Analysis: Could this be the end of India’s BJP?

NEW DELHI, India — This week, one of the most shameful incidents in India’s democratic history will once again come into focus, as parliament debates the findings of a government-sponsored report on the 1992 razing of the 16th-century Babri Mosque. But despite taking 17 years and costing the country $1.7 million, the report is hardly likely to put an end to the controversy — or India’s troubling flirtation with religious nationalism.

“While the BJP has been much defamed for raising these issues originally, it’s now the so-called secular parties [like the Congress] who are keeping these issues alive so they can reap political benefits,” said moderate Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha.

More than 1,000 pages in length, the report compiled by Justice M.S. Liberhan squarely places the blame for the destruction of the mosque built by India’s first Mughal emperor, Babar, on the Hindu nationalist BJP and its paramilitary parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He rejects categorically the BJP’s claim that the destruction was a spontaneous act, and instead labels it the product of a carefully planned conspiracy. But this is hardly news.

“There’s nothing novel,” said Pralay Kanungo, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Center for Political Studies. “The commission has not come out with any startling revelations.”

Indeed, over 17 years, Liberhan conducted an in-depth investigation into an issue about which all the important facts have always been known. The destruction of the mosque by Hindu fanatics was the culmination of an eight year campaign captained by the BJP’s Lal Krishna Advani, during which the leader traveled the country by caravan to recruit volunteers to build a temple on the disputed site, where some claim the Hindu god Ram was born.

Around 150,000 kar sewaks, or “volunteers,” showed up on Dec. 6, 1992. They carried bricks and building materials, and when the mob erupted in supposedly spontaneous anger to assault the mosque, they miraculously produced ropes to rappel down its sides and picks and shovels to break it apart. In the riots that inevitably followed more than 2,000 people were killed. And by projecting itself as the protector of the Hindus, the BJP emerged as India’s strongest political party for the first time in 50 years.

The Liberhan report, which echoing a general consensus the Indian Express called “fit for the bin,” adds little to that knowledge, will do nothing to speed the two court cases underway against the people allegedly involved in destroying the mosque, and does not recommend any punitive action against the 68 people named in it. But by bringing Ayodhya and Hindu nationalism to public focus in the midst of the chaos-ridden BJP’s apparently unstoppable decline, Liberhan’s costly and flabby tome could nevertheless prove to be important.

In many respects, the rise of the BJP marked a dark chapter for Indian history. As the political wing of the RSS, the BJP’s roots lay in an essentially fascist ideology called “Hindutva” that was anathema to India’s founding principles of secularism and equality. This doctrine, invented by RSS founder V.D. Savarkar in his 1923 tract “Hindutva! Who Is a Hindu?”, asserts that India is the country of the Hindus, engaged in a thousand-year-old struggle against Muslim invaders, like Babar. A Hindu is “a person who regards the land of Bharatvarsha from the Indus to the Seas as his Fatherland, as well as his Holy land — that is the cradle land of his religion,” Savarkar claimed, an expression of ideology that cast Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands were located in the Middle East, as outsiders.

If the similarities between Savarkar’s cultural Hinduism and the Germanic “folk” so admired by Nazism were not already obvious, in 1938 RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar made the comparison explicit in “We or Our Nationhood Defined.”

“To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races — the Jews,” he wrote. “From this standpoint sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations, the non-Hindu people in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language … They must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges…not even citizen’s rights.”

According to Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarcar and Sambuddha Sen, the authors of Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags, “the RSS and its affiliates have never repudiated this definition of Hindu Rashtra” or the Hindu state.

But even before its back-to-back losses against the Congress party in the last two elections the BJP — while stopping short of repudiating Hindutva — was seeking to remake itself as the conservative alternative to Congress liberalism instead of its neo-fascist bogeyman. Its stint at the head of government from 1998 to 2003 had proven that it would have to modulate some of its anti-Muslim jingoism to attract and keep coalition partners. And party technocrats had already begun to suspect that the core issues of 1992 — “Hindu pride” and the Congress party’s alleged coddling of the Muslim minority — were fading in their importance to voters.

By bringing these repugnant aspects of the party into focus again, the Liberhan report promises to undermine those efforts by the party’s moderates and tempt the BJP back to the chauvinist identity that holds for it an almost magnetic force. That’s bad for India — which could do without forces that seek to stir up trouble among its religiously and ethnically diverse population.

But it could also spell disaster for the BJP. If the past two elections weren’t enough, the reaction to the Mumbai attacks showed that confidence in the country’s economic rise has made Indians less vulnerable — though not immune — to puppeteering by rabble-rousing demagogues.

“The BJP is slightly out of sync with the times,” said a Delhi University professor, Mahesh Rangarajan. “Unless it works out how to create a space for itself in this new 21st-century India, it may have a long wait [before it can hope to return to power].”