People's Democracy

Education For Communal Mobilisation In Gujarat

Nalini Taneja

THERE is a need to appreciate the political role of education not only in our daily lives but also in the life of countries and societies. In the case of Gujarat it has been crucial. It is not merely the physical mobilization of communal forces that led to the carnage. There is a whole history of poisoning of people’s minds through a slow, but steady process of communalisation of consciousness through media, through the educational system, and through the indoctrination in the RSS shakhas, which made this physical mobilization possible/feasible in the first place.

ROLE OF GUJARATI PRESS

The kind of communal propaganda and disinformation that Gujarati newspapers like Sandesh and Gujarat Samachar specialize in are credible and acceptable to large parts of the newspaper reading public in Gujarat because an average reader has already been prepared to receive such communalized "information" as common sense, truth and ‘facts’ by a long process of communal socialization, mainly through schools, and through the cultural symbolism assiduously propagated on an everyday basis by the state controlled institutions and the political discourse that emerges from them in Gujarat, apart from the thousands of RSS shakhas.

It is often said that economic rivalry fuels communal-sectarian violence and deepens the communal divide. It does, but it needs to be understood that such a process requires the presence of certain socio-political conditions within which it becomes possible to determine communal relations in an antagonistic direction. In Gujarat, economic development of a specific kind - Gujarat is one of the more advanced states in terms of economic development - or the special mix of globalisation and culturalism that thrives on emphasizing ‘difference’ in the name of cultural roots of identity as in the west, have promoted sectarian and prejudiced attitudes. The cultural and intellectual developments in Gujarat are a consequence of this specific mix of economic development and economic integration of all the religious communities in the state and the particular social-political conditions.

RIGHT WING CONSENSUS

In Gujarat, in the fifty odd years following independence, the mainstream political parties have represented a consensus that is far more right wing in economic and political terms than in other states, none daring to pose a challenge, in power or in opposition. The Congress found its tentative efforts in creating new political alliances (KHAM) aborted in the face of the strategic class alliances of the new beneficiaries of economic development. The drive towards communal polarization has gone unchecked by any government in power, and all major parties that pose themselves as alternatives to the party in power.

The traditional supporters and financiers of communalism and communal politics have been the businessmen, who have a much stronger hold on polity in Gujarat than in any other state, while the professional classes have come to communalism more recently through the ideologies generated in the west by the drive towards globalisation, accepted uncritically as indigenism and right to ‘difference’ by them.

PROPAGATION OF COMMUNAL IDEOLOGY

In other states, communal interpretations of history and parochial views infiltrated into the governmental school system and into higher education through default and primarily as a result of inaction and indifference of the state to the urgency for a secular school system. Or as a result of the non-availability of good progressive textbooks or lack of progressive outlook on the part of teachers. Communal ideology as matter of policy confined to private institutions run by the RSS and their linked organisations run under different names. In Gujarat propagation of communal ideology through educational and cultural institutions has been intrinsic to government policy.

Life in independent India began in Gujarat with campaigns against Gandhi and support for the Gandhi murder in the social networks of the RSS. Hegemony for sectarian, parochial ideology gained further momentum with the ‘glorious’ reconstruction of the Somnath temple and the campaign around it, which promptly found its way with all the attendant stories of Muslim cruelty and Muslim rule, into government school texts in Gujarat and brought the state school system in line with the schools run by the RSS linked organisations. The trend we have been witnessing in other states of the communalization of the government school system in the last decade is much older in Gujarat.

In Gujarat the leaderships of all successive governments and the government linked cultural bodies have been involved in a consistent campaign on the so-called glorious Hindu past, the so-called Muslim atrocities in medieval times, and a deliberate and systematic neglect of the composite, pluralistic cultural heritage which ironically informs the very personality of an average Gujarati. There has been, since independence, almost complete affinity between what a child learns from a social milieu hegemonised by RSS culture and in schools run by the RSS linked organisations or by the government.

Gujarat does not lack in Gandhian institutions. In fact there are thousands of them there even today, but most of them have for decades now adopted a right wing stance on social and development issues, and have not dared to enter into debate with the parochial and chauvinistic forces in the state, or even at the countrywide level. They have in fact, through their ideological stance and determined opposition to left forces, contributed significantly to creating ideological bridges with the Hindutva forces.

