ruling party in Delhi much less powerful than it seems.  Congress and BJP alike bow to a economic policy framed by the World Bank.  They both operate amidst trends of weakening state power, coalition dependency, regional party fracture, and votes floating free of party loyalty. Yet national power is an asset that BJP and Congress can use to move the tenor of Indian politics one way or another.  The NDA did its best to use that power to make India Hindu. It remains to be seen what the UDA can do to alter that trend.  Good indicators might be prosecution of criminal cases stemming from Gujarat massacres and effective amelioration of the victim’s suffering.  In any case, politicians at the pinnacle of national power remain hostage to shifting loyalties among voters and politicians who remain targets of opportunity for the opposition.

Research on Hindutva thus needs to focus attention not only on the Sangh Parivar but also on everyday environs that imbue Hindutva with diffuse meaning and substance. Scholars need to look closely at where Hindutva takes root, prospers, withers, dies, lives in surrogates, or never arrives. Places to study include foreign sites, which we barely touch upon here.  In the US, Republican Hindutva is growing.  Elsewhere too, ethno-religious bigotry dissolves, merges, and mutates into other idioms. 2004 elections in India suggest that struggles against Hindutva may not be its undoing and that Sangh Parivar activism does not guarantee its own success. Hindutva may not be one singular thing at all, but rather disparate bits of ideology lumped together by specific groups in specific times and places. Hindutva has many histories, and maybe as many meanings as locations. We might usefully imagine Hindutva as being like the NDA, a pragmatic alliance of disparate forces, coming together in some settings, under its own media spotlight, only to fragment and dissipate elsewhere.  Hindutva may find various sources of support under Congress-led government, as it has in the past.

We should think about Gujarat not only as an Indian state where the Sangh Parivar mobilized genocide and won elections, but also as a place where local, regional, national, and global influences converged to generate those outcomes. Here and elsewhere, BJP voters have had diverse motivations, options, and strategies, and by itself, Hindutva does not explain much. Various trends help to explain Gujarat killings and their immediate election aftermath.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Gujarat textile sector collapsed, and in Ahmedabad alone, over 100,000 unemployed industrial workers hit the streets. At least a million people found their family incomes and subsistence security dramatically reduced. This impoverishment came with retrenchment that also made workers more dispensable and insecure in villages and towns across Gujarat.  For decades, industrial unions had served a culturally diverse urban working class. Under the flexible production regime fostered by liberalization and globalization, the state abandoned its commitment to industrial workers, reduced the role of unions, and boosted business profits along with economic growth.  Improving the business climate became the central government concern. At the same time, the organization directly serving Dalit interests, the Dalit Panthers, collapsed.  Growing economic disparities among Dalits pulled potential leaders away to pursue enterprise in the entry ranks of the middle class. Meanwhile, thriving middle class and business families financed Hindu sectarian organizations that promoted Hindu unity with Sanskritization, which stressed patriarchal authority to raise the status of low caste families. Many Hindu organizations embraced the RSS, helped the BJP win elections, and won patronage in return. Also in the 1990s, far from the city, conflict arose between Adivasis and Muslim moneylenders. To repay usurious loans at 120% annual interest, many Adivasis fell into petty crime, including liquor smuggling in India’s only prohibition state.

Free-market insecurity, fear, ambition, poverty, class anger, criminality, patriarchy, and communalism joined hands when Sangh Parivar recruiters used spiritual, political, and business connections to procure support from Dalits and Adivasis by giving jobs, loans, and other assistance. After the deadly spark at Godhra -- a place with a local history of Hindu aggression -- Adivasis killed Muslims in villages all around Godhra.  Thus at one stroke killers eliminated the Adivasis’ creditors and the Banias’ Muslim competitors.  In towns and cities across Gujarat, Dalits looted Muslim shops and homes, to reap the plunder of class war as they liberated real estate for Hindu investors. Well-heeled high caste women in high heels followed mobs into broken Muslim shops for riot season bargain hunting, while most of the middle class stayed home with doors locked. Fearing violence, even the Sabarmati Ashram, founded by Mahatma Gandhi, closed its gates to Muslims fleeing killer mobs. Mass rapes drove Muslim families from villages and neighborhoods in disgrace and fear. Muslims then stayed away from the polls. In 2002, the 55% BJP electoral majority in Gujarat included people who engaged in pogroms, people who feared them, and people who only valued economic stability they attributed to the BJP regime.     

Gujarat may be unique. Its record of communal violence certainly is: the Justice Reddy Commission found almost 3,000 Gujarat incidents of communal violence in the 1960s alone. Events in Gujarat may indicate nothing about India. Each Indian state has a specific collection of local and regional issues, factions, and social forces. International influences arrive in each state differently. Law and order and economic development are primarily state subjects. Language, culture, and history inscribe state borders with potent meanings.  At Lok Sabha election time, each state seems disconnected from others and connected only to New Delhi. Each Legislative Election operates in its own universe.  As a result, national strategists must target each state separately. State politicians must look up to New Delhi and down to localities, but not across state lines. In this context, most Indian parties remain state-bound.

