hindu nationalism five years after godhra

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This article was downloaded by: [George Mason University] On: 19 December 2014, At: 17:23 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK India Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/find20 Hindu Nationalism Five Years after Godhra Jason A. Kirk Published online: 10 Mar 2008. To cite this article: Jason A. Kirk (2008) Hindu Nationalism Five Years after Godhra, India Review, 7:1, 73-90, DOI: 10.1080/14736480801901238 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14736480801901238 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

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Page 1: Hindu Nationalism Five Years after Godhra

This article was downloaded by: [George Mason University]On: 19 December 2014, At: 17:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

India ReviewPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/find20

Hindu Nationalism Five Yearsafter GodhraJason A. KirkPublished online: 10 Mar 2008.

To cite this article: Jason A. Kirk (2008) Hindu Nationalism Five Years afterGodhra, India Review, 7:1, 73-90, DOI: 10.1080/14736480801901238

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14736480801901238

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

Page 2: Hindu Nationalism Five Years after Godhra

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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India Review, vol. 7, no. 1, January–March, 2008, pp. 73–90Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN 1473-6489 print; 1557-3036 onlineDOI:10.1080/14736480801901238

FIND1473-64891557-3036India Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, Jan 2008: pp. 0–0India ReviewREVIEW ESSAY

Hindu Nationalism Five Years after GodhraHindu Nationalism Five Years after GodhraIndia ReviewJASON A. KIRK

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.By Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 2007. 403 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

Communalism, Caste, and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence inGujarat. By Ornit Shani. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2007. 215 pages. Paper, $29.99.

Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. By Christophe Jaffrelot, ed. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 391 pages. Paper, $24.95.

Anniversaries give impulse to reflection and stocktaking. Indiacelebrated 60 years of independence in 2007, and a fine crop of high-profile books appeared to (re)introduce the most populous democracyto an increasingly interested international audience. Of particular notewere journalist Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Riseof Modern India and scholar Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial Indiaafter Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.

But 2007 also marked a half-decade since the horrifying pogromsagainst Muslims in India’s Gujarat state, following the notoriousepisode at the Godhra railway station in which 58 Hindu train passengersburned to death following a communal confrontation. Thus, the yearalso saw the publication of several important works focusing onHindu nationalism and communal violence in India, including newmonographs by Martha Nussbaum and Ornit Shani, and an editedvolume by Christophe Jaffrelot that brings together key text excerptsranging from the writings of some of the earliest Hindu nationalist

Jason A. Kirk is an Assistant Professor of International Studies and Political Science atVirginia Military Institute.

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thinkers to those of political leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) who occupied India’s highest offices for much of the lastdecade.

The Nussbaum and Jaffrelot works are both concerned in partwith discerning the origins of Hindu nationalism during the colonialera, but both ultimately place more emphasis on analyzing Hindunationalism in action in more recent times – from charting the BJP’sentry into the mainstream of India’s democratic politics in the 1980s,to the early 1990s development of the “Ayodhya movement” that ulti-mately would contribute directly to the violence of 2002. Nussbaumdevotes her first full chapter to documenting what she describes as“the genocide in Gujarat” and its aftermath, and then spends much ofthe rest of the book building her argument for how India came toexperience that tragedy, and how it might secure its future againstreprises of such vitriolic extremism.

Jaffrelot’s volume is not much possessed by the ghosts of Godhra,but it does take the reader into the milieu of a movement that hasbecome “deeply divided” (p. 23) – especially after the BJP’s electorallosses in 2004 – between more pragmatic politicians concerned withviability in an era of fractious coalition government, and hardline ideo-logues in the sister Sangh Parivar organizations who believe the move-ment has faltered by straying from its Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) core.

Shani, writing for a specialist academic audience, offers the mostnarrowly drawn and least accessible analysis, but by focusing onGujarat over several decades, she demonstrates how a history of rapidde-industrialization – combined with the state’s steady withdrawalfrom responsibility for the material and physical security of itscitizens – created a “continuum” of communal tension and set thestage for the violence of 2002.

Taken together, these three works conjure useful questions aboutHindu nationalism today: how is it affected by, and how in turn doesit affect, other patterns of popular mobilization in India’s democraticpolitics, particularly caste, class, regional, and other religious identities?What lessons did various Hindu nationalists take from the BJP’slosses in 2004, and where is the movement heading?

And yet none of these books should stand alone as a fresh intro-duction to the subject. Indeed, a newcomer might do better simply toread Luce and Guha. As an in-depth (if somewhat dated) introduc-tion, Jaffrelot’s 1996 The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India still

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stands as a landmark, and the new primary source reader comple-ments and updates it nicely.

