:: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 ::

Anti-Sikh, Anti-Dalit Video Game:

Here is a petition to the makers of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin protesting the anti-sikh and anti-dalit themes presented in the video game. The slogan for the game is "Travel the World. Meet Interesting People. Kill Them." (That alone should be sufficient reason to protest this game).

October 16, 2002

Michael P. McGarvey
Chief Executive Officer, Eidos plc.
Wimbledon Bridge House
1 Hartfield Road
Wimbledon, London SW19 32RU

Dear Mr McGarvey:

The game Hitman 2: Silent Assassin has been brought to our attention. We have received numerous complaints about the racist nature of the game from across the globe. It was felt that if you were made aware of the potentially serious ramifications of your involvement in the game and the international outcry against the racist nature of this game that you would want to limit the damage to your company's name and reputation by removing this game from the market.

A close look at this game reveals a strong prejudice against Sikhs (adherents of the fifth largest religion in the world) and Dalits (literally meaning "broken" people who face oppression stemming from the Hindu caste system). [1]

One of the locations in the game takes the players to Punjab. The location description states:

"A magnificent, ancient gurdwara (Sikh temple) - complete with marble inlays, glazed tiles, filigree partitions, priceless old wall paintings and gold domes - is flanked by a qila (old fort) and protected by high walls as well as fanatical believers - in front, a maze of small shops and bangalas (small houses) gives evidence of riches and prosperity in this otherwise poverty stricken remote region of Punjab in Northern India. Relentless loos (hot dry winds that blow across the plains of North India during summer) keeps this little oasis isolated from the outside world. A Sikh uprising in this region in the mid 80's was ruthlessly cracked down on by government issued troops, and many innocents were killed - ever since, no outsider has dared venture into this territory for fear of reprisals."

Based on the physical description of the Gurdwara, one can state with certainty that it refers to the Harmander Sahib, also known as the Golden Temple, which was attacked by the Indian Army in June 1984. During the attack thousands of innocent Sikhs and possibly others were killed.[2] Furthermore, the filigree and artwork shown in the game match the sacred ornamentation on the walls of the Harmander Sahib. The Harmander Sahib is a holy Sikh place of worship that serves as a religious and a political center for the Sikhs worldwide. The Harmander Sahib is held in reverence, just as the Vatican by Catholics. Whether the Gurdwara portrayed in the game is Harmander Sahib or not, such a graphical portrayal of violence within the sacred grounds of any religious place -- whether a Gurdwara, a Temple, a Church or a Mosque, is completely unacceptable.

Given the media-constructed images linking Sikhs to terrorism and the oppression that Sikhs have endured in Punjab for the past twenty years, this game shows a deliberate lack of decency and sensitivity by depicting a turbaned Sikh succumbing to violent aggression within the sacred precincts of a historic Sikh shrine. Such actions in your game encourage hate and may possibly endanger innocent Sikhs all over the world by connecting Sikhs with terror.

The world has been shaken by the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. Since September 11th, Sikhs, like others, have been grappling with grief and fear. Hundreds of Sikhs have become targets of hate crimes because of their appearance alone. Several innocent Sikhs have been murdered as a result of this bigotry. By propogating hate and stereotypes, Hitman 2 irresponsibly adds to this climate of intolerance.

We pray that misplaced racial and ethnic victimization - of Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Dalits and people of all faiths and colors - will not continue. The Sikh community invites you to join us in bringing about mutual understanding and deep respect for all people.

Across North America and in Europe, the only people who wear turbans are Sikhs. Sikhism is a revealed, monotheistic faith that stresses the equality of all men and women. Sikhs believe in three basic principles: meditating on the name of God (praying), earning a living by honest means, and sharing the fruits of one's labor with others. Sikhism rejects caste and class systems and emphasizes service to humanity.

One of the characters shown in the game refers to a cult leader:

Zip Master Deewana Ji is the self-proclaimed satguru of a cult called Samhara Dharma that worships Kali, the malevolent Hindu goddess of war, and studies advanced computer technologies. His panth (followers) comprise a strange blend of dalits (the lowest Hindu caste, aka untouchables), thugz (a sect of murderers and robbers, hitherto believed to be exterminated by the English colonialists almost two centuries ago) as well as top trained computer engineers.

The Dalits are a people who have faced oppression that continues today. Dalits are not "untouchables" and strongly resent such a characterization. To charge a nation of 200 million people worldwide as followers of an injurious cult leader is an unacceptable practice and factually incorrect.

We are seeking an agreeable resolution to what appears to be an egregious act of racism and promotion of hatred against Sikhs and Dalits, as depicted in Hitman 2. We stipulate the following:

- Issue an apology to Sikhs and Dalits worldwide.
- Recall all copies of the game from distributors and retailers.
- Remove all scenes depicting Sikhs and Gurdwaras immediately from all versions of the game in-stock and from those recalled.
- Remove all offensive mention of Dalits as followers of an evil cult leader from all versions of this game.
- Remove all references to Dalits, Gurdwaras and Sikhs immediately from all media advertisements, promotions and the content from all web sites owned by Eidos, its partners and its affiliates.

The undersigned organizations and individuals worldwide would like a written response from Eidos with a project plan showing how it plans to achieve the aforementioned stipulations. If a satisfactory response is not received, these organizations will seek further action against Eidos and its partners. A respected publicly traded company such as Eidos should be concerned about the economic and other repercussions that may result from negative publicity and damage to its reputation.

At a time when the world is grappling with issues of international violence, extremism and racism, the Dalits and the Sikhs are deeply concerned about media stereotypes in the video game world that depict violence as a form of victory over people of a particular faith, ethnicity or origin.

The undersigned organizations stand in solidarity with 26 million Sikhs and 200 million Dalits worldwide in strongly objecting to the hateful content associated with Sikhs and Dalits in the video game, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin.

We appreciate your earnest consideration and rapid response in removing the offending material from your website and look forward to a positive response to the fundamental issues by removing this content from the video game.

Sincerely,

The Sikh Coalition [and many, many other organziations -- see petition on line]

:: Vikash Yadav 11:27 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Retail Hinduism:

I think the concept of "Retail Hinduism" introduced by Conrad below is quite fascinating and useful. In several respects this concept begs to be analyzed through the lens of Bourdieu's brilliant text, Distinctions, which carefully detailed the daily class struggles and the cunning of the market system of product differentiation. There are also links between the ways in which "political Hindus" are reproduced through conspicuous consumption and Baudrillard's early essays on Consumer Society.

I would certainly agree that Hindutva seeks to forge a Hindu mass or crowd rather than simply reactivating existing identity formations through traditional patterns. This is a particularly important phenomenon to study given the ways in which the Hindutva movement has been traditionally hampered in its ability to proliferate through society (by region, class, caste, gender).

The concept of retail Hinduism also raises interesting issues for the politics of economic liberalization. I would tend to agree that the project of Hindutva is not necessarily hostile to economic liberalization or vice versa. In fact, in persons such as Arun Shourie we see an embodiment of economic liberalization and Hindutva politics. (I should state that I am not convinced that consumerist materialism is inimical to leftist brands of mobilization. Both left and right can be coopted by consumerist materialism. In the US for example, the left is almost wholly coopted by materialist consumerism that provides nods to "fair trade" and "recycling" while hardly challenging the broader consumption driven culture. Even when the American left is mobilized in public protest, one gets the feeling that the signs of being in the left are more related to the types of consumption on display rather than the depth of commitment or beliefs. In fact, one could say that leftist identity in the US is almost wholly produced through selective "lifestyle" consumption as opposed to minimalist consumption. The American left is an aesthetic left, not one concerned with achieving actual shifts in property relations.)

