The roots of Hindu nationalism

...Taken together, their networks and organizations constitute a massive right-wing arena that contains all known varieties of illiberalism...

...Hindu nationalists have been quick to discover that this strategy doesn't simply meet pre-existing psychological needs, but rather sustains and, just when they appear to be vanishing, resuscitates them...

...Hannah Arendt once wrote that the severest form of hatred is reserved for those who are wealthy but have lost their political power or public function...

...Hindutva (extreme Hindu nationalism) cannot survive without a real or imagined enemy...

...Once only the marginal voice of a small number of Hindu ideologues threatened by the Muslim mobilization of the 1920s and stung by the inclusive nationalism of the Indian National Congress, the Hindu nationalist movement now boasts of the most powerful cluster of political and cultural organizations in the country...

...Even in 1989, the BJP garnered no more than 10 percent of the national vote...

...Its discourse, when it merely imagines an enemy, is quite strong enough, but it is a powerful, overweening force when the enemy is real...

...Why does the majority in India feel and behave like a persecuted minority...

...In spite of their ugly social order they have cherished and fostered correct national consciousness, while we [Hindus] ignore the cause of our trouble and grope about in the dark...

...A collective egoism overwhelms everyone...

...Doesn't this show that they can abandon extremism...

...Hindu nationalists now make instrumental use of memory, emotion, prejudice, religious difference, and generalized deprivation to advance their extremist agenda...

...Envy accumulated over the years is such that the very existence of "others" appears to be an unbearable humiliation...

...For example, one of the first issues used for the construction of a religious/ national identity was the protection of the holy cow...

...Feelings of uncertainty and danger always accompany such social transformations...

...4. Christophe Jaffrelot, op cit., pp...

...Rather, they include schools and hospitals, moneylending agencies, and associations for children, youth, students, women, and workers...

...So the two extremisms feed on each other...

...They are not a political party, although they have a party and can not do without it...

...What transpired in the following week was miraculously different...

...The traditional self-image of upper caste Indian males is that they are comfortably androgynous, morally upright, inwardlooking, and otherworldly...

...Perhaps this was bound to happen because the Nehruvian project was carried out by people who "were unwilling to engage with the masses except in a patronizing or modernizing mode...

...It is time that they begin to think in terms of larger collectivities, such as the nation...

...Why then should the mindset that typifies a resentful, crippled, and powerless people still be so dominant...

...They simultaneously valorize and stigmatize religions such as Islam and Christianity...

...Would there be yet another orchestrated "reaction" against ordinary Muslims...

...In post-independence India, both on account of the constraints imposed by a liberal-democratic Constitution and the enormous social and political power made available because of it, some Hindu nationalists, as suggested helpfully by Christophe Jaffrelot, have adopted a relatively moderate strategy that has three features.' First, they have moved away from a hard communalism to a soft, tradition-bound Hindu communitarianism...

...The force of the invention was evident in 1984, when the VHP engineered the revival of a movement to liberate "sacred" Hindu sites believed to have been usurped by Muslims— an issue that has excited and invigorated Hindu nationalists for more than a decade now...

...There are reports that educated but disgruntled young Muslims are embracing terrorism and in particular that Gujarati Muslim youth are crossing over the border into Pakistan...

...There is, in India today, a general feeling of insecurity and danger...

...The first of these was the search for a "deeper understanding" of India...

...The power and visibility of the RSS and its affiliates such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP—World Hindu Organization) have grown with time...

...An RSS ideologue declared recently that "Muslims have to rethink their positions on this issue which is so dear to Hindu hearts...

...However, until as late as 1984, in the elections held after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, their political party secured a mere 2 percent of the votes...

...He built an entire narrative around the vulnerability of Hindus: they could not have lost political power had they been strong and united...

...I say this because all of a sudden I hear people making a distinction between Muslim terrorists and ordinary Muslims and condemning the persistent disregard for the impartial implementation of the rule of law that has left many Muslims alienated...

...By this definition, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, as well as the lower castes, are taken to be authentic Hindus, but Christians, Jews, Parsees, and Muslims, whose religions did not originate in this prescribed geographical area, are forever excluded from the nation...

...The homegrown terrorist, once a Kashmiri phenomenon, appears to be spreading into other parts of the country...

...and every loss of privilege is fiercely resisted...

...Is something new afoot in India...