ROLE OF GANDHIANS

Gandhi’s Dandi March for salt in 1930 electrified the entire country. In Gujarat it electrified the Congress following, but already the Hindu communal forces too had a social base and following there, and Gujarat was becoming special to these forces, in a way that even Nagpur and Maharashtra could not because of the strong anti caste movements in Maharashtra. Gandhi himself adopted very clear positions on women’s role in nation building and social upliftment, but it was a position of contradictory messages and limiting in many ways in its implications for how mainstream intelligentsia would perceive issues of caste, community, religion and women in independent India. In Gujarat, given the dominance of the industrial bourgeoisie and the trading classes, Gandhi’s influence expressed itself more clearly through Gandhi’s own firm opposition to trade unionism and the Ahmedabad textile mill workers strikes, and his treatment of the untouchability question as a humanitarian and social service issue. The industrialists support to Gandhian ashrams and Gandhi derives to a great extent from this emphasis in Gandhi.

That Gandhi himself went on to adopt more radical positions in regard to many issues in the late thirties and forties and looked on his ashrams as experiments in creating a new culture is of less consequence for Gujarat than the fact that Gandhian politics all over the country—much more so in Gujarat—remained far behind Gandhi on social and political questions. The disjunction between what Gandhi’s own politics represented and that of Gandhians has only grown larger in the years after independence. Gandhians and neo traditionalist intellectuals have eschewed politics in the formal sense in favour of social service. They have rejected the best of Gandhi and embraced all that was limiting, most notably the opposition to trade unionism and left movements. In Gujarat social service has remained divorced from political action. Social service and welfare organisations have made a virtue of their non-relationship with the political process, a stance that is political and has had important political implications nevertheless.

The Gandhian institutions in the state have played a key role in de-politicizing people and their considerable influence in the intellectual-academic life in Gujarat has prevented the growth of a consciousness that foregrounds issues of citizenship. They have been crucial in distancing the Gujarati intelligentsia in right wing ways and in the right wing direction from the Congress as well, whose children they were to begin with. In the academia this position and distancing is --at its very best—represented by those who have substituted emancipation and social equality for empowerment, and anti imperialism for culturalism and the politics of difference so fashionable in western academia as well, and argue for a moral superiority of NGOism and social service over political action. Neo traditionalism and neo Gandhianism express themselves primarily as an "anti-secularist" platform today.

While this is a development that is not exclusive to Gujarat, in Gujarat, the wide networks and strong roots in Gujarati society that these institutions of neo traditionalism and neo Gandhianism enjoy has given a certain legitimacy in wider society to an intelligentsia ‘organic’ in its social origins because of these networks, but deeply divorced from the concerns of the classes that it originates from—an intelligentsia that has virtually sanctioned political initiative to the ruling classes in the state.

ABSENCE OF PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS

There has been a relative absence in Gujarat not just of left politics and working class trade union movement which never recovered after the Gandhian let down of the Ahmedabad workers strikes, but also of a tradition of anti caste movements, the women’s movements and pressure groups representing the Muslims, the tribals or the dalits. The economic integration of these sections into the economy has worked against emergence of even such partisan self organisations and their political articulation, as in the case of UP where Mayawati and Mulayam Singh have a major social base, or Laloo Yadav in Bihar, or farmers movements and dalit organisations in Maharashtra, or the Jat and Rajput networks in Rajasthan, Jat organisations in Haryana or even the Muslim League in Kerala. These organisations may not pose real challenges to the social order, but they certainly help erode the hegemony of the Hindutva forces.

In Gujarat, their absence has paralleled the relative absence of progressive critiques of Gujarati society, except in small conclaves funded by the centre. Social sciences and humanities have not been the preferred subjects of study for a long time. The NRI component and the dominance of the business community has made Gujarat a pioneer in the recent trend towards MBAs and Business School degrees geared to needs of industry.

It is no wonder then that the thousands of RSS and government run schools in the state enjoy complete hegemony in school education, and RSS texts, or RSS like texts, poison young minds through their twelve odd years in school. These are schools where it is taught that Muslims are enemies of the nation, and where Muslim children are made to feel aliens, and where textbooks refer to Hitler and Mussolini in adulatory terms, and where Modi can make the kind of election speeches that he does.