How do Hindu nationalists relate to globalization? Malik analyzes the complex and often paradoxical attitudes towards globalization within the "family" of Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Malik suggests that globalization is not perceived as a threat to Indian cultural products, despite sporadic publicity stunts that might suggest otherwise. Instead, he focuses on the diverse political responses by these groups to economic liberalization, including the opening of India to foreign investment since 1991.

Ashok Malik is Associate Editor at the weekly magazine India Today, published in New Delhi. A political journalist for the past 12 years, he has previously worked for The Telegraph (Calcutta), The Hindustan Times and The Times of India (both New Delhi). He has reported and written extensively on India’s governing system, national and local elections, parties and pressure groups. Malik’s current research interests include the impact of religion on politics and, in particular, the Hindu nationalist movement. This article conveys the author’s personal assessment and views, which does not necessarily reflect the editorial position of India Today.

In the days when the British still ruled India – as the apocryphal story goes – rookie civil servants, packed and ready to board the ship to the East, found their training course concluding with an unorthodox valediction. “We have taught you all we know,” the young men were told, “but remember, for everything that is true of India, the opposite is also true.”

It may sound terribly politically incorrect, but imperial wisdom had much to recommend. India, Indian society and the Indian polity are a paradox. Accordingly, it is impossible to make an assessment of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’s Party) and its relationship with globalization outside this broader frame of reference: namely, the acceptance that India is best defined in terms of paradoxes.

This paradox is evident in the fact that an analyst has to consider not one BJP but several BJPs. The BJP heads India’s ruling coalition as the political articulation of Hindu nationalism. Yet each influence group within the BJP that helps shape its policies and ideas has its own individual relationship with globalization or, indeed, with the world. For example, protectionist business lobbies find support among some segments of the BJP. Senior BJP functionaries and ministers, however, see globalization as not just a fait accompli but as the very road to prosperity. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, or World Hindu Council), which is the religious voice of Hindu nationalism and a crucial source of mobilization for the BJP, has no explicit position on the economic dimensions of globalization. Globalization, as a phenomenon, is for the most part beyond the ambit of its concerns.

For a start, it would be important to define globalization in the Indian imagination. The term is used almost exclusively in the economic sense, referring to a breaking down of national barriers to facilitate trade and commerce.

Despite occasional grandstanding, globalization is not seen as a threat to India’s cultural products such as music, films, food and attire. The reason for this is simple enough. Unlike, say, its French counterpart, Indian cinema is not threatened by Hollywood. Local films consistently do better business than American imports. Neither are Indian food habits in danger of being altered. Kentucky Fried Chicken famously shut down its New Delhi outlet, realizing it couldn’t match consumer taste for home-flavored tandoori chicken. “Coca-cola-ization” is a popular term for the spread of American culture in a society, but despite huge advertising budgets, Pepsi Cola and Coca-Cola have barely made a dent in the Indian market.1  As such, any serious debate on globalization involves only its economic rather than its cultural dimension.

The Grandstanding Culturati

Admittedly, there is some rhetoric about the cultural aspects of globalization. This is inextricably linked to fears of “Westernization,” of “Indian values” being wiped out. Such political reflexes are, to be fair, scarcely unique to the BJP and its allies. In the 1960s, Ram Manohar Lohia, a towering socialist leader and no friend of Hindu nationalism, began an agitation that sought to replace English with Hindi. English was, to the Lohia-ites, the “language of imperialism”; Hindi was more rooted in India. The RSS family or Sangh Parivar, of which the BJP and VHP are both a part, is not immune to such sentiment. Ashok Singhal, president of the VHP, has often spoken of “Macaulay’s children” (India’s English-speaking intelligentsia) as ideological enemies.2 

There have also been occasional protests against “Western-style decadence” and “American-style consumerism,” omnibus phrases that really mean whatever one wants them to mean. The most “celebrated” example is what may be termed the “Valentine’s Day ritual.” In 1999, in Kanpur – a city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh – the local unit of the Bajrang Dal (Hanuman’s Army, the youth wing of the VHP) called for a boycott of Valentine’s Day. It was backed by the Ram Sena and Lakshman Sena (Ram’s Army and Lakshman’s Army).3  The two Senas were, roughly speaking, self-appointed vigilante groups with no influence beyond a few neighborhoods. They had come into being shortly after Hindu-Muslim religious riots in December 1993 and called themselves “protectors of Hindu culture.”