...Remarkably, a new space is opening up where ordinary people have begun to register not just their protest against terrorism but also against the political use that might be made of terrorist attacks...

...British imperialism is present only in the traces it has left behind...

...Ideally, extreme Hindu nationalists want the Muslim enemy neither to disappear altogether nor to become too strong...

...These sudden shifts in strategy leave everyone confounded, particularly when BJP leaders speak in different tongues, change colors, and switch masks...

...These local networks are not explicitly political, because their main objective is to build an alternative civil society...

...Once a mere irritant to secular forces confidently defining the agenda of the country, it now shapes the common sense of the very large Indian middle class...

...To grasp this, it is best to understand the mindset of the earliest protagonists of the movement...

...It is not as if no difference exists between soft and hard Hindu nationalism, but as long as proponents of the soft line continue to make instrumental use of the hardliners, the twists and turns in the BJP's ideological journey, as one commentator aptly put it, can have only one ending: extremist nationalism.' There is little doubt that except during the brief period of Indira Gandhi's emergency rule, when they were gripped by uncertainty about their future, Hindu nationalists have remained committed to an overtly militant program to take over society and polity...

...A substantial part of the daily life of these Hindu militants is spent in patiently responding to and resolving problems of local people, mainly uppercaste families in middle-class neighborhoods across India's small towns and cities...

...What democracy cannot afford, however, is an extremist politics driven by lies, violence, and hegemonic aspirations...

...Ayodhya, the mythical birthplace of Lord Rama, the main protagonist of the great epic Ramayana, remained the most evocative and significant rallying cry...

...But the movement also has political organizations such as the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), whose sole purpose is to capture state power...

...2. Thomas B. Hansen, The Saffron Wave (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 174...

...Hindu extremism would have petered out, its network of local activists would eventually have collapsed, and the strategy of ethno-religious mobilization would surely have failed had a parallel and similarly paranoid discourse of exclusion and imagined hurt not been constructed by Muslim bigots...

...They are not a religious sect, even though they sometimes behave like one...

...I BELIEVE THERE are two answers to this question...

...the rich want to suspend welfare provisions for the poor...

...But this bewilderment is now quite unnecessary...

...Now, this strategy re14 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 kindles the mindset for which it was devised in the first place...

...This is partly because they know that gains that accrue suddenly and unexpectedly can as swiftly be lost...

...And yet, isn't the psychological animus undergirding extreme Hindu nationalism on the decline...

...I can address only the most important reasons here...

...Till recently this was talk in a few academic circles, not where public opinion is forged...

...So did the famous Shah Bano case in which Rajiv Gandhi's government succumbed to the pressure of Muslim power brokers and passed a law legitimizing the subordination of women in Islamic courts—for the sake, it was said, of POLITICS ABROAD protecting the cultural rights of minorities...

...He saw Hindus, on the other hand, as being in a deplorable state of disunity and physical weakness...

...vowed to preserve the cosmopolitan cultural character of this vibrant, hardworking, and fun loving city...

...International terrorism by Muslim extremists or cross-border terrorism in Kashmir has not helped matters...

...A conservative, upper-caste ultra-traditionalism, driven by the anxiety to preserve a beleaguered cultural and social order, has always been a major ingredient of Hindu nationalism...

...This has not happened because four commitments cement all the various groups: first, an abiding and pervasive antiliberalism...

...They are inventing a new anti-Muslim Hinduism that they use to form a "vote bank" that has helped them to capture and now to retain political power...

...Upper-caste Hindus dominate all political institutions in independent India and are economically and culturally powerful...

...Perhaps...

...A key element in this strategy is to mobilize the masses on ethno-religious grounds—through "stigmatization and emulation," the strategic incorporation of certain elements of the religions that it vilifies in order to beat them, so to speak, at their own game.' Other religions are stigmatized because they are said to demand a kind of absolute loyalty that is in tension with the equally absolute loyalty demanded by the modern state...

...The mental world of such people is marked by the desire for a new framework of identity...

...The holy cow, too, returned to the political agenda...

...It is built into the dominant mindset of these terrible times...

...The presence of a real but weak antagonist suits their purposes perfectly, and this is precisely what Indian politics and society now present to them...

...Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that the militancy of certain minorities—the separatist movements in Sikh-dominated Punjab and Muslim-dominated Kashmir— would ignite an already inflamed sense of vulnerability...

