In 2003, the Bharatiya Janata Party politician Uma Bharti was elected chief minister of Madhya Pradesh in circumstances closely resembling Narendra Modi’s ascent to the post of prime minister last year. Bharti was one of the most effective spokespersons of Hindutva ideology, but had campaigned on the plank of development, and won a sweeping electoral victory. Numerous small incidents of communalism had occurred against the backdrop of her campaign, such as an attempt to provoke a riot over the slaughter of a cow near the town of Vidisha, and an effort to mobilise people around a disputed shrine in the western district of Dhar, but these were largely overlooked.
In early February that year, on assignment for the Indian Express, I travelled through the tribal villages near Dhar, accompanied by the journalist Sandeep Bhushan, then NDTV’s Madhya Pradesh reporter, and his cameraman Rizwan Khan. We were investigating a scheme launched by the then mayor of Indore, Kailash Vijayvargiya, the BJP leader who led the party’s victorious election campaign in Haryana in 2014. Through this scheme, supported by Dharma Raksha Samitis—committees to save the faith—stray cattle in Indore were sold to tribal residents of the districts adjoining the city at Rs 121 a head.
But news had started to filter out that many of these cattle, rounded up from the streets of Indore, where they were used to ingesting plastic, were dying once they passed into the hands of new buyers in rural areas. A veterinary extension officer in the area told us that the accumulated polythene in the rumen of these animals was proving fatal. I made notes for a report, while the NDTV team filmed a story about the problem, and how unhappy the scheme had made the tribal buyers of these cattle.
We were heading out to a nearby town when our vehicle was chased and flagged down by a number of young men on motorcycles. Attired in kurta-pyjamas and saffron bandanas, they were hostile to us from the outset. Our press cards made no impact. When they heard Rizwan Khan’s name, they stood ready to lynch him. Bhushan and I staved them off until they agreed to check our credentials with some others who were, they claimed, senior functionaries of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It took nearly an hour before we were released from this illicit custody, although we also received profuse apologies for the trouble. Someone they had spoken to had indeed heard of the Indian Express and NDTV.
Khan escaped with his life that day, but Mohammed Ikhlaq, falsely accused of having butchered a cow and eating its flesh in Bishada village, Uttar Pradesh, in late September, did not. Two weeks after Ikhlaq’s murder by a lynch mob, Prime Minister Modi broke his controversial silence over the incident, only to call it “unfortunate.” It was a statement in keeping with Modi’s habitual reluctance to criticise acts and statements that contradict the narrative of development-oriented governance that he has worked so hard to put in place.
The reason for Modi’s abdication of responsibility may not lie in endorsement, but in fear. His BJP and its influential supporting organisations, including the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, now run the serious risk of being outflanked from the right by Hindutva outfits they can no longer control. The last six months have made it evident that the cultural agenda of the RSS, relegated to the background of Modi’s election campaign last year, is now at least as important to his government as attempts to deliver “good governance.” But several recent incidents suggest that the RSS cannot keep control of the forces it has unleashed. Ikhlaq’s murder is one of them. Many of those arrested for the crime have links with a local BJP leader. In the aftermath of the murder, party men such as Mahesh Sharma, the union minister for culture, and the BJP MLA Sangeet Som, who is under investigation for his role in the Muzaffarnagar violence of 2013, visited the village and sought to justify the actions of the mob.
This mob did not emerge spontaneously. Reports suggest that an organisation called the Samadhan Sena had been active in the area for a few months. When The Caravan’s reporter Atul Dev met the head of the Samadhan Sena, five days after the murder, the leader claimed an association with the RSS, and went on to say “Kitna gambhir vishay hai ye? Gau hatya—par koi baat nahi kar raha. Baat kiski kar rahe hain? Ki ek Musalman mar gaya. Matlab, behenchod, desh badal jana chahiye?” (Cow slaughter is such a serious issue, but no one is talking about it. What are they talking about? That one Muslim has died. And so, sisterfuckers, the country should change itself?)
The second event was the public attack on the journalist and former BJP member Sudheendra Kulkarni, who was accosted and had his face blackened by men backed by the Shiv Sena in protest against the launch of a book by the former Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri in Mumbai. The Shiv Sena has always lashed out at the suggestion of any Indian contact with Pakistan, especially on its home turf in Mumbai, but it was striking that this assault was committed in spite of its alliance with Maharashtra’s BJP government. When Modi chose to distance himself from the act, the Sena attacked him. “The world knows Narendra Modi due to Godhra and Ahmedabad, and we respect him for the same reason,” the Shiv Sena lawmaker Sanjay Raut said, referring to the violence that occurred in Gujarat in 2002 under Modi’s rule. “If the same Narendra Modi has called the controversy surrounding Ghulam Ali”—the Pakistani singer, whose concert in Mumbai was forcibly cancelled— “and Khurshid Kasuri unfortunate, then it is indeed unfortunate for all of us.”
