People's Democracy

    Sangh Parivar On Offensive In Rajasthan

Nalini Taneja

DISLODGED from the government at the centre and wiped out in many states during the last elections, the Sangh Parivar is now concentrating on states where it or its alliance partners hold the state government – Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, Goa and some north-eastern states. The reports from Rajasthan --- where the Congress was in government till recently --- are alarming. The chief minister, Vasundhara Raje, is a committed member of the RSS, and is moving with the same confidence and decisiveness as her counterpart in Madhya Pradesh (Uma Bharti), following the pattern set by the BJP ministers in the last central government. She has learnt a thing or two from Narendra Modi too, as these reports show.

COMMUNAL MOBILISATION 

She is openly identifying the state government with the RSS and other Sangh Parivar organisations, promoting the growth of these organisations in the state, encouraging and facilitating their communal campaigns and ensuring that the state machinery turns a blind eye on their misdemeanors. Through these moves she is abetting and accelerating the infiltration of the Sangh Parivar elements into government institutions and government machinery, including the administration and the police forces, and also allowing large scale communal mobilisation to proceed without hindrance.

She has more decisively overturned some of the decisions of the previous Congress government. While prime minister, Manmohan Singh, refrained from mentioning communalism in his independence speech, touching upon all other important issues, Vasundhara Raje has seen to it that cases pertaining to communal violence in Rajasthan are selectively withdrawn.

The BJP government in Rajasthan has selectively withdrawn a large number of cases related to communal conflicts filed during the previous Congress government in the state. According to a report in The Hindu, “by the government’s own acknowledgement in the State Assembly during the just concluded budget session orders have been issued for the withdrawal of 122 cases while the fate of 68 others is under consideration.” It does not need much guessing that most of these cases are against the activists of the RSS, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, the Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad and Shiv Sena. However, cases registered against members of the minority community in the same communal incidents have not been withdrawn (August 13, 2004) Many of these cases pertain to 2002 in the areas adjoining Gujarat and are linked to the Gujarat genocide. 

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Rajasthan today lifted the ban on trishuls imposed by the previous Congress dispensation last year. The Congress government had issued the notification on April 8 last year under the Arms Act to ban distribution, acquisition and holding or carrying of tridents in the wake of the `trishul diksha' programme launched by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in the state. Trishul diksha programmes are already underway and the VHP has threatened to distribute 30 lakh trishuls in the state. The programme has open and public support from BJP ministers in the state.

INCITING TRIBALS AGAINST MUSLIMS

Following the pattern of Gujarat in inciting and organising tribals against Muslims, the Sangh Parivar has unleashed similar activities in Rajasthan. Violence was systematically perpetrated through an attack by tribals in Sarada village in Udaipur district. It was a 5,000-strong mob of tribals that attacked two Muslim localities in the village on July 30, and major bloodshed was prevented only due to timely intervention by the police officer in charge in the area. Yet, it was a successful experiment of communal forces to incite tribals against Muslims on the Gujarat pattern. 

The government on its part transferred the officer, Ravi Prakash Mehta sending an explicit message to the police about what is required from the police force in the state. According to a report in The Hindu, a six-member delegation of the Rajasthan Forum, which visited the tribal belt from August 6 to 9, found that Muslims were being regularly terrorised by both police and tribals and police had launched a crackdown on the Muslim residents of Sarada after a visit of the state home minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, in the last week of July. More than 200 Muslim families have now migrated from there. 

CREATING A BASE FOR FASCISM

According to another report (The Hindu, August 11, 2004), a group of Sangh Parivar activists forcibly stopped a Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation bus taking a group of 28 tribal christians, comprising 10 women, six extension workers, and regular passengers, on their way to Ajmer from Banswara to Ajmer near the Chittorgarh railway station alleging that they were being led to a conversion ceremony. The roadways bus stand at Chittorgarh came virtually under the siege as Sangh workers reached there in large numbers following a call by their leaders. VHP and the Bajrang Dal men also got into the bus and manhandled the passengers, including a tribal priest, Stephen Rawat, who is the director of the Banswara unit of the Udaipur-based Sampoorna Jeevan Vikas Samiti. Later, following police intervention, the tribals escaped the fury of slogan-shouting men, but had to return to Banswara.

At the meeting of the newly constituted CABE the BJP ministers from all the BJP ruled states, including Rajasthan, declared that the old (the communal NCERT textbooks of the BJP regime at the centre) would continue in their states. The state board textbooks of course were not looked into by the previous Congress government and so they continue from the earlier period of the BJP government in the state.

EXPLOITING FEUDAL LOYALTIES

 
All this, it may be noted, are efforts to create a base for fascism within state structures, and while the more outrageous doings get reported in the press and are protested against, the slow but steady infiltration goes unnoticed. Rajasthan is one of the backward states of the Hindi heartland, where feudal remnants are still quite strong and the old royal families still carry prestige and political clout. The old values of honour and opposition to modern mores has taken violent forms here in the form of large mobilisations in favour of sati and child marriages. Casteism is still strong and is linked with the clout of the old Rajput royal families and the landed classes. The mobilisations of the Sangh Parivar are aimed at exploiting these old loyalties to suit their very modern agenda of Hindu rashtra, where this backwardness can be geared to globalisation policies and anti-minority campaigns to influence the direction of the ‘modernisation’ process in Rajasthan. 

Yet Rajasthan is also a state where the movement of women anganwadi workers and saathins has had tremendous impact in posing a threat to this conservative and oppressive order, both in the realms of society and politics. There is also an active workers movement and the new WTO policies are helping to create avenues for strong mobilisations of peasants. 

In this context, the Sangh Parivar is very much interested in capturing for itself a constituency of the oppressed through a communal mobilisation that allows for combining terror with creating divisions among the oppressed. There is a need to be alert to these strategies which may well proceed unhindered under a new regime at the centre.