Nussbaum’s book wants to be the masterwork on Hindu nationalismfor an American readership, and it comes close to fulfilling the promiseof this ambition. But it is ultimately marred by a selective rendering ofIndian political history, a stunted view of how India’s myriad socialcleavages operate in the political arena (caste and especially regionalmobilizations receive too little emphasis), and a self-indulgent writingstyle that repeatedly pushes Nussbaum’s own voice and characterjudgments to center stage.

She announces in the book’s preface, “This is a book about Indiafor an American and European audience” (p. ix) though it soonbecomes clear that the book is more specifically for Americans – andin some senses about America and its relationship to democracy,both at home and abroad. She repeatedly draws parallels between theBJP and Southern right-wing politics in America: “The Hindu rightis comparable to the U.S. South, torn between explicit appeals toracism and a more inclusive politics.” She predicts, “First, a timecomes when politicians begin to realize that an open appeal to hatredand division is not acceptable (Vajpayee and Advani seem to havereached this moment.) Next, we would expect that over time a ‘NewSouth’ would come into being – that is, politicians who really do notbelieve in sectarian animosity would gradually take the place ofthose who conceal their animosity behind code words.” But unfortu-nately, she says, “There are no clear examples of this next generationamong BJP leaders in India” (p. 321). Such parallels are interesting,but they are very casually drawn, and sometimes have the unfortu-nate quality of hearkening back to stale modernization models ofdemocratic development: India’s experiences will track and repeatthose of the US.

Who would have predicted, just a few years ago, that today Nussbaumwould be able to pair Lal Krishna Advani with Atal Behari Vajpayeeas a relatively moderate elder leader of the party? The exigencies ofcoalition politics at the national level (and even in some states) haveplaced considerable pressure on the BJP to temper its Hindutvarhetoric and goals, and this looks to remain the pattern of Indiangovernments for the foreseeable future. Thus, in one of the book’smore optimistic moments, she hopes, “Perhaps India and the UnitedStates are especially alike in having such an evident history of diversity

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and inclusiveness that the politics of hatred has an uphill battle towage” (p. 332).

Nussbaum also wants Americans to better grasp the implicationsof their country’s turn, under the “Bush Doctrine,” toward a foreignpolicy of promoting democratization around the world: “Facing out-ward, it is imperative to see the complexities and internal divisionsthat are there,” she argues. She perceives a “widespread neglect ofIndia in the U.S. curricula and the U.S. and European media” (p. xi).While the first half of that claim no doubt remains too true, the lattermay be becoming less so (as any perusal of content from the BBC,The New York Times, The Financial Times, or The Economist – whichnow has a larger readership in North America than in Britain – wouldattest).

Certainly Nussbaum’s argument that the West, and Americans inparticular, continue to pay too little heed to the complex working outof democracy in India is reasonable. India’s experience is remarkable:its mostly unblemished record of stable democratic institutions for sixdecades has defied pessimistic predictions made in the early decadesafter its independence, even if its sporadic tendency toward convul-sions of communal violence also shows the terrible harm that cancome from explicitly ethno-religious identity appeals to politicalmobilization in a pluralist polity.

If there was any “silver lining” in the terrible cloud that Godhrawrought five years ago, it was that at least this time the violence did notspread to other corners of India as it had a decade earlier, when theAyodhya issue first exploded, the 1992–93 Mumbai riots raged, andthere were reports of communal violence even in such usually quieterlocales such as Bangalore (Nussbaum does not emphasize the “con-tained” quality of communalism of 2002, but rather worries that it couldherald a dark future for India as a whole). Apart from holding the state’sleadership under Chief Minister Narendra Modi culpable, Nussbaumdoes not delve deeply into the structural factors that made Gujarat soripe for conflict (whereas that is the major focus of Shani’s book). None-theless, Nussbaum seems to be arguing, if America is going to be in thebusiness of vigorously promoting democracy in divided societies, it hadbetter take a hard look at India for models of what such governancemight look like, and for both the promise and peril it entails.

The “clash” in Nussbaum’s title refers to the American SamuelP. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis from the mid-1990s,

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which she summarizes as centered on a view that “the world iscurrently polarized between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence,and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America” (p. ix).Much ink has been spilled in response to Huntington’s thesis – andmuch of it has been quite critical – but Nussbaum’s present-tense char-acterization, and her failure to place it in its original context (as part ofa spirited early post-Cold War debate among political scientists aboutwhat new fault lines might emerge), is just the first of several instancesin the book in which she does not deal entirely fairly with subjects, andlets a polemical penchant get in the way of professional standards ofscholarship (Nussbaum’s editors at Belknap/Harvard University Presshave applied a fairly light touch, and the book comes across almost asa star vehicle for its author).

