They said, ‘Let’s postpone the mid-term elections till the Hindu’s anger cools down.’ I say, ‘Is the Hindu a bottle of mineral water? Keep the bottle open for a while and the water will stop bubbling?’ It is nine hundred thousand years since Ravana kidnapped Sita and challenged god Rama. But to this day we have not forgotten. Every year we burn his effigy and yet the fire of our revenge burns bright. We will not forget mullah Mulayamh and his supporter Rajiv Gandhi. I have come to tell the young men and mothers of Bhagyanagar, listen to the wailing of the Saryu river, listen to the story told by Ayodhya, listen to the sacrifice of the kar-sevaks. If you are a Hindu, do not turn your face away from the Rama temple, do not spare the traitors of Rama.
After the incident on the ninth of November, many Hindu young men came to me. ‘Sister,’ they said, ‘give us weapons to deal with mullah Mulayam.’ I said, ‘Why waste a bullet to deal with a eunuch?’ Rama had become tired shooting his arrows. Ravana’s one head would fall to be immediately replaced by another. Vibhishna [Ravana’s brother] said, ‘Lord, you will not kill this sinner by cutting off his heads. His life is in his navel.’ My brother Hindus, these leaders have their lives in their chairs [of power]. Take away their power and they’ll die—by themselves. They are only impotent eunuchs. When Rama was banished from Ayodhya many citizens accompanied him to the forest and stayed there overnight. In the morning, Rama said, ‘Men and women of Ayodhya go back to your homes.’ The men and women went back but a group of hermaphrodites, who are neither men nor women stayed back and asked, ‘Lord, you have not given us any instructions.’ Rama is kind. He said, ‘In the future Kaliyuga you will rule for a little while.’ These, neither-men-nor-women, are your rulers today. They will not be able to protect India’s unity and integrity.
Make the next government one of Rama’s devotees. Hindus, you must unite in the coming elections if you want the temple built. Hindus, if you do not awaken, cows will be slaughtered everywhere. In the retreats of our sages you will hear the chants of ‘Allah is Great’. You will be responsible for these catastrophes for history will say Hindus were cowards. Accept the challenge, change the history of our era. Many say, Rithambra you are a sanyasin. You should meditate in some retreat. I tell them raising Hindu consciousness is my meditation now and it will go on till the saffron flag flies from the ramparts of the Red Fort.i
The feeling of helplessness which persecution anxiety engenders reverses the process of idealization, reveals the fragility of the group’s grandiose self. The positive self-image of the Hindu—tolerant, compassionate, with special insight into the relationship between the divine and the natural worlds, between human and divine—exposes another, negative side: the specific Hindu shame and fear of being too cowardly and impotent to change the material or social conditions of life. Indeed, we should always look closely at a group’s specific form of self idealization to find clues to its particular moment of self-doubt and self-hatred. What a group most idealizes about itself is intimately related to its greatest fear. For the Hindu, the positive self-image of tolerance has the shadow of weakness cleaving to it. Are we tolerant or are we merely weak? Or tolerant because weak?
The crumbling self, with its unbearable state of helplessness, demands restoration through forceful action. Rithambra channels this need for agens into a call for collective and united action in the political arena. She holds out the possibility of some kind of self-assertion through the coming electoral process where all the persecutory anti-Hindu forces, from within and without the Hindu fold, can be engaged and defeated. With this prospect, the negative self-image begins to fade, the group self becomes more cohesive. The Muslim, too, though remaining alien, becomes less demonic and more human, although still a cursed adversary.
They ask what would happen to the Muslims in a Hindu India? I tell them the Muslims will not be dishonoured in a Hindu state nor will they be rewarded to get their votes. No umbrella will open in Indian streets because it is raining in Pakistan. If there is war in the Gulf then slogans of ‘Long Live Saddam Hussein’ won’t be shouted on Indian streets. And as for unity with our Muslim brothers, we say, ‘Brother, we are willing to eat sevian [sweet noodles] at your house to celebrate Eid but you do not want to play with colours with us on Holi. We hear your calls to prayer along with our temple bells, but you object to our bells. How can unity ever come about? The Hindu faces this way, the Muslim the other. The Hindu writes from left to right, the Muslim from right to left. The Hindu prays to the rising sun, the Muslim faces the setting sun when praying. If the Hindu eats with the right hand, the Muslim with the left. If the Hindu calls India ‘Mother’, she becomes a witch for the Muslim. The Hindu worships the cow, the Muslim attains paradise by eating beef. The Hindu keeps a moustache, the Muslim always shaves the upper lip. Whatever the Hindu does, it is the Muslim’s religion to do its opposite. I said, ‘If you want to do everything contrary to the Hindu, then the Hindu eats with his mouth; you should do the opposite in this matter too!’
After the laughter subsides, Rithambra ends by asking the audience to raise their fists and repeat after her, ‘Say with pride, we are Hindus! Hindustan [India] is ours!’
