Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  Six years after the demolition, the BJP, benefiting from India’s “first past the post” electoral system, became the dominant party in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Delhi. Despite its being forced to share power with more secular parties, the BJP’s ideological fervor seemed undiminished, if ultimately unfulfilled. Certainly, the Hindu nationalists have tried hard to whip up Hindu passions. In early 1998, during their first few months in power, they conducted nuclear tests, explicitly aiming them against Pakistan, which responded with its own tests. The VHP and Bajrang Dal distributed radioactive earth from the nuclear test site as sacred offerings; they were also responsible for an unprecedented series of mob attacks on Christians across India. About half of these occurred in Gujarat, but Advani claimed that there was “no law and order problem in Gujarat” and at a meeting of Hindu nationalists shared the dais with the new chief of the RSS, K. S. Sudarshan. The latter spoke of “an epic war between Hindus and anti-Hindus,” asked Christians and Muslims to return to their “Hindu roots,” and also attacked secular intellectuals as “that class of bastards which tries to implant an alien culture in their land.”

  A clearer sense of the worldview RSS members subscribe to from childhood can be had from a long discourse K. S. Sudarshan, the present supreme director of the RSS and a regular adviser to Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani, delivered to RSS members in 1999. In this speech, later published in Hindi with the title of Ek Aur Mahabharata (“One More Mahabharata”), Sudarshan claimed that a new epic war would shortly commence between the demonic and divine powers that apparently forever contended for supremacy in the world. Sudarshan identified the United States as the biggest example of the “rise of inhumanity” in the contemporary world. As he described it, violence was endemic in America, where the institution of the family lay shattered and where “all the tender feelings of man” had died. Referring to the Monica Lewinsky affair, he asked, “What can you say about a nation whose president itself is so crazed with lust?” He claimed that India exercised the “greatest terror” over America, primarily because Indians were extremely intelligent and talented. He had touched on this theme in his praise of India’s nuclear tests in 1998, when he said that “our history has proved that we are a heroic, intelligent race capable of becoming world leaders but the one deficiency that we had was of weapons, good weapons.” America, he said, was trying to subjugate India through its multinationals. Sudarshan ended his speech by denouncing the international conspiracy hatched against India by the United States alongside the World Trade Organization, the pope, and Sonia Gandhi, a conspiracy he predicted would result in a “final victory” of Hindu nationalism.

  This mishmash of anti-American rhetoric, paranoia, moral arrogance, and ill-digested history brings to mind the rants of Osama bin Laden. But the comparison with Al Qaeda or other radical Islamists does not go very far. The RSS doesn’t reject so much as seek an alternative route to Western modernity. In fact, much like the Japanese nationalists of the 1930s, the RSS upholds modern science and technology as the essential way to national strength; four out of the five supreme directors of the RSS so far have held college degrees in medicine, nuclear physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering. Suffering from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the modern West, Hindu nationalists are obsessed with beating the West at its own game.

  During the six years the BJP held power in New Delhi, the RSS members I met exulted in private conversation about their well-placed colleagues in the Indian government. But the RSS does not aim at capturing state power alone. As M. G. Vaidya, the RSS’s official spokesman, an elderly man wearing a dandyish silk scarf and a rakishly tilted black cap, told me in his Delhi office in September 2002, “Forming a state without building and unifying a nation doesn’t work. Look at the Soviet Union. The Communists had power, but the nation was not with them, and they collapsed.”

  Golwalkar had hoped to reorganize India into a microcosm of the RSS, achieving the “perfectly organized state of society wherein each individual has been moulded into a model of ideal Hindu manhood and made into a living limb of the corporate personality of society.”