It should be noted though that although "retail Hinduism" may provide multiple modes of participation, these modes of participation will also becomes part of the modern market system. In other words, commodified Hinduism would be subject to fads and trends as part of the underlying daily class struggle. It is not just that the movement becomes tied to the fluctuations in the market (i.e., the business cycle), the commodification of Hinduism makes the symbols of the religion part of the games in the daily class struggle. As Golwalkar was aware, and as Conrad points out, the commodification of Hinduism also permits such minimalist forms of participation as to potentially render the Hindutva movement irrelevant and meaningless. If owning an armband or button signals membership, then membership is worth little more than the monetary cost of the armband or button.

The commodification of Hinduism also brings us to an interesting conjuncture when we consider the cultural impact of the televised version of the Ramayana. The transformation of an epic into a soap opera with cheesy special effects, may on the surface appear to provide a powerful weapon to the purveyors of Hindutva, but it also dilutes, subverts, and cheapens religious authority. The work of the left is cut out for it when Hinduism comes to be projected as "retail Hinduism." Maybe in the long run Hindutva will consume itself?

:: Vikash Yadav 12:42 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Development of the Saffron Movement:

This is just to quickly respond to the points raised by Vikash on the topographical nature of the RSS/Sangh Parivar’s strength in the Indian polity and society. I will just sketch out some brief answers and expand where I think there has been a significant change that merits closer explanation:

1) Urban/Rural: yes the BJP has always been an urban-based party; in its earlier guises of the Jan Sangh and the Swatantra party its election strongholds were almost exclusively in the small towns and cities of northern India. In part this is unsurprising as urban centres are also where the Muslim population in India is concentrated and any communal flare-up has historically been confined to the towns – this gives the BJP an ability to cash in on the greater polarisation along religious lines in the urban centres. However, of late there has been an expansion into rural areas in states like Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh: this is a combination of the growth of Hindutva organisational work and also the winning over of Dominant castes such as the Patidars in Gujarat who see Hindutva as a vehicle to protect their established socio-economic position in rural society. In Hindi states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar the extreme caste polarisation of society has mean that the BJP is really a vehicle for the upper castes much in the way the old Congress party was in these regions – with the sole difference that the old Congress core blocs of Dalits and Muslims obviously have broken away and switched their support to lower caste parties. This accounts for the fact that although the BJP can put up a respectable showing in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar it cannot come to power without coalition allies.

2) North/South: Yes, the BJP support and Hindutva is confined to the north and the west: effectively outside the Hindi belt and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra it has very limited support. In the South it is almost non-existent, only having made inroads onto Karnataka. In Tamil Nadu no political formation can compete with the two rival Dravidian parties which have dominated the state since 1967 and any party must ally with one or the other to make any gains here – the Congress and the Janata Dal did this allying with either the DMK or the AIDMK and the BJP has followed this strategy of using regional partners to make local gains. Similarly in Andhra Pradesh electoral analysis shows that without the support of the Telegu Desam Party (TDP) the BJP wouldn’t not be able to win more than a handful of seats either at state or parliamentary level. In Kerala given the high proportion of Christians and Muslims and the established Congress coalition in the United Democratic Front, it doesn’t have much presence. Also in the South the Ramjanmabhoomi mobilisation would not have struck as deep a cord given the fact that the Non-Brahmin movement and the Dravidian literature has traditionally identified Ram worship as an imposition by Aryan invaders who destroyed the pre-existing Dravidian culture and religion. As for the north-eastern states they are almost exclusively populated by tribal groups who follow their regional parties or Congress -in anycase their political importance is marginal. The eastern states of West Bengal and Orissa are dominated by their own political constellations: the presence of regional parties, survival of the Congress and the strength of the Left have made these a hard bastion for the BJP to crack. In West Bengal the dominance of the Left can only be challenged by other leftist forces or the Congress (Trinamul) the BJP is very weak only surviving politically as an ally of the Trinamul Congress; the strong secular stand of the state government, large Muslim and adivasi population as well as the presence of a mainly Sakta Hinduism which is hostile to Ram worship has prevented the BJP from making much headway here. Of course in some sense this is all academic as the western states along with the Hindi heartland are the politically vital parts of the polity a party would wish to capture should it want to gain power at the Centre. After all Congress had lost the South and the East from the late 1960’s onwards and still managed to dominate Indian politics for two more decades; moreover the BJP has been much more adept at picking up regional allies who are left to do what they want t in their own states as along as they support the Hindutva programme at the federal level: so far this compromise seems to have worked.

