India: Is the ruling BJP's 'Hindutva' approach a civilizational principle?

The difference between Hinduism as a religion and Hindutva as a political ideology has been a topic of heated debate in India for years.



Since the BJP was re-elected to power in 2019, tensions between Hindus and Muslims have escalated

Election season is underway in five Indian states, and the big question is whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janta Party's (BJP's) core Hindu nationalist agenda will continue to be well-received by the over 180 million eligible voters.

The defining credo of the BJP since 1989 has been "Hindutva," a political ideology that promotes the "values" of the Hindu religion as being the cornerstone of Indian society and culture.

The BJP's continuous reliance on an aggressive Hindutva plank has given it electoral success in the past. However, the BJP's political opponents say the party's ultra-nationalist rhetoric, based on Hindu nationalism, threatens to displace secularism as the foundation of India's constitution.

The politicization of the Hindu religion has also been combined by the BJP in recent years with more aggressive policies that India's Muslim community says treats them as second-class citizens.

Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk and chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, has emerged as a poster child for the Hindu right-wing.

He recently described the election in the northern Indian state as an "80% versus 20%" contest, which roughly corresponds to Uttar Pradesh's Hindu and Muslim population proportion.
Hindu-Muslim tension in India

Since the BJP was again elected into power in 2019, tensions between Hindus and Muslims have escalated.

Watch video 02:34Uttar Pradesh candidate pushes anti-Muslim message

A citizenship law passed in 2019 called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) fast-tracks citizenship of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who arrived in India before 2015. However, critics say it excludes fast-tracking citizenship rights for Muslims.

In 2020, Muslim-majority neighborhoods in Delhi were the scene of violent riots that were set off by protests against the CAA. Mobs of mainly Hindu men targeted Muslim homes and businesses.

Two days of bloody violence left 53 dead, including both Hindus and Muslims, and more than 200 wounded.

More recently, a controversy over women wearing the Islamic headscarf "hijab" in schools and colleges has sparked tension and protest in southern India between Hindus and Muslims.

"The proliferation of anti-Muslim hate forms the architecture of Hindutva," rights activist Shabnam Hashmi told DW.

"Hate speech against Muslims in India has gained momentum, with several right-wing and Hindutva leaders calling for a Muslim 'genocide' with no response from the government," she said.

How intertwined are Hindutva and Hinduism?

Hindutva was first proposed as a political idea in 1928 in a pamphlet written by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar titled "Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?"

"Hinduism has many texts including the Vedas, the Puranas while Hindutva has one central political pamphlet," Congress lawmaker Shashi Tharoor wrote in a recent social media post.

The BJP says Hindutva is a vehicle for social development and governance.

UP Chief Minister Adityanath said at a recent BJP rally that "Hindutva and development are complementary to each other. Those who are opposing Hindutva are in fact opposing development and Indianness

Watch video 02:51 Controversy over hijab at India's educational institutions

Hindutva is 'not divisive'

However, Tom Vadakkan, a Christian member of the BJP from the southern Kerala state, said that there is room from pluralism in Hindutva, despite it being rooted in Hinduism as a religion.

"There should be no hair-splitting about Hinduism and Hindutva. They are conjoined, and a historical reality which is civilizational. We live in a pluralistic society and there is no attempt to impose the party's ideology on any denomination," he told DW.

"Hindutva does not mean divisive politics," he added.

Muslim BJP member Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, a minister of minority rights in Modi's government, presented a different point of view, contending that Hindutva is not associated with religion but is rather a guiding civilizational principle.

"It is because of Hindutva that we talk about unity in diversity," said Naqvi during a heated television debate over Hindutva in December 2021.

Shazia Ilmi, a BJP spokesperson, told DW that Hindutva was being misinterpreted by the media and denied that the BJP discriminates against Muslims, adding that social development under the political ideology provides benefits for all of India's ethnic groups.

A major new Pew Research Center survey of religion across India, based on nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults conducted in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020, found that Indians of all religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths.

K J Alphons, a BJP lawmaker and a former minister, told DW that sectarian strife in India should not be blamed on Hindutva politics.

"We are a huge country with nearly 1.4 billion people. Many of these incidents involving Muslims or Christians are economic in nature and not religious. These are isolated incidents and to see a conspiracy in such isolated incidents is unfair," he said.

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ARYAN SUPREMACISTS

Hindu extremists target Muslim sites in India, even Taj Mahal


The Gyanvapi mosque is in Hindu nationalists' crosshairs after claims circulated that a representation of Shiva was found there

 (AFP/Sanjay KANOJIA)

Abhaya SRIVASTAVA
Fri, May 20, 2022

Thirty years after mobs demolished a historic mosque in Ayodhya, triggering a wave of sectarian bloodshed that saw thousands killed, fundamentalist Indian Hindu groups are eyeing other Muslim sites -- even the world-famous Taj Mahal.

Emboldened under Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aided by courts and fuelled by social media, the fringe groups believe the sites were built on top of Hindu temples, which they consider representations of India's "true" religion.

Currently most in danger is the centuries-old Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities, where Hindus are cremated by the Ganges.

Last week reports claimed a leaked court-mandated survey of the mosque had discovered a shivalinga, a phallic representation of the Hindu god Shiva, at the site.

"This means that is the site of a temple," government minister Kaushal Kishore, a member of Modi's BJP party, told local media, saying that Hindus should now pray there.

Muslims have already been banned from performing ablutions in the water tank where the alleged relic -- mosque authorities say it is a fountain -- was found.

- Religious riots -

The fear now is that the Islamic place of worship will go the way of the Ayodhya mosque, which Hindu groups believe was built on the birthplace of Ram, another deity.

The frenzied destruction of the 450-year-old building in 1992 sparked religious riots in which more than 2,000 people died, most of them Muslims, who number 200 million in India.

The demolition was also a seminal moment for Hindutva -- Hindu supremacy -- paving the way for Modi's rise to power in 2014.

The movement's core tenet has long been that Hinduism is India's original religion, and that everything else -- from the Mughals, originally from Central Asia, to the British -- is alien.

Some groups have even set their sights on UNESCO world heritage site the Taj Mahal, India's best-known monument attracting millions of visitors every year.