  Some part of this vision also motivated my father and uncles, who, like hundreds of thousands of Brahmin men in the 1940s, became active members of the RSS; a couple of my uncles were in prison briefly after Gandhi’s murder. These young, educated Brahmins were anxious about how they would fare as a somewhat privileged minority in independent democratic India. The ideal Hindu manhood proposed by the RSS—to be both a Hindu man and to mold your world according to your image—was irresistible to them. The vision did require them to subjugate their will and intellect to a larger cause. But this was and is considered so even now by some a small price to pay for security and identity in a poor, chaotic country.

  The RSS’s large-scale schemes of molding individuals seem closer to the engineering of human souls that Stalin and Hitler attempted in their different ways. They mark the RSS as “totalitarian.” Anxieties about the fascistic outlook and makeup of the RSS are not allayed by its strongly hierarchical and centralized organization, in which the word of the supreme director is final and the members have little say in the shaping of policy.

  There is also its reputation as a secretive, extraconstitutional force, which does not provide details about the size and spread of its membership. “The RSS is not interested in publicity,” I was told by the brusque young man in charge of the RSS’s media office in Delhi. Mr. Sudarshan declined my request for an interview; neither did he reply to a letter seeking clarifications on some of his assertions. The deputy prime minister, L. K. Advani, also declined to be interviewed on his connection with the RSS, which he joined in 1942, as a young student in what is now the Pakistani city of Karachi. Other members of the RSS bluntly refused to talk to someone they described as an “anti-Hindu” writer. The few members I did manage to talk to suddenly became elusive af ter the first meeting.

  “The Hindu nationalists are cautious at present, especially with the foreign press,” a senior Indian journalists told me. “Their fascistic nature has been obscured so far in the West by the fact that India is a democracy, has regular elections, and has a potentially large consumer market. They have managed to speak with two voices, one for foreign consumption and the other for local. But they know that religious extremists are under closer scrutiny worldwide after 9/11, and they know that they don’t look too good after the killings of two thousand Muslims in Gujarat.”

  Tarun Vijay, the youngish editor of the RSS Hindi weekly Panchajanya, who was represented to me by Delhi journalists as the “modern face of Hindu nationalism,” was, he confessed to me, “wary.” He said he was “very skeptical” about foreign media and “left-wing Indians and secularists.” “Westerners don’t understand,” he said, “that the RSS is a patriotic organization working for the welfare of all Indians.” Mr. Vijay’s own career seems to prove this. Born in 1956 to a middle-class family in North India, Mr. Vijay was educated eclectically at schools run by Gandhian and American Presbyterians. But he was impressed most by the “selflessness” and “patriotism” of the RSS members he met as a young man. They inspired him to leave home and work in western India, protecting tribal peoples from exploitation and discrimination. They had even helped arrange his marriage.

  When I met him, Mr. Vijay had been working on Panchajanya, a magazine with a circulation of ninety thousand, for over a decade. The magazine’s first editor, in the late forties, was Vajpayee; the dusty walls of Vijay’s office are covered with large enlargements of Vajpayee’s old editorials demanding that the Indian government take an aggressive line with Pakistan over Kashmir. During that time, the Hindu nationalists became the most powerful political group in India, and Mr. Vijay was considered to have contributed to their success. The English-language newsmagazine Outlook described him as one of the closest confidants of Deputy Prime Minister Advani. He would show up frequently on STAR TV, India’s most prominent news channel. For some time he appeared to be destined fo
r even higher things—a ministerial or advisory position with the federal governments, an ambassador’s job. But when we met, his suave manner often broke to reveal impatience and restlessness.

  “I was educated at a Christian school,” he said. “Some of my best friends are Muslims. My wife wears jeans, and she wears her hair short; we eat meat at Muslim homes; we go to church on Christmas Day. There are reasonable people among Muslims, but they are afraid to speak out their minds. We are trying to have a dialogue with them. We are trying to talk with Christians also. After all, Jesus Christ is my greatest hero. But the left-wing and secular people are always portraying us as anti-Muslim and anti-Christian fanatics.”