3) Hard Saffron/Soft Saffron: This is an old debate and goes right back to the argument about whether the Congress was really a Hindu organisation or a nationalist secular one. My own view is that Sardar Patel was by far the more typical Congressman rather than Nehru, whose socialist and atheistic secular leanings would have been an anathema to most rank and file Congress members. Nehru became Congress leader and Prime Minister not because he was elected by the party but because he was the personal choice of Gandhi. Quite clearly for Patel and many other Congressmen like KM Munshi and Rajendra Prasad, India was predominantly a Hindu as opposed to a secular nation and Muslims in India needed to prove their loyalty to India rather than simply have it taken for granted. This is the beginning of soft Saffronism in India (interestingly the whole campaign to replace the old Somnath temple carried out in the early 1950’s under Munshi and Patel’s auspices despite Nehru’s opposition has some parallels with the Ayodhya movement). The soft Saffron support that was extended to the Congress tended to dissipate away towards the BJP in the 1990’s; as Christopher Jaffrelot has written “The BJP attracted support because the Congress (I) was deeply unpopular. Moreover, the BJP probably won over former Congress- (I) supporters all the more easily because it appeared to be the sole proponent of a political project – the building of a strong India – which had been established and assiduously promoted by Indira Gandhi”. By the 1990’s the Congress had lost this mantle due to its factionalism, corruption and inefficiency. It was for this reason, amongst others, that the BJP began to win support from those outside its traditional base in the trading castes, in the private corporate sector, ex-servicemen and top administrators. The National Front lost support from the upper castes and the middle classes due to their advocacy of reservations and their redistributive rhetoric. How far religion plays a role in this is a matter of debate: Jaffrelot argues that on the whole “for such people religious factors played a minor role compared to their opposition to the reservations policy and commitment to a more disciplined (or even authoritarian) form of politics and the clean image of the BJP. On the other hand the demolition of the Babri Masjid, when inserted into a survey carried out in Delhi and western Uttar Pradesh shortly after 1992 showed that 60% of white-collar professionals and 62% of traders approved of the assaults, while amongst workers the support fell to 28%. This supports the arguments of some that amongst the large numbers of the lower middle classes who have acquired economic status but not corresponding social status there is an anxiety to bring the two into consonance partly through religious observance and congregational politics. Much of the soft Saffron supporters of the BJP are not so interested in anti-Muslim pogroms as an end it itself but desire: authority, stability and order and want the affirmation of Indian nationalism with the status of the country as a great power in the context of a globalising world order. These modernist and modernising claims sometimes come into conflict with those whose intentions are more religious and prone towards disorder. On a personal note I remember many businessmen and company managers being relieved that the BJP had come to power not because they wanted some sort of Hindutva holy war but because in the words of one executive “workers now will respect us, the bosses, and not reply back when we tell them to do something”.

This however, is probably the most controversial and hardest to prove part of my theory and the distinction between hard and soft saffronites will need much more work before it can become something more than impressionistic theorising.