Despite no credible evidence, they believe that the 17th-century mausoleum was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan on the site of a Shiva shrine.

"It was destroyed by Mughal invaders so that a mosque could be built there," Sanjay Jat, spokesman for the hardline organisation Hindu Mahasabha, told AFP.

This month a court petition was filed by a member of Modi's party trying to force India's archaeological body, the ASI, to open up 20 rooms inside, believing they contained Hindu idols.

The ASI said there were no such idols and the court summarily dismissed the petition.

But it was not the first such case -- and it is unlikely to be the last.

"I will continue to fight for this till my death," Jat said.

"We respect the courts but if needed we will demolish the Taj and prove the existence of a temple there."

- 'Gospel truth' -

Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian history with Rutgers University, said the claims about the Taj Mahal are "about as reasonable as the proposals that the Earth is flat".

"So far as I can discern, there is not a coherent theory about the Taj Mahal at play here so much as a frenzied and fragile nationalist pride that does not allow anything non-Hindu to be Indian and demands to erase Muslim parts of Indian heritage," she told AFP.

But while the demolition of the Taj Mahal remains -- for now, at least -- a pipe-dream of the fundamentalists, other sites are also in the crosshairs.

They include the Shahi Idgah mosque in Mathura, built by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb after he attacked the city and destroyed its temples in 1670.

The mosque is next to a later temple built on what is believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna.

On Thursday a court agreed to hear a lawsuit demanding the removal of the mosque, one of a slew of similar petitions.

Police in the northern city have been put on alert.

Another is Delhi's Qutub Minar, a 13th-century minaret and victory tower built by the Mamluk dynasty, also from Central Asia.

Some Hindu groups believe it was constructed by a Hindu king and that the complex housed more than 25 temples.

Such claims were born of a "very sparse" knowledge of the past, historian Rana Safvi told AFP.

Instead, a "sense of victimhood" was being fuelled by social media misinformation, she said, "making them believe it's the gospel truth".

abh-ash/stu/slb/smw/je

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Seattle considers historic law barring caste discrimination

By DEEPA BHARATH

yesterday

1 of 7
New Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant speaks, in Seattle. One of Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather – a man she “otherwise loved very much” – utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid. Now an elected official in a city thousands of miles from India, she has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

One of Kshama Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather — a man she “otherwise loved very much” — utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid.

The Seattle City Council member, raised in an upper-caste Hindu Brahmin household in India, was 6 when she asked her grandfather why he used that derogatory word when he knew the girl’s name. He responded that his granddaughter “talked too much.”

Now 50, and an elected official in a city far from India, Sawant has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. If her fellow council members approve it Tuesday, Seattle will become the first city in the United States to specifically outlaw caste discrimination.

In India, the origins of the caste system can be traced back 3,000 years as a social hierarchy based on one’s birth. While the definition of caste has evolved over the centuries, under both Muslim and British rule, the suffering of those at the bottom of the caste pyramid – known as Dalits, which in Sanskrit means “broken” — has continued.

In 1948, a year after independence from British rule, India banned discrimination on the basis of caste, a law that became enshrined in the nation’s constitution in 1950. Yet the undercurrents of caste continue to swirl in India’s politics, education, employment and even in everyday social interactions. Caste-based violence, including sexual violence against Dalit women, is still rampant.

What is India's caste system? Is it contentious in U.S.?

The national debate in the United States around caste has been centered in the South Asian community, causing deep divisions within the diaspora. Dalit activist-led organizations such as Oakland, California-based Equality Labs, say caste discrimination is prevalent in diaspora communities, surfacing in the form of social alienation and discrimination in housing, education and the tech sector where South Asians hold key roles.

The U.S. is the second most popular destination for Indians living abroad, according to the Migration Policy Institute, which estimates the U.S. diaspora grew from about 206,000 in 1980 to about 2.7 million in 2021. The group South Asian Americans Leading Together reports that nearly 5.4 million South Asians live in the U.S. — up from the 3.5 million counted in the 2010 census. Most trace their roots to Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

There has been strong pushback to anti-discrimination laws and policies that target caste from groups such as the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America. They say such legislation will hurt a community whose members are viewed as “people of color” and already face hate and discrimination.

But over the past decade, Dalit activism has garnered support from several corners of the diaspora, including from groups like Hindus for Human Rights. The last three years in particular have seen more people identify as Dalits and publicly tell their stories, energizing this movement.

Prem Pariyar, a Dalit Hindu from Nepal, gets emotional as he talks about escaping caste violence in his native village. His family was brutally attacked for taking water from a community tap, said Pariyar, who is now a social worker in California and serves on Alameda County’s Human Relations Commission. He moved to the U.S. in 2015, but says he couldn’t escape stereotyping and discrimination because of his caste-identifying last name, even as he tried to make a new far from his homeland.

Pariyar, motivated by the overt caste discrimination he faced in his social and academic circles, was a driving force behind it becoming a protected category in the 23-campus California State University system in January 2022.

“I’m fighting so Dalits can be recognized as human beings,” he said.

In December 2019, Brandeis University near Boston became the first U.S. college to include caste in its nondiscrimination policy. Colby College, Brown University and the University of California, Davis, have adopted similar measures. Harvard University instituted caste protections for student workers in 2021 as part of its contract with its graduate student union.

Laurence Simon, international development professor at Brandeis, said a university task force made the decision based “on the feelings and fears of students from marginalized communities.”

“To us, that was enough, even though we did not hear of any serious allegations of caste discrimination,” he said. “Why do we have to wait for there to be a horrendous problem?”

Among the most striking findings in a survey of 1,500 South Asians in the U.S. by Equality Labs: 67% of Dalits who responded reported being treated unfairly at their workplace because of their caste and 40% of Dalit students who were surveyed reported facing discrimination in educational institutions compared to only 3% of upper-caste respondents. Also, 40% of Dalit respondents said they felt unwelcome at their place of worship because of their caste.

Caste needs to be a protected category under the law because Dalits and others negatively affected by it do not have a legal way to address it, said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder and executive director of Equality Labs. Soundararajan’s parents, natives of Tamil Nadu in southern India, fled caste oppression in the 1970s and immigrated to Los Angeles, where she was born.