Nussbaum’s own “clash” thesis is clear and compelling enough:modern democracies, from India to the United States, confront aninternal struggle “between people who are prepared to live with otherswho are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek theprotection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of asingle religious and ethnic tradition” (p. ix). Going further, she arguesin a fashion after Mohandas K. Gandhi, this “clash within” democraticsocieties is a clash that their individual citizens also confront insidethemselves, “between the urge to dominate and defile the other and awillingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality,with all the vulnerability that such a life entails” (p. ix).

In the book’s introduction, she makes clear her disdain both for manyimpacts of British colonialism (“the British were appalling tyrants,exploiters, and racists,” she pithily pronounces, p. 8) and for the reactionsit generated among founders of the Hindu right, whom she regards assadly derivative fascists, “humiliated and emasculated by conquest [and]inclined to turn to thoughts of purity and a cleansing by violence to wipeaway the stain” (p. 6). The image of Hindu nationalism as a response towounded masculinity recurs throughout the book. For whatever realmerit there might be in examining the Hindutva movement and itsconceptions of “Mother India” through such gender-conscious lenses,Nussbaum’s preoccupation with this theme leads her to make somequestionable choices in terms of both methodology and professionalethics for the personal interviews that she conducted for the book.

A particularly frustrating chapter, which she calls “The HumanFace of the Hindu Right,” uses bait-and-switch. “It is relatively easy

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for the moral imagination to put a human face on the suffering ofGujarat’s victims,” she explains, but “It is much more difficult to seethe human face of the people who aided or condoned the violence” (p. 52).Unfortunately, the vignettes she offers on three “leading figures of theright” – “The Zealot” K. K. Shastri, “The RSS Scholar” DevendraSwarup, and “The Politician” Arun Shourie – alternate between car-toonish and condescending, and only fleetingly convey the empathythat Nussbaum claims to be seeking. Consider this gratuitous aside inher account of an interview with Shastri, the president of the VishvaHindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Council) in Gujarat:

Imagine seeing the almost-bald Gandhi, his skinny torso clad inhis usual white loincloth, his kindly childlike face with deeplaughing eyes that made strangers so quickly gravitate to him.Now imagine a similar figure but a different face: surprisinglylively dark eyes, hooded by folds of skin, with no humor, nowarmth, but a piercing intensity. Picture this figure extending anarm across the table and touching the arm of my research assistantMona Mehta, a slender young Hindu woman around five feet tall,very vulnerable-looking. He says to her, speaking suddenly inGujarati, “My dear, I must give you a warning. These Muslims,they abduct young Hindu women. They take them away and doterrible things to them.” I understand what is said only later,when Mona whispers a translation in my ear, but I see how theaged form is galvanized with excitement at the thought of Mona’sdanger and his own role as guardian of her purity. (p. 53)

If this is an empathic portrait, the reader can only wonder what tawdrynarrative devices Nussbaum would deploy if she fully embraced theinstinct to make clear her scorn. The dreadfully cartoonish dimen-sions of Shastri’s worldview hardly need to be amplified: he tellsNussbaum, for example “that there were no castes before the intro-duction of toilets by Muslim rulers” (p. 55). According to this logic,presumably, the Manu Smriti actually originated as latrine graffitimany centuries later than its conventional dating.

Elsewhere in the book, in a chapter entitled “The Assault on History,”Nussbaum does ably address some of the sources of such folklore, andits total disconnect from the best historical and archeological evidenceon India’s past (she particularly excoriates what passes for humanities

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education at the primary level). But it is unfortunate that here, in themoment of encounter with an avatar of such chauvinism, she takes apass on the opportunity to pursue an authentic understanding of itsspecific inspiration. Instead, she relies on the American readership’slimited and stereotyped images of elder Indian malehood – the“kindly childlike” Gandhi in his loincloth – to present Shastri as theMahatma’s id doppelganger.

In some respects, the largest ego in this book is Nussbaum’s own.Describing her encounter with Swarup, “an in-house historian for theRSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or ‘National Volunteer Corps’]rather than a scholar with a university appointment,” she details thecontents of her subject’s modest apartment in suburban Delhi:

Although most of the books on the shelves have Hindi titles, thename Gandhi, written in huge black letters in English on the spineof one large volume, is visually prominent, as if to draw attentionto Swarup’s admiration for the leader whom the RSS at one timedespised. I can’t help wondering whether this eye-catching label-ing is for my benefit. (p. 56, emphasis added)

Would Nussbaum dream of making such insinuations about a visit tothe office of a Chicago colleague? Despite the diverse and complicatedsensibilities about Gandhi that one encounters in India today – fromdeeply reverent to ambivalent to sharply critical, sometimes all at oncedepending on the specific aspect of his character and politics underdiscussion – he remains one of the most ubiquitous icons of India’smodern history; his visage appears on Rupee currency notes of severaldenominations. A more honest and curious Nussbaum might havesimply asked Swarup about the Gandhi volume, but in a sense shealready knows what she wants to know about her interview subjects.

