Deradicalisation - II

In part two of this series, I examine the idea of combatting radicalisation with competing or alternate identities and why this failed to counter Hindu radicalisation

In part one of this series, we saw that radicalisation plays a significant role in the creation and maintenance of the “group” political Hindu identity. When we acknowledge this, it would seem that the answer to Hindu radicalisation is more likely to come from political and social forces and interest groups that do not depend on this collective Hindu identity for their own political and social survival.

This is not a new line of thinking. With the exception of the period immediately following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu fundamentalist in 1948 (when the RSS was legally banned as well as socially ostracised), efforts in independent India to combat Hindu radicalisation have (consciously or unconsciously) focussed on emphasising on alternative identities instead of directly speaking against radicalisation within the community and its consequences.

The secular nationalism of the Nehruvian model for example sought to deemphasise the more divisive aspects of religious identity by overwriting it with a common “Indian” identity. And it did have its share of success. Ashutosh Varshney’s work demonstrates this empirically — post independence, levels of communal violence remained fairly stable and relatively low across decades until the late 1970s, when it began to show a sharp uptick culminating in the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid.

By the early 2000s, with the collapse of the secular nationalism of the Congress, many liberal Indian political theorists began to place their faith in the caste narratives that had dominated the politics of the 1990s. They were certain that the large backward caste vote alone would be a sufficient to guard against the most extreme forms of Hindu nationalism.

In part two of this series, I examine the theory behind this idea of combatting radicalisation by stressing on competing identities and why this failed to counter Hindu radicalisation.

Caste narratives and Hindutva

The role of caste narratives in keeping both Hindutva political dominance and communal conflict at bay has been long acknowledged — from the role of EV Ramaswamy (“Periyar”) and the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu to Bihar under Lalu Prasad Yadav during the Babri Masjid riots, there are multiple examples of states with strong caste related political movements being more resistant to anti-Muslim violence. Varshney, in his widely acclaimed Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life - Hindus and Muslims in India (2003), reposes his faith in caste narratives to counter Hindutva. He writes :

By far the biggest obstacle for the BJP is presented by the northwards extension of the caste narrative in the 1980s and the 1990s. The so called other backward castes (OBCs) add up to 52 percent of India. After the mobilisation of lower castes, no party seeking power can ignore their wishes. The realities of Indian politics have thus already pushed the BJP toward a center-right ideological position. As Hindu nationalism has grown, it has lost its ideological cohesiveness.

This faith in the power of caste narratives to keep Hindu radicalisation at bay was also, if I were to venture a guess, the root of Indian liberal complacency in the lead up to the 2014 general election and the candidature of Narendra Modi — many were certain that even if he did come to power, the exigencies of electoral politics and the predominance of caste narratives would push his government to centre-right positions on most issues.

Today, it is clear that this complacency was misplaced. When Mr. Modi’s government came to power in 2014, it did not do so solely on the votes of the so called upper castes — the BJP also made significant inroads into the OBC vote, which had historically gone to regional or social justice based parties. In 2019, they consolidated these gains despite dropping all pretence of sabka vikas ("development for all”) , and focussing on an agenda driven by Hindu nationalism. To understand this, we need to delve deeper into identity theory.

Sen’s Competing Identities

In Identity and Violence (2006), Amartya Sen argues that each member of society sees herself as a member of multiple groups at any given point of time. He writes:

“In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups— we belong to all of them. A person’s citizenship, residence, geographic origin, gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sports interests, tastes in music, social commitments, etc., make us members of a variety of groups. Each of these collectives, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the person’s only identity or singular membership category.”

Deeply rooted in ethical individualism, Sen goes on to argue that there is a component of choice in the creation of ones own identity. Each individual chooses what importance to give to each of their multiple identities. For Sen therefore, the solution to identity based violence is to stress on what he calls “the power of competing identities”. He stresses that suggesting alternate ways of grouping people can “restrain the exploitation of a specifically aggressive use of one characterisation”.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his critique of Sen’s identities puts his finger on the key difficulty with this theory — identities are also normative, and the enforcement of these norms on us do not necessarily depend on our choices. There are many ways in which others, of our own identity as well as contrasting identities, enforce codes of behaviour upon us which make it difficult to exercise this individual choice that Sen sees as the crux of identity (and identity based conflict).

