Identity is deeply political. Politics that it generates has taken us all by storm. Global politics today manifests a clear shift to a politics of identity. We in India are no exception. All identity politics is a politics of recognition. Some say that politics of recognition got globally intensified with 9/11. Maybe in India it took roots with the demolition of Babri Masjid. We may also locate its origins in the disruption that colonisation has caused.
Ashish Nandy has studied the loss of self under colonisation and its recovery in post-colonial India. Gopal Guru of JNU studies how humiliation and cruelties that the Dalits suffered for centuries at the hands of the upper castes continue to drive dalit emancipatory self assertion/ struggles in our country. This means politics of recognition is deeply embedded in the politics of caste and has afflicted us for centuries. But due to neo-liberal economic policies of our Government in the 1990s, we can discern new intensities in the politics of recognition. There are no prizes for guessing which political party continues to benefit through the politicisation of this deep seated human need. Meera Nanda, in her book, God of the Market: How globalisation is making India more Hindu, attempts to capture the manner in which a kind of economics feeds into the violent self assertion of Hindus in our country.
Charles Taylor, a Canadian thinker emphasises that due recognition is not just a courtesy that we owe to people but is a basic human need. While Karl Marx and the Marxists focused on the material production of the self (economics), thinking that it is foundational to all societies, we are slowly realising that the symbolic production of the self is equally fundamental to humans. The symbolic production of the self is certainly based on the material conditions. Maybe, we can see how with a clever cocktail of the material and symbolic production of the self (development and Hindutva) that PM Modi rose to power. Congress standing on the left of the centre largely focused only on the material production of the self failed to read the signs of the time and therefore, could not capture the imagination of the people of our country. Besides, the corruption tag that was hurled at it stuck to it and crippled its electoral prospects. Although, the recent judgement on the alleged 2G scam has cleared some of the dark clouds yet the face of Congress has still to come clean of the muck of corruption that is disfiguring it. Thanks to arrogance and faulty economics policies by the present ruling dispensation, Gujarat elections, has shown that Congress is receiving its lost recognition. Several Indians are collectively feeling that BJP has violated their moral expectations and it appears that downward slide of BJP is beginning to look more likely.
We may understand how a sense of violation of moral expectation is a significant part of human struggle for recognition, if we study the work of Axel Honneth, a third generation thinker of the critical theory of Frankfurt School. Honneth teaches that ‘ethical life’ is a fruit of a struggle for recognition. Recognition is linked to human quest for self realisation and is therefore bound to ethics and the highest values close to human heart. The ideal of Hindu Rashtra, a deep manifestation of desire to gain recognition of the global community, may continue to feed the desire of several Hindus in our country. But the fact that it seems to lack moral stature, brings it down. One can notice the fall of moral standards in our society (like the violence of the lynch mobs on the streets) has produced discontent among Indians at large. Honneth points out that all self realisation is depended on mutual recognition. This is why adharma that has taken hold of our society cannot be the cost that we are ready and willing to pay towards the rise of a Hindu Rashtra. In fact, without moving away from dharma/ righteousness, there cannot be an exclusionary Hindu Rashtra as envisioned by the RSS-BJP combine. The dharma of Hinduism cannot promote an unethical life that pushes its other (minorities) on the margins of society. Unfortunately, a politics that has shown it’s back to the dharma of pristine Hinduism is adulterating Hinduism and steadily moving towards its self destruction. Religious Hinduism is dying and political Hinduism is on the rise.
The grammar of politics of recognition being moral has the power to bring about an outrage and indignation against anything that violates a collective sense of self realisation of humans in any given society. We saw such an outrage in the Nirbhaya rape case in Delhi. The rise of BJP to power was based on the large scale outrage against the corruption of the Congress. Thus, when the normative ideal of a society is violated, people feel that their need for self recognition is being violated. This leads to a sense of deprivation of conditions for self realisation.
The identity politics that is brewing in our country is chiefly denying the minorities, tribals, dalits and the women conditions of self respect and dignity that are needed to full self realisation of humans. But paradoxically, such a denial of conditions also simultaneously becomes denial of full realisation of Hinduism that sees the world as Vasudaiva Kutumbukam. It is only at the cost of degeneration of grammar of Hinduism that a corrosive fascist politics of Hindutva has grown into our country. Hinduism can only be secular in relations to its other. This is why a secular Indian state may be a true Hindu Rashtra. Unfortunately, it is being destroyed in front of our eyes. India cannot be viewed in isolation. It cannot be imagined without its minorities and plurality. Violence to minorities has no place in authentic Hinduism. The fact that rapid Hindutva seems to have come to dominate our society, we may say that it is (un) hinduising Hinduism. Hence, there is a need to save Hinduism from Hindutva. The loss of moral grammar has brought about a loss of the grammar of Hinduism. Several Hindus are out raged and cognise this decadence. Hence, we must recognize that the politics of identity (that dismantles the moral fabric our society) is cutting the branch on which we are sitting.
We can recognise the growing discontent about this loss in our country. Hence, to save India, we have to save Hinduism from Hindutva.
(The author is Professor of Rachol Seminary).