“We South Asians have so many difficult historical traumas,” she said. “But when we come to this country, we shove all that under the rug and try to be a model minority. The shadow of caste is still there. It still destabilizes lives, families and communities.”

The trauma is intergenerational, she said. In her book “The Trauma of Caste,” Soundararajan writes of being devastated when she learned that her family members were considered “untouchables” in India. She recounts the hurt she felt when a friend’s mother who was upper caste, gave her a separate plate to eat from after learning about her Dalit identity.

“This battle around caste is a battle for our souls,” she said.

The Dalit American community is not monolithic on this issue. Aldrin Deepak, a gay, Dalit resident of the San Francisco Bay area, said he has never faced caste discrimination in his 35 years in the U.S. He has decorated deities in local Hindu temples and has an array of community members over to his house for Diwali celebrations.

“No one’s asked me about my caste,” he said. “Making an issue where there is none is only creating more fractures in our community.”

Nikunj Trivedi, president of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, views the narrative around caste as “completely twisted.” Caste-based laws that single out Indian Americans and Hindu Americans are unacceptable, he said.

“The understanding of Hinduism is poor in this country,” Trivedi said. “Many people believe caste equals Hinduism, which is simply not true. There is diversity of thought, belief and practice within Hinduism.”

Trivedi said Seattle’s proposed policy is dangerous because it is not based on reliable data.

“There is a heavy reliance on anecdotal reports,” he said, suggesting it would be difficult to verify someone’s caste. “How can people who know very little or nothing about caste adjudicate issues stemming from it?”

Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, called Seattle’s proposed ordinance unconstitutional because “it singles out and targets an ethnic minority and seeks to institutionalize implicit bias toward a community.”

“It sends that message that we are an inherently bigoted community that must be monitored,” Shukla said.

Caste is already covered under the current set of anti-discrimination laws, which provide protections for race, ethnicity and religion, she said.

Legislation pertaining to caste is not about targeting any community, said Nikhil Mandalaparthy, deputy executive director of Hindus for Human Rights. The Washington, D.C.-based group supports the proposed caste ordinance.

“Caste needs to be a protected category because we want South Asians to have similar access to opportunities and not face discrimination in workplaces and educational settings,” he said. “Sometimes, that means airing the dirty laundry of the community in public to make it known that caste-based discrimination is not acceptable.”

Council member Sawant said legal recourse is needed because current anti-discrimination laws are not enough. Sawant, who is a socialist, said the ordinance is backed by several groups including Amnesty International and Alphabet Workers Union that represents workers employed by Google’s parent company.

More than 150,000 South Asians live in Washington state, with many employed in the tech sector where Dalit activists say caste-based discrimination has gone unaddressed. The issue was in the spotlight in 2020 when California regulators sued Cisco Systems saying a Dalit Indian engineer faced caste discrimination at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

Sawant said the ordinance does not single out one community, but accounts for how caste discrimination crosses national and religious boundaries. A United Nations report in 2016 said at least 250 million people worldwide still face caste discrimination in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Pacific regions, as well as in various diaspora communities. Caste systems are found among Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Muslims and Sikhs.

Among the diaspora, many Dalits pushing to end caste discrimination are not Hindu. Nor are they all from India.

D.B. Sagar faced caste oppression growing up in the 1990s in northern Nepal, not far from the Buddha’s birthplace. He fled it, emigrating to the U.S. in 2007. Sagar says he still bears physical and emotional scars from the oppression. His family was Dalit and practicing elements of both Hinduism and Buddhism, and felt shunned by both faiths.

“We were not allowed to participate in village festivals or enter temples,” he said. “Buddhists did not allow anyone from the Dalit community to become monks. You could change your religion, but you still cannot escape your caste identity. If converting to another religion was a solution, people would be free from caste discrimination by now.”

In school, Sagar was made to sit on a separate bench. He was once caned by the school’s principal for drinking from a water pot in the classroom that Dalits were barred from using. They believed his touch would pollute the water.

Sagar said he was shocked to see similar attitudes arise in social settings among the U.S. diaspora. His experiences motivated him to start the International Commission for Dalit Rights. In 2014, he organized a march from the White House to Capitol Hill demanding that caste discrimination be recognized under the U.S. Civil Rights Act.

His organization is currently looking into about 150 complaints of housing discrimination from Dalit Americans, he said. In one case, a Dalit man in Virginia said his landlord rented out a basement, but prevented him from using the kitchen because of his caste.

“Caste is a social justice issue, period,” he said.

Like Sagar, Arizona resident Shahira Bangar is Dalit. But she is a practicing Sikh and her parents fled caste oppression in Punjab, India. Her parents never discussed caste when she was young, but she learned the truth in her teens as she attended high school in Silicon Valley surrounded by high-caste Punjabi friends who belonged to the higher, land-owning Jat caste.

She felt left out when her friends played “Jat pride” music and when a friend’s mother used her caste identity as a slur.

“I felt this deep sadness of not being accepted by my own community,” Bangar said. “I felt betrayed.”

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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Path of instability
Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry 

PAKISTAN is currently muddling through a storm of political instability, economic downturn and resurgent terrorism. Large sections of Indian media and pundits have seized the opportunity to demonise Pakistan as the epicentre of the problems plaguing South Asia. In doing so, they aim to absolve the Indian government of its own contribution towards an unstable South Asia.

Worrisome trends in India tell a different story. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in an interview characterised the present Indian government as communitarian, majoritarian and anti-Muslim, which he deems as a ‘reduction’ of India from the pluralistic and culturally rich country it once was. He is not alone in raising these concerns. Since India is the largest state in South Asia, it is important to understand the recent rise of Hindu nationalism there, and why it matters to regional stability.

The secular, pluralistic and democratic country that Nehru had envisioned is rapidly giving way to a Hindutva-driven rashtra. Nehru’s book The Discovery of India des­cribed “unity in diversity” as the defining character of Indian civilisation. Conver­sely, the BJP’s political philosophy derives its inspiration from RSS leader Savarkar, who asserted that Hindu identity was the essence of India. Eventually, the Modi-led BJP actualised the nationalist political ideology of Hindutva. According to Aakar Patel, author of Our Hindu Rashtra, India today is a Hindu majoritarian state in practice.