The Shiv Sena’s actions have typically been instrumental. It now seems to have decided that its interests are best served by being more hawkish than the BJP and the RSS. But the third incident has been linked with an outfit whose actions seem to spring out of genuinely held beliefs. On the morning of 30 August, the scholar MM Kalburgi was killed by gunmen at his residence in Karnataka’s Dharwad district. The Sanatan Sanstha’s name, which cropped up two years ago in connection with the Pune murder of the rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, came up once again in the investigations. These murders have ensured the Sanstha has now attracted attention even beyond its areas of operation in Maharashtra and Goa, but the organisation has been active since the 1990s. An Indian Express report on the Sanstha says that it “presents itself as a spiritual organisation that works for social uplift and national security, and to rekindle dharma, protect ‘seekers’ (of the path of righteousness) and destroy ‘evildoers.’”
In an insightful essay for the website The Wire, the political scientist Suhas Palshikar wrote that the case of the Sanathan Sanstha presents “a more complicated reality” than older outfits such as the Bajrang Dal or Sri Ram Sene, which “represent the more militant platforms that might or might not work within the diktats of the RSS-BJP.” According to Palshikar, “That reality consists of a more deep rooted but diffuse public sentiment favourable to traditional understanding of good and evil in religious terms, a traditional understanding of the Kshatriya ethic and therefore a more militant, more intolerant element within Hindu society, an element prone to violence as a religious necessity for preserving the traditional social forms and mores of behaviour.” The Sanstha is not controlled by the RSS, and as Palshikar suggests, it may have far broader appeal than most people suspect.
The murderous mob near Dhar, during that 2003 election, was not by any means a unique phenomenon in that region—Malwa—where the RSS and the erstwhile Jana Sangh, precursor to the BJP, had deep roots. By 2007, when I had moved to Delhi and was covering the police investigations of the Samjhauta Express bombing, the inquiry appeared to be closing in on a group called Abhinav Bharat. Originally founded by VD Savarkar in 1904, it had been revived in 2006, in Malwa.
Several news reports suggested that members of Abhinav Bharat had moved to the right of the RSS. The group maintained links with the Sangh, but was not bound by its orders, and its members believed in violence as a political solution. The details that have emerged since suggest that the organisation was meant to answer extremist Muslim “jihadi” terror with terror of its own. The profile of many of the members of Abhinav Bharat was no different from those of scores of young men from the RSS I encountered in the course of my reportage in the region, but their actions went far beyond those that the RSS endorses, at least openly.
BJP-led governments have shown us more than once that when political parties with communal ideologies come into power, violent extremists to their right, and out of their control, are also given an impetus. But this is a pattern that predates them.
In Punjab, the Shiromani Akali Dal, which claims to speak for Sikh interests much in the same way that the BJP seeks to appeal to Hindu sentiments, had to contend with the rise of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the late 1970s. Bhindranwale, initially backed by the Congress, outflanked the Akalis in the early 1980s, by agitating for the implementation of the very demands the Akalis had made of the Indian government in the Anandpur Sahib resolution, which called for Sikhs to have greater autonomy in their affairs.
Bhindranwale soon captured the support of radical Sikhs, whom the Akalis considered their own support base. He unleashed violence across the state, and the Akalis, who had been unable to contest his rise, eventually became fellow travellers to terror in the state. The Akali efforts to match Bhindranwale pushed the centre of Sikh politics dramatically rightwards. The terror organisation that emerged after Operation Bluestar, in which the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple and killed Bhindranwale, was made up of young men who had been radicalised during the Bhindranwale years.
While there is no Bhindranwale figure yet among those to the right of the Sangh, this space is increasing. The BJP grows in power, yet has no means to combat those who occupy this space. In Maharashtra, the BJP state government can do little against the Sanatan Sanstha or the Shiv Sena. The party now finds itself in a similar situation elsewhere in the country, with regard to more extreme elements of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal.
Ever since the BJP came to power at the centre, it has given tacit or explicit approval to a number of attempts at cultural re-engineering, including so-called reconversions to Hinduism, restrictions on beef consumption, and violent responses to inter-religious marriage. From these strategies, it hopes to reap electoral benefits. In the background, other issues that the BJP has kept long simmering to serve its political ends remain, such as the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya. Since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the BJP and the RSS have both held off the more extreme members of the Hindutva right with the suggestion that a party ruling as part of a coalition at the centre cannot act independently even on issues that are important to it. After its 2014 victory, however, this excuse is no longer available. The VHP recently chose to remind the government that it was elected not only for vikas—development—but also for the Ram mandir.
This pressure will only grow as the Modi government moves towards the end of its term. Unable to confront these forces head on, Modi will be forced to exercise caution even when dealing with greater provocations that are now inevitable. Personally, he stands to lose the carefully crafted image of a decisive leader who delivers on his promises, but the damage to the republic may be far greater.