...Surely, they thought, this is not the stuff of which world champions are made...

...Hindu nationalism brings together fundamentalists, traditionalists, anti-modernists, and right-wing conservatives who covet a modernization process radically different from the one begun by secular humanists such as Jawaharlal Nehru...

...First, the long-established Congress Party system has collapsed...

...Since the partition of the country, DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 13 POLITICS ABROAD Muslims constitute only 11 percent of the population...

...5. Vidya Subrahamaniam in Times of India, June 29, 2003, in a report on the latest attempt by the Indian prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to reach an out-of-court settlement on the Ram Janam Bhoomi dispute...

...More recently, the discourse of the RSS appears to have "normalized...

...A conspicuous feature of this syndrome is that groups make impossible demands on each other that cannot be fulfilled ever, conjure up imaginary grievances, and insist precisely on that which hurts the other most...

...A gentler, much chastened Hindu nationalist party isn't unwelcome in a democracy, which must after all accommodate right-wing groups just as it must, within limits, offer space for religious communities to criticize one another...

...The cow, believed sacred by many, has long been a symbol of upper-caste Hindu identity and is therefore invested with great potential for political manipulation...

...More important, the organizations that sustain Hindu nationalism have become considerably stronger since the 1980s...

...Worse, it has succumbed to the serpent and taken a bite of the communal apple...

...But sadly, this Hinduism suppresses its POLITICS ABROAD own core values—eclecticism and diversity— and defines itself in terms of a set of anti-values, in opposition chiefly to Muslim religion and culture...

...0 UR EXPLANATORY story would be woefully inadequate, however, unless we mention a fourth, and perhaps most important, reason...

...This strategy would never succeed without a reliable, dense grid of local activists who see themselves as missionaries of the nation and pride themselves on their dedication to "Mother India...

...The upper castes want to withdraw "reservations" (quotas) for the lower castes...

...The success of Indian democracy and rapid changes in the economy in the neoliberal era brought wealth and enhanced social status to many hitherto marginalized urban and rural people...

...Now they began asking themselves if these very qualities were not holding them back...

...A culture stewed in poison, embittered and weakened, focused ceaselessly and aggressively on revenge is skillfully fostered on Hindu streets...

...11-79...

...If injustices are not addressed through routine legal procedures, then some people are bound to resort to extreme measures...

...Given the talent, intelligence, and skill possessed by Indians, why was their country still weak, still on the margins of international affairs...

...And, why did it wait so long in the wings...

...A discourse for which there were few takers earlier began to sound plausible...

...Upper-caste violence that followed the introduction of job quotas for the "backward" classes underscores this point...

...What then is the real character of Hindu nationalism...

...Invariably, Hindu nationalists affirm their community or religion not for its intrinsic quality but with the sole intention of denying and denigrating other religions and communities, always playing one against the other...

...Under its wings, there are proponents of old-style terrorism, authoritarianism, and fascism, cheek by jowl with people who reluctantly submit to the constraints of representative democracy...

...But unlike many of the others, they were cursed with an ineluctable propensity to compare themselves with others—and to suffer, in their own eyes, by the comparison...

...Fear and foreboding gripped Indians...

...This appears harmless enough, but what is really taught in the Shakhas is a mode of conflictual, even violent engagement with the "Other," which is made the pre-condition of Hindu self-assertion...

...What then explains its power today...

...Half-baked arguments that the weakness of India is caused by a lack of a killer instinct, because Indians do not see themselves as winners, went hand in glove with a longing for a new India and a new Hindu...

...Hedgewar was equally obsessed with the earlier failure of Hindu rulers to resist the conquering Muslims...

...The ideological father of militant Hindu nationalism, V.D...

...They then taught these definitions of Hinduism to DISSENT / Fall 2003 n I I POLITICS ABROAD the Indians themselves, who readily learned them in the new colonial educational institutions...

...Servicing Mother India is for them not merely an abstract concept...

...Second, they have accepted the need to operate by the rules of constitutional democracy, showing a willingness to forge alliances with opposing parties...

...They obsessively desire at one time the very thing that the other wants, at other times they insist that such a thing cannot be desired—always with the sole purpose of negating the claims of the other...

...Alas, an even more cruel treatment may befall those who are powerless, poor, and seen to be politically redundant...

...RAJEEV BHARGAVA is a professor of political theory at the University of Delhi...

