People's Democracy

  Hindutva And Liberalisation In Orissa

Nalini Taneja

THE assumption that the RSS and its Parivar have a free run only where the BJP is in government and that its NDA constituents are somewhat faltering allies who can, when situation arises, adopt ‘secular’ positions stands falsified by the example of Orissa.

Since the BJP came to form the government and more especially since it was voted out of power, most people have felt and argued that the support base for liberalisation policies may cut across the mainstream bourgeois political spectrum, but that this is not true of support for communalism. Although the killings in Gujarat did give a jolt to this understanding when the ‘secular’ allies of the BJP failed to take a stand on the issue, this argument has still remained strong.

It has certain validity, of course, given the cultural diversity and religious pluralism of our country, and more particularly because of the emergence of politics organised along caste lines in recent decades, but then the same can be said about support and opposition to specific policies and measures which effect different sections of the bourgeoisie and different regions differently.

In fact, it would not be wrong to make the generalisation that just as the ruling classes have become united on the general direction of liberalisation policies, so have they grown to have a larger stake in communalism. Liberalisation and communalism tie up very well in the strategy and perspectives of the ruling classes, even as they may take differing stands on specific events, or hold themselves back from taking outright communal positions in certain situations, depending on their electoral-vote banks. A fine example of this is the Congress, which represents and ‘leads’ the secular political platform, but whose Gujarat unit has never been able to assert itself in Gujarat.

RIGHT WING HINDUTVA

What has been happening in Navin Patnaik’s Orissa also needs to be seen in this context. There has been a sustained, continuous, and if one may add, uninterrupted, growth of the right wing Hindutva forces in the state since the murder of Graham Staines which the suave and modern chief minister, Navin Patnaik, has benignly presided over. While the focus has been on Rajasthan where a BJP chief minister presides, happenings in Orissa have almost gone unnoticed.

The RSS has been particularly active among the tribal population of Orissa and has made significant advances in creating an educational set up in the rural areas, as well as in rewriting school texts which are easily available in the market for use outside their own school system. The content of these texts are far more virulent, parochial, hate filled and anti-people than can be imagined from the BJP sponsored history textbooks and the NCERT initiated National Curriculum Framework the intelligentsia had opposed during the BJP rule. 

Orissa was one of the first states to enact the bill on religious conversions and to give full freedom to the VHP’s programme of ‘reconversions’. Dara Singh, who was convicted of the murder of Graham Staines and his two sons following a world wide protest, remains unpunished. The Bajrang Dal has been organising its trishul diksha programmes here as much as in Rajasthan, in which potential cadres are given arms training. The Shiv Sena has taken the trouble to create suicide squads, ‘ready to sacrifice all for motherland’, clearly defined by them as cleansing India of Muslims and Christians.

Activities of the Sangh Parivar have been documented by journalist John Dayal and academic Angana Chatterji, and written about by academics Biswamoy Pati and Pralaya Qanungo, but somehow mainstream media and political parties have not yet sensed the urgency of the situation in the state. Some of the bare facts are revealing of the organizational strength and network that the Sangh Parivar has been able to create in the state. Figures, taken from the research work done by Angana Chatterji, available in the form of short articles on the Chowk website, pertain to the situation in 2003, after which too there has been expansion.

NETWORK OF THE SANGH PARIWAR

Membership of the BJP is 4,50,000. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh manages 171 trade unions with a cadre of 1,82,000; the 30,000 strong Bharatiya Kisan Sangh functions in 100 blocks; the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, functions in 299 colleges with 20,000 members; the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, the RSS’s women’s wing, has 80 centres; the Durga Vahini, has 7,000 outfits in 117 sites in Orissa. The RSS has also established units of Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad, Vivekananda Kendra, Sewa Bharati, Hindu Jagran Manch, Harikatha Yojana centres in 780 villages and 1,940 Satsang Kendras in order to facilitate its sectarian political agenda. There are 1,700 Bhagabat Tungis in Orissa, cultural reform centres run by the Sangh that aim at Hindus and Christians. The Sangh has set up various trusts in Orissa for fund raising, such as the Friends of Tribal Society, Samarpan Charitable Trust, Yasodha Sadan, and Odisha International Centre.

