Parsis and Hindutva's ethnic nationalism
Hindutva is highly influential in India. It is comprised of a section of largely upper caste Hindus and is distinct from the religion of Hinduism (Jaffrelot 1993). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of this movement (Hansen 1999, 10) and in the 2014 national elections the BJP was elected and Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India. Modi has spent his entire adult life advancing the Hindutva ideology (Teltumbde 2014; Jaffrelot 2008). Prior to his election as Prime Minister he was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, which has been described as the 'Laboratory of Hindutva' (Spodek 2010, 349). Several authors argue that a pogrom or state sanctioned violence against Muslims occurred in 2002 whilst Modi was Chief Minister, although his culpability is disputed (Spodek 2010, 363; Berenschot 2011, 181–182; Patel 2002, 4826; Sarkar 2002, 2874); Ashis Nandy (2002, 106) has described Modi as fitting the clinical diagnosis of a fascist and a Muslim leader described his model of governance as one of marginalisation (Seervai 2014).
I draw upon Christophe Jaffrelot's (2011, 44–45, 85) reading of Hindutva as an ethnic nationalist movement in order to explicate it and the scholarly framework for understanding such movements. Jaffrelot destabilises the popular position that Hindutva is an anti-secular movement. For an example of such a position see Amartya Sen's comments (Guha 2014). Jaffrelot argues that Hindutva constructs' Hindu identity and the Indian nation by drawing upon European theories. The nation is defined by race, religion, language and a sacred land encapsulated in the phrase 'Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan' (Jaffrelot 2011, 45). In this schema Hindus are defined as an ethnic group. Such an approach enables Hindutva actors to sidestep the unanswerable question of what Hinduism is. It decouples the question of Hindu identity from a definition of Hinduism. In Hindutva thought, the Indian nation has been weakened by Muslim and British conquest. For Hindutva, the Indian nation is defined by a threatening Other of Muslims and Christians.
Hostility to Muslims is central to the founder of the movement, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who invented the term Hindutva. Savarkar began his political career opposing British rule in India for which he was jailed for two consecutive life terms. In prison he came into contact with Muslims involved in the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement that developed from 1919 in the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. This contact transformed him from a revolutionary into a Hindu nationalist. He became convinced that Muslims, with their pan-Islamic sympathies, were more of a threat to Hindus than the British.
Hindutva took form in the 1920s against and in parallel with the secular nationalism of the Indian National Congress. They each represent a different strand of nationalist thought. Broadly the Congress subscribes to Mahatma Gandhi’s conception of India as a collection of equal religious communities. Secular in this sense does not mean a separation of religion and state, rather the state did not privilege one religion over another. Although it has been argued that there is a form of soft Hindutva within the Congress, it is generally understood that it is not the Hinduness that constitutes India, the nation is not constituted by an ethnic group or one religion, rather the secular nationalism of the Congress seeks to address each community’s distinct traditions and desires. The difference between them can be seen in the origins of Hindutva as a splinter group within the Congress opposed to Gandhi's alliance with the Khilafat movement. Whilst Gandhi used a Hindu idiom to express his political agenda this did not preclude supporting a pan-Islamic movement. The Hindutva group was eventually ejected from the Congress due to its radical communal ideology. Today the foremost Hindutva political party, the BJP and the Congress are political opponents (Jaffrelot 2007, 14, 17). One of the key contemporary differences emerging from ethnic and secular imaginations of the nation can be seen in the language they and their supporters use to describe each other. The Congress are derided as “pseudo-secularists” for their support of special status provisions for minority communities such as personal law relating to divorce. In turn the BJP are derided as “communalist” for advancing the interests of one community over another.