Valentine’s Day was never a big event in India. In the 1990s, it was publicized primarily by an Indian greeting cards company, eager to push its sales among romantically inclined young people. In Kanpur in 1999, the Bajrang Dal and the two Senas decided Valentine’s Day threatened Indian culture and took to vandalizing shops and restaurants that invited customers to enjoy the day. The event was widely reported in the news media.

Since then, February 14 has acquired an importance of its own for the publicity-hungry. In 2002, the Shiv Sena – a Hindu nationalist party politically allied to the BJP but, strictly speaking, not part of the Sangh Parivar – organized anti-Valentine’s Day demonstrations in New Delhi, in Pune and Nasik (both in Maharashtra) and in Rajkot (Gujarat). The Bajrang Dal did likewise in Lucknow, Bareilly and other small towns in Uttar Pradesh. In Delhi, furniture at a restaurant was broken.

This is about all there is to the “debate” on the cultural aspects of globalization. The protests have been small and sporadic, the brainchild of local mavericks rather than an organized central command. Senior functionaries of the BJP see such agitation as counterproductive, pointing out that the young people who celebrate Valentine’s Day belong to the very upwardly-mobile urban and small town middle classes that constitute an important part of the BJP’s constituency. Senior VHP leaders see such protests as a trivialization of their cause, diverting attention from the larger goal of consolidating Hindu society as an end in itself as well as a counter to militant Islam.

BJP versus the Congress Party

The BJP represents the most forceful right of center position in Indian politics. It would be easy to describe it as the Hindu version of, for instance, Germany’s Christian Democrats – the party of a deeply religious middle class, steeped in family values, wedded to enterprise, committed to truncating the role of the government in the citizen’s life and inculcated with a deep sense of national identity. Indeed, that was the BJP that emerged in the 1990s. It had two seats in the 544-strong Lower House (Lok Sabha) of the Indian Parliament until the 1989 election. By 1999, the number had swelled to 182. The growth was directly proportional to the crumbling of the Indian National Congress – the original pan-Indian party, better known simply as the Congress – from a robust political organization to a conglomeration of power brokers.

The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, began as a representative party of the Westernized Indian elite. Under Mahatma Gandhi, it acquired a mass character from the 1920s and led the Indian struggle for independence from British rule. When India became independent in 1947, the Congress formed the first government, with Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s protégé, as the first prime minister. Between 1947 and 1989, the Congress Party ruled India for 40 of 42 years, 38 under Nehru and his progeny, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.4 

The Congress imploded in the 1990s after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by a Tamil terrorist group. As a result, regional groupings took its place in many states. At the level of the federal polity, the vacuum was partially filled by the BJP. The Congress could no longer address the aspirations of middle class India. This was a new, post-independence generation of Indians, no longer unsure of its place in the world order – rather, some would argue, it was and is a trifle cocksure. It had benefited from the moderate educational and economic progress independent India had made but was anxious for a better life, to be realized at a faster pace.

Until the economy was liberalized in 1991, India’s foreign policy was officially “non-aligned” but decidedly tilted towards the Soviets during the Cold War. Nehru was strongly influenced by Marxist socialism. He saw the Soviet Union as an industrial role model for India and borrowed from the idea of a planned economy. Nehruvian socialism began with an emphasis on state-controlled heavy industry but, by the late 1960s, it had established a state stranglehold over virtually every area of the economy. State-owned units became expensive patronage dispensers rather than business corporations. When the Soviet Union acknowledged its economic miseries and finally collapsed, Indians obviously began to ask critical questions about Nehru’s legacy.