...But imagined threats from an invented enemy cannot sustain a movement indefinitely...

...Other minorities are much smaller...

...Hindu nationalists have been around for nearly a century...

...A second reason, however, is more salient...

...A huge propaganda machinery of lies and falsehood is constantly at work furnishing negative stereotypes...

...Can one hope that the tide has begun to turn...

...One would think that a movement with such seemingly opposed tendencies would have split, if not collapsed, by now...

...Much of their work is done in the Shakha (the local branch), where individuals drill with the Lathi (a long bamboo stave), play Indian games such as the Kabaddi, and are taught to be loyal to the Hindu nation...

...POSTSCRIPT: Mumbai, as Bombay is now known, was rocked in August by two powerful bombs that killed 52 and injured more than 150 persons...

...The third process was a gradual political democratization, which sharpened differences between Hindus and Muslims and generated new fears and anxieties about lower-caste assertion...

...When men are enlisted on opposite sides, they contract an affection to the persons with whom they are united, and an animosity against their antagonists...

...Groups that once supported it have left and formed political parties of their own...

...If terrorism is to be checked, the ground that breeds it must not be watered...

...They have used this newly invented identity not only to extract social and political benefits in their adopted country, but also to support extremist ideas and fund illiberal movements in the country of their origin...

...This is the secularist's ultimate nightmare...

...They think of themselves as an Indian extended family, a parivar...

...The economic policy of the BJP is decidedly right wing, but the reality is that no party in democratic India can survive without at least lip service to the elimination of poverty...

...Comparisons with other cultures need no longer engender feelings of inferiority and inadequacy...

...Hindu nationalists contended that this mosque must be handed over to them, and in 1992, after this demand was refused, a wellarmed mob led by VHP activists reduced the mosque to rubble, as senior BJP leaders looked on...

...Legacy of Colonialism Three processes set in motion by the British in colonial India created the conditions for the emergence of Hindu nationalism...

...For centuries, Indians have been obsessed with their families, with their mothers or their children...

...When the Muslims don't play ball, Hindu extremists are compelled to invent their enemy...

...and these passions they often transmit to their posterity...

...For more than a decade, the demand to "liberate" the Ram Janam Bhoomi remained the most spectacularly effective way to mobilize extremist Hindu nationalism...

...1. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, (London: Hurst & Company, 1996), pp...

...An extremist movement has been growing from strength to strength for more than fifteen years...

...Colonial classifications and census enumeration forced people to choose a single, well-demarcated communal identity...

...If India is to become a power in the globalized world, Indian men must shed their moral self-righteousness and acquire a practiPOLITICS ABROAD cal sense, a manipulative, this-worldly cunning and aggressiveness...

...Those at the bottom of the ladder then begin to be seen as a threat to the new middle classes...

...This mindset leads inexorably to a militant strategy that aims at the construction of a pure culture and is sharply focused on the formation of a narrow, hardened, and belligerent identityformation...

...There were peace and solidarity marches in the city...

...Present in the movement are Hindus with rigidly hierarchical convictions, who never shed their strong upper-caste leanings, as well as half-hearted egalitarians who, for strategic reasons, grudgingly include the lower castes within their fold...

...Terrorism was unambiguously condemned by everyone, including all major Muslim organizations...

...When the Rajiv Gandhi government passed a bill that placed the retrogressive family law of the Muslims above the criminal law of the state, the carefully fostered and malicious talk of appeasement no longer appeared fictitious...

...The first was offered by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, when he drew attention to how splenetic memories of the past fester in the mind and how negative emotions are bequeathed from one generation to another: "Nothing is more usual than to see parties which have begun upon a real difference, continue even after the difference is lost...

...I cannot explain all this...

...Perverse comparison induced, once again, the sense of deprivation and disadvantage...

...Because secular humanism legitimated a social and political order that offered them few benefits, they are drawn to its opposite, an ideology closer to their own views...

...Could it be that a hidden, rusted, convoluted, self-correcting mechanism is slowly cranking back to life...

...The state machinery, which Nehru tried to keep impartial, has gradually been communalized...

...Not surprisingly, traditional elites are dismayed by any change to the existing order...

...Among its many organizations is the avowedly culturist Rashtriya Svayamsewak Sangha (RSS—Association of National Volunteers) whose members patiently and determinedly work far away from state-sponsored sites...

...This is a complex issue...