In a third vignette, she describes her encounter with Shourie, the prom-inent journalist-author, former World Bank economist, and governmentminister who held several important portfolios (Disinvestment,Communications, and Information Technology) during the BJP-ledcoalition government from 1999 to 2004. Nussbaum has been primedfor the interview, she discloses, by her businessman friend GurcharanDas, who has described Shourie as “one of the most decent and sensi-tive of the BJP group, not a religious zealot” (p. 61). Yet Nussbaumalso has seen filmmaker Lalit Vachani’s documentaries The Boys in the

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Branch (1992) and The Men in the Tree (1994), and knows that Shou-rie addressed an RSS Founders Day rally in 1992 and vigorouslyendorsed its aim to construct a Ram Temple at Ayodhya, not longbefore the destruction by Hindu kar sevaks (volunteers) of the BabriMosque.1 “Shourie is surely aware that the Hindu right hasannounced its readiness to use violence if it encounters any resistanceto its project,” she points out, “So his endorsement of the ‘aims of themovement’ cannot help including the use of force” (p. 62). She wonders:

Who is Arun Shourie? Liberal defender of freedom of expression,without much respect for what other people express; fighter forindividual liberty, who participates as a guest of honor in a massquasi-fascist rally and supports its advocacy of mass violence;member of a religion-based political movement, with a deep andvitriolic hatred of religion.

But once again, the author seems more concerned with putting Shourieon display than in genuinely engaging the man’s many apparentcontradictions. She wants to like Shourie: “Unlike the others, he doesnot seem to have any obsessions about women and their purity –which contributed to my feeling that this was a man who lives in myworld, and who could in principle even be a friend” (p. 70). Yet as asubstitute for the “wounded masculinity” ethos, she has to putforward (yet simultaneously undercut) a different quasi-Freudianmotivation behind his “restless burning eyes”: Shourie has a son whowas born with multiple physical disabilities, and he tells her that aseries of highly critical books on religion that he wrote in the 1990s(on Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism itself) represented his “screamagainst the explanations given for suffering” in these faith traditions(p. 64).2 And yet Nussbaum is not satisfied: “Since he later mentionsthat the son is thirty-nine years old, thus born in 1966, while thebooks on the religions were published in 1995, 1998, and 2000, it ishard to credit that the books were an immediate reaction” (p. 65).

Who is Arun Shourie? Unfortunately, from the full eight text pagesthat Nussbaum devotes to their encounter, we learn less about hiscomplicated politics than we do about how much he disappoints her.

Did any of these men, in agreeing to sit for an interview with theErnst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics inthe Department of Philosophy, the Law School, and the Divinity

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School at the University of Chicago, imagine that she would offer upto readers such presuming, pulpy accounts of their conversations?(Possibly: in the book’s acknowledgements, we learn by name whoagreed to speak to her and later withdrew the interview material, whostopped returning her emails, and so on). What makes her stylisticchoices here so disappointing is not just that they are beneath com-monly held standards of professional scholarship, but that they fallshort of the standards of conduct that Nussbaum herself (via Gandhi)sets for India and America. In its own way, is not her treatment ofthese all-too-human subjects a kind of “violence,” a seeking to putthem in their place? To her, such means are apparently justified by theHindu nationalist movement’s own sporadic penchant for literalbrutality, but the adage often attributed to Gandhi resonates: “an eyefor an eye makes the whole world blind.” It is precisely whenNussbaum’s book is at its most polemical that it casts the dimmestlight upon its very important subject matter.

If these were only stylistic transgressions, The Clash Within mightstill be credited as a great scholarly achievement. Yet such materialrepresents one of the book’s most original contributions. In one of herother stated goals for the book – that it might function as “a loud-speaker” for “a wide range of high-quality materials [that] the Indianpress and publishing industry have made available [to] scholars andothers seeking to understand these events” in India – Nussbaum suc-ceeds very substantially. If she succeeds in encouraging Americanreaders to seek out Vachani’s films (which are hard to find in the US) orother extant texts, or to recognize the vibrancy of India’s civil society(especially efforts by nongovernmental organizations such as Com-munalism Combat and the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal to pursuejustice for victims in Gujarat), then the book will have performed atremendous service. When Nussbaum allows some of these othervoices to speak truth to power, The Clash Within is both informativeand engaging.

