THE August 11 speech by Mohammad Ali Jinnah is one of the most quoted and interpreted pieces of history in Pakistan by all schools of political thought. Whether the Founder wanted the state of Pakistan to be secular or theological in orientation is a matter of conjecture and an element inherent in all interpretations. But India, the state, had no such confusions and made much of its secular credentials on the global stage. But is that the whole picture? Well, the jury is still out on this one, even in India itself.

While tracing the rise of the Hindu right wing in The Saffron Tide: The Rise of the BJP, author Kingshuk Nag, a senior journalist, asserts at the very outset that Indian secularism was “only skin-deep.” Even though Jawaharlal Nehru ruled India for 17 years and had all the time in the world to articulate, interpret and execute his vision, his brand of secularism could not take root firmly enough to last long after him; the success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being a reflection of that feeble pedigree. Talking of the secular republic, Nag insists that “barring a few men … others were quite ‘pro-Hindu’ in their thinking … [and for them], being Hindu was the natural thing … This did not mean that they were disrespectful of other religions or their adherents. These leaders found nothing wrong with being secular and Hindu at the same time.”

Even before Partition, Congress had a lot of Hindu symbolism built into its public posturing, writes Nag and cites, among others, the use of ‘Vande Matram’, “the anthem of freedom-fighters,” which was drawn from a novel in which it used to be sung by “Hindus rebelling against their Muslim kings.”

The compulsion of electoral politics — “Is it possible to win elections in India without polling the Hindu vote?” — is the only rationalisation Nag has on offer for this rather dubious approach.

However, his other questions have built-in answers. Sample this: “Was Nehru’s Indian Republic really secular or was the Hinduness of the country couched in secular terms? Did the BJP become a victim of criticism because of promoting its cause too blatantly? Was this the same cause that the Congress had been promoting, albeit in a softer fashion?” It is only understandable that the book doesn’t try to answer these questions directly, but the discreet silence speaks for itself.

Having said that, indirect allusions galore: “The original Hindu party of India — the party that reflected the Hindu interests — was the Congress party … [which] — professing to be secular — remained in power so long as the Hindu vote was with it,” argues Nag. He adds that as soon as the Hindu votebank started perceiving that the Congress was not able to fully serve its interests it “started deserting it” and thus began the search for an alternative.

This happened at a different pace and over varying timeframes in different Indian states (provinces) and the fortunes of the right-wingers remained dependent on the performance graph of the Congress. “Till date, the BJP relies on the lack of performance of the Congress party for its election showing, even though its dependence has reduced in the last couple of decades.”

Though it remains a critical study of Indian politics at large, The Saffron Tide, as the title suggests, has taken a look at the larger picture through the prism of right-wing religious parties that together threw up the BJP to take on Congress at the national scale.

The Congress party was established in 1885 and in less than three decades, in 1914, the Hindu Mahasabha was formed to “represent Hindu interests”. In the intervening period, in 1906, one may recall, the All-India Muslim League was formed.

Next was the formation of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925. On paper, it was to “abstain from active politics and work at resuscitating the nation’s civilisational ethos, which was a cultural task.” However, in his inaugural message, the party founder emphasised to the activists, among other things, the need to “train [themselves] physically” to attain their goals.

Nag traces the development as the momentum was carried forward by the Jana Sangh in 1951, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964, the Shiv Sena in 1966, the Janata Party in 1977 and, finally, the BJP in 1980. It was only in the mid-1980s that the “war cry” — ‘Garv Se Kaho Hum Hindu Hain’ (Say with pride we are Hindus) — started being heard in public. It was coined years ago by Guru Golwalkar of the RSS, the “BJP’s parent body,” according to Nag. And then came the ideology of Hindutva in 1998, flanked on either side by the Babri Masjid riots in 1992 and the Gujarat carnage in 2002.

As chronicled by Nag, though not in as many words, the strong-arm tactics by the Hindu right wing did help it in the arena of electoral politics. From just two seats and eight per cent votes in the 1984 elections, it jumped to 85 (11 per cent votes) and 120 (20 per cent votes) seats in the next two elections.

In the first polls after the Babri Masjid riots, the BJP ended up with 161 seats (20 per cent votes) and became the single largest party in the 543-member house for the first time. The next time round, the BJP had 182 seats and 25 per cent of the total votes polled.

Paying the incumbency cost, the BJP had to lie low in the next two elections, before roaring back in 2014. With 282 seats (31 per cent votes), the BJP became the first non-Congress party in India to have a parliamentary majority of its own. Together with the National Democratic Alliance with which it had an electoral adjustment, the party has 336 seats, almost 62 per cent parliamentary majority. These heights were unimaginable even for a diehard right-winger at the start of the journey.

And all this while, the rigidity has increased not only across the nation, but also within the right wing itself. Nag has been able to capture the infighting that has seen the likes of L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh getting waylaid, and the “flexibility and liberalism” of Atal Bihari Vajpayee being replaced by the “superb organisational skills” of Narendra Modi only because the “RSS bosses had made up their mind.”

With religious fanaticism being one of the main worries of the modern world, The Saffron Tide is bound to come in handy for anyone trying to make sense of the phenomenon as it develops in a country that is home to about 15 per cent of the global population.

The reviewer is a Dawn staffer

The Saffron Tide: The Rise of the BJP

(POLITICS)

By Kingshuk Nag

Rupa Publications, India

ISBN 978-81-291-3127-0

247pp.