We can thus reasonably imagine two very different Indias. One is unitary. In this India, the line between top and bottom of the political system is variously complex, state-by-state, but all localities are influentially connected to the central government. In this unitary India, Congress and BJP contest the future. Another India, however, is composed of regions. State borders so heavily transect lines connecting Centre and localities that each state constitutes a separate polity. In this regional India, national trends are illusive, deceptive, or irrelevant; only state politics matter, even as each state is separately connected to the Centre. 

A combination of top-down and bottom-up views of unitary and regional India forms a useful perspective for studying Hindutva. In a top-down view of unitary India, the BJP and Congress fight for national supremacy and for power to define Indian nationalism.  A bottom-up view of unitary India reveals, however, that neither Congress nor BJP nationalism holds voters’ loyalty. Voters easily defect. Hindu and secular loyalties bind a small proportion of voter.  Most BJP voters ignore Hindutva and many Congress voters could embrace Hindutva. Combining top-down and bottom-up views of unitary India, we can conclude that national struggles for political power depend on combinations of ideology and performance, and that India now demands a national coalition government that appears to deliver benefits of economic development to the voting majority.  BJP and Congress provide two different styles of national leadership, which lean Right and Left, respectively, but are both malleable in the face of bottom-up demands and obstacles.

By contrast, a top-down view of regional India pictures the BJP and Congress as regional parties vying for votes in regional languages from people in regionally specific local communities. The BJP thrived initially only in states where no other regional party emerged to oppose Congress. In UP, the BJP faded as soon as indigenous regional parties rose to challenge Congress. Only in Gujarat has the BJP become truly indigenous and dominant. Most states remain fertile for BJP and Congress alliances.  In a bottom-up view of regional India, only local issues and people matter; BJP and Congress are abstract representations of a distant national administration. In localities, voters have more to think about than voting, and party strength comes from the toil and influence of local activists who address a range of local concerns. Internal diversity inside regions has led to an increasing fragmentation and localization of regional parties.

Combining top-down and bottom-up views of regional India, we can see that the Sangh Parivar promotes Hindu unity to attach Hindu identities to BJP votes. By targeting Muslim or Christian adversaries -- even in such symbolic settings as cricket matches or beauty pageants -- the Sangh Parivar generates a group feeling and public appearance of Hindu unity. When local conflicts of any kind become communal, they advertise the RSS idea that India is still wracked by Hindu failure to purify Bharat as a Hindu homeland. Metaphorically, communal conflict anywhere affirms that Hindu India lives forever at odds with its alien others.

This volume shows how social conflict attending social change has produced sites for communal mobilization since the days of the Cow Protection Movement. (S.Freitag, R.Fox, S.Sarkar) The salience of social change for communalism increased in the 1970s, when a Home Ministry study concluded that “the persistence of serious social and economic inequalities in the rural areas has given rise to tensions between different classes which may lead to a situation where the discontented elements are compelled to organise themselves and the extreme tensions building up with the ‘complex molecule’ that is the Indian village may end in an explosion.”  Potentially explosive localities provide the Sangh Parivar targets of opportunity for mobilizing communal antagonism. To understand such sites, we had best abandon the idea that each locality is a miniature of the Indian nation.  For in addition to regional identities, localities inhabit spaces that open across international borders. Gujarat would not be Gujarat without Gujaratis overseas. 

Under globalization, localities experience social, economic, and cultural trends that escape the nation. In this perspective, we can study places inside and outside India, side-by-side, and we find that violent discrimination against minorities typifies many countries, rich and poor alike, in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. We can also find opposition to ethnic chauvinism in other countries with lessons for India. For example, in nearby Bangladesh, Jyotrinda Bodhipriya has long struggled against Bengali domination as Chairman of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Regional Council, and on 22 December 2003, he called for securing minority rights by saying, “Only a secular, progressive and democratic system of government can ensure the equal rights of all citizens.”

The future of Hindutva will unfold inside social change that no one controls. Activists who would design India’s future navigate history with at best a precarious picture of their own location and with no means to escape events pushing this way and that. Scholars can help by providing perspective.  We can never rise above history’s turbulence. We can never be non-partisan. We can merely work to identify people, forces, interventions, effects, and trajectories that help to explain where history is moving and why. We hope this new edition of Making India Hindu helps to establish a useful perspective for those who would improve our future.

Additional supplementary material and updates are available at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/hindutva.  I thank Shapan Adnan, Amrita Basu, Victoria Farmer, Bela Malik, Thomas Mathew, Dina Siddiqi, and Narendra Subramanian for insight and information that I have used liberally here.  I thank all the authors in this volume and numerous other correspondents, including Ashok Chowgule, for improving the additional bibliography.

 

David Ludden

Dhaka

15 August 2004