Another facet of the “Nehruvian project” was a secularism that was not so much the separation of church and state as a safeguard of minority rights. Hindu nationalists felt this was overdone, pointing out that Muslims and other communities had been allowed to retain their religious personal law rather than conform to a “uniform civil code.” According to such Hindu nationalists, Nehru and his successors were guilty of a condescension towards Indian culture and Hindu tradition that had, for the most part, also marked Western imperialism. It was this sense of injury that the BJP and Sangh Parivar adroitly exploited.

Under L.K. Advani – BJP president from 1986 to 1991 and perhaps still its most trenchant strategist – the BJP posited itself as everything the Congress was not. Nehru had often taken an antiseptic view of Hindu religiosity, and his successors were unable or unwilling to shake off this received wisdom. In contrast, the BJP eschewed left-liberalism and championed Hindu nationalism. The Congress had become the party of crony socialism; the BJP positioned itself as the party of enterprise.

Since its founding in 1951, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Indian People’s Party, the earlier incarnation of the BJP) had drawn sustenance from the politically conservative Baniya or Vaish merchant communities and from small manufacturers. Since these sections were also most vulnerable to the tyranny of the minor bureaucrat that so exemplified the “Congress system,” they expectedly gravitated towards the only mainstream party that spoke against an over-regulated economy. The “Baniya base” had led to the BJP being awarded the epithet “Party of Shopkeepers.” By the late 1980s, it was wearing this as a badge of pride. Since political ideas are easiest to espouse in the abstract when a party is in the opposition, the BJP then was probably more zealous about globalization than it is today.

In 1991, when a Congress administration initiated economic liberalization, the BJP practically accused it of stealing its agenda. At that time, India was on the brink of a financial crisis, with inflation touching 17% (very high by Indian standards and politically risky) and both the trade gap and fiscal deficit were alarming.5  The Congress’ submission to market economics, BJP ideologues argued, was not born of belief but of exigency. This assertion was the high point of the BJP’s self-projection as a modern, Thatcherite party. However, it did not quite translate subsequently into clear-cut policy formulation in government. The BJP took office in New Delhi in 1998 and since then its support for globalization has been, frankly speaking, fitful.

Why? The answer is both complex and peculiar to Indian conditions.

Roadblocks to Globalization

The Indian economy began to be “decontrolled” and to allow greater room for private initiative in 1991. The process of globalization, however, could be more accurately dated to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on January 1, 1995. If 1991 was about ending state monopolies, 1995 was about lowering the barrier for competition from the world outside. This short interval has meant that, in popular discourse, globalization is often confused with privatization and a market economy.

An example would be illustrative. Presume the government abolishes or otherwise curbs a state monopoly in a particular line of business and allows private enterprise a role (probably with a designated degree of equity participation by a non-Indian entity). In this case, the government ends up being attacked for both privatizing and globalizing. In essence, ideological criticism of privatization has become a sub-set of ideological criticism of globalization. This limits the government’s room to maneuver.

Furthermore, the mix of business classes that have traditionally backed the BJP has also flustered it. Broadly speaking, these merchant communities and small manufacturers have faced a decade of contrasting experiences. For example, small traders and shopkeepers have no complaints about a more liberal import regime. They now have a greater volume and wider variety of goods to sell, whether these are made in India, in China or in Australia. Their main worry is that large retail chains, which have begun to dot the Indian consumer landscape in recent years, may elbow them out. These chains are Indian-owned, so aversion to them is not strictly a vote against globalization. If anything, it reflects the fear that the “small guy” will be overwhelmed by the economies of scale and consolidated resources of “Big Business” – big, but Indian. To be fair, India’s big retail-small retail conflict is still in its infancy.

What has reached full-blown maturity is the crisis in Indian manufacturing. Small manufacturers, in product areas as diverse as children’s toys and light engineering goods, have lost heavily to cheaper and higher quality imported competition. In contrast to the traditional loyalty of big manufacturing to the Congress, small manufacturing has long been politically aligned to the BJP and considers globalization a threat to its livelihood.

