Fifth Column; Tavleen Singh

The uglier side of Hindutva is distroying BJP's image of a 'normal' political party

On Valentine's Day we saw the gilded youth of Hindutva smash shop windows in Kanpur and attack young couples who, they thought, were succumbing to the lure of westernised love. They justified their violence on the grounds that they were defending India against the insidious spread of western culture. Valentine's Day is not our culture, they said, and they are right. It is not our culture to send a woman red roses on Valentine's Day. Quite the opposite. It is our culture to murder baby girls as soon as they are born. Earlier, they were strangled, poisoned or buried alive. Western technology has now made it possible for them to be killed more scientifically so something like 90 per cent of abortions in our wondrous land occur when a female foetus is discovered in a woman's womb.

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If God wills a female baby to survive it is our culture to marry her off as soon as possible, often even before she has reached puberty and often to grown up or old men who do not consider sex with little girls child abuse. Then, when the old man dies it is our culture to shave the head of his child widow and deny her the right to any colour in her life. Since our culture is so fragile and weak that Valentine's Day threatens it, the Hindutva hoodlums will soon be smashing TV sets and computers which bring us westernisation less insidiously than Valentine's Day.

The upsurge of ugly Hindutva we have seen in recent weeks has had two unexpected victims. The first is, of course, the prime minister whose main political achievement has been his transforming the BJP from an untouchable into an acceptable political party. With the uglier forces of Hindutva suddenly to the fore even people who voted BJP in the last election are beginning to wonder whether A.B. Vajpayee is, as he was once described, a mere mask for the real thing.

The second victim, more surprisingly, is L.K. Advani. The home minister's rise in national politics was almost entirely due to his rath yatra and its message that something was seriously wrong with Indian secularism and that it had in fact become "pseudo-secularism". If the events in Varanasi and the absurd fuss over Valentine's Day is real secularism give us the pseudo kind any time.

Advani defined pseudo-secularism as the sort that permitted Sikh and Muslim communalism but disallowed Hindus to behave equally badly. During his long drive to Ayodhya, his speeches brimmed with pseudo-secular examples of which the most potent was the fact that Muslims had been allowed their own personal law. It was because Advani's argument on pseudo-secularism was so convincing that the BJP's seats in Parliament rose dramatically from two in 1984 to 86 in 1989. And, it was because the BJP had really begun to seem like a normal political party that the number of seats have continued to rise since and Vajpayee became prime minister once again. But, if the RSS continues to dominate our front pages for a few more weeks, the BJP may find its voters becoming increasingly disenchanted.

Perhaps, it is time that someone reminded the old men who run the RSS that the majority of BJP votes in the last general election did not come from people who wanted to slip into khaki knickers every morning and trot off to their local shakha. There are, indeed, several thousand Hindu men (both old and young) who like the mix of patriotic physical training and puritanism that the shakhas offer but not nearly enough to keep Vajpayee in power.

Vajpayee's main support comes from the middle classes which have very little interest in the RSS and certainly did not vote for it. RSS supporters assert that it is an organisation with absolutely no interest in politics, that its goals are cultural and social and so there should be no objections to the Gujarat Government's decision to allow its officials to become regulars at those morning shakhas. Why have RSS leaders then taken such a keen interest in the political and economic decisions of Vajpayee's Government?

Remember the terrible noise they made over swadeshi during Vajpayee's previous term as prime minister? Well, with a new budget round the corner those mutterings have started again and it is being spread around that the idea of Indians buying only Indian goods and limiting foreign trade is still a good one. It only needs to be explained better. Does the RSS leadership think that economy is a cultural matter? And, when it interferes in the prime minister's choice of cabinet ministers, as was reportedly done in the past, should we consider this cultural or social?

Judging by the fuss over Valentine's Day and Deepa Mehta's film it is clear that the RSS has much to learn about Indian culture, leave alone anything else. Unless the RSS realises that it cannot be uber alles it could find itself destroying the very government it is riding piggyback on.

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	Feb 28, 2000