The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) along with the support of many other parties can now muster a two thirds majority in both houses of parliament and that is what it has done in amending the Right to Information Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Article 370 of the Constitution to the detriment of freedom in this country. In the last case it has also imposed a complete curfew on the Kashmir valley to prevent any protests there against the changes brought about in the status of Jammu and Kashmir. Thus, effectively, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the force behind the BJP and provides it with its main leaders, including the Prime Minister and the Party President, is now in control of the Indian state apparatus and also that of 15 states either by itself or in coalition with like minded parties. It would be of interest to analyse how what began as a social movement has now moved very close to achieving its goal of establishing a Hindu Rashtra in India while other social and political movements for justice have become marginalised.
As all participants in social movements know the biggest hurdle in getting one going and then sustaining it is that of lack of finances. Social or political movements for justice invariably find it difficult to garner funds from those they fight for since they have little funds anyway. The moneyed class will not contribute funds to social movements which tend to undermine their power. Therefore, it is always a struggle to sustain for these movements. Even if they do manage to attain critical mass in some cases, as the communists and socialists did for quite some time, eventually the exigencies of working within a capitalist framework have meant that they have metamorphosed into parties that work for the capitalists and not for justice for the masses.
This is where the RSS has scored. Initially its clarion call of establishing a Hindu Rashtra resonated with the obscurantist Sarvarnas who were losing out to the more modern Savarnas who were embracing liberal education and getting the new jobs created by the colonial administration. These obscurantist Savarnas had wealth earned from feudal lands and so they funded the growth of the RSS. It also received support from the Hindu religious congregations for its project to organise the diverse sects into a systematic Hindu religion. Since some of these congregations and their temples are wealthy they too provided funds to the RSS. Thus by the time of independence the RSS had acquired critical mass and it had enough resources to spread far and wide its message of Hindu nationalism. Some of its active members even planned and executed the murder of Gandhi in 1948.
The RSS then launched a political party called Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. Possibly as a consequence of the state backlash from the murder of Gandhi, it astutely decided to pursue the parliamentary path to power instead of one of armed struggle. It diligently worked to build up its cadre through community groups called Shakhas and it is these cadres that also worked for the Jana Sangh and gradually built up the party. Initially its base was in Maharashtra and in the Hindi heartland. It came to power at the centre and in the some states in 1977 as part of the Janata Party in the elections after the revocation of the internal emergency which had been declared in 1975.
After the breakup of the Janata Party in 1980 the RSS formed the BJP and since then, except for a brief hiccup in 1984 when due to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, it ended up with only two seats in the subsequent parliamentary elections, it hasn't looked back. It also learnt from its failed experiment with socialism along with the socialists in the Janata Party and adopted an aggressive Hindu nationalist line that was also pro-business. This was crucial because the Indian economy was opened up from 1986 onwards and the power of global capitalism was unleashed in India. A huge NRI support base of the RSS began to be built up along with supporters from the business world in India. Religion is deeply a part of the psyche of people in India and so overtly religious programmes of action were adopted and the Babri Masjid dispute which had been peripheral earlier was brought to centre stage and the Muslims systematically othered. Nowhere more so than in Kashmir which is now under a lockdown.
Once it gained state power at the Centre in 1998 the RSS gained control over immense state resources and its programmes for reaching out among the masses increased substantially. I can speak from my own experience as an activist at the grassroots. The RSS actively began poaching our own grassroots workers by giving them many sops. It also used these resources to spread into the rest of India apart from its traditional base in the Hindi heartland and Maharashtra. Similarly it was totally pro-business in its governance and consequently it lost power in the elections in 2004 to a Congress led coalition. Unfortunately, the Congress and the various Socialist and Communist Parties pursued corrupt ways over the decade that they were in power after that and so the masses plumped for the BJP once again in 2014. Such is the negative perception among the masses regarding the bankruptcy of the Congress and the other parties including the Dalit formation Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that the BJP has come back to power again with an even greater majority in 2019 and is now emboldened to aggressively follow its Hindu nationalist agenda. It has now used its financial power to twist the arms of quite a few regional parties and get them on its side also. Despite having now become the masters of the Indian state, the RSS is still working at the grassroots through its cadres who work on the same shoe strings personally as they used to do earlier.
This astute march to power of the RSS has to be contrasted with the political trajectory of the Socialists, Communists and the new social movements who are now on the margins. Unlike the RSS, their opposition to the capitalist dispensation meant that they were strapped for resources. When they did come to power they soon realised that they would have to toe the capitalist line and so they jettisoned most of their pro people agenda and became corrupt. The BSP is the prime example in this respect. It too grew out of a social movement of the Dalits into a political party but then it could not spread its wings outside Uttar Pradesh and there too it diluted its social justice agenda to follow a capitalist and corrupt path. While the RSS has a clear cut philosophy and agenda, the socialists and communists do not have one anymore as their practice has become capitalist.
The India Against Corruption Movement also metamorphosed into a political party and was sensationally able to capture power in the state of Delhi of all places. However, due to its sticking to its principles of anti-corruption it has come up against the problem of resource mobilisation and it is also continually hamstrung by the BJP government at the centre. Consequently it too has not been able to spread its wings and stands in danger of losing power in the forthcoming state elections as it has lost much of its cadre and mass base in the interim.
The only anti-capitalist political formation that has retained its ideology is the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) in its various factions. While the Maoists who are fighting for a revolutionary overthrow of the Indian state are as a consequence restricted to a few remote forested locations, the parliamentary faction called Liberation faces the problem of lack of resources and so has a small mass base which is shrinking.
The most pathetic is the situation of the social movements. We are still sticking to our ideology and we also have an alternative to the present development paradigm that has devastated agricutlure, livelihoods and the environment. However, with time our access to resources has dwindled drastically and so we are neither able to maintain our cadre nor expand our mass base. Even winning panchayat elections has become difficult let alone capture power at the state or central level.
The immediate future, therefore, does not seem rosy at all. The RSS with its control of the state institutions and the fourth most powerful military in the world and cavalier disregard for constitutional propriety can easily declare an emergency on the country and clamp down on democratic rights in pursuit of its retrograde aim of establishing a Hindu Rashtra. Especially as it has continually bungled on the economic front and the economy is in serious trouble with agricultural and industrial production in recession and unemployment figures increasing. Dark days seem to lie ahead.
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