But in trying to “present not only the [Godhra] event itself but alsoa good deal of historical and legal background about the Indian democ-racy,” Nussbaum makes some questionable choices of emphasis. Someof these follow from a desire to construct a text with narrative flair;the chapter focusing on this unholy trinity of Hindu nationalist men,for example, is followed by a chapter surveying the lives and views ofthree very different “archetypes,” men who sought, albeit with

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different particulars, “a united India free from caste discriminationand interreligious hostility” (p. 80): Rabindranath Tagore, MohandasK. Gandhi, and Jawaharal Nehru.

Tagore, Nussbaum argues, was a visionary who saw the need to cre-ate a “public poetry” of tolerance and empathy, rooted in a childhoodeducation model that emphasized arts and humanities and explicitlycultivated critical thinking skills. (We have already seen how a well-known strand of Gandhi’s thinking informs the core of Nussbaum’s“clash within” thesis.) Toward Nehru she is more ambivalent: shecredits his “staggering achievement” in “the creation of a basicallythriving pluralist democracy,” but also faults the “limitations inNehru’s imagination of humanity” (p. 119). Since the Pandit personallywas suspicious of religious belief and practice, he did not see (asGandhi did) that “religion can in principle offer a great deal to thepublic culture of a pluralistic democracy” (p. xi). Nor did he shareTagore’s understanding that “the liberal state needs public poetry”(p. 119); rather, his vision and policies emphasized “scientific rationality,”concrete and steel – and, Nussbaum would argue, his legacy is a mod-ern India of too many “docile engineers” and too few “public poets.”

This is an interesting way of framing the argument, andNussbaum’s emphasis on Tagore, in particular, vibrantly brings theBengali Nobel laureate into conversation with the more conventionallyemphasized crafters of India’s democracy. But the obvious stylisticchoice here – expose three badly misguided models of contemporaryHindu nationalism, juxtapose them against three great “founders” ofmodern India – leads Nussbaum to deemphasize other importantdimensions of India’s history and contemporary politics. For example,there is no mention of B. R. Ambedkar’s bitter disagreement withGandhi over who rightfully could claim leadership of the Untouch-ables, and whether they should be incorporated into the broader bodypolitic or deserved separate electorates. Other visions of politicalmobilization, such as Subhas Chandra Bose’s revolutionary resistancemodel, are marginalized in an effort to frame a binary debate betweenintolerant Hindu majoritarianism and inclusive Gandhian–Nehruvianpluralism.

Similarly, the choice to frame Hindu nationalism as an expressionof wounded masculinity, and to focus on male antagonists, leads herto all but ignore prominent women in the movement: Uma Bharatiand Sushma Swaraj, for example, are both mentioned exactly once in

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the book, in passing references in a single paragraph. Like women,Muslims in Nussbaum’s account – with the important exception ofsome NGO activists – are often little more than inert victims. At multi-ple points she offers assertions like, “The approximately 13 percent ofIndia’s citizens who are Muslims have no ties to international Islamicradicalism or to terrorist organizations . . . The struggle over Kashmir,”Nussbaum concedes, “is an obvious exception, but it is not related” tothe events that are her focus (p. 5).

This is an oddly compartmentalized view of identity politics andconflict in South Asia. Much more persuasive are arguments, such asStephen P. Cohen’s, that South Asia, like so many other regionsconfronting intractable conflicts (Israel–Palestine, for example),exhibits the “paired minority” syndrome: Muslims were and are theminority in India, but many Hindus in India see themselves as threat-ened by an extensive, encircling Islam stretching from the Middle Eastto Southeast Asia. In other words, it is not just that wily Hindunationalists seek to exploit Americans’ penchant to see the world interms of a “clash of civilizations” in order to garner sympathy fortheir cause, but also that many Hindus themselves see their region inHuntington hues.

It is one thing to dismiss such a worldview as wrongheaded, but itis intellectually dishonest to discount the role that it plays in shapingHindu nationalist mobilization, including communal violence. In herchronology of events to set the context for the 2002 pogroms inGujarat, for example, Nussbaum makes no mention of the December2001 terrorist attack on India’s Parliament, which significantly height-ened tensions with Pakistan (which, Indian officials said, had links tothe terrorists) well into 2002. India’s 150 million Muslims obviouslyare not the sinister “fifth column” they represent in the fevered mindsof Hindu zealots and cynical politicians such as Narendra Modi(indeed, leftist “Naxalite” extremists probably represent a muchgreater threat to India’s internal security than groups such as theStudent Islamic Movement of India), but Nussbaum either cannot ordoes not wish to take seriously the question of Muslim extremismwithin India, or a broader regional backdrop to sectarian tension andviolence.