This is particularly evident in India today — a Hindu woman may wish to marry a Muslim man, but this choice about her identity is very likely to be violently resisted by local law enforcement and vigilante groups of her own community. And this behaviour isn’t limited to marriage — in the UP Khudai Khidmatgar case, social activist, Faisal Khan offered namaz within the temple premises with the permission of the priest — but the matter created a furore in the Hindu community after the video of him offering namaz went viral. The fact that Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgars (a recreation of the group originally formed by Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan) are a group deeply committed to inter-faith dialogue — at least 35% of their members are Hindu— and the fact Khan had also performed Hindu prayers and rituals during that same temple visit did not soften the reaction. What Sen would term Khan’s individual choices about his identity — willingness to recite Hindu prayers, membership of an interfaith group— were ineffective in counteracting the way in which the members of the contrasting identity (in this case, Hindus) viewed him — as a Muslim man offering namaz within a Hindu temple.

When we acknowledge that our identities are not just a matter of choice, Sen’s solution for identity based conflict feels less helpful. As Appiah points out, in his critique of Sen’s identities:

Given these general truths, we should expect (as common sense would also suggest) that once a conflict begins, it isn’t usually going to help to point out that you and I, though divided by the identity that has become salient in our context, are in fact also both humans, or lawyers or what not. Sen’s thought, which I have already quoted, that we can tame one identity by appeal to others may be true in the study; in the struggles of social life it is usually not much help.

The second problem with Sen’s idea of using competing identities is in his assumption that an individual by choosing a particular identity will be disincentivized to commit violence in the name of one of her alternative less prioritised identities. Unfortunately, as we have seen far too often, human beings have the ability to hold group based grudges across multiple axes at once. For example, the rise of Hindutva, with its violent anti-Muslim propaganda, has not resulted in any reduction in the caste based violence and discrimination faced by Dalits in India — on the contrary, between 2009 and 2018, crimes against Dalits also increased. The corollary is also true. While a majority of caste based political discourses challenge Hindutva for its underlying promotion of the caste system and its upper caste hegemony, that has not, in itself been enough to prevent members of the castes in question from being radicalised. Members of backward castes in states like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana have also participated in events that propagate anti-Muslim hatred.

Finally, even when solidarities are woven across these alternative “chosen” identities in the manner in which Sen imagines, these new solidarities can be somewhat fragile. For example, the cooption of the Khilafat movement into the non- cooperation movement in the early 1920s did lead to an unprecedented level of Hindu-Muslim unity in the sub-continent — in the November 1921 Prince of Wales riots in Bombay, groups of Hindu non-cooperationists banded together with Muslim Khilafat supporters to attack communities like the Parsis and the Christians that were deemed to be pro- British. And yet, the collapse of the non-cooperation movement led into perhaps what was the worst period of violent antagonism between the Hindus and the Muslims of the subcontinent at the time.

Conclusion

To conclude, alternative identity groupings (like the anti-caste political movements or the farmer movements) and the solidarities they generate are deeply important in themselves, but they are not solutions for Hindu radicalisation, and must not be viewed as such even when they do provide the added benefit of countering Hindutva. To view anti-caste movements or the farmers movement as a “solution” to Hindu radicalisation risks placing the burden of countering Hindu radicalisation on an oppressed group (that has its own issues to focus on) instead of on the perpetrators of the ideology.

To counter radicalisation, it is perhaps time to catch the bull by the horns and consider more direct approaches. Varshney’s work empirically demonstrates that the 1950s and the 1960s were periods of relative communal harmony. And while Varshney credits this to the secular nationalism of the Nehruvian Congress, he also acknowledges two additional factors that dominated the discourse in India at the time that are worth discussing — a social abhorrence of Hindu fundamentalism (due in part to its links with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi), and a collective social memory of the trauma of the communal violence of partition.

The role of remorse in reconciliation is documented in stories of post conflict societies elsewhere. In Germany, since the end of the Second World War, both individual and social remorse has been effectively used to deter a repeat of the events of the holocaust.

Despite being almost as catastrophic in scale as the Nazi holocaust, partition, for sub-continental Hindus, is a little more complicated — they were both the perpetrators and the victims of genocide based on their geographic location. For the generations affected by it, not talking about the complicated emotions associated with partition seems to have been the preferred way to move on. This has meant that the learnings from partition, of the extreme consequences that can result from communal conflict were not institutionalised and did not generally extend beyond the partition generation.

The third and last part of this series will examine the use of community remorse and memories in deradicalisation and the role this can play in combatting Hindu radicalisation today.