by MUKUL DUBE
One reality that is clear to all is that the secular forces in India do not act: we only react. The other side lights fires and we rush to douse the flames. We leave the embers glowing, which makes it easy for the next fire to be lit. Having done what we can to repair the damage caused by the fire, we retreat to our seminar rooms and our writing desks: and there we stay until the next fire forces us off our backsides. We let loose torrents of words but accomplish little or nothing.
To put it more exactly, the communalist camps are continuously active, planning and laying the ground, gathering personnel and materials: while we secularists move only sporadically and as a reaction to what the other side does. They carry out a sequence of actions that fit together into a larger scheme, while each of our actions is fresh, hurried and unrelated to the past and certainly not part of a coherent whole.
Another reality is that the Hindu Right (of which alone I speak in this piece of writing) has been in existence, in much the same form, for 88 years now. I take the birth of the RSS as the crucial point, for the RSS survives and thrives while the other groups and organisations either died or became moribund. The fact that there were precursors to the RSS—that it was born to forebears and not in a vacuum—only means that the Hindu Right has been growing and consolidating for an even longer time than I said.
That there are dozens of Parishads and Dals and Senas and Samitis and Kendras, all working towards a “Hindu Rashtra” or “Akhanda Bharat”, shows how successful the RSS has been in spreading its tentacles, in building a web which now enmeshes all areas of life in India. It has been demonstrated that, for all their nominal autonomy, these outfits cannot even dream of going against the dictates of the RSS. They are parts of the larger organism, for which the expression “Hydra-headed” is used with good reason. What appear to be disagreements among them are simply orchestrated play-acting.
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