However, both Hindutva and the Congress share a similar conception of India as divided into a majority and minorities. Appadurai (2006) and Pandey (1999) have both pointed out, the conception of ethnic majority and minorities developed by borrowing the language of parliamentary democracy and jurisprudence. It is the ascribing of terms developed in the context of temporary political majorities and minorities to the permanency of ethnicity. It is numerical strength that determines who is a minority and who is a majority legally, politically and nationally. Muslims and Parsis are minorities in India because they are numerically less than Hindus. Conversely, in Pakistan and Bangladesh it is Muslims who are the majority and Hindus the minority. For the Congress the Indian nation is constituted by both majority and minority communities, for Hindutva it is the majority who constitute the nation. It is important to note that majority and minorities are mutually constituted, there can be no question of majority and minority without the existence of the other, If there were no minority communities there can be no majority. (Pandey 1999, 608)
In Hindutva thought the majority Hindu Indian nation and its minorities are delineated by an historical argument. The title page of Savarkar's (1923) seminal book, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? defines a Hindu as 'a person who regards this land of Bharatvarsha, from the Indus to the Seas as his Father-Land as well as his Holy-Land that is the cradle land of his religion'. Savarkar distinguishes Hindus from non-Hindus by the Indic or non-Indic origins of a community's religion. Hindus embody the Indian nation because their religion originated in India and they are the most numerous (Jaffrelot 2011, 45). Christians and Muslims, as followers of non-Indic religions were assigned subordinate positions in a Hindu nation (Pirbhai 2008, 39). Scholars have understood history as an integral component of the Hindutva ideology; the Hindu nation is defined by it, Muslims and Christians excluded by it (Thapar 2007; Michael Gottlob 2007, 181–3; Nandy 1995, 64–65). An historical definition includes all Hindu castes, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, Dalits and Adivasis as Hindus because their religions are of Indian origin. Such a definition excludes Muslims, Christians, Parsis and Jews because their religions are of foreign origin.
Yet Hindutva does not represent a threat to the Parsis. The Parsis are a tiny ethno-religious community of Zoroastrians who claim descent from Iranians who fled religious persecution in the centuries following the Islamic conquest of Iran. They are the world’s foremost adherents of a religion that is at least three thousand years old which once dominated what is now the Middle East and Central Asia. Today they number about 61,000 in India and are disproportionately wealthy. While initially reticent about Modi and the BJP, the Parsis have recently begun to support him. Numerous Parsis expressed their support for Modi to me during fieldwork in India during 2013; also see (Sunavala 2014). The BJP together with the Congress have supported efforts by the community to reverse their demographic decline. Both parties have supported various efforts to preserve and publicise the community's achievements and unique culture (India-Asia News Service 2014; Chakrabarty 2013). The absence of a threat posed by Hindutva towards the Parsis is illustrated by a story a Parsi told to me about his father's experience with the Shiv Sena, an ethnic nationalist movement in the Hindutva fold. For a study of Shiv Sena see (Lele 1995). During the 1992-3 Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai his father was driving to the airport to greet a guest and came to a temporary road block run by Shiv Sena members. They pulled his father from the car believing him to be a Muslim because of his beard. They ripped his shirt off and saw that he was wearing the sacred shirt and thread that identify him as a Parsi. The Shiv Sena workers apologised and let him go. I was told that the Shiv Sena is not hostile towards Parsis because when the founder of the movement first came to Bombay he stayed with Parsi friends. This is not to suggest that all Parsis support Hindutva. Many socially conscious Parsis I have interviewed are appalled by the ideology of Hindutva and the actions of Modi, but they do not perceive a threat to themselves.
Savarkar, Modi and other Hindutva actors have consistently expressed a fondness for individual Parsis and the community as a whole (Savarkar, n.d.; Savarkar 1984; Golwalkar 1966; Madhok 1970, 33). In 2011 Modi commissioned the construction of 'World Heritage Centres for Religious Harmony' in the Gujarati villages of Udvada and Sanjan (Dna 2011). These centres celebrate Parsi heritage in Gujarat and India. Modi said at the announcement 'When the world's smallest minority gives a political leader a standing ovation, no greater stamp of approval is required.' (Sunavala 2014) When Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat he recited a version of the Parsi story at a press conference to announce his successful inducement of a Parsi industrial conglomerate's planned new car factory (The Economic Times 2008). In 2013 the Parsis were celebrated as 'The World's Best Minority' by Modi’s state government in a play performed as part of an annual celebration of the creation of the state known as Gujarat Day.
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To be continued ...
Cheers, Doc
Have you come across anything that led you to believe that Parsis loved Muslims, to explain your shock?
There are at most cultural affinities of food. And mingling in the upper crust. Where religion is kept safely aside.
Cheers, Doc
