Women of the Hindutva family

The one political party in India that has grasped the importance of working in constituencies between elections, sustained a dedicated cadre, and established like-minded “service” organisations is the BJP. It has damaged the body politic, normalised vocabularies of hate, eroded democratic institutions, and subverted the Constitution. Still, we must take the organisation of the BJP seriously to understand how and why it wins elections despite maladministration, corruption, and crony capitalism. The party is unhealthily obsessed with power. This is not worthy of emulation. What is noteworthy is the indispensability of the party organisation to its evolution. This was once the provenance of the Left and of the Congress during the freedom struggle. Regrettably, no more.

Election experts attribute the BJP’s massive victory in the recent Assembly election in Maharashtra to the women’s vote, and the institutionalisation of the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana in the aftermath of a general election in which the ruling alliance was shown in a poor light. The incumbent Maharashtra government, following the Madhya Pradesh model of Mukhyamantri Ladli Behna Yojana, began to deposit Rs.1,500 monthly in the bank accounts of women. The amount is certainly not impressive, but it protects households from utter destitution.

The puzzle here is that other parties also hand out money to voters, or at least promise to do so. The strategy has become a soft option that liberates parties from accountability. They hold no responsibility for failing to provide the preconditions of a dignified life, that is, remunerative work. Karl Marx wrote that human beings realise agency though labour. But this is an aspect that political parties are not particularly bothered about today. They would rather hand out taxpayers’ money and make that the sum of their obligation to citizens.

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Arguably, handing out taxpayers’ money to individuals creates at least three problems for democratic politics. One, attention is diverted from non-performance of governments. Two, small sums of money become a substitute for universal education and healthcare for all. Recollect that in a democratic state, access to shared and indivisible social goods is a basic right. Three, this pathetic sum of money is presented as an act of beneficence.

Internalising patriarchy

The pillars of the welfare state have been brought down. What we have now is a patrimonial state that garners electoral rewards for charity. Citizens have been turned into recipients bound to the ruling class by personalised largesse. By concentrating on an individual’s needs rather than on a citizen’s rights, the scheme pre-empts solidarity on the one hand, and absolves the ruling party from responsibility on the other. Primarily an electoral strategy, it depoliticises democracy. What we have now are feudal patrons and followers. Subsistence-level pin money does nothing to liberate populations from shanty towns, but it does breed loyalty to the party.

Interestingly, however, the loyalty of women to the BJP cannot be traced only to doles at election time. The Hindutva parivar has concentrated on mobilising Hindus since its inception, and in recent times it has focussed on Dalit, Adivasi, and other backward groups and women. Studies show that women members of its allied organisations mostly belong to the middle and lower classes. They have experienced patriarchy, domestic violence, dowry deaths at home, and sexual violence at the workplace. They are promised a way out.

Women accept the ideology of Hindutva by internalising an elaborate set of highly conservative right-wing tenets. The strategy works in subtle ways. Goddesses who symbolise the mother figure provide them an ideal of womankind. The prime goddess who must be worshipped and protected is the BJP’s version of Bharat Mata holding a saffron flag. The image that provided inspiration to millions of Indians during the freedom struggle is now openly identified with militant right-wing Hindu nationalism and a saffronised Indian nation, whose followers will do anything to protect her from the enemies of the nation. The manufactured enemy in the Hindutva narrative is the Muslim. The message is clear: the natural children of Mother India are Hindus, the rest are outsiders, the enemy.

Organic nationhood

This imaginary is frightening because it subverts recognition and the empirical evidence that India has been historically constituted as a plural society. The poet Firaq Gorakhpuri had famously written: “kafile baste gaye / Hindustan banta gaya” (caravans of settlers kept coming / Hindustan kept getting made). But for the Hindu Right and its women, the nation is alarmingly monochromatic and exclusionary.

The other goddess that women are encouraged to follow in Hindutva training camps, and through the rhetoric of fierce women leaders known as sadhvis or renouncers, is Sita, who followed her husband into exile for 14 years, who had to walk through fire to prove her chastity, and who was expelled from her marital home because a random man made a random comment that reflected adversely on her character. The message is that women are basically homemakers who owe fidelity to their husbands.

The third set of goddesses invoked are openly militant. They fight evil that comes embodied in the form of a demon. Durga rides a tiger and carries a sword ready to cut down her enemies. Kali wears a garland of skulls around her neck, symbolic of past victories over evil. These goddesses, who are known as “mother”, are benefactors: they grant boons. They protect their children against any kind of danger. But they can also become angry avenging devis who dexterously cut off the heads of enemies of the family/nation, both of which are identical and interchangeable in the discourse of the religious Right.

The model for the nation is the Hindu undivided family. That most joint families fight wars over property, ever since Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata, is glossed over. The image of the nation in Hindutva’s theoretical formulations is organic nationhood, or a nation bound by ties of blood, a frightening imaginary when we recollect that this particular notion of blood ties has motivated genocide across the world.

A deeply conservative ideology

Despite the Hindutva Parivar’s claims that it liberates women, its ideology is really a deeply conservative one, that of the wife and the mother; the quintessential homemaker fiercely protecting her family and nation, ready to kill enemies at the gate. It is not surprising that women of the Parivar disdain “Westernised” feminists who relentlessly draw attention to the pitfalls of fascist nationalism, who chronicle the injustice done to Sita and support her courage in refusing to go back to her marital home, who critique the household as a site of violence, and who interpret patriarchy as a structural problem and not an individual practice.

Ironically, despite the radicalisation of women in the Hindutva world, we do not see women’s faces on the posters, which, instead, flourish with images of Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, or J.P. Nadda. Women, brainwashed by a sordid ideology into servitude, appear in the public space as cheerleaders, as they did when the Babri Masjid was destroyed in 1992. Today, they become petitioners in courts demanding the excavation of mosques, they relentlessly search for trishuls under Muslim places of worship built centuries ago, they mouth venomous slogans against the minorities, they emit toxicity as television anchors.

The leaders among these women, who label themselves renouncers, warn Hindu women against the supposedly sexually superior Muslim man, against being converted, against feminist ideas. The sites of indoctrination are camps run by the Durga Vahini and similar organisations. Pragya Singh Thakur, an accused in the 2006 Malegaon bombings that targeted Muslims and killed approximately 40 citizens, is a prominent member of the Durga Vahini.

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What can we then expect of gendered nationalism? Only bare politics, coarse and insensitive to the rights of other citizens.

Witness the irony: Kali and Durga fought against injustice; women who subscribe to the right-wing ideology fight for injustice. They show no concern for the massive impoverishment, malnutrition, and pathetic standards of education prevalent in the nation, focussing instead on divisive and violent rhetoric. Above all, the gendered nationalism of Hindutva politics does not challenge patriarchy and injustice in society. All it asks for is monopoly over the state and power, and destruction of India’s rich plurality. Hindu right-wing nationalism has not taught its women adherents the fine art of critical reflection; rather it encourages “no thinking”.

Therefore, Hindutva’s women followers forego the task that feminists have taken on: of creating a society free of discrimination. They might speak of liberation, but they do not speak of empowering women in their own right. We thus have women militants pursuing causes that are neither noble nor patriotic, nor forwarding the cause of women’s rights. But the handout becomes a substitute, and women end up believing that Rs.1,500 is the sum of all good things the government has to offer. This is the poverty of right-wing nationalist politics.

Neera Chandhoke is Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi.