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COMMENTARY
MARCH 14, 2015 vol l no 11 EPW Economic &
PoliticalWeekly22
P K Vijayan ([email protected]) and Karen
Gabriel teach English Literature at Hindu
College and St Stephens College, respectively,both institutions
affiliated to the University of
Delhi.
Hindutvas PsychologicalWarfareThe Insidious Agendas of Ghar
Wapsi
P K Vijayan, Karen Gabriel
Hindutva demands self-erasure
from the minorities as the price of
being part of the nation.T
he coming to power of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with
full majority in the Lok Sabha un-
der Narendra Modi has begun to have the
very effects that many of us had been
dreading. The Sangh Parivars self-
definitive agenda to create a Hindu
rashtra out of secular India has sud-
denly gained enormous traction, within
and outside the government. Religious
minorities have been feeling more and
more vulnerable and threatened over the
last few months that the BJPhas been in
power. Within the government, central
ministers, Members of Parliament (MPs),
state ministers as well as members of
state legislative assemblies, have all open-
ly begun airing explicitly communal sen-
timents, with barely a check or remon-
stration. Outside the government, leaders
of political parties, religious heads, andmembers of the Sangh
Parivars various
outfits have gone even further, in spewing
venomously communal hate-speech, and
inciting and machinating several inci-
dents of communal violence.
The most recent instance of such brazen
disregard for constitutionally guaranteed
rights and protections came, in fact, in the
form of an open undermining of the Con-
stitution itself: the governments own pub-
licity campaigns deleted the words secu-
lar and socialist in their representations
of the Preamble of the Constitution. The
unprecedented manner in which their
communal agenda is being pressed is evi-
dently a consequence of the BJPhaving full
majority in the Lok Sabha it no longer
fears being checked by its coalition part-
ners. This is a major difference from the
earlier National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
regime, when the BJPhad to negotiate coa-
lition partners who could bring down the
government if they were unhappy with it.The current concerted
and brazen as-
sertion of Hindutva is also substantially
an effect of having Narendra Modi, the
mastermind of Gujarat 2002, at the helm,
rather than a Vajpayee-like figure, who
would at least nominally insist on re-
straint, and maintain a facade of respect-
ing the rights of minorities. But the im-
punity with which Hindutva is being as-
serted now arises out of the well-found-ed confidence that Modi
himself is of the
same mindset. What used to be referred
to as the lunatic fringe of the Parivar is
now boldly moving from the periphery
to the centre from being lunacy to be-
coming the rationale itself, of the Hindu
right. The worst they need expect is gen-
tle deprecation of the more excessive
acts but for the most part, there is an
air of indulgence, as, for instance, with
Modi excusing his own minister, Sadhvi
Niranjan Jyotis hate-speech in Decem-
ber 2014, by invoking her village and
backward caste background.
Insidious Assault
The recentghar wapsiprogramme initi-
ated by the parivar is in one sense the
most insidious of its assaults on the mi-
norities. The traditional Parivar line on
minorities has been to treat them as
aliens: since, in this discourse, India be-
longs to Hindus, non-Hindus specifi-cally Muslims and Christians
are out-
siders who should leave India to the
Hindus (Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs are
exempted from this because they are
considered part of the larger Hindu fold;
and Parsis are too small a community to
matter). BJP MP Sakshi Maharajs com-
ment that Good days have come; now
those with four wives and 40 children
shouldnt be allowed in the country is a
typical example of such a perception of
Muslims. (He also went on to say, I also
want to ask our people to follow the in-
struction of sadhus and have at least four
children a clear manifestation of the
anxiety of numbers underlying the im-
agination of the religious minorities (see
http://www. dailymail.co.uk/indiaho-
me/indianews/article-2902564/Sakshi-
refuses-apologise-calling-Hindu-family-
four-children.html).
One major reason for communal vio-
lence against religious minorities has beenprecisely this
sentiment: the violence
not only aims to kill off as large a
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number of these alien communities as
possible, but also (a) to render the re-
maining homeless and destitute; (b) to
drive home the lesson that they live in
India at the mercy and benevolence of
the majority community; that they there-
fore have, and can make, no claims on
the country; and (c) to threaten and inti-midate them into a
condition of perpetual
migration and/or self-ghettoisation. These
points require some elaboration.
First, even hardcore votaries of Hindut-
va are well aware that communal violence
in and of itself cannot eliminate the pres-
ence of the minorities not just because
of the practical problem of having to kill
off millions, but because of the ethico-le-
gal implication that this would amount to
genocide, perhaps on a globally unprece-
dented scale. Second, rendering them
homeless and destitute is also not a solu-
tion, in and of itself, since it can only re-
sult in a large lumpen population with all
its attendant social and civic problems.
(However, it can and does contribute to
the general sense of intimidation and fear
required to keep a population quiescent
of which, more, shortly.)
Third, the consequent impulse to
escape the intimidation through migra-
tion and/or ghettoisation has its limits primarily physical and
geographical,
insofar as there are only so many spaces
that they can escape to within the nation.
It has limits also because the inevitable
inertia inherent to all communities hin-
ders the possibility of frequent migra-
tion, on the one hand, while the ghettos
and camps that do form, inevitably start
resisting the pressure to accommodate
more migrants, on the other. The relief
camps that spring up almost after every
incident of communal violence them-
selves mutate into ghettos in due course,
from where the only escape is either to
migrate to another region or to leave the
country altogether. The only other es-
cape option that emerges then is for
them to lose their identities as religious
minorities by converting into the majori-
tarian Hindu community. And this is
the solution to the minorities prob-
lem that Hindutva votaries have now
refashioned, out of the 19th centuryshuddhirituals of the Arya
Samaj, as the
ghar wapsi programme.
Minorities as Prodigal Offspring
The ghar wapsi programme is insidious
precisely because it offers to facilitate
this last option it is the carrot to the
stick of communal violence. The meta-
phor of ghar wapsi, or homecoming,
reinforces the suggestion that the mi-
nority religions do not belong to theghar, which is the nation
as owned by
the majoritarian community. Further-
more, the representation of the majori-
tarian religion as home a physical,
but also an affective and familial, space
constructs the minorities as prodigal
offspring, who need only to return
home, to find acceptance. It is not only a
viable alternative to genocide, as a
means of dealing with the unwanted mi-
norities; it actually serves to increase the
numbers of the majority. Yet, even as it
eschews explicit violence, it draws on
the potential for violence to encourage
the minorities to re-convert.
In fact, it is not even acknowledged to
be conversion, because it is represented as
a form of shuddhi or purification, rather
than as conversion: as such, members of
the minorities are understood to have
been defiledby the other religion, rather
than as belongingto it. They are therefore
simply returning to their true religion,through ghar wapsi; but
they do need to
be cleansed off the other religion, not
just converted from it. This speaks volumes
about the attitude of the majoritarian com-
munity towards the minorities. They are
not simply members of a different reli-
gion, in a neutral, equanimous way; not
even just other and alien, in some fun-
damentally irreconcilable, but still broadly
neutral way. They are viewed as funda-
mentally polluting, impure, anathema to
the sanctity of the Hindu, and actively
requiring elimination hence the need
for purification, not just conversion.
Significantly, this ritual purification
is essentially an extension of caste-based
categorisations, the perpetuation of the
idea of the outcaste whether dalit or
foreigner as mleccha (one who is
impure, dirty, uncultured). In other
words, the ghar wapsi programme is
essentially a reiteration of caste, rather
than of religion. This is tellingly con-firmed by the fact that
the reconverted,
the returning prodigal offspring, despite
being purified, cannot choose their
caste, but must return to their castes of
origin. For the very large number of the
convertees to Islam and Christianity,
who converted in order to escape the
oppressions and humiliations of the
caste system, ghar wapsi then is not a
very appealing option. This is recog-nised by Sangh Parivar
activists, who
have begun stressing the need to respect
all castes, in an attempt to assuage the
concerns of those targeted by the ghar
wapsi programme.
Somewhat paradoxically, this is also
one of the reasons why the ghar wapsi
programme has been conducted largely
amongst lower-caste members of the mi-
nority communities. Apart from the fact
that, as Manjari Katju says, It is also easi-
er to intimidate the poor and marginal-
ised into coming back home (see her
Politics of Ghar Wapsi, EPW,3 January
2015), each successful ghar wapsi pro-
gramme will serve as increasing reassur-
ance to the oppressed and humiliated
convertees. The insistence on maintain-
ing the original caste affiliation is also
interesting: it suggests that the Hindu
rights anxiety is specifically about losing
ideological control (almost amounting to
an affective ownership) over the lowercastes, and consequently
about losing the
labour force required for the tasks per-
formed by them, but on the terms set by
the upper castes. Since the majority of the
professions and tasks involved are them-
selves considered to be impure, dirty, de-
filing, menial, etc, it is worth asking why
the returning prodigals would want to
subject themselves to purification, if the
work they will be taking on and conse-
quently they themselves continues to
be regarded as impure.
Demanding Self-erasure
Even if, for arguments sake, we were to
accept this as an innocent agenda to
simply bring the lost flock of Hinduism
back home, the Hindu right clearly
needs to first set its caste-ridden ghar in
order, before initiating a ghar wapsi.
The fundamental problem, of course, is
that this caste-ridden ghar is the Hindu
nation of the Hindutva imagination ifnot in its ideations, then
in its practices.
Because the existence of minorities is