Given these multiple imperatives, the BJP’s perception of globalization is anything but linear. As a protectionist state-driven economy has opened to a fluid and harsh new world, allies of the BJP have stopped seeing eye to eye with it on globalization and the virtues of the market. Specifically, the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM, or Forum for Domestic Awakening) and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS, or Indian Workers’ Society) have emerged as roadblocks on the BJP’s already unsteady march towards globalization.

The SJM was founded in November 1991 to prevent what was termed a “re-colonization of India” by multi-national corporations. Among its backers were Indian companies concerned about cost-effective foreign competition. As a sentiment, it was no different from the antipathy steel manufacturers in the American Midwest reserve for South Korean or Chinese imports. The SJM initially said it had no problem with the free market but wanted a “calibrated deregulation,” a period of “internal liberalization” and tariff walls before industry was thrown open. By the end of the 1990s, however, the SJM had become selective in its opposition to globalization. Ideological clarity had taken second place to becoming a participant in domestic corporate warfare.

As India’s largest trade union collective – claiming 6.5 million members – the BMS has different motivations. It sees itself as safeguarding the interests of industrial workers. It fears that globalization will take away jobs, leaving vast armies of Indians unemployed and unemployable. Before a more focused critique of the SJM and the BMS is attempted, it is necessary to understand why the BJP cannot entirely ignore them. This requires another, deeper journey into the party’s ideological roots.

Most of the top leadership of the BJP has emerged from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, or National Volunteers Society). Founded in 1925, the RSS serves primarily as a cultural organization devoted to regenerating Hindu society. It is also the fount for the BMS and the SJM. The founding of the RSS was prompted by questions of culture, of nationhood, and of identity.6  Economics was not a priority, and politics – at least in the sense of contesting elections – was seen as merely an instrument to meet its goals to unify Hindu society.

Under the stewardship of Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar, the sarsanghchalak (supreme leader) from 1940 to 1973, the RSS saw itself as a sort of Hinduized social service league. It concentrated on issues such as rural development and uplift of aboriginal tribal people. If it had an economic view at all, it was fairly similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s cottage industry doctrine. This involved the idea of the self-sufficient village, one that met its own needs and did not need to look to the world beyond. In essence, it was an anti-free trade argument, albeit in an inchoate form.

The RSS played mentor to many daughter organizations. This was, in part, an expansion into different areas of society. The leadership of the RSS also recognized that the mother body had to be flexible enough to allow outlets for the energies and public concerns of members who might otherwise feel stifled by rigid RSS discipline. In 1951, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh was created as the RSS’s political wing.7  In 1958, the BMS was its foray into organized labor. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, or World Hindu Council) was formed in 1964, dedicated to consolidating disparate preachers and sects into a Hindu constituency. Together, these groups came to be called the Sangh Parivar (Sangh/RSS Family).

With the exception of the BMS, not one of these bodies had an explicitly economic imperative. At this point, the world was still divided into Soviet and American spheres of influence. The contest between Marx and the market was far from settled. Globalization was years away. India’s state-propelled industrialization was two decades from being acknowledged as a failure. As a result, the BJP and its siblings in the Sangh Parivar had neither opportunity nor need to confront hard economic questions.

In standard politics, it is unimaginable that the Sangh Parivar could be called the foremost right of center collective in Indian public life and yet be remarkably unperturbed by the shackles on the free market. It would be interesting to draw an analogy between the Republican Party in the United States and the Sangh Parivar. Every stream that makes up the Republican right is represented in the Sangh Parivar. For the Christian Coalition, there is the VHP; for perennial Cold War warriors, there are those who advocate an aggressive line on Pakistan and China. There has, however, traditionally been no place for big business in the Sangh. (Admittedly, the SJM has links with big business but that organization is a post-1991 phenomenon.) Where individual businessmen have become members of the Sangh or its affiliates, it has usually been guided by cultural or religious affinities.

Big business’ traditional alignment with the Congress had a historical context and a strategic motive. Family-run business houses such as Bajaj, Tata and Birla, were supportive of the Congress-led anti-imperial struggle. They saw the British regime as an impediment to the growth of domestic capital. After India’s independence, big business gravitated towards the Congress because it was the party of government, capable of issuing or refusing licenses and permits to help a particular industrial group prosper or to thwart its rivals.

