Religious and political iconography consists of images and ideas that embody a shared value system, each icon carrying its own political context and history.
My thesis is, that religions are purely political constructs, founded to create an exclusive brotherhood, for the equitable distribution of women – spirituality is just a faux veneer to the primary agenda. Witness therefore the obsession of religions with how women ought to and can be treated and with the practices of marriage and kinship. The exclusive brotherhoods also give rise to the notion of the ‘other’, marking those outside the brotherhood as undesirables, unworthy of social cohabitation or in the extreme, unworthy of life itself. Fascism, which rides on the paranoia already injected into a populace by religion, has a very close relationship with it. It should now no longer surprise one to learn that Savarkar, an atheist himself, is the poster-boy of Hindutva hate.
A primary icon of fascism is racial purity. An examination of early 20th century manifestation of fascism will reveal patterns that we can find in 21st century India. Even though fascist Italy was not officially racist, like its Axis partner Nazi Germany, racial purity was a common thread that ran through Mussolini’s speeches. In a speech in Bologna, Italy in 1921, Mussolini stated, “Fascism was born… out of a profound, perennial need of this, our Aryan and Mediterranean race”. Mussolini was concerned with the low birth rates of the white race in contrast to the African and Asian races. In 1928, he noted the high birth-rate of blacks in the United States and claimed that in some areas of the US, like Harlem, blacks had surpassed whites in population and were thus a threat to their existence. Similarly, most Hindutva ideologues express the notion of racial purity in terms of Hindus being the original inhabitants of this subcontinent and anyone Muslim or Christian being a cultural interloper, an usurper of its resources and a pariah of an unbroken civilisation claiming birth almost 5,000 years ago and more.
In the argument of racial purity, scientific evidence is given short shrift, even University educated Hindutva proponents shrugging off historical evidence as Left promoted propaganda, suggesting thereby, that the pursuit of history is just opinion, rather than a rigorous scientific pursuit backed with paleobiology, nuclear physics and other sciences. None of them can explain, however, how the Left obtained a stranglehold on the writing of history, worldwide. The same Hindutva proponents will quote wild figures of the growth rate of Muslims, but when challenged with decadal data from the Census of India, will brush the evidence aside as figures manipulated across decades, by Leftists. Anecdotal data feeds the paranoia that these elements seek to propagate.
For an icon to be identifiable for most of the unwashed masses, it needs visual clarity. The colour brown was the identifying colour of Nazism (and fascism in general), due to it being the colour of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (storm detachment) paramilitaries (also known as Brownshirts). It is not mere coincidence that the RSS is in khaki – Golwalkar was openly in admiration of Adolf Hitler and later of Hitler’s victims the Jews, for maintaining ‘purity of their race’. The seemingly counter-intuitive observation of the Sangh admiring the Nazis and the Jews, is explained in terms of this admiration for racial purity. The khaki colour of the RSS uniform, was a natural consequence of Golwalkar’s admiration of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung.
Rape is the other icon of the fascist iconography of hate. It comes as no surprise therefore, that Hindutva elements and the Sangh Parivar were in silent support of the rape of Asifa, the Kathua child victim.
In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, there were two distinct social movements in our country – the anti-colonial movements for a free India and a social emancipation movement associated with Jyotirao Phule, Periyar EV Ramasamy and BR Ambedkar. These two movements, reinforced each other at the grassroots level and effected a general awakening among the people. This awakening presented a vision of free India as a fraternity of equal citizens, each enjoying certain fundamental rights and together electing, on the basis of universal adult franchise, the legislature, and indirectly the executive, of a State that had no religion of its own. The Constitution of independent India enshrined this vision. In a society characterised by millennia of institutionalised inequality embodied in the caste system, this was a remarkable leap, a veritable social revolution. But now, as we complete four and a half years of the BJP government at the Centre, we see an India besieged by Hindutva goons roaming the streets with impunity, terrorising Dalits, Muslims and other minorities, a shrill jingoism that brooks no rational argument, where academics and academic institutions are under systematic attack from the State and lumpen agents, where anyone perceived to be in opposition to the government is pursued by coercive arms of the State and where individuals seen in opposition to the ideology of the ruling party, are pursued with frivolous court cases or worse, murdered by Hindutva elements.
It will take more than just the printed word to set things right.
(Rajiv Tyagi is an erstwhile Mig-21 fighter pilot)