The conclusion of Rithambra’s speech complements its beginning. Both the beginning and the end are concerned with the issue of drawing the boundaries of the group of ‘us’ Hindus. Whereas Rithambra began with a self-definition of the Hindu by including certain kinds of Hinduisms—as personified by heroes, gods and historical figures—she ends with trying to achieve this self-definition through contrasts with what a Hindu is decidedly not—the Muslim. At the start, the boundary was drawn from inside out; at the end, its contours are being marked off by reference to the ‘them’, the Muslims, who lie outside the psychogeographical space inhabited by ‘us’. It is, of course, understood that ‘their’ space is not only separate and different but also devalued. In her enumeration of differences Rithambra cleverly contrives to end at a note which associates the Muslim with certain denigrated, specifically anal, bodily parts and functions.
I have suggested here that the construction/revival of the new Hindu identity in the text of Rithambra’s speech follows certain well-marked turnings of the plot which are motivated, energized, and animated by fantasy. To recapitulate, these are: marking afresh the boundaries of the religious-cultural community, making the community conscious of a collective cultural loss, countering internal forces which seek to disrupt the unity of the freshly demarcated community, idealizing the community, maintaining its sense of grandiosity by comparing it to a bad ‘other’ which, at times, becomes a persecutor and, finally, dealing with the persecutory fantasies, which bring to the surface the community’s particular sense of inferiority, by resort to some kind of forceful action.
In describing these psychological processes, I am aware that my own feelings toward the subject could have coloured some of my interpretations. This is unavoidable, especially since I am a Hindu myself, exposed to all the crosscurrents of feelings generated by contemporary events. My own brand of Hinduism, liberal-rationalist (with a streak of agnostic mysticism) can be expected to be critical of the new Hindu identity envisaged by the sangh parivar. Thus, to be fair (the liberal failing par excellence), one should add that the Hindu is no different from any other ethnic community or even nation which feels special and superior to other collectivities, especially their neighbours and rivals. This sense of superiority, the group’s narcissism, its self-aggrandizement, serves the purpose of increasing group cohesion and thus the enhancement of the self-esteem of its members. Rafael Moses, reflecting on the group selves of the Israelis and the Arabs, asks: ‘And is perhaps a little grandiosity the right glue for such a cohesion? Is that perhaps the same measure of grandiosity which is seen in the family and does it serve the same purpose, thereby strengthening the feeling of specialness and of some grandiosity which all of us harbour in ourselves?’20
The sangh parivar cannot be faulted for fostering a Hindu pride or even trying to claim a sense of superi
ority vis-à-vis the Muslim. These are the normal aims of any group’s narcissistic economy. Perhaps we recoil from such aims because narcissism, both in individuals and groups, is regarded with much misgiving. A person who is a victim of passions, sexual and aggressive, may be pitied and even seen by some as tragically heroic. An individual propelled by narcissism, on the other hand, is invariably scorned as mean and contemptible. Whereas the perversions of sex may evoke sympathy, the miscarriages of narcissism, such as a smug superiority or an arrogant self-righteousness, provoke distaste among even the most tolerant. The question is not of the sangh parivar’s fostering of Hindu narcissism (which, we know, serves individual self-possession) but of when this narcissism becomes deviant or abnormal. The answer is not easy for I do not know of any universal, absolute standards which can help us in charting narcissistic deviance or pathology in a group. One would imagine that the promotion of persecutory fantasies in a group to the extent that it resorts to violence against the persecuting Other would be deviant. Yet we all know that a stoking of persecutory fantasies is the stock in trade of all nations on the eve of any war and continues well into the duration of hostilities.
One could say that a group wherein all individual judgement is suspended and reality-testing severely disturbed may legitimately be regarded as pathological. This, however, is an individualistic viewpoint which looks askance at any kind of self-transcendence through immersion in a group. In this view, spiritual uplift in a religious assembly, where the person feels an upsurge of love enveloping the community and the world outside, would be regarded with the same grave suspicion as the murkier purposes of a violent mob. It is certainly true that transcending individuality by merging into a group can generate heroic self-sacrifice, but it can also generate unimaginable brutality. To get out of one’s skin in a devotional assembly is also at the same time to have less regard for saving that skin when part of a mob. Yet to equate and thus condemn both is to deny the human aspiration toward self-transcendence, a promise held out by our cultural identity and redeemed, if occasionally, by vital participation in the flow of the community’s cultural life.