The second dimension of today’s India is the personality cult of Narendra Modi that has been systematically developed. The BJP’s 2014 manifesto Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat (‘One India, Excellent India’) featured the pictures of many BJP leaders, but the title page of the 2019 manifesto Sankalp Bharat, Sashakt Bharat (‘Resolute India, Strong India’) had only the picture of Modi, a shift aimed at portraying Modi as the only hope for a strong India. In a Foreign Policy essay ‘The Cult of Modi’ published last year, Ramachandra Guha describes in detail how Modi has used a massive propaganda machinery to enhance his image as the “great redeemer of Hindus and Hinduism”. Arundhati Roy argues in an article published by The Guardian recently that Modi’s policy of violent Hindu nationalism was “underwritten by big business” like billionaire Gautam Adani.

Nehru’s India has given way to an India driven by Hindutva.

The third aspect of communitarian India is the growing anxiety of the country’s minorities. In 2018, then BJP president Amit Shah described Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh as “termites”. The Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, offered Indian citizenship to religious minorities from neighbouring countries, except Muslims, which the UNHCR characterised as “fundamentally discriminatory”. The Muslim-majority population of Indian-occupied Kashmir has also suffered from communication blockades and lockdowns for years. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom asserted in its 2022 report that Modi’s India was committing “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom” against its minorities.

Hate speech and attacks targeting Muslims have become routine in India. Saffron-clad Hindu mobs frequently lynch Muslims on the streets. In February 2022, RSS followers made headlines in Karnataka when they heckled a hijab-clad Muslim student, Muskan Khan. On Aug 15, 2022, 11 convicted men, who had gang-raped a pregnant Muslim woman, Bilkis Bano, during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, were released prematurely and received a heroes’ welcome. The recently relea­sed BBC documentary India: The Modi Question describes in detail how then chief minister Modi oversaw a pre­­planned pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Minorities in India face hate-mong­ering programmes, like ‘Ghar Wapsi’ (conversion to Hin­du­ism) or ‘Love Jihad’ (discouraging Hindu women from meeting Muslim men). Even Bollywood is embracing right-wing narratives that glorify Hinduism and disparage Islam.

The fourth plank of the Hindutva strategy is to isolate and demonise Pakistan. A massive disinformation campaign against Pakistan was run in Europe using fake NGOs (unearthed by EU’s DisinfoLab). Indian leaders recycle their mantra that Pakistan is the epicentre of terrorism, without acknowledging Pakistan’s valiant fight against terrorism.

If these trends continue, and minorities are pushed to the wall, South Asia’s largest country could head towards tumult. Pakistan and other South Asian nations are already facing serious political and economic challenges; if there is instability in India too, there would be grave implications for regional peace and prosperity. As the BJP-led government completes its second term, one hopes that it heeds wiser counsel, and prevents India from turning into a majoritarian state that is fast losing its democratic ethos.

The writer is a former foreign secretary and author of Diplomatic Footprints.

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2023

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Hinduism Is Fascism

Modern Hinduism is fascism and racism. It is the origin of what we would call modern Fascism. Based on a religious caste system that is Aryan in origin, it divides up the world into three castes, warriors, priests, merchants, and in a slave class; the Dalit's or Untouchables. India Caste System Discriminates

The influence of Hindu Fascism on the Occult is well documented. Especially in the racialist constructs of Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical movement. It is the concept of the Secret Chiefs, of higher beings who contact select humans, usually Caucasian Europeans, while relegating other 'races' of humanity to lesser rungs in the celestial hierarchies. Hence the belief in reincarnation, karma, dharma, etc. gets interepreted as the need for these lesser races to evolve to be accepted into the divine prescence fo the Secret Chiefs.

Later Aryan racialists would look at India as the home of the purist of the Aryan social constructs, that is the caste system, which they equated with the Indo-European peoples and as dating back to the orginal Aryan/Germanic expansion into the region. Savtri Devil, Hitlers Priestess was such a Indo-Aryan revivalist. The underlying construct of Hinduism is of whiteness/light verus black/darkness, which appealed to the Aryan racialists.

Dalit: The Black Untouchables of India
Originally published in India under the title Apartheid in India, V.T. Rajshekar's passionate work on the plight of the Indian Dalits was first introduced to North American readers through the publication of DALIT: The Black Untouchables of India in 1987. This book is the first to provide a Dalit view of the roots and continuing factors of the gross oppression of the world's largest minority (over 150 million people) through a 3,000 year history of conquest, slavery, apartheid and worse. Rajshekar offers a penetrating, often startling overview of the role of Brahminism and the Indian caste system in embedding the notion of "untouchability" in Hindu culture, tracing the origins of the caste system to an elaborate system of political control in the guise of religion, imposed by Aryan invaders from the north on a conquered aboriginal/Dravidian civilization of African descent. He exposes the almost unimaginable social indignities which continue to be imposed upon so-called untouchables to this very day, with the complicity of the political, criminal justice, media and education systems. Under Rajshekar's incisive critique, the much-vaunted image of Indian nonviolence shatters. Even India's world-celebrated apostle of pacificsm emerges in less saintly guise; in seeking to ensure Hindu numerical domination in India's new political democracy, Mahatma Gandhi advocated assimilating those whom Hindu scriptures defined as outcastes (untouchables) into the lowest Hindu caste, rather than accede to their demand for a separate electorate. Rajshekar further questions whether the Brahminist socio-political concepts so developed in turn influenced the formation of the modern Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy, placing the roots of Nazism deep in Indian history.

At the Culture and the State Conference at the U of A three years ago there was a concurrent conference of Dalit's from across North America. It was organized by my comrade John Ames. It was there I picked up their materials denonucing Hinduism as Racism and Fascism. These texts advocated a secular socialist humanist perspective on the Dalit struggle against the feudalist religion and politics of Hinduism.