One final contribution – which actually comes in the book’s firstfull chapter – is a detailed account of the violence in Gujarat itself.What happened on the railway platform that dark day in February

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2002? Nussbaum consults a wide range of nongovernmental, press,and personal interview sources to reconstruct the initial incinerationtragedy, played out against the backdrop of slow-burning communaltension over repeated kar sevak rail pilgrimages to and from Ayodhyathrough the heavily Muslim Godhra district over the precedingweeks. “It will never be possible to say who threw the first stone;what is clear is that both sides joined in with enthusiasm” (p. 18), sheconcludes. In Nussbaum’s view, the most plausible theory to explainthe fire outbreak – based on forensic evidence that emerged in aninvestigation that came far too late to stem reprisals – is not deliberatearson, but rather a terrible but preventable accident: kerosene cookingstoves carried in passengers’ luggage were ignited, possibly by some-thing thrown in the melee, and intensive heat quickly built up withinthe compartment resulting in an engulfing “flash over.”

But if the spark was senseless, Nussbaum contends (as have manyother observers) that “There is copious evidence that the [subsequent]violence” in districts across Gujarat “was planned before the precipi-tating event – at least in the sense that a long process of anti-Muslimindoctrination involving Hindu-right groups had led to widespreadstockpilings of weapons and the circulation of lists of Muslim dwellingsand businesses” (p. 20). The police, and the state more generally, wereclearly complicit in the systematic raping and murdering of hundredsand possibly thousands of Gujarati Muslims, and in the months afterthe violence the state was appallingly unresponsive to the plight oftens of thousands more who had lost family members and in manycases virtually all their property (in a cruel twist, Nussbaum notes thatIslamic charities, including some militant ones, helped fill the void).

Ornit Shani’s book delves deeper into the Gujarati state’s historyof unresponsiveness toward the plight of its weakest citizens. Shani, aLecturer in Asian Studies at Haifa University in Israel, links theparticularly virulent tendencies of Hindu nationalism in Gujarat to“the politics and discourse of reservations and caste” going back to themid-1980s. Her concise monograph, a revised doctoral dissertation, isfor a specialist academic audience, without much regard to broaderaccessibility (a sample: “communalism grew . . . in the intersticesbetween the interrelations of caste and class,” p. 12), but it does makean important contribution to that scholarly literature.

As Shani sees it, existing explanations for “the rise of communalismand the formation of a Hindu identity” in India’s democratic politics

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tend to fall into either culturalist or materialist camps. Shani rejectsthe cultural approach for assuming an ahistorical primordial Hinduidentity. She has more sympathy for materialist-instrumentalist expla-nations that focus on elite manipulation of Hindu symbols, butbelieves that they too often take for granted “how leaders convincesignificant numbers of people to do as they are told,” and risk fallingback on a dubious assumption “that some groups are culturally proneto violence” (p. 7).

A better approach, Shani argues, would start with the recognitionthat “While Hindu nationalism gained power and communal violencebetween Hindus and Muslims intensified, there was also a considerableincrease in caste conflicts around redistributive policies for the lowerand backward caste Hindus, particularly over the reservations ofplaces in educational institutions and government jobs” (p. 10). Whileit may seem “paradoxical” that an increase in inter-caste conflictmight be linked to the construction of a unitary “ethnoHinduism,”Shani sees in modern Hindutva discourse a sleight-of-hand: “Therhetoric of Hindutva about the appeasement of Muslims by the state,and the attempt to portray them as a threat to Hindus, has appealedprimarily to upper-caste and urban middle-class Hindus, who areparticularly anxious about compensatory reservation policies forlower- and backward-caste Hindus. Muslims were lumped togetherwith these minorities, even though religion was excluded as a categoryqualifying a candidate for positive discrimination” (p. 11), and eventhough, ironically, many of India’s Muslims remain outside the formalsector and experience a profound want of economic security.Ultimately, she argues, “The threat that Hindu nationalists claimed tobe posed by Muslims actually expressed a fear about the peril ofviolating the Hindu social and moral order from within” (p. 12). Shaniherself would concede that this “order” is largely an imagined one,since she so firmly rejects primordial-cultural approaches.

