The Identity Project
Credit: Special Arrangement
The roots of Hindu nationalism run deep. Intolerance, spreading hatred and misinformation, communal profiling and incendiary speeches targeting minorities also have a long history. Communal riots or killings in the name of cows date back over a century. Religious processions before places of worship have routinely triggered killings. Even as millions of Indians were caught up in a relentless struggle to gain freedom, a few fringe groups were working overtime to further their sectarian agenda. Ironically, it now seems like the this fringe has become the mainstream.
How has this fundamentalist ideology reshaped the political landscape and social life of India? The Identity Project: the Unmaking of a Democracy by Mumbai-based writer Rahul Bhatia is an honest attempt to find an answer to a Delhi riot victim’s question: “Where is the poison coming from?’’ His investigation into the devastating Delhi riots of 2020 prompted him to dig deeper to find the roots of Hindutva. Through travels across India, hundreds of interviews, archival materials, letters, diary entries and first-hand accounts, Bhatia brings out the movement’s role in leading India onto what many believe is the road to majoritarianism.
Colours of violence
The book traces the evolution of medieval religious sectarianism to the majoritarianism of the present, which many believe is endangering India’s intrinsic pluralism and secularism.
The factors that paved the way for Narendra Modi’s rise did not emerge overnight, writes Bhatia. He recalls how the Arya Samaj’s call for cow protection societies in the 1800s aggravated communal animosity. In 1882, there was a riot at Salem. In the 1920s, Hindu Mahasabha, the self-styled custodian of Hindu values, began spreading its tentacles. One of its leaders, Balakrishna Sheoram Moonje, advocated muscular Hinduism. A great admirer of Mussolini whom he met in Rome, Moonje devoted his life to an overblown concern that Hindus were in danger. He believed that the differences between Hindus and Muslims were irreconcilable. Colonial India witnessed 52 riots from February 1926 to August 1927 claiming over 200 lives. Of them, 17 were provoked by music and processions outside places of worship.
Bhatia traces the history of the RSS with its founder chief K B Hedgewar and his successor M S Golwalkar propagating rigid opinions about Hindu culture and allegedly expressing admiration for Hitler, among others. The author goes on to elucidate how the then Prime Minister Nehru had apparently found an RSS imprint in the organised post-partition massacres in Delhi. Nehru fought their “medieval state of mind” with limited success, writes Bhatia while Gandhi, who had voiced concern over the rapid growth of RSS, termed it a “communal body with a totalitarian outlook.’’
Bhatia insists that Aadhaar, the world’s most ambitious data-gathering project, is a threat to citizens with its potential for unparalleled surveillance. What was intended as a development tool has become a means to target minorities, he adds. He goes on to state that BJP leader L K Advani had been dismissive of the trail of death and destruction that accompanied his Ayodhya Rath Yatra. What India had witnessed, he had said, was “an outpouring of suppressed national sentiment.’’
In private, Bhatia writes that Advani used to say Vajpayee’s centrist ideas were not going anywhere.
The product of meticulous research for six years, the volume is crammed with details on the rise of majoritarianism. Bhatia follows riot victims, perpetrators, doctors, police officers, lawyers, and human rights activists and even sits through court proceedings for hours. He lays bare the police bias against certain communities and the subsequent gargantuan legal delays. Bhatia spends time in an RSS shakha to know more about its functioning. He quotes a former RSS member Partha Banerjee: “RSS has helped to build a very powerful national network of people who cannot think.”
The Identity Project is a seminal work. The reader is confronted with a multitude of events like protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, police high-handedness in Jamia Milia Islamia library and the riots in East Delhi. It is an empathetic and insightful critical enquiry into the genealogy of Hindu fundamentalism.
The author rightly says the work “pieces together fragments of history to bring the present into focus”. This captivating post-colonial story of India, embellished with flawless prose, is narrative reportage at its best and an essential read for anyone concerned about the future of Indian democracy.