Many Dalit groups, taking their cue from civil liberties organizations, ignore much of the economic ground for untouchability. Communist leader Brinda Karat notes that “only Communist inspired movements, enabled by the active participation of Dalits, have led to concrete gains against casteism.” In West Bengal, she shows, the Communist government initiated land reform that now forms “the backbone of Dalit self-respect and dignity in the State.”Badges of Color

Dalit Voice - The Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied Human Rights
Dalit Voice was the first Indian journal to expose this closely guarded secret and shock the outside world and make history. That is how Dalit Voice has become the organ of the entire deprived destitutes of India, the original home of racism. Started in 1981 by V.T. Rajshekar, its Editor and founder, Dalit Voice, the English fortnightly, has become the country's most powerful "Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied Human Rights". A veteran journalist, formerly of the Indian Express, powerful and fearless writer, V.T. Rajshekar, had to face the wrath of the ruling class, arrested many times, several jail sentences, passport impounded and subjected to total media boycott.

The Dalits are not only literal shit collectors in India they are also the largest group of workers in the service sector including government and the public sector. The political activism of the Dalits has been to unite in unions, broad based populist political parties, movements for womens rights, etc. to confront the Hindu Caste State in India.

Dalit Rising

Ghettoised Indians of the gutter society, eternally condemned. Not anymore, writes Amit Sengupta. The uprising is not a revolution, but it is no less

Buddha Smiles: Mass-conversion of dalits to Buddhism, November 4, 2001 Delhi

The sun of self-respect has burst into flame Let it burn up these castes!
Smash, Break, Destroy These walls of hatred
Crush to smithereens this aeons-old school of blindness Rise, O People!
Marathi song, anti-caste movement, 1970s

In other words, five thousand years and more after, almost 60 years after ‘Independence’, dalits in India are a priori condemned, even before they are born. Even after they die when they are buried in separate village graveyards. Even when they become educated or employed, within or outside the politics of half-fake affirmative action.

Unlike in Punjab, with plus 30 percent dalit population, many of them economically well-off, not dependent on land, where Kanshiram begun his first mobilisation. The dalit-sufi secular traditions (they control dargahs) are as strong here, as is the old Ghadarite-Leftist-radical traditions — be it during the freedom struggle, or in the great sacrifices made against terrorism. The Mansa and Talhan movements are examples of organised dalit reassertion: political and ideological (see story).

In Bant Singh Inquilabi’s amputated limbs, lies the epic story of a nation defiled, like his raped daughter in Mansa. But the truth is that this ‘invisible nation’ is refusing to accept its fatedness anymore. As in Gohana in Haryana, in Bhojpur in Bihar, Ghatkopar in Mumbai, Talhan in Punjab, this rising is rising like a wave on a full moon night. It’s only that we only want to see the dark side of the moon.

The Politics of the Caste System and the Practice of Untouchability The Hindu religious belief that" ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT BORN EQUAL" is deeply entrenched in the psyche of the upper-caste Hindus, leading them to see themselves as a superior race destined to rule and the out-castes (the Untouchables or Dalits) an inferior race born only to serve. This system, which has resulted in the destitution of millions of people due to racial discrimination, has not changed one iota after 50 years of Indian independence.

"For the ills which the Untouchables are suffering, if they are not as much advertised as those of the Jews, and are not less real. Nor arc the means and the methods of suppression used by the Hindus against the Untouchables less effective because they are less bloody than the ways which the Nazis have adopted against the Jews. The Anti-Semitism of the Nazis against the Jews is no way different in ideology and in effect from the Sanatanism of the Hindus against the Untouchables.The world owes a duty to the Untouchables as it does to all suppressed people to break their shackles and set them free."

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in a preface to his book,

"Gandhi and the Emancipation of Untouchables" - 1st September 1943

Man who redefined Dalit politics- The Times of India

October, 10, 2006

NEW DELHI: Kanshi Ram, the Dalit icon who changed the political landscape of north India, was cremated as per Buddhist rituals at a funeral conducted by his political legatee, Mayawati, after Delhi High Court turned down the plea of his family for staying the last rites.

For a man who single-handedly turned the politics of North India on its head by thrusting Dalits as a factor in the regional power-play, Kanshi Ram's end was rather sedate, passing away on Monday, at 72, after being confined to bed for almost four years.

As in life, Kanshi Ram, in death, did not miss to shock his main haters — the urban middle classes — as he pulled the subaltern in droves on to the Capital's roads, throwing them off gear in sweltering heat.

Post-independence, Kanshi Ram redefined Dalit politics in the idiom of defiance. Hailing from a Ramdasiya Sikh family of Ropar and employed as a research assistant in a defence ministry lab, he resigned over the right of Dalit staff to get leave to celebrate Ambedkar and Valmiki jayantis.

What unfolded was a long-drawn mobilisation of Dalits, which changed political faultlines of the Hindi belt, marked by rebellious rhetoric and neat networking.

Kanshi Ram first targeted the better-off among Dalits, who had benefited from job quota. The result was the birth in 1978 of the Backwards and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF), the first countrywide network of government employees from these categories.

APPRAISAL

KANSHI RAM

The Dalit Chanakya

If Ambedkar was theory, Kanshi Ram was practice. Roaring practice.

RAMNARAYAN RAWAT

Magazine | Oct 23, 2006

The dalit in India - caste and social class

THE dalit or "Untouchable" is a government servant, the teacher in a state school, a politician. He is generally never a member of the higher judiciary, an eminent lawyer, industrialist or journalist. His freedom operates in designated enclaves: in politics and in the administrative posts he acquires because of state policy. But in areas of contemporary social exchange and culture, his "Untouchability" becomes his only definition. The right to pray to a Hindu god has always been a high caste privilege. Intricacy of religious ritual is directly proportionate to social status. The dalit has been formally excluded from religion, from education, and is a pariah in the entire sanctified universe of the "dvija." (1)

Unlike racial minorities, the dalit is physically indistinguishable from upper castes, yet metaphorically and literally, the dalit has been a "shit bearer" for three millennia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. The word "pariah" itself comes from a dalit caste of southern India, the paRaiyar, "those of the drum" (paRai) or the "leather people" (Dumont, 1980: 54).