  An Indian journalist who reported regularly on the RSS later explained Mr. Vijay’s defensiveness as that of an ambitious man who recognizes the extreme aspects of Hindu nationalism as a disadvantage in the modern world. The journalist thought I should meet Uma Bharti, probably the most famous woman among the Hindu nationalists and one of the senior leaders accused of demolishing the mosque in Ayodhya in 1992.

  Power and responsibihty—she was now the federal minister for sports and youth affairs—seemed to have tempered her nationalist zeal. I met her at her office, where her ocher robes—ocher, the Hindu color of renunciation—stood out brilliantly against the bare blue-painted walls, and the bureaucrats running around in Western-style trousers and shirts seemed the employees of a spiritual self-help corporation. Ms. Bharti, then forty-two years old, and a self-declared sanyasin, someone who has renounced the world for the sake of spiritual wisdom, started her life in a poor low-caste village in Central India. A decade ago her tales of Muslim cruelty toward Hindus sent her vast audiences into a frenzy. But in her conversation with me, Ms. Bharti seemed keen to distance herself from Hindu nationalism. In fact, her aides granted me an interview on the condition that I would question her only about her work among underprivileged Indians.

  She brushed aside a question about the killings in Gujarat and instead told me that she had not forgotten what it meant to be poor, low-caste, and a woman in a small village in the middle of nowhere. She was very young when her father, a Communist activist fighting against local landlords, died. Her mother worked as a menial laborer in order to support her family. She was four when she saw her house burned down and the family cattle destroyed by a vengeful landlord in her village. It was then she began to memorize the Hindu epics, mostly by listening to other people recite them. Devout Hindus invited her to their homes for religious discourses. She acquired a reputation as a divinely inspired speaker. Later, local leaders of the VHP saw her potential and turned her into a performer before the large, intense Hindu audiences clamoring for a Rama temple.

  It was a sense of injustice—why were Hindus not allowed to worship where Lord Rama was born?—that had provoked her into joining the campaign for the Rama temple in Ayodhya. But, she said, she now derived her “ultimate satisfaction” from attacking poverty and social injustice. She felt herself inspired by not just Flanuman, the Hindu monkey god, and Shivaji, the seventeenth-century militants Hindu chieftain, but also Che Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary. For her religious past that she now wished to outgrow, Ms. Bharti had a simple explanation. She wanted to fight injustice, she had wanted power, and “religion seemed the only way to have it.”

  3. Engineering Souls

  After a few days in Delhi, I traveled to the Central Indian city of Nagpur, where the RSS was established in 1925. At first, Nagpur seems an unlikely birthplace for the RSS. Its grand colonial buildings and broad avenues confirm its reputation as an educational and administrative center. Its new shopping complexes and residential high-rises speak of the affluence the city has known since the Indian economy was liberalized in the early 1990s. Nagpur has few Muslims, and its largest community consists of Dalits, who have traditionally shied away from the RSS, which they consider, not unfairly, as dominated by, and serving the interests of, Brahmin. It was in Nagpur in 1956 that Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who was a disciple of the American philosopher Jolrn Dewey and who draftee the Indian constitution, led a mass conversion of low-caste Hindus to Buddhism in protest against the inequities of Brahminical Hinduism.

  I went to see Shyarn Pandharipande, who belongs to an old Brahmin family and now edits Nagpur’s only monthly feature magazine in English. Mr. Pandharipande’s father was an early member of the RSS, and so was Mr. Pandharipande himself, before his disillusionment with Hindu nationalist ideology led him toward Candhi-inspired environmental organizations. His long experience of the RSS seems to have given him an acute insight into its workings. He told me that when Dr. Hegdewar, a native of Nagpur, set up the RSS in 1925, his first recruits were all very young Brahmin men from educated middle-class families. He persuaded some of these Brahmins to travel to many different parts of India and set up RSS branches there. It was these missionaries who first brought most of the current leaders of the BJP—Vajpayee and Advani—into the RSS. The RSS really began, Mr. Pandharipande said, as a rearguard action by privileged and insecure Brahmins who felt that they would have little place in a new democratic India where low-caste Hindus would grow assertive and demand their rights.