4) Men/Women: This again is a point where intuitively Vikash should be right – I mean why should women support the Saffron agenda. Yet things are not so simple; women have always been associated with religiosity in Hindu culture and the role of the women has been traditionally directed towards spiritual salvation. In the wake of the Sati debate of the 1980’s we were treated to the sight of Vijarya Scindia leading processions of women protesting the RIGHT of women to commit Sati. Prominent amongst the demagogues of the Hindu right have been Sadhvi Rithambara and Uma Bharati whose speeches on tape cassettes urging Hindu men into violence against Muslims, conjuring up the picture of the virile and lusting Muslims and deriding Hindu males for being unable to protect their womenfolk circulated “with the ubiquity of a one rupee coin in north India”. Many observers of communal violence have noted the participation of women in recent violence with some shock: one study by Amrita Basu of the Bijnor riots in 1990 saw Hindu women lead a procession through the town wielding tridents and shouting inflammatory slogans that started the rioting off; while Veena Das’s look at the Ahmedabad riots of 1991 showed how middle class women driving Marutis played an important role in co-ordinating and directing the violence against Muslims. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia have devoted a study as to why women who are often themselves the targets of patriarchical violence in India are so willing to indulge in violent political activities and mobilisation. Much of their research argues that women have found a new activist role as cheerleaders and the defenders of the family, community and by extension national virtues/culture within the Hindutva project allowing them new opportunities that were denied to them before. I am somewhat unconvinced as to the explanations put forward that seek to explain women’s participation in the movement but I do agree that sympathy for Hindutva definitely exists amongst women no less than it does amongst men – in other words gender is not a sufficient indicator as to the allure of the saffron movement. While counterintuitive this is not a new phenomenon: in pre-WW I England it was well known that as a group women would vote Conservative rather than Liberal (or Labour) despite the fact that the Liberals were in favour of giving them the vote while the Conservatives were very much against it; something that was proven when women did get the vote and voted generally against Labour-Liberal parties who had extended them suffrage. Still many women in India would probably be passive supporters of Hindutva, wanting a stable middle class lifestyle (which means controlled inflation, increased access to consumer goods and the provision of civic amenities by a complaint labour force) and will favour a party that can run on a Law and Order platform (given their vulnerability to violence both in urban and rural settings) both of which tend to favour the BJP over any third front grouping (the Congress having dropped out of the running in many states).

The Public Sphere and Retail Hinduism:

I would like to explore the concept of what some media scholars have called “retail Hinduism”. The contradictions of a public split by divisions of language and caste, mediated in complex ways by a linguistically split media has shaped the way Hindu appeals were made by the Saffron movement. “Retail Hinduism” was a means of negotiating with this diverse and split public, offering discrete forms of Hindu affiliation via multiple modes of participation and consumption, thus cutting across divides of class and caste. Commodity images of Hindutva became absorbed as part of the symbolic apparatus of liberalisation, providing the semblance of a self-sufficient indigenous modernity unruffled by the developmental state’s retreat and greeting globalisation. Retail Hinduism pointed to a greater energy and investment in securing popular participation; the counterpart being however a greater chaos in the public sphere, due to the greater volume of participation and also the more authoritarian character of the state, as it assumed a more blatantly partial and aggressive role.

Earlier ideas of modernisation involved a use of brahminnical rituals, lifestyles and mores new developments led to a re-articulation of this earlier Sanskritisation approach. First, the rise of the Backward castes as a result of the development process and democratisation, reduced the gap between the more well to do sections of these rising castes and the upper castes, second the reservation system, led to a sense of entitlement and privilege arising from different caste positions and to a cultivation and assertion to a different range of caste identities, thirdly the growth of communication systems that led to a shift away from classical to more demotic cultural forms, as the forms of communications slowly aligned with the more popular character of the audience and lastly the rise of a consumer culture, catering to classes whose fault lines intersected with rather than simply mimicking caste cleavages, so that implicitly trans-caste identities arose. Hindutva nationalism offered a range of identities formally free of caste and sect, but that in fact could be filled up with prevailing configurations. More specifically, it offered undetermined identities, resituating prevailing ritual objects and practises for consumption through appropriate publicity campaigns. Existing caste hierarchies could be projected and reproduced, at the same time the evidence of hierarchy was idealised so that difference was not seen as inequality. Older markers of Brahminhood could thus be refined rather than explicitly rejected. This was the cultural façade of Hindu society attempting to liberalise without directly confronting the illiberal ordering of caste.

