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Indian Dalits and Hindutva Strategies Seth Schoenhaus Denison University Denison Journal of Religion Volume 16 Article 1 2017 Indian Dalits and Hindutva Strategies Seth Schoenhaus Denison University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/religion Part of the Ethics in Religion Commons, and the Sociology of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Schoenhaus, Seth (2017) "Indian Dalits and Hindutva Strategies," Denison Journal of Religion: Vol. 16 , Article 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/religion/vol16/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Religion at Denison Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Denison Journal of Religion by an authorized editor of Denison Digital Commons. Schoenhaus: Indian Dalits and <i>Hindutva</i> Strategies INDIAN DALITS AND HINDUTVA STRATEGIES Indian Dalits and Hindutva Strategies Seth Schoenhaus The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, is a right-wing nationalist political party charged by its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh (RSS), to spread its ideology of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) through the political process.1 In doing this, the BJP has gained national prominence, as seen most recently in its resounding 2014 victory in which Narendra Modi shot to power as Prime Minister of India.2 However, the party has made itself into the stalwart political arm of In- dia’s burgeoning middle class: conservative, fairly wealthy voters who tend to see themselves as the backbone of India’s emerging global might and economic prow- ess.3 In order to increase its share of power, the BJP and other Hindutva organiza- tions have increasingly realized the need to reach out to Scheduled Caste voters, specifically Dalits: those who have largely existed at the bottom of the Indian caste system, below even those considered “untouchable.”4 Dalits often find themselves on the fringe of acceptable Indian society due to their historically low caste posi- tion, so their receptiveness to Hindutva politics is quite curious. In order to court Dalits, the ideological message of Hindutva has shifted, as has its dissemination among populaces that were not formerly receptive to its na- tionalist thrust. This paper examines the methods by which Hindutva activists and politicians have courted Dalit voters, specifically focusing on the appropriation of Dalit traditions, the Hindutva meta-narrative of Lord Ram, and the claiming of Hindu space. This examination takes place through the lens of a clashing of ideals, and will thus begin with an overview of Hindutva as a political and religious mes- sage, moving on to delve into the Dalit experience and collective identity. Hindutva: The Ideology of a Hindu India Badri Narayan, a professor of social anthropology and frequent political contributor to various Indian newspapers, characterizes Hindutva as a strain of “cultural nationalism … based on the moral and cultural code preached by the ancient Hindu religious epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.”5 More 1 Radhika Ramaseshan, “The BJP and the RSS: Family Squabbles Turn Intense,” Economic and Political Weekly 1, no. 1 (2013): http://www.epw.in 2 Ibid. 3 Sumit Sarkar, “Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva,” in Making India Hindu, ed. David Ludden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 270-293. 4 Badri Narayan, Memory, Identity and the Politics of Appropriation: ‘Saffronisation’ Among the Dalits of North India, ISAS Working Papers (Singapore: Institute for South Asian Studies, 2015), 2. 5 Badri Narayan, Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2009), 8. Published by Denison Digital Commons, 2017 55 1 Denison Journal of Religion, Vol. 16 [2017], Art. 1 THE DENISON JOURNAL OF RELIGION specifically, one might discuss Hindutva activism in the context of Indian public culture, characterizing the ideology as a mix of the paternalistic and xenopho- bic sentiments expressed by conservative Indians as a result of a changing Indian society. As India has become a global powerhouse increasingly exposed to new ideas and practices, the political mobilization of lower castes and rising consum- erism in the broader Indian sphere has “fractured social imaginings and notions of order and hierarchy.”6 As such, Hindutva activists and supporters share a general goal of asserting their Indian-ness (the meaning of Hindutva) through a sort of reclamation of their native homeland from those who would see it destroyed (thus destroying Indian identity itself).7 This has tended to create an “othering” process, often explained by Hindutva detractors as projecting imagined or otherwise inac- curate wrongs done to Hindus onto minority communities, thus creating racist sentiments based upon ethnicity.8 Supporters of Hindutva, though, characterize the ideology as a defense of the Hindu religion alongside a sober recognition of the threat that “outside” re- ligious traditions, most notably Islam, pose. However, analysis of the Bharatiya Janata