  In 1926 the first shakha (assembly) was held in an open ground. Young RSS members, dressed in khaki shorts, white shirts, and black caps, did military-style drills, played traditional Indian team games, learned to use the lathi (a thick bamboo stick), and were intellectually indoctrinated with ideas about Muslim invaders and the need for Hindu unity. In 2000 the RSS celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday with a giant shakha at its Nagpur headquarters of sixty thousand uniformed men and boys.

  The shakha quickly became the most important ritual in the life of an RSS member; it was also a recruiting ground for new members, mostly boys, attracted by the idea of open-air games. One evening, a couple of months ago, I went looking for a shakha in Nagpur. I was accompanied by Devendra, a young advertising executive in his mid-twenties. He told me that he had attended RSS shakhas as a child much in love with the outdoors, but then, like most people of his generation, he had grown bored of the Indian games. He had wanted to play tennis, but the RSS men disapproved of Western sports.

  We drove through a sudden monsoon shower. The streets were empty; so were the small parks within middle-class localities where the shakhas were usually held. We were about to give up when unexpectedly we found a crowd of middle-aged men in a leaky damp-stained room at the corner of one of the larger parks.

  These were mostly retired Brahmin professionals, engineers, doctors, civil servants, the kind of middle-class people that had always formed the backbone of the RSS. They sat in neat rows on the damp cement floor, many of them dressed in the RSS uniform. Before them, on a small stage, were framed photographs of the RSS’s founder Dr. Hegdewar—his moustache in the photo almost as thick as the marigold garland that framed his face—and of the densely bearded Guru Golwalkar, Hegdewar’s successor. An ocher flag hung listlessly over the photographs.

  We had arrived during a baudhik, an intellectual session. A thin man in a black cap gave a long, rambling speech, the principal, and perhaps overplayed, themes of which were the perfidy of Muslims, the cunning of Christian missionaries, and the need for Hindu unity. The elderly audience, which had listened to the same speech many times before, was attentive. As he spoke, blank white envelopes were passed around the assembled crowd, to be filled with rupee notes. When the talk ended, we walked in a brisk queue toward the stage, taking it in turns to pick up rose petals from an urn on the floor and throw them in the general direction of Dr. Hegdewar’s photograph, before dropping the envelopes in a little bag and walking back to our seats. The RSS prayer—“Satutations to these. O loving Motherland”—and some slogans—“Victory to Mother India!”—concluded the shakha.

  I had been, I later discovered, to the annual ceremony called Guru Dakshina (“Offering to the Guru”), where RSS members express their dedication to the aims of the organizations in the form of a cash donation.
The ceremony was repeated at roughly forty-five thousand shakhas the RSS now holds across India and also, as reported by newspapers the next day, at the home of a senior minister in New Delhi, where Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani joined other RSS members in affirming their allegiance to the elite order of Hindu nationalism.

  The superior organization of the RSS, which until recently reached up to the highest levels of the Indian government, is its strength in a chaotic country like India. Its members run not just the biggest political party in India but also educational institutions, trade unions, literary societies, and religions sects; they work to indoctrinate tribals and low-caste groups as well as affluent Indians living in the West. It is through what Guru Golwalkar called the “untiring, silent endeavor of hundreds and thousands of dedicated missionaries” that the RSS hopes to create a Hindu nation.

  The scale and diversity of this essentially evangelical effort are remarkable. I was startled when Tarun Vijay triumphantly showed me his magazine’s headline about the patenting of cow urine in the United States. Western science, he said, had validated an ancient Hindu belief in the holiness of the cow; it was another proof of how the holistic Hindu way of life anticipated and indeed was superior to the discoveries of modern science, economics, ecology, and sociology. The cow had reemerged as the key to self-sufficient, ecologically sustainable living.