The commodification of ritual objects potentially rendered them more open and available to appropriation by diverse caste groups, while at the same time, upper caste retention of the means of cultural reproduction led to new inscriptions of erstwhile hierarchies. Several crucial features of this re-structured language of ritual can be noted. It abstracted objects, symbols and practises from existing, rooted networks of belief and practices. They often involved purchase eg of armbands, buttons, stickers pots of holy water; these discrete acts were there for public display rather than for worship per se and they were meant to signal membership in a new group, the public Hindus, or the “political Hindus”. The assertion of pre-existing identities, albeit in modified guise, was now offered as a right and as a form of political participation previously denied. What Hindu nationalists were attempting to create was a new mode of participation where caste status did not matter: instead in a tautalogous mode of reasoning, belonging was defined in terms of a Hindu crowd or mass.

While these new identities have been made available and the individual affiliation could be asserted with all the ease and convenience that Hindu nationalists could make available, the fixity and the durability of membership was ntocertain. To take the oath to the saffron flag and to dedicate one’s life to organising Hindu society was one thing. To chant slogans and pay a rupee, to walk along with a crowd for a while or to lay a few bricks was another. The more uncertain character of the recruits acquired through new modes of publicity complemented the volatility in the electoral arena. In the 1980s, Hindu religious practises came to be defined for the first time as acts of national citizenship, as existing petty commodity production around Hindu ritual practises was selectively reformulated and consolidated into regional and nationwide markets, and private consumption began to signal membership in a Hindu Public. New products were made available, retail Hindu commodities such as buttons, pamphlets, posters, scarves, stickers, shawls, bricks for the Ram temple, bottled holy water, audio cassettes and viewer consumption of other media products including Hindu teleserials which were themselves sold on tape. Securing the interest of small traders, whose incentives were built into their activity, complemented the publicity guaranteed Hindutva by its militant manoeuvres and a spectacle hungry press, opening Hindu nationalism up to a wide audience. At the same time it signalled an important shift in Hindu nationalist strategy, embracing what Gowalkar, had earlier condemned as “today’s method of more advertisement than actual work”. As political propaganda mimicked the language of advertising, and the social landscape itself became a metaphor for the market, the categories of voter and consumer increasingly began to merge into one another.

I want to bring in here Walter Benjamin’s idea of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin focused on the means of reproduction as the material basis for tracking and understanding the cultural shift to modernity, and thereby connected questions of media and representation directly to politics. Central to his argument, which is built around changing perceptions of art with mass reproduction, is the loss of what he calls “aura” of the art object, due now to its infinite reproducibility. With the loss of the aura the ritual space of the art object is no longer singular or unique, but is de-sacralised and the power of tradition must now pass through the filter of mass perception. He relates this loss to disenchantment with the world, but argues at the same time, that the rise of new forms of politics can be understood as its consequence. He describes these new forms generically and disparagingly, as the aestheticisation of politics – in other words the deflection of mass politics from economic transformation to mere self-expression. Writing in the 1930’s he was of course referring to the rise of German Fascism and the Nazis skilful use of new technologies, specifically the cinema to illustrate the point. In his view the logical result of fascism was the introduction of aesthetics into politics: the right of the masses to change property relations was replaced by the opportunity to express themselves. Here I am not interested in setting up a politics of the true revolutionary transformation against a false aesthetic one but want to identify the new cultural forms of politics that arise out of such changes.

The entry of aesthetics in this fashion expands and simultaneously channels the possibility for self-expression and works to orchestrate the collective expression of this desire. In the discourse of Hindutva such self-expression is oppositional in it’s lived meaning and is harnessed to memories of “otherness” in community as means of resistance to oppression. The ceaseless emphasis on mobilisation and performance, either through kar seva or rioting, was evident of the contradictions within communal politics, between individual expression and a coercive political regime, between claims to community and the stereotyping of the “other” through which the community was realised. From its inception the RSS had aimed at a long-term programme of universalist “brotherhood” insulated from the vagaries of the marketplace and the fickleness of electoral democracy. The move to retail Hindu identity declared an intention to seek and build on far more partial forms of support with the explicit aim of securing political power at the centre. This harnessing to the circuits of commodity power did entail a certain vulnerability to the rhythms of market cycles and the need to bolster demand by keeping the political promises of Hindutva alive. Economic liberalisation could proceed with its re-organisation of the public and private sphere in ways that were articulated to the Hindu nationalist project but not identical with it.