Party webpage entitled “Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology” reveals a strong sectarian bent, referring to Muslims using words such as “barbaric,” “hordes,” “bloody,” and “unwilling to change.”9 As such, the overarching theme of Hindutva as the BJP perceives it is not only a rewriting of history with Hindus as the benevolent idealists and Muslims as the violent barbarians, but a generaliza- tion of who is “Muslim” and who is “Hindu.” In making these generalizations, one becomes aware of a theme central to the Hindutva idea: Hindu unity, especially across castes. The webpage makes no note of certain caste values, heroes, idols, or practices, instead discussing Hindus as an already unified group of people with similar viewpoints and like minds. While the significance of this imagined unity is discussed in greater detail later, we can note here that the notion of a universal Hinduism presents a great challenge to courting voters, such as Dalits, who feel they have been left out of the gains made by the modern Indian state. As such, the otherness heaped on to Muslims on the webpage has been extended to include those Dalits who have converted to Islam or other religions in protest of their poor treatment under the Hindu caste system. In fact, as Hindutva has flourished since the 1920s as an upper caste reaction to progress made by formerly oppressed 6 Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 8. 7 More conversation on the Hinduisation of space to come later in the paper. 8 Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003), 1. 9 Bharatiya Janata Party, “Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology,” Bharatiya Janata Party, last modified 2015, http://www.bjp.org/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=369:hindutva-the-great-nationalist-ideology&Itemid=501 https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/religion/vol16/iss1/156 2 Schoenhaus: Indian Dalits and <i>Hindutva</i> Strategies INDIAN DALITS AND HINDUTVA STRATEGIES groups, we can extend the overt fear of Muslims to cover an underlying fear of lower-caste Hindus as they mobilize and demand their equal rights under the secular state.10 Understanding Dalit identity, then, is key to an overall comprehen- sion of the tactics used by Hindutva activists in gaining their support. As a final observation concerning the BJP’s depiction ofHindutva, one cannot fail to notice the narrative structure of the webpage entry. The very fact that the ideology is presented as a story, complete with moments in history during which Muslim invaders, such as the Mughals, attempted to destroy dharma, points to the greater Hindu tradition of imparting religious knowledge in the form of a story. In fact, an account of one scholar’s experiences with a Hindu holy man led her to remark that storytelling is “an expression of deep-rooted cultural themes.”11 Folding this observation into an analysis of the BJP’s explanation of Hindutva, one might surmise that the webpage is in the form of a narrative specifically to play to Hindus’ feelings of cultural belonging, unity, and overall Indian-ness. Additionally, scholarly analysis of traditional Hindu storytelling techniques reveal emphasis on “characterization,” or the incorporation of targeted audience members into wide- ly-known folk stories in order to convey a pre-conceived message or idea about the general nature of something as it applies to the listener.12 This point will also be vital to understanding the reasoning behind certain methods and techniques for Hindutva recruitment of Dalits, which this paper comes to later. Who is a Dalit? Understanding Dalit Identity and Dynamics The term Dalit means broken, oppressed, or ground down; it has been used in India’s northern states since the 1920s but was not widely used until the 1960s, when radical groups such as the Dalit Panthers (a group modeled after the Ameri- can Black Panthers, using militant ideology to assert their rights as a marginalized people) appropriated the term to assert their political standpoint.13 In practice, a Dalit is one formerly designated as an “untouchable,” or one existing below the caste system, relegated to jobs and locales with diminished or non-existent ritual purity in a traditional Hindu context.14 There are several sub-castes within the broader Dalit fold, such as Pasi, Dhobi, Kori, and others, and divisions between these Dalit castes are often widened or traversed based on local and state-level 10 Kama Kellie Maclean, “Embracing the Untouchables: The BJP and Scheduled Caste Votes,” Asian Studies Review 54, no. 4 (1999): 489. 11 Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 11. 12 Ibid., 235. 13 Juned Shaikh, “Who Needs Identity? Dalit Studies and the Politics of Recognition,” India Review 11, no. 3 (2012), 200. 14 Deepa S. Reddy, Religious Identity and Political Destiny: Hindutva in the Culture of Ethnicism (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2005), 87. Published by Denison Digital Commons, 2017 57 3 Denison Journal of Religion, Vol.
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