The book’s conceptual framework becomes clearer in its extendedcase study of Ahmedabad’s political economy (she characterizesGujarat’s largest and most prosperous city as the “laboratory” of Hindunationalism), and its tendency toward episodic communal rioting, whichoccurred as far back as 1969, but took on a more ferocious character in1985 and especially 2002. The middle act in this tragedy is the book’sfulcrum, as Shani challenges the official accounts about 1985 with oraltestimonies from survivors and witnesses, along with previously

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neglected documentary evidence. She shows how what started as anexpression of middle-class, forward-caste Hindu ire at the state’sreservation policies for backward castes – introduced in the wake of ahalf-decade of contraction in the city’s key textile mill industry, risingunemployment and falling wages, and the movement of many workersinto smaller industrial units that avoided protective labor laws –“transmogrified” into Hindu–Muslim conflict as the opposition BJPand affiliated Hindu organizations sought to assail the state’sCongress Party government of Madhavsinh Solanki and undercut itselectoral base in a “KHAM” (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, andMuslim) coalition. Ironically, through earlier electoral rhetoric rootedin its KHAM arithmetic, the Solanki government itself had “inadvert-ently produced” the odd dynamic whereby preferential policies forlower and backward Hindu groups were seen as favoring Muslims(p. 150).

Shani’s book is not without its limitations. The precise mechanismswhereby inter-caste tensions were transformed into communalviolence are somewhat murky; what comes through in thick descriptionis not easily reduced to a concise causal relation. Shani is somewhattoo critical in her review of existing scholarly literature on Hindunationalism, and tends to overdraw distinctions among various argu-ments by oversimplifying their underpinnings. For example, in goingdeep into the local conditions that gave rise to communalism in severalAhmedabad neighborhoods, her approach would seem to share acertain concern for violence’s micro-foundations with AshutoshVarshney’s work on associations and networks of civic engagementbetween Hindus and Muslims in various Indian locales. Yet she isfairly critical of his “society-centered approach” for placing “the onusfor maintaining communal peace . . . on prominent members of socialgroups and civic organizations,” and underemphasizing the role of thestate. State-centric approaches, on the other hand, are faulted fordepriving ordinary citizens of their due agency. Shani sets a veryexacting standard for a porridge that is not too hot and not too cold –her goal is to put forward a state–society framework which sees thetwo as “mutually transforming” – but it is hard to strike such abalance and still retain a reasonably parsimonious perspective.

Another possible pitfall that Shani creates for herself, from a meth-odological standpoint, concerns the fine line between oral histories as“living texts” and the unreliability of memory. In some respects, her

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account makes the second stage of the 1985 Ahmedabad riots look likea dress rehearsal for the tragedy of 2002. Yet is it not also possible thatwitnesses to both periods might have “read backwards” from Godhraa set of meanings that did not fully take hold at the time of the earlierevents? Shani acknowledges this issue, but does not fully resolve it.

Still, the analysis deftly manages to keep several plates spinning atonce: in a work concerned mainly with Hindu nationalist mobiliza-tion, Shani manages to place caste dynamics and political economy atthe center of the account, and the localized focus of the study showshow all of these forces – which are central to changes in India’sdemocracy at the national level – are mediated through distinct partypolitics and state policies in India’s federal system. This is exactly thekind of sophisticated study we need at this juncture in the developmentof scholarly literature on the Hindu nationalist movement, andits relationship to other seismic shifts in contemporary Indiandemocracy.

Jaffrelot’s anthology, while not necessarily breaking new ground,is a welcome and overdue resource for professional scholars, yet it isjust as easy to imagine that it will find its way into undergraduatelibrary collections (or journalists’ luggage) as the general interest inIndia continues to increase. It opens with a strong introductory chapterby Jaffrelot (director of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Interna-tionales in Paris) that serves as a distillation of his extensive work onHindu nationalism. He characterizes “this particular ism” as “one ofthe oldest ideological streams in India,” which “took concrete shapein the 1920s and even harks back to more nascent shapes in the nine-teenth century” (p. 3), and yet emphasizes that it stands sharply atodds with “the essential characteristics of Hinduism” – the pointbeing, of course, that there are no “essential characteristics” to whichthe religion’s polymorphous principles and practices can be reduced.Hindu nationalism emerged as “an ideological reaction to the Other”– both the colonial experience, and the encounter with more unitaryfaith traditions, especially Islam – and is “a modern phenomenon” as adeliberate ideological construction (p. 6).

Following the introduction, Jaffrelot organizes the reader into twomain parts. The first, “The Making and Reshaping of Hindu NationalistIdeology,” garners texts from the movement’s key architects and earlyleaders: V. D. Savarkar, M. S. Golwalkar, Deendayal Upadhyaya, andearlier and lesser-known progenitors of a “neo-Hinduism.” Jaffrelot

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precedes each entry with illuminating biographic and historicalsketches that place the texts in context, and gathering all this materialin one place yields useful insights. Yet it is the book’s second half, awide-ranging survey of various “Hindu Nationalist Issues,” that is themost engaging. Jaffrelot and a variety of primary sources take thereader through an impressive topical tour: the development of the RSS,relations among the constituent organizations of the Sangh Parivar, theJammu and Kashmir issue, debates over Hindi as the national lan-guage, the religious conversion of Dalits, caste reservation policies, the“saffronization” of educational curricula, the Ayodhya controversy,national security, economic reforms, and the Indian diaspora’s role inthe Hindutva movement.