...In Zaveri Bazaar, Hindu and Muslim neighbors helped each other recover from the blasts, picked up the shards from their lives, and determinedly came out to work the very next day...

...The RSS, the linchpin of the movement, was founded in 1925 by K.B Hedgewar, who was disturbed by the ease with which colonial administrators ruled over a vast country like India...

...Middle-class Indians began to wonder why India was not a superpower...

...The idea of the Hindus as a dying race was invented in the 1920s...

...Uprooted from tradition, these people were radically uncertain of themselves...

...September 11 was a shot in the arm for Hindu nationalists (as it must have been for Christian fundamentalists also...

...The BJP captured more votes in the last election than any other party and leads the national coalition...

...Clearly Hinduism is again being reinvented on the basis of a relentless anti-Muslim campaign...

...The third reason is especially interesting because its roots lie outside India...

...The explosions, recalling the infamous bombing in 1993 of the Bombay Stock Exchange, occurred at the Gateway of India outside the legendary Taj Hotel and in Zaveri Bazaar, an old busy street of mostly Gujarati traders, the first with the intention of disrupting business and travel and the other serving as some kind of retribution for the injustice against Muslims in Gujarat...

...Would life grind to a halt, and would the state helplessly watch another macabre round of massacres...

...On television and in newspapers, opinion makers collectively resolved not to allow communal division to widen...

...3. Quoted in the Outlook, March 10, 2003...

...It is of course true that identities are always formed in relation to others, and that a constitutive link exists between identity and recognition...

...They must jettison talk of justice that demands concessions to the weak...

...However, the new middle classes are no less anxious...

...secularism was now seen as an ideology that favored minorities...

...In the 1940s, together the Hindu and Muslim extremists generated a vicious inter-communal syndrome, a diseased network of neurotic relations so completely poisoned and accompanied by such a vertiginous assortment of negative emotions that the two communities plummeted into deeper and deeper estrangement...

...Thoughts like these among the new middle class have provided fertile ground for the expansion of an aggressive and resentful Hindu nationalism...

...They continually failed in their efforts at self-affirmation in a modernizing world...

...Globalization has introduced new anxieties...

...This psychology of perverse comparison, and the resentment it produces, can be seen in extreme Hindu nationalism from its inception...

...They are a poor substitute for real action from real people...

...M. Golwalkar, Hedgewar's successor, wrote, "The European is exceptionally defective...and yet Europeans as nations are free and strong...

...But it is due in part also to the social logic inherent in such transformations: the changes that brought benefits to these people open up new possibilities for others too, and raise the prospect of upward mobility for all marginalized social sectors...

...Second, the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized a world crisis not only of socialism but also of secular DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 1 5 POLITICS ABROAD humanism...

...He saw Muslims as a cohesive unit, unflinchingly committed to their religion, even fanatical about it...

...fourth, and above all, a relentless antipathy to Muslims and, to a lesser extent, to Christians—and also to secularists who desire equal citizenship for all Indians...

...Though well-knit, they are not a single organization, nor are they driven by a single idea...

...Except that alongside all this there is an alarming new development...

...justice begins to be seen as the morality I6 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 of the weak...

...But the target of this resentment is a largely imaginary enemy, now one of the weakest, most frightened, and beleaguered communities in India...

...The Congress Party has gone into steady decline, losing its standing as a party with a coherent program, ideology, and support base...

...What are they after...

...As a result, one can no longer be sure of its secularist commitments...

...Why has Hindu nationalism assumed this form...

...For most of the last fifty years, Hindu nationalists have mixed moderate with militant strategies and selected the appropriate combination depending on their relative strength vis-a-vis other political forces...

...The increased wealth and security of the Indian diaspora has boosted the self-confidence of its members, whetted their appetite for the reinvention of the culture and religion of their childhood, and made it possible for them to forge economic links with their homeland...

...It made the revival of counter-enlightenment movements marked by religious enthusiasm possible...

...Projections from available census reports, he argued, showed that, in comparison to the rapidly multiplying Muslims and Christians, Hindus would disappear in the next four hundred years...

...The permanent subtext of such campaigns is their anti-Muslim character: all Muslims are assumed to be beef-eaters, a permanent body of cow-slaughterers...

...Present-Day Influences Perverse comparison—feelings of inferiority, envy, resentment, and negative stereotyping of the Other—propels extreme Hindu nationalism even today...

