Various political and cultural signals in the past few weeks alert us to the rejuvenation of the “Hindutva agenda”. Various political and cultural signals in the past few weeks alert us to the rejuvenation of the “Hindutva agenda”.

Waves recede rather quickly and often leave behind some ravages, but life then comes back to normal. Are we witnessing this maxim playing out in the results from a series of bypolls? But the “mandate” from May, as understood by some BJP supporters, has unleashed non-electoral processes that may have long-term implications.

Various political and cultural signals in the past few weeks alert us to the rejuvenation of the “Hindutva agenda”. During the campaign for the 2014 election, Narendra Modi reinvented himself as the icon of development. That encouraged many supporters of economic reform and efficient government to prop up the BJP, or at least welcome its victory. But sooner rather than later, the BJP needs to explain what relationship exists between the party of today and the longstanding aspirations of the Hindutva platform.

Both the BJP and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, never hid their deep dissatisfaction with the shaping of India’s national identity. They believed in the necessity of forming a political community based on a monistic religio-cultural identity. For them, this required sustained initiatives to reshape India’s cultural space. That effort continues today. As the BJP settles down in office, at least four unrelated developments require scrutiny to understand the contemporary interface between competitive politics and the politics of cultural and normative spaces.

First, there is a controversy over the alleged hate speech by Yogi Adityanath aimed at communal mobilisation. Such attempts are not new.

Electoral competition sometimes incentivises communal mobilisation (whenever and wherever it pays). Communal mobilisation becomes a useful strategy in two circumstances. One, it helps when a party is shorn of a sufficient base among the “majority” community and seeks to make a dent by creating a community-based consciousness among voters. The BJP did this in the 1989 and 1991 elections, just as the Shiv Sena did in Maharashtra in 1995. Two, this strategy is adopted selectively in constituencies or regions with mixed electorates to counter the localised division of majority-community votes. Adityanath’s current politics of polarisation fits into the second category. It seeks to create a self-conscious Hindu constituency, at least locally. As the results from Uttar Pradesh indicate, such a strategy can be rebuffed through local configurations.

But beyond electoral mobilisation, a parallel effort is made to mix national and religio-cultural identities. This puts the non-Hindu minority on the defensive and prompts it to uphold the “Hindu ethos” in more ways than one. The reported claim by Najma Heptullah that Muslims are not a minority is symptomatic of this inner compulsion to pass the nationalist test. Similarly, the claims by some politicians from Goa that Goa’s Christians are Hindu represents the mixing up of nationalism, secular cultural patterns and faith-based identity. This was echoed by the RSS chief when he recently claimed that all Indians are (or should be) Hindus.

Such Hinduisation faces an impediment in that, in most situations, the Hindu is unselfconscious of her religious affiliation as a critical factor in her collective identity. The shaping of that self-consciousness can take place through aggressive campaigns like the one over “love jihad”. Such language not only creates the spectre of conversions, it exhorts Hindus to consciously avoid intermixing with non-Hindus and segregate the cultural space of “Hindu” festivities by excluding non-Hindus. Such efforts not only exclude the non-Hindu, they seek to create an awareness of Hinduness among the disparate followers of Hindu religious beliefs by converting festivities into public expressions of religiosity and religious identity.

While pointing fingers at the external “other” is one way of fostering Hinduness, another is to transform the Hindu religion into an organised religion. Internal cohesion and gatekeeping are required for such a transformation, and the practice of convening the Hindu Dharma Sansad is representative of that attempt. Recently, the Dharma Sansad announced that Sai Baba (of Shirdi) should not be worshipped as a deity. Without getting into the complex social history surrounding Sai Baba and the enormous commercial activity that now constitutes the Sai Baba Sansthan, this move can easily be seen as an attempt to streamline the spiritual and practice-related boundaries of what constitutes the Hindu faith.

In the context of such developments — and these are only some instances — how does one look at the BJP? It could, of course, be argued that Adityanath is only the fringe of the BJP; that the RSS is charting its own course independent of the BJP, which is not involving itself in these activities. Having won the Lok Sabha elections handsomely, the BJP may have settled for a division of labour. The government will not get involved in controversial issues of identity but the party and its not-so-distant cousins will initiate cultural offensives.

However, this draws our attention to a complex process. The (second) coming of the BJP must be seen as a dual affair: on the one hand, now that the BJP has come to power, it will try and shift the middle ground of political and socio-cultural norms and discourse. On the other hand, the return of the BJP itself represents a slow but sure shift in that middle ground during the past two decades. After all, elections are shaped by pre-existing normative frames as much as they change normative bases of politics.

Provocatively, this can be described as the politics of converting Hindus to Hindutva. The BJP has won the politics of the ballot. Now the more serious and long-term politics commences. It is not just the politics of labels and identities, it is the politics of culture and norms. The first time such politics began in earnest during the 1980s and 1990s, a reasonable sprinkling of political forces fought it (albeit only electorally). Now, arguments about “love jihad” are an invitation to join a renewed phase of politics over norms and what constitutes the middle ground of India’s democratic politics.

Bypoll results notwithstanding, this phase of the politics of culture will likely be more one-sided because there are barely any political forces left to accept the invitation — or the challenge.

The writer teaches political science at Savitribai Phule Pune University

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