COMMENTARY

Hindutvas Psychological
Warfare
The Insidious Agendas of Ghar Wapsi
P K Vijayan, Karen Gabriel

Hindutva demands self-erasure

from the minorities as the price of
being part of the nation.

P K Vijayan (pk.vijayan@gmail.com) and Karen

Gabriel teach English Literature at Hindu
College and St Stephens College, respectively,
both institutions affiliated to the University of
Delhi.

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he coming to power of the

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with
full majority in the Lok Sabha under Narendra Modi has begun to have the
very effects that many of us had been
dreading. The Sangh Parivars selfdefinitive agenda to create a Hindu
rashtra out of secular India has suddenly gained enormous traction, within
and outside the government. Religious
minorities have been feeling more and
more vulnerable and threatened over the
last few months that the BJP has been in
power. Within the government, central
ministers, Members of Parliament (MPs),
state ministers as well as members of
state legislative assemblies, have all openly begun airing explicitly communal sentiments, with barely a check or remonstration. Outside the government, leaders
of political parties, religious heads, and
members of the Sangh Parivars various
outfits have gone even further, in spewing
venomously communal hate-speech, and
inciting and machinating several incidents of communal violence.
The most recent instance of such brazen
disregard for constitutionally guaranteed
rights and protections came, in fact, in the
form of an open undermining of the Constitution itself: the governments own publicity campaigns deleted the words secular and socialist in their representations
of the Preamble of the Constitution. The
unprecedented manner in which their
communal agenda is being pressed is evidently a consequence of the BJP having full
majority in the Lok Sabha it no longer
fears being checked by its coalition partners. This is a major difference from the
earlier National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
regime, when the BJP had to negotiate coalition partners who could bring down the
government if they were unhappy with it.
The current concerted and brazen assertion of Hindutva is also substantially

an effect of having Narendra Modi, the

mastermind of Gujarat 2002, at the helm,
rather than a Vajpayee-like figure, who
would at least nominally insist on restraint, and maintain a facade of respecting the rights of minorities. But the impunity with which Hindutva is being asserted now arises out of the well-founded confidence that Modi himself is of the
same mindset. What used to be referred
to as the lunatic fringe of the Parivar is
now boldly moving from the periphery
to the centre from being lunacy to becoming the rationale itself, of the Hindu
right. The worst they need expect is gentle deprecation of the more excessive
acts but for the most part, there is an
air of indulgence, as, for instance, with
Modi excusing his own minister, Sadhvi
Niranjan Jyotis hate-speech in December 2014, by invoking her village and
backward caste background.
Insidious Assault
The recent ghar wapsi programme initiated by the parivar is in one sense the
most insidious of its assaults on the minorities. The traditional Parivar line on
minorities has been to treat them as
aliens: since, in this discourse, India belongs to Hindus, non-Hindus specifically Muslims and Christians are outsiders who should leave India to the
Hindus (Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs are
exempted from this because they are
considered part of the larger Hindu fold;
and Parsis are too small a community to
matter). BJP MP Sakshi Maharajs comment that Good days have come; now
those with four wives and 40 children
shouldnt be allowed in the country is a
typical example of such a perception of
Muslims. (He also went on to say, I also
want to ask our people to follow the instruction of sadhus and have at least four
children a clear manifestation of the
anxiety of numbers underlying the imagination of the religious minorities (see
http://www. dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2902564/Sakshirefuses-apologise-calling-Hindu-familyfour-children.html).
One major reason for communal violence against religious minorities has been
precisely this sentiment: the violence
not only aims to kill off as large a

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COMMENTARY

number of these alien communities as

possible, but also (a) to render the remaining homeless and destitute; (b) to
drive home the lesson that they live in
India at the mercy and benevolence of
the majority community; that they therefore have, and can make, no claims on
the country; and (c) to threaten and intimidate them into a condition of perpetual
migration and/or self-ghettoisation. These
points require some elaboration.
First, even hardcore votaries of Hindutva are well aware that communal violence
in and of itself cannot eliminate the presence of the minorities not just because
of the practical problem of having to kill
off millions, but because of the ethico-legal implication that this would amount to
genocide, perhaps on a globally unprecedented scale. Second, rendering them
homeless and destitute is also not a solution, in and of itself, since it can only result in a large lumpen population with all
its attendant social and civic problems.
(However, it can and does contribute to
the general sense of intimidation and fear
required to keep a population quiescent
of which, more, shortly.)
Third, the consequent impulse to
escape the intimidation through migration and/or ghettoisation has its limits
primarily physical and geographical,
insofar as there are only so many spaces
that they can escape to within the nation.
It has limits also because the inevitable
inertia inherent to all communities hinders the possibility of frequent migration, on the one hand, while the ghettos
and camps that do form, inevitably start
resisting the pressure to accommodate
more migrants, on the other. The relief
camps that spring up almost after every
incident of communal violence themselves mutate into ghettos in due course,
from where the only escape is either to
migrate to another region or to leave the
country altogether. The only other escape option that emerges then is for
them to lose their identities as religious
minorities by converting into the majoritarian Hindu community. And this is
the solution to the minorities problem that Hindutva votaries have now
refashioned, out of the 19th century
shuddhi rituals of the Arya Samaj, as the
ghar wapsi programme.
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MARCH 14, 2015

Minorities as Prodigal Offspring

The ghar wapsi programme is insidious
precisely because it offers to facilitate
this last option it is the carrot to the
stick of communal violence. The metaphor of ghar wapsi, or homecoming,
reinforces the suggestion that the minority religions do not belong to the
ghar, which is the nation as owned by
the majoritarian community. Furthermore, the representation of the majoritarian religion as home a physical,
but also an affective and familial, space
constructs the minorities as prodigal
offspring, who need only to return
home, to find acceptance. It is not only a
viable alternative to genocide, as a
means of dealing with the unwanted minorities; it actually serves to increase the
numbers of the majority. Yet, even as it
eschews explicit violence, it draws on
the potential for violence to encourage
the minorities to re-convert.
In fact, it is not even acknowledged to
be conversion, because it is represented as
a form of shuddhi or purification, rather
than as conversion: as such, members of
the minorities are understood to have
been defiled by the other religion, rather
than as belonging to it. They are therefore
simply returning to their true religion,
through ghar wapsi; but they do need to
be cleansed off the other religion, not
just converted from it. This speaks volumes
about the attitude of the majoritarian community towards the minorities. They are
not simply members of a different religion, in a neutral, equanimous way; not
even just other and alien, in some fundamentally irreconcilable, but still broadly
neutral way. They are viewed as fundamentally polluting, impure, anathema to
the sanctity of the Hindu, and actively
requiring elimination hence the need
for purification, not just conversion.
Significantly, this ritual purification
is essentially an extension of caste-based
categorisations, the perpetuation of the
idea of the outcaste whether dalit or
foreigner as mleccha (one who is
impure, dirty, uncultured). In other
words, the ghar wapsi programme is
essentially a reiteration of caste, rather
than of religion. This is tellingly confirmed by the fact that the reconverted,
the returning prodigal offspring, despite
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being purified, cannot choose their

caste, but must return to their castes of
origin. For the very large number of the
convertees to Islam and Christianity,
who converted in order to escape the
oppressions and humiliations of the
caste system, ghar wapsi then is not a
very appealing option. This is recognised by Sangh Parivar activists, who
have begun stressing the need to respect
all castes, in an attempt to assuage the
concerns of those targeted by the ghar
wapsi programme.
Somewhat paradoxically, this is also
one of the reasons why the ghar wapsi
programme has been conducted largely
amongst lower-caste members of the minority communities. Apart from the fact
that, as Manjari Katju says, It is also easier to intimidate the poor and marginalised into coming back home (see her
Politics of Ghar Wapsi, EPW, 3 January
2015), each successful ghar wapsi programme will serve as increasing reassurance to the oppressed and humiliated
convertees. The insistence on maintaining the original caste affiliation is also
interesting: it suggests that the Hindu
rights anxiety is specifically about losing
ideological control (almost amounting to
an affective ownership) over the lower
castes, and consequently about losing the
labour force required for the tasks performed by them, but on the terms set by
the upper castes. Since the majority of the
professions and tasks involved are themselves considered to be impure, dirty, defiling, menial, etc, it is worth asking why
the returning prodigals would want to
subject themselves to purification, if the
work they will be taking on and consequently they themselves continues to
be regarded as impure.
Demanding Self-erasure
Even if, for arguments sake, we were to
accept this as an innocent agenda to
simply bring the lost flock of Hinduism
back home, the Hindu right clearly
needs to first set its caste-ridden ghar in
order, before initiating a ghar wapsi.
The fundamental problem, of course, is
that this caste-ridden ghar is the Hindu
nation of the Hindutva imagination if
not in its ideations, then in its practices.
Because the existence of minorities is
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COMMENTARY

thus seen as a defilement of this exclusive and pure entity, the everyday practice of the nation effectively translates
into an everyday pressure to act physically against the minorities whether
as a pressure to commit violence against
the more intractable members of the minorities, or as a pressure to convert, in
the more tractable ones.

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It is this latter that we have referred to as

the more insidious danger, because it relentlessly demands of the minorities that
they see themselves, not only as heterogeneous to the (Hindu) nation, but as a defilement that can only be erased by their
reconversion their ghar wapsi. It is the
insistent erasure of certain kinds of differences, while unrelentingly insisting on

maintaining the validity of, even the need

for, other kinds of differences. In short, and
rather paradoxically, Hindutva demands
self-erasure from the minorities as the price
of being part of the nation. This is mass psychological warfare of the most insidious
kind, conducted essentially to maintain this
fundamental contradiction that constitutes
the basis of the project of the Hindu nation.

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Economic & Political Weekly