...third, a belief in a distinctive and exclusivist variant of nationalism that aims to reinstate a strong, disciplined, and united Hindu nation, the Rashtra...

...The prestige of Western culture has fallen off in direct proportion to the growth in Indian cultural self-confidence, something inevitable with more than a half century of democratic self-rule...

...Over the years, it has been thoroughly embroiled in scandal, controversy, corruption, and misgovernment...

...In addition, they rank low on a scale of civilizational values in which the nationalists' version of original, pristine Hinduism scores the very highest points...

...So long as moderation remains a strategy rather than a constitutive feature of its politics, the fundamental character of Hindu nationalism can only be extremist...

...and stressed the significance of citizenship over community identity...

...As in many Asian countries, Indians had highly diffused and fluid self-understandings, which made it possible for them to identify easily with two or more fuzzily defined communities...

...The smallest action of Muslim extremists energizes Hindu nationalism, revives or exacerbates the inter-communal syndrome, and gives popular legitimacy to Hindu nationalists...

...Who are the Hindu nationalists and what do they stand for...

...Third, they have eagerly mobilized people on populist, socio-economic issues that automatically downplay an aggressive Hindu identity...

...Muslim extremism makes it possible for ordinary Hindus to believe that there is a real enemy out there and to see anti-Muslim discourse less as the hysteria of disturbed people and more as a necessary response to possible oppression and injustice...

...As Thomas Hansen points out, "Rama became a metaphor for the essential Hinduness of Indian culture," 2 and the restoration of the temple was made the pivot of the reassertion of Hindu cultural religious rights, violated for centuries in their own homeland...

...The real basis of rivalry, inferiority, and resentment is long gone, but its memory continues to produce embittered and poisoned minds...

...But haven't Hindu nationalists occasionally softened their aggressive views...

...Why did a militant strategy that had persistently failed earlier now succeed so spectacularly...

...Extreme Hindu nationalism cannot exist without an enemy...

...Their long-distance nationalism parallels that of the Sikh, Muslim, and Jewish diasporas...

...I see the cow issue as part of the global struggle against jehadi fundamentalism...

...Its goals, beliefs, emotions, and prejudices are fast penetrating the discourse of ordinary people...

...Would Mumbai be ripped again along communal lines...

...They disseminate appropriately selected and interpreted information...

...Western Orientalists imposed a set of attributes on Indian religion and society that was supposedly essential to them...

...Earlier, the mindset created the strategy it needed...

...And so, from being a predominantly personal or collective device to overcome the simmering tension eating into the soul of a marginalized group, it now makes possible a political bid for total hegemony...

...But at I2 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 play here is a pervasive pathology wherein people never perceive or understand themselves except by comparison with others...

...Why the Increased Popularity...

...However, these processes do not fully explain why the movement took an extreme, largely negative, ethno-nationalist form centered around a xenophobic religious identity...

...Savarkar, defines a Hindu as a "person who regards this land from the Indus to the seas as his fatherland as well as his holy land...

...Hindu hard-liners did not open their mouths, even BJP leaders showed restraint...

...158-192...

...Like other antimodern traditionalists, they were insecure and vulnerable in a world that they could not call their own...

...second, a repugnance for the socialist left or for anything that is remotely like it...

...The violence in Gujarat was not an accident...

...There is something to this...

...The conversion of "untouchables" to Islam in Tamilnadu in 1981 gave the VHP the opportunity to raise the specter first of Islamic and later of Christian expansion...

...6. Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India, (Cambridge:Polity, 2000), p. XIX DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 17...

...Hindu nationalists claim that a temple dedicated to Lord Rama stood on his Janam Bhoomi (the site of his birth) until it was destroyed in the sixteenth century by Babur, the first Mughal ruler, and replaced by a mosque...

...Given these different strands, its actions are bound to be octopus-like: each tentacle appears to move independently, and yet all come together to push the body in the desired direction...

...The lies and exaggerations about a largely imaginary threat were now anchored in real events...

...The second process was the introduction of separate laws and electorates for Hindus and Muslims, which created stable, neatly compartmentalized religious identities...

...The first movement for cow protection was initiated at the end of the nineteenth century and sought to unite all Hindus against the alleged barbaric practices of Muslims that threatened the natural order of Hindu society...

...and among Hindus there is an outcry against minority rights...