Hindutva Striptease

To many of us, the BJP has seemed to be the nightmare that will not go away, yet we have clung to the hope that the morning will dispel it. This is a desperate illusion, and if this book does no more than to shatter this terminal complacency, it will have made a valuable contribution. The fact of the matter is that the BJP has come to constitute the common sense of a significant minority of the population. Most of the essays in this volume are concerned with the strategies and accommodations that are being resorted to in order to convert this minority into a majority. And they may or may not work. But the hard and irreducible fact is that this minority—or largely upper-caste, more or less educated, mostly urban dwellers—is not likely to prove deliquescent. It will have to be factored into whatever future the future holds.

It is hardly possible, in the present format, to do anything like justice to the richness—of information, of analysis—that this book contains. The complex negotiations which have been forced upon the BJP by the deep, secular—different word, look up the dictionary!—trends of the Indian polity: in sum, the growing regionalisation of politics, which is no longer subsumable under a hegemonic nationalism, whether of the BJP or even of the Congress variety; and, of course, the rise and rise of the OBCs and the Dalits. The traditional savarna base of the party still has a kind of demographic preponderance in UP, but it is under severe stress elsewhere, being forced to cohabit with strange and some rather nasty bedfellows.

The crucial question posed by the essays in this book boils down to: can the BJP be "mainstreamed", become a normal political party? Can it be socialised, taught to accommodate itself to the bedrock realities of Indian society, to seek to change only that which can and must be changed, and reconcile itself to what cannot? "If the BJP...succeeds in...adapting to the characteristics of regional politics, of specific con-figurations of caste politics and the peculiar compulsions and idioms of the different political fields it engages with...the party may be 'normalised' into an amorphous mechanism of bargaining like most other political parties in India. But this requires an emancipation from the RSS..." It is quite a choice.

Meanwhile, we are treated to this endless oscillation between the moderate and the hardline, symbolised I suppose by Vajpeyi and Advani, the Mask and the Face. This is usually presented in terms of an opposition between the two tendencies if not personalities. But Hansen's observation apropos "the Sangh parivar variety of cultural nationalism" suggests another possibility: "however quasi-intellectual and ostensibly peaceful it may appear within its middle-class 'cocoons', [it] needs to mobilise the fears, misrecognitions and ideological fantasies of the communal unconscious. .."

Recent research has produced another model with which to make sense of this concert of voices, the subtle harmonies that underlie the apparently divergent views emerging from both moderate and hardline. This is the model of the striptease: its essential dynamic consists of flashes of revelation, and veil upon veil of hypocritical dissimulation. The veils are an integral part of the performance—the poetic Mr Vajpeyee, and Sushma Swaraj the housewife-next-door—but the promise that anchors the performance is the periodical glimpse of hard Hindutva, the full monty. It is entertaining enough, in its strange, sick way, but—something's got to give.