The focus here is less on Hindutva’s ideology and more on itsmanifestations in active politics, and while early leaders like ShyamaPrasad Mookerjee are included, the emphasis is on recent BJP leadersincluding Vajpayee, Advani, Shourie, Jaswant Singh, and Murli ManoharJoshi. As in Nussbaum, there is no emphasis on the movement’swomen, though that seems less of a problem in the anthology formatsince figures like Bharati and Swaraj have been known for theiractions and advocacy, not for writings (though some of Swaraj’sspeeches, in particular, might have made for interesting reading).

Vajpayee, of course, is a Hindi poet by avocation, but Jaffrelotpresents this “moderate face of Hindu nationalism” and eventualPrime Minister of India railing against the “pseudo-secularism” of theCongress Party and the government of Indira Gandhi (for theirpurported bias in favor of religious minorities) in 1969, well before theShah Bano affair that drove Shourie and a younger generation ofdiscontents toward the BJP. One of the most interesting entries in thereader’s latter half comes from Shourie himself, defending theeconomic liberalization practices that the Vajpayee government pur-sued (furthering reforms initiated under earlier Congress and coalitiongovernments) as opposed to the swadeshi (“own country”) economicnationalism of past BJP platforms. In a 2003 essay titled “This is India’sMoment, But It’s Only a Moment, Can We Grasp It?” Shourie, thefingernail-biter of Vachani’s films and Nussbaum’s account, gentlybut firmly chides India’s “nervous politicians” (of which presumablyhe is one) for letting their short-term electoral horizons dissuade themfrom pressing ahead on economic reform. He also expresses ambiva-lence for what Indians “have made of democracy”:

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The electorate has been so fractured by caste and the rest that itdoes not respond to national issues. To attain office and retain it,therefore, parties have to aggregate votes, section by section. Eachsection liable to be dislocated by change . . . is able to subornparties and politicians to block that change.

To this lamentation, one might respond, “Thank goodness.” ThoughShourie has in mind the frustrations that India’s complex coalitiongovernance can throw up for economic liberalization, it is preciselythis same coalition logic – and what Arend Lijphart once described asa social structure of “cross-cutting cleavages”3 – that has frustratedefforts by the BJP to mobilize a permanent Hindu majority, and thatforced it to moderate its stance on core Hindutva issues in the party’splatform (including Ayodhya) during its years in government at theCentre. To be sure, there are those in the sister organizations who arearguing for an even harder line, and who now no doubt look expect-antly toward another round of communal conflict to reenergize themovement. The RSS and Bajrang Dal continue their quasi-fascist martialexercises, and the former in particular continues to indoctrinate thenext generation of “volunteers” for the cause, many of which maysomeday find their way into political office through the BJP. Whenthey do, they are likely to confront the same Indian realities thatVajpayee, Advani, and Shourie faced.

Godhra and its aftermath represent India’s darkest moment so farin this young twenty-first century. “In the end,” Nussbaumconcludes, “Gujarat shows us that the world is both more compli-cated and simpler than people think when they talk in terms of a ‘clashof civilizations.’ The forces involved are multiple, complex.” Indeed,as Shani’s account suggests, India’s multiple identity mobilizationsmay interact with one another and constitute yet new identities, inways that even Nussbaum’s sweeping account does not envision. Yet,Nussbaum concludes, “the traditions of both Hinduism and Islam inIndia are multifaceted, diverse, and impossible to reduce to simplepolarities, if one cares about evidence and argument” (p. 335). May itever be so.

NOTES

1. The Ram Janmabhoomi (birthplace of Ram) movement, of course, has been at the crux ofHindu nationalist mobilization in recent years: Hindutva precepts hold that the hero-god

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Ram was born at Ayodhya (in modern Uttar Pradesh), that a major temple dedicated tohim occupied the site until its demolition in 1528 and replacement with the mosque bythe Mughal ruler Babur, and that historical justice demands that a new Ram Temple bebuilt on the site.

2. Shourie tells Nussbaum that his personal “religious practice” is a kind of agnosticBuddhism, and says his turn to the BJP was motivated instead by political beliefs, at thetime of the Shah Bano case “when Rajiv Gandhi’s government seemed to him to bemaking inappropriate concessions to Muslim clerics” over laws relating to divorce andalimony.

3. Lijphart, Arend. Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1977.

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