The RSS administers 9,300 Ekal Vidyalayas in adivasi areas; its Vidya Bharati directs 391 Saraswati Shishu Mandir schools with more than one lakh students in Orissa; and through its educational camps, the RSS has a scheme for recruiting teachers and campaigners. The RSS operates 2500 shakhas in Orissa with a 100,000 strong cadre; the Bajrang Dal has 20,000 members working in 200 akharas in the state; the VHP has a membership of 60,000 in the state. Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram runs 1,534 projects and schools in 21 Adivasi districts.

On the other hand Patnaik has been implementing all the conditionalities attached to loans as part of ‘structural-adjustment’ ever since he came to form the government in Orissa. More recently he has initiated the loot of Orissa’s mineral wealth in the name of industrialisation. Vast areas (30,000 acres) of rich coastal agriculture land in Jajpur and Jagatsinghpur districts are being handed over to MNCs. Farmers are being forced to become daily wage earners, and amidst a virtually mad “Steel Rush”, the Naveen Patnaik government has already signed 36 MOU’s with major industrial houses.  Negotiations are on between Orissa government and POSCO for setting up of a 12 million tonne steel plant at port city of Paradeep in Orissa, which is against the national interest and will ensure that the Korean multinational’s control over our precious ore. (People’s Democracy, June 6, 2005). Protests of tribals and dalits against the corporates and multinationals have invited severe police brutalities, Kashipur being the latest.

This mix of communal politics and anti-people policies and brutal repression of popular protest is not much different from Rajasthan, where the BJP is in power. A recent incident is revealing of the muscle power of the Sangh in the state and of the leeway it enjoys from the state government.

A secular citizens’ group called The Indian People’s Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights (IPT) has been travelling throughout the state as part of its investigations on communalism in Orissa. It undertook its primary investigations from June 11-14, 2005.  The Tribunal is headed by justice K K Usha, Former Chief Justice, Kerala High Court, and Justice R A Mehta, Former Acting chief justice, Gujarat High Court, and former director, Gujarat Judicial Academy; convened by Dr Angana Chatterji, associate professor, Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies, and Mihir Desai, Indian People’s Tribunal and Advocate, Mumbai High Court and Supreme Court of India; and has among its members Dr Chetan Bhatt, Reader, Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Dr Asha Hans, Professor, Women’s Studies, Utkal University; Ms Lalita Missal, National Alliance of Women-Orissa Chapter; Dr Shaheen Nilofer, Scholar-activist from Orissa; Sudhir Patnaik, Scholar-activist from Orissa; Dr Ram Puniyani, EKTA, Committee for Communal Amity.

While conducting a hearing with the Hindutva organisations, who initially agreed to be interviewed on June 14, the Sangh Parivar members verbally attacked Tribunal members, made false, defamatory, and inflammatory statements, sought to seize information gathered during the investigations, and shouted threats, including the threat to rape attending female members of the Tribunal. They shouted: “This is an IPT funded by the foreign funding agencies to tarnish the image of the Hindu Rashtra and we will rape those women”. When the Tribunal staff was leaving, one of the Sangh Parivar members said: “We will parade them naked”. Ms Mallik of the Sangh Parivar also forcibly took a picture on her mobile phone of Dr Chatterji, saying that: “we will make sure that everybody knows your face”. The Parivar members also took down the vehicle numbers of the Tribunal (Communalism Watch website). Since then letters have been sent by the Tribunal members to the police and the Human Rights Commission, but action has yet to be taken against the members of the Bajrang Dal and VHP.

The incidents tell a great deal about the kind of ‘Indian culture’ or ‘Bhartiyata’ that these organisations represent, but are also an indication of what is happening on the ground even as the BJP has been defeated in electoral terms. Spread of communalism in India no doubt finds fertile ground in a society where feudal values still have a hold and where the secularisation of mentalities has not kept pace with the rise of modern capitalist development, but it is as much the work of organised right wing political mobilisation, which needs to be challenged along with the economic agendas that it espouses. The neo-liberal economic policies and communalism are inseparable in the right wing strategy, and fight against both must be inseparable in left wing strategy for democratic alternatives.