Barbaric Assault on Bant Singh (AIALA Leader)
Petition to Prime Minister of India

We the undersigned condemn the savage and barbaric assault by powerful Congress-backed Jat landlords which has left Bant Singh, Dalit leader of the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha (All-India Agrarian Labour Association) in Mansa, Punjab, with both hands and one leg amputated. Further we note that this criminal attack was planned in retaliation for Bant Singh’s sustained campaign against caste and gender based power and violence, and in particular, his struggle to bring his minor daughter’s rapists to justice. We stand by Bant Singh and his family in the face of this unspeakable tragedy and we believe passionately that such atrocities cannot be acceptable in 21st century India.




Dalit Religious Conversion

A Struggle for Humanist Liberation Theology

The development of Buddhist and Christian conversions as a political force for change is key to the Dalit philosophy. Rather than being absorbed into their new religion, the Dalit's use religious conversion to counter the hegemonic cultural domination of Hinduism. In that they adapt their new religious affiliations to meet their needs, ironically which are based on a humanistic and secular view of the world that oppresses them.

Hindus set to convert to Buddhism

Despite advances, India's lowest Hindu castes remain downtrodden

Tens of thousands of people are due to attend a mass conversion ceremony in India at which large numbers of low-caste Hindus will become Buddhists.

The ceremony in the central city of Nagpur is part of a protest against the injustices of India's caste system.

By becoming Buddhists low-caste Hindus, or Dalits, can escape the prejudice and discrimination they normally face.

The ceremony marks the 50th anniversary of the adoption of Buddhism by the scholar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

He was the first prominent Dalit - or Untouchable as they were formerly called - to urge low-caste Indians to embrace Buddhism.

Similar mass conversions are taking place this month in many other parts of India.

Several states governed by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, have introduced laws to make such conversions more difficult.

Dalit Theology-

Dalit-liberative hermeneutics is scientific and praxis-oriented.

The Travancore Pulaya mass conversion movement to Anglicanism in the latter half of 19th century was an expression of social protest. For thousands these conversions were protests heralding exit from the inhumanity of the caste system. These oppressed also saw the doors opening for them as a way out of the misery with the success of the anti-slave campaign championed by the missionaries.

Guru Ghasidas

Guru Ghasidas according to delivers of the Satnami panth was born on 18th December 1756 and died at the age of eighty in 1836. He was born in village Girodhpuri in Raipur district in a dalit family. Ghasidas was born in a socio-political milieu of misrule, loot and plunder. The Marath the local had started behaving as Kings. Ghasidas underwent the exploitative experiences specific to dalit communities, which helped him the hierarchical and exploitative nature of social dynamics in a caste-ridden society. From an early age, he started rejecting social inequity and to understand the problems faced by his community and to find solutions, he traveled extensively in Chhattisgarh.

Ghasids was unlettered like his fellow dalits. He deeply resented the harsh treatment to his brotherhood', and continued searching for solutions but was unable to find the right answer. In search of the right path he decided to go to Jaganath Puri and on his way at Sarangarh attained true knowledge. It is said that he announced satnam and returned to Giordh.On his return, he stopped working as a farm worker and became engrossed in Tapasya. After spending six months in Sonakhan forests doing tapasya Ghasidas returned and formulated path-breading principles of a new egalitarian social order. The Satnam Panth is said to be based on these principles formulated by Ghasidas.

Dissident Sects & Anti-Caste Movements:

Both Vedic ritualism and gnosis [supremacy of Brahmans] were bound to be called in question by the common people. The popular discontent found expression in dissident sects like Jainism (540-468 B.C.) and Buddhism (563-483 B.C.). There is no doubt that Jainism and Buddhism were the first attacks or revolts in general against the caste system.

Lord Buddha initiated a radical critique of contemporary religion and society. He was forthright in repudiating the caste system and the notion of ritual purity associated with it. One of his famous sayings runs like this:

No Brahmin is such by birth,

No outcaste is such by birth.

An outcaste is such by his deeds,

A Brahmin is such by his deeds.”

From out of the struggle between Vedic religion and heterodox movements like Jainism and Buddhism was born what is today called Hinduism, which reached its golden age in the Gupta period (300-700 A.D.). Many factors were responsible for this new development. Brahminism succeeded in integrating within itself popular religions. Popular deities were absorbed into the Vedic pantheon through a process of identification or subordination. Even Buddha was given the status of a vishnuite incarnation.

Dalit poems and sayings on evil brahminic system

Tell a Slave is a Slave!

Surely and invariably he will rebel!

For most of times Slaves know not they are Slaves!

Always they only keep enjoying and relishing their Slavery!

They say that had been their lives generations after generations!

That too over the many many millenniums!

Slogging in the fields and mines for the landlords!

Taking just a pittance in return and still be proud and happy!

Listen to this! This is what the landlords, who had raped butchered killed otherwise murdered in cold-blood, and burnt SC&ST Dalits say –

We had all along for generations employed them paid them given them grains, fed them and looked after them! Now they had forgotten all that, to believe in the Govt, go for Education, seek Govt Employment, trust the Parties, run behind the Party Workers, follow the useless Leaders, pin their Hopes on the meaningless Govt Programmes, lean on the fake NGOs, and repose faith in all those stupid Activists! And, they have turned against us, we who have been feeding them for Generations! We can’t understand this! Hence we had to teach them a Lesson! Discipline them! Put them in their Places! They are like our Children! They are our Responsibility! And in fact it is our Duty to Discipline them, and bring them back to the right path – their old ways!

That is it. The Landlords want now to reclaim the SCs&STs, bring them back under their total and tight control, and keep them in their fold, as in the good old days! The old bondage and slavery!

Yes, it is true! Many SC&ST Dalits still toil as Slaves to crude cheap landlords and goons! They don’t realise their status and slavery. They don’t know that the World had changed!

One need not be surprised or feel shocked by this ignorance, and lack of knowledge or realisation of the World. After all they are poor rural labourers of backward feudal areas! But even the educated and employed SC&ST Dalits are not aware of all their Dues and Rights! In fact the depth of their ignorance is shocking! If the Dalits’ Knowledge of Dalit Issues are so shallow, what can we say of others understandings of Dalit Problems! It is for this reason that any writings on Dalit Issues, and Dalit Views have to be in so much of, perhaps what appears to be too detailed! That includes Dalit Poetry on Dalit Issues and Problems! Hence, the Prose like Poetry, or Prose rendering of Poetry! That may not matter, but that also so inevitable!