It is, however, evident that it is this group pride and narcissism which have made it possible for the Hindutva forces to offer another alternative vision of India’s future as an alternate to those offered by the modernists and the traditionalists. The modernists are, of course, enthusiastic votaries of the modernization project although the Left and Right may argue over which economic form is the most suitable. Both factions, however, are neither interested in nor consider the question of cultural authenticity as important. The traditionalists, on the other hand, including the neo-Gandhians, totally reject modernity solely on the issue of cultural authenticity. The Hindutva forces have tried to offer yet another alternative by reformulating the project of modernity in a way where its instrumentalities are adopted but its norms and values are contested. The pivotal issue for them is not the acceptance of global technoscience or the economic institutions and forms of modernity but their impact on and a salvaging of Hindu culture and identity—as they define it. Cultural nationalism, though, will always have priority whenever it conflicts with economic globalism. It is apparent that such an approach to modernity will have great appeal to the emerging middle classes and sections of the intelligentsia which are committed neither to what I can only call universal modernism nor to a postmodern traditionalism.
The danger of stoking group narcissism, Hindu garv (pride) in our example, is that when this group grandiosity (expressed in a belief in its unique history and/or destiny, its moral, aesthetic, technological, or any other kind of superiority vis-à-vis other groups) is brought into serious doubt, when the group feels humiliated, when higher forms of grandiosity such as the group’s ambitions are blocked, then there is a regression in the group akin to one in the individual. The negative part of the grandiose self which normally remains hidden, the group’s specific feelings of worthlessness and its singular sense of inferiority, now come to the fore. If all possibilities of self-assertion are closed, there is a feeling of absolute helplessness, a state which must be changed through assertive action. Such a regression, with its accompanying feelings of vulnerability and helplessness, is most clearly manifested in the sphere of group aggression which takes on, overtly and covertly, the flavour of narcissistic rage. As in the individual who seeks to alter such an unbearable self state through acts as extreme as suicide or homicide, the group’s need for undoing the damage to the collective self by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of this aim give it no rest. Narcissistic rage does not vanish when the offending object disappears. The painful memory can linger on, making of the hot rage a chronic, cold resentment till it explodes in all its violent manifestations whenever historical circumstances sanction such eruptions. I am afraid Ayodhya is not an end but only a beginning since the forces buffeting Hindu (or, for that matter, Muslim) grandiosity do not lie within the country but are global in their scope. They are the forces of modernization itself, of the wonderful attractions and the terrible distortions of the mentality of Enlightenment.
It would also be easy to dismiss Rithambra’s—and the sangh parivar’s—evocation of the Hindu past from a postmodern perspective which considers every past a social construction that is shaped by the concerns of the present. In other words, there is no such thing as the past since the past is transformable and manipulable according to the needs of the present. Yet as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim pointed out long ago, every society displays and even requires a minimal sense of continuity with its past.21 Its memories cannot be relevant to its present unless it secures this continuity. In a society in the throes of modernization, the need for continuity with the past, a sense of heritage, essential for maintaining a sense of individual and cultural identity, becomes even more pressing, sharply reducing the subversive attractions of a viewpoint which emphasizes the plasticity and discontinuities of the past. It is this need for a continuity of cultural memory, of a common representation of the past in times of rapid change, even turbulence, which the sangh parivar addresses with considerable social resonance and political success.
The Muslim Fundamentalist Identity
Even though the appellation ‘fundamentalist’ is often used for stigmatizing particular groups, especially of Muslims, there is no other word which is a satisfactory substitute. This lies in the nature of the phenomenon itself which, with its pious passions, strong beliefs, and inflexible values, will inevitably imbue any neutral and originally descriptive term with negative or positive connotations. As a phenomenon, many hold the opinion that religious fundamentalism is an attempt by a religious community to preserve its identity by a selective retrieval of doctrines, beliefs, and practices from a sacred past.1 Although a nostalgia for the sacred past is a hallmark of fundamentalist rhetoric, the retrieved fundamentals are very often pragmatically refined and modified. Contemporary fundamentalism is both a revival and a construction, both derivative and original.
Muslim fundamentalism in India shares some of the abiding concerns of Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in the world but also has some distinct local flavours. As the political scientist M. S. Agwani points out, there are not one but many fundamentalisms in India of which the major varieties are associated with the names of Deoband, Nadwah, Tablighi Jamaiat, and Jamaiat-i-Islami.2 Muslim fundamentalism is thus not monolithic but divided into factions which differ not only over the means of bringing about the desired Islamic revival but sometimes also over the preferred ends. Although they all agree that the precepts of earliest Islam, valid for all times and climes, must govern a person’s private and collective life, that nationalism, secularism, and materialism are un-Islamic, and that such popular practices as saint worship at dargahs (shrines) and devotional music in Muslim social and religious life are undesirable imports from Hinduism, they disagree on the desired relationship between religion and the state, or the extent of totalitarian practice needed to
enforce religious orthodoxy.
For me, fundamentalism is the third Muslim response to the loss of collective self-idealizations and the fracture in self-representation brought on by historical change. If the victim is unable to hate, the fundamentalist cannot stop hating. Whereas in the Andalus syndrome the group cannot stop mourning, one of the components of fundamentalism is the phenomenon of the ‘inability to mourn’,3 an emotional state where the natural process of grieving is blocked by undue anger.
Meeting the Mullahs
Colours of Violence Page 24