The economic policy of the BJP government with its opening up of the insurance sector, amending of patent laws in line with WTO rules and on going privatisation revealed it to be very sympathetic to the project of Finance Capital and notwithstanding the grumblings and resistance of the RSS cadres and the swadeshi wing of the party the liberalisation project went on unhindered. Combined with the alliance in Hindutva appeals based on consumer imagery and the materialistic aspect of north Indian Hindi culture I do not think that the rise of consumerist materialism is as hostile to the Hindutva project as some may argue; it is of course more antithetical to leftist brands of mobilisation.

To move on to the more specific points Vikash, raises, there is to be expected some shift to the right that has occurred on a wide scale since the 1980s. The liberalisation of India’s economy began not in 1991 or even with the new budget and Rajiv Gandhi’s technocratic approach in 1985, but as Atul Kohli has pointed out in the early 1980s under Indira Gandhi’s last administration when the first relaxation of regulations and restrictions on the private sector were introduced. Though even if one does agree that the collapse of the USSR and the Chinese marketisation would have had an effect on radical projects and contribute towards a general shift to the right one would need to explain why it would take on a saffron hue rather than simply be a continuation of the Congress hegemony or a hodgepodge of regional pro-Capital constellations like the TDP.

As for the Leftist forces of resistance, well even if we confine ourselves to talking about the cultural sphere (the left forces in the political sphere are in a dismal shape) there are few causes for cheer. Deepa Mehta’s films (I know of only Fire and Water) while controversial are hardly direct attacks on the explicit ideology of Hindutva – at best they can be seen to question traditional embourgoised ideas of culture, patriarchy and Indian history, they do not really deal with religious themes in a very explicit way. Even so one should note that state protection still was not enough to allow her to continue filming in UP and the offer by the Madhya Pradesh state government was a shrewd political move dictated by short term considerations rather than some assertion of secularism. One can also wonder whether the financial problems were not in some way linked to the opposition the film did face. Looking at other cultural attempts that explicitly challenge religious ideas or doctrines the picture is far less comforting: as posted below DN Jha’s book on beef eating was banned by the Hyderabad High Court and stopped from being published in India, MF Hussain’s artwork showing Ram and Sita as brother and sister as they were in some of the Buddhist Jatakas were destroyed and vandalised by VHP activists and Ambedkar’s controversial tome “The Riddles of Hinduism” was repeatedly delayed for publication and finally only given a very limited release by the Maharashtra state government which has a copyright over his unpublished works. With the saffronisation of education under the new NCERT textbooks, the denial of the Aryan migration theory in university courses and the ugly debates in the Indian Archaeological Survey which has politicised the excavation work going on in Ayodhya there has been a definite shift in the debate. It would be difficult from within India to challenge such a shift decisively and I know of no clear attack that has done so far; even the attempts by leftist artists to do so have not attracted much attention – one can hardly compete with the kind of audience commanded by the television mythological epics. The question is not whether such a shift has occurred but how deep does it run and what contours it can take.

I should add though that I did not say that the public sphere had been co-opted – the saffron movement is not hegemonic enough to perform such a task yet. Though the emergence of Hindutva has done far more than just make minorities insecure, it has led to rioting and organised attacks on selected targets as well as state engineered pogroms in places like Gujarat. More than this it has also as we have discussed earlier made some headway in the semitising of Hinduism and the replacement of a polymorphic religious tradition with a much more simplified and artificial one. In altering the essential character and nature of Hinduism could well be the most damaging legacy of the Hindutva movement.


:: Conrad Barwa 9:18 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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