Dalit Womens Struggles

The oppression of women is a double burden in slave societies, and amongst the Dalit's women have played an important role in linking their struggles with that of being Dalits and women. It has created a syncratic feminism that is reflected in the movement regardless of their religious affiliations. Again emphasising the humanist nature of Dalit relgious conversion.

Ruth Manorama, voice of Dalits
Ruth Manorama is a women's rights activist well known for her contribution in mainstreaming Dalit issues. Herself from the Dalit community, she has helped throw the spotlight on the precarious situation of Dalit women in India. She calls them "Dalits among the Dalits." A peacewomen profile from the Women's Feature Service and Sangat.

DALIT WOMEN: The Triple Oppression of Dalit Women in Nepal

Terai Dalit Women - Violation of Political Rights

Attacks on Dalit Women: A Pattern of Impunity - Broken People ...

FEMINIST DALIT ORGANIZATION

Dalit Women Literature Review

Dalit Feminism By M. Swathy Margaret

EMPOWER DALIT WOMEN OF NEPAL is a small human rights organization for Dalit women, the “untouchable” women on the lower rungs of Nepal’s caste hierarchy.

Five pledges for dalit shakti By Freny Manecksha
Martin Macwan’s Dalit Shakti Kendra in Gujarat provides vocational training to dalit youth. More importantly, it gives them a sense of identity
It began as a small agitation in Ranpur, Dhanduka taluka, Gujarat. Women of a particular dalit sub-caste, who still performed the menial task of manual scavenging despite legislation against it, had asked the panchayat for new brooms but were refused on grounds that there was no budget for it. This was a seminal moment for Martin Macwan, a dalit activist who had set up the Navsarjan Trust in 1989 against scavenging. “What totally devastated me was that they were not agitating against the practice. They were merely begging the panchayat to give them more brooms to prevent their hands from being soiled with shit. They didn’t dream of eliminating scavenging.” (Mari Marcel Thekaekara in Endless Filth, Saga of the Bhangees)

Globalization and the Dalit

The Green Revolution in India as well as the later developments around GMO's etc. have had a disproportionate negative impact on the Dalit's agricultural communities. Modernization and industrialization have not benefited these peasant economies, as much as chaining the Dalits to their landlords.

Free Trade – A war against Dalits & Adivasis

Dalits and Adivasis have never been the part of the conventional trade systems. Today they are faced with the horrible hostility of trade and market policies. In recent times trade entered the scene on mass scale through the principles of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation. Mega industrial production still plays the key role in all trade deal not only at the national level but also at the international level.

Industrialisation, which made a colourful and dreamy entry, is turning out to be the worst form of human development. The steady economic growth of industries with active support from the state machinery is directly proportional to the unchecked exploitation of masses. Most of them belong to marginalized communities such as Dalits, Adivasis, women, working class, etc. Though during the independence struggle “land to the tillers” and “factory to the workers” prominently came on to the national agenda, nowhere in India had we witnessed the later one being implemented in the post independence era. Resultant displacement, migration, repercussion of workers, loss of land and livelihood, pilfering state revenue, forest resources, etc. has outgrown to monstrous level.

This has amplified particularly with WTO taking the centre stage of all sorts of trade related agreements and transactions at the international level. Trade is no longer buying and selling of goods and services but it encompasses issues like Intellectual Property Rights. With this the global market has wide open for exploration and exploitation of resources under the aegis of free trade. Industrialised nations found their tools to maintain supremacy on world trade. Prophets of trade and commerce argue that free trade maximises world economic output. This is what is considered to be progress. But what we have been witnessing with the Dalits and Adivasis in India is diametrically opposite to these claims.


Dalit woman shows the way to better yields


Dalit Academic Perspectives

A Dalit Bibliography

558, February 2006, Dalit Perspectives

Seminars and Workshops of Deshkal Society | Seminars on Dalit


Dalit Resources

Nepal Dalit Info

CounterCurrents.org Dalit Issues Home Page

Dalit Freedom Network: Abolish Caste, Now and Forever

Dalit foundation - Accelerating change for equality

Dalit Welfare Organisation (DWO)

Dalit Human Rights

Punjab Dalit Solidarity-A blog

National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR)

The Bhopal Dalit Declaration

International Dalit Solidarity Network

Formed in March 2000, the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) is a network of national solidarity networks, groups from affected countries and international organisations concerned about caste discrimination and similar forms of discrimination based on work and descent.

IDSN campaigns against caste-based discrimination, as experienced by the dalits of South Asia to the Buraku people of Japan, the sab (low caste) groups of Somalia, the occupational caste people in West Africa and others.

The work of IDSN involves encouraging the United Nations, the European Union and other bodies to recognise that over 260 million people continue to be treated as outcasts and less than human and that caste-based discrimination must be regarded as a central human rights concern. IDSN insists on international recognition that "Dalit Rights are Human Rights" inasmuch as all human beings are born with the same inalienable rights.

IDSN brings together organisations, institutions and individuals concerned with caste-based discrimination and aims to link grassroots priorities with international mechanisms and institutions to make an effective contribution to the liberation of those affected by caste discrimination.

More than 260 million people worldwide continue to suffer under what is often a hidden apartheid of segregation, exclusion, modern day slavery and other extreme forms of discrimination, exploitation and violence.

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HINDUTVA/HINDU NATIONALISM IS NOT HINDUISM

 Islamophobia in India;

Notorious Indian priest urges Hindus to take up arms against Muslims

INDIA IS A SECULAR STATE

April 5, 2022 - 10:52 AM News Code : 1244905 Source : GeoLink: 

Yati Narsinghanand, the head priest of the Dasna Devi temple in Uttar Pradesh of India, claimed that 50% of Hindus would convert to Islam if a Muslim were to become the Prime Minister of India, Zee News reported.

AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): Yati Narsinghanand, the head priest of the Dasna Devi temple in Uttar Pradesh of India, claimed that 50% of Hindus would convert to Islam if a Muslim were to become the Prime Minister of India, Zee News reported.

In a recent 'Hindu Mahapanchayat' attended by many Hindu supremacists, he also encouraged Hindus to hold arms to fight for themselves.

"If you want to change the future, become a man, man is the one who has arms in hand," Yati is heard saying in the video.

The priest warned the Hindu listeners against Muslim leadership in India in the future saying that Muslims in India had not come from "Arab" but from among them.

Journalist Mahmodul Hassan published a part of Narsinghanand's speech on Twitter.

The police said that the Delhi administration had not granted permission for the event.

Narsinghanand is notorious for making controversial and extremist comments against Muslims.

He was taken into custody earlier in the Haridwar hate speech case for which he got released on bail.

The group that organised this Mahapanchayat, Save India Foundation, has previously orchestrated events such as Jantar Mantar where anti-Muslim slogans were raised.

Preet Singh of Save India Foundation was even arrested by Delhi Police for hate speech.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HINDUISM IS FASCISM 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/10/hinduism-is-fascism.html

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for DALIT 

Are Hindu reformers anti-Hindu?

Jawed Naqvi

Published September 14, 2021 -

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.


LIKE other religions Hinduism has faced challenges from ancient times from within its fold and outside. Hindutva is a modern invention and the idea of a right-wing militarist nation state it panders to would not be possible before the advent of the nation states that came with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Some Muslim ideologues opposed the movement for Pakistan also on similar lines, saying there was no sanction for a nation state in Islam.

The three-day international conference on ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ ended on Sunday with important insights into Hinduism itself, but the discussions also revived memories of the pitfalls of similar projects and criticisms attempted in the recent and distant past.

One takeaway from the conference was that critiquing Hindutva, the militant philosophy that set out to model Hindus on the European fascism of the 1930s (by replacing European Jews with Indian Muslims and Christians as targets of hate) would remain incomplete if B.R. Ambedkar’s call for the destruction of the Hindu caste system remained unheeded. Ambedkar canvassed for equal and secular rights for everyone, starting with the liberation of the Dalits from Hinduism’s Brahminical hold and women from its patriarchal fold.

Read: How to dismantle Hindutva?

Organisers of the conference offered a word of caution. “To equate Hinduism and Hindutva is to fall into the narrow, bigoted, and reductionist fiction that instrumentalises Hinduism by erasing the diverse practices of the religion, the debates within the fold, as well as its conversations with other faiths. If the poet A.K. Ramanujan reminds us about the importance of acknowledging Three Hundred Ramayanas, then Hindutva seeks to obliterate that complexity into a monolithic fascism.”

Hinduism as we know it today has been in ferment since its inception.

A scholarly intervention made a less-discussed argument that underscored many commonality of views between Hindutva practitioners and Zionist settler class Jews in occupied Palestine. Akanksha Mehta particularly focused on the affinities between women activists of Hindutva and Jewish settler women. She introduced a different perspective to the currently overstated comparisons between the Taliban and Hindutva practices. Their colonial project and the economic underpinning of Hindutva and Zionism together with hidebound social and gender iniquities perpetuated within both groups present a remarkable similarity.

Ambedkar had noted the absence of a defining feature of Hinduism other than the caste. There were anti-idolatry Hindu sects and there were worshippers of deities and images and nature. In Bengal, they worship Durga as slayer of evil and protector of her followers. In swaths of Uttar Pradesh the role is given to Hanuman — sankatmochan, who clears the path of personal and social impediments. In Maharashtra, Ganapati is the vighna-haran or remover of obstacles dogging the followers.

Ambedkar listed Hindus who followed Muslim customs, observed circumcision and buried their dead. He pointed to Muslims who called Brahmin and Muslim priests to together preside over their weddings. It is a relic of the mediaeval Bhakti movement that Muslims and Hindus are entwined in the worship of common saints, particularly in Punjab. Atheists and monotheists also came out of the Vedic fold in early Hinduism and its accompanying Brahminical practices. Nastikas took a materialist view of the world and were opposed to Brahminical rituals. They were shunned as a class as were followers of Buddha and Mahavira.

I got a call from a close friend from Mumbai on Friday, a Jain with a modern lens. “I’m calling you to forgive me for any wrong I may have done you,” he said to my complete surprise. It was part of a period of Jain rituals, Sumedh Shah confided. It was observed over several days and ended with the quest for forgiveness from friends and family. The discussion veered around to a Jain belief that they were the original Indian atheists. And since Mahavira was the 24th teerthankar, a contemporary of Buddha around 600 BC, the claim would tend to put the atheism of Jains ahead of the Hindu nastikas.

Be that as it may, the point is that Hinduism as we know it today has been in ferment since its inception, not unlike other religions that branched off from their original purposes of peace and harmony, as Swami Vivekanand observed, into puritanism, mysticism and even bloodletting by acquiring weaponised and sectarian forms.

For close to two centuries in India, Hindu reformers have been trying to tweak Hinduism. Of these the most persistent but not entirely successful lot belonged to the Bengal Renaissance — from Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833) to Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). The question is: were the reformers anti-Hindu or Hindu-phobic, to use the term thrown by many right-wing Hindus at their critics. Supporters of militant Hindu groups in the US and India have used such terms to describe and even threaten rival Hindus against critiquing India’s current tryst with what is otherwise regarded as a great religion of the world.

The Bengal Renaissance canvassed support for banning child marriage, encouraging widow remarriage and scientific education, discouraging superstition and sati — the practice of Hindu widows being forced to sit on their husband’s funeral pyre.

The Bengal effort was, however, a social movement largely aloof from politics. The synthesis of politics and social reforms was to flower with Gandhi. When he arrived on the scene from South Africa, the political churning against colonialism had already spread from Bengal to Maharashtra and Punjab, but it had acquired pronouncedly Hindu motifs. The use of religion for anti-colonial mobilisation also tempted Muslim leaders like Maulana Azad. He applied the Bengal model to unfolding events in Turkey to woo Muslims to the Congress.

Gandhi strove to use religion to bring Hindus and Muslims together, but his attempt at reforming Hinduism was slammed as vacuous by Ambedkar, and as too emasculated for a fascist project by leaders like Savarkar and Golwalkar. It may not be wrong to ask, therefore: if Ambedkar failed to annihilate the Hindu caste system, what’s the chance the virulent Hindutva project could be dismantled with well-meaning intellectual cogitation?

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2021