Relationships that survive adversity sometimes fall apart in good times. In a sense, that is what has happened to the BJP and its friends. In the 1990s, three separate landmarks were reached. The BJP moved from the fringes to the center of Indian politics. The VHP, with 2.5 million members today, became the vanguard of an assertive, Hindu movement. The BMS became India’s biggest labor union. The daughter organizations had grown up. A clash was inevitable.

Four individuals who were in a sense equals led the three wings. In the mid-1960s, Dattatreya Bapurao Thengadi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were both Jana Sangh parliamentarians. Today, Vajpayee (now 78) is the BJP prime minister, while Thengadi (82) is the BMS’s founder-cum-father figure. Ashok Singhal (76), the international president of the VHP, is also their contemporary. Advani (73) is only a little younger.

In the old days, the four would have gladly listened to the RSS sarsanghschalak, the patriarch of the RSS family, harmonizer of all differences. He was, in a sense, the court of final appeal. By the late 1990s, this was no longer possible for several reasons. At 71, K.S. Sudarshan, the current RSS sarsanghchalak, is too junior to naturally command the Vajpayee generation. Most crucially, the BJP is now a party of governance, and government has brought its own compulsions. The BJP’s middle-brow commitment to modernity and the market has outgrown the Sangh mindset. Moreover, since 1995, the number of shakhas (daily gatherings) of RSS workers across India has remained static at 43,000. For the first time in its history, the RSS has stopped growing. The mother unit is in terminal decline; the daughter organizations have acquired a momentum of their own.

No one wants to cut the umbilical cord. Indeed, the BJP and the rest of Sangh Parivar still cover vast acres of common ground. The RSS, the VHP and the BMS still provide an almost captive vote to the BJP. Even so, globalization has become a major internal fault line.

Making Sense of the BMS and SJM

For years now, a reform of labor laws has been delayed thanks to BMS pressure. In sum, the BMS opposes a hire-and-fire system, without which few major investors are going to find India attractive. A major achievement of the BJP-led government in New Delhi has been kickstarting privatization and actually selling government-owned companies to businessmen. At every step, it has had to fight the BMS.

Given its Marxist-style rhetoric, it would be easy to label the BMS as an anachronism. There is, however, a method to its madness. The BMS taps into a uniquely Indian perception that does not see state-run companies as profit-driven corporations but as job providers, a social security system in disguise. The BMS fears that the removal of such a societal lynchpin without an alternative in place is a recipe for anomie.

BMS alarmism would seem to be bolstered by the Indian government’s own figures. The national job market is shrinking. Between 1996 and 2000, agriculture saw a net decline of 41,000 jobs. The substantially state-controlled mining sector abolished 95,000 jobs. Since 1998, manufacturing has seen a fall of 233,000 jobs, thanks to an East Asian competitive onslaught and, in some cases, the dumping of excess products. True, in the same two years, the service sector added 69,000 jobs.8  Nevertheless, there was no direct correlation: a laid-off factory foreman could probably never join the burgeoning IT-enabled services industry. While globalization has not been solely responsible for all this, it has doubtlessly contributed.

The Indian economy is in flux, readjusting from excessive employment-dependence on agriculture to a thrust on services. This process is both massive and time consuming. There is an inevitable and immediate casualty in terms of human capital. To the BMS, this is globalization as nightmare. Explaining to those left unemployed that short-term pains will be compensated by long-term gains is a forlorn quest.

To the SJM, which has enormous clout with senior RSS leaders such as Sudarshan, globalization is opportunity. Today, its reputation is severely compromised, since it appears to have become an adjunct to domestic corporate warfare. If the BMS is driven by the conviction that trade does not translate into mutual prosperity, the SJM is the master of convenience. Its opposition to government decisions is issue-based and a trifle too narrow to be disinterested. This has led to the charge that the SJM allows itself to be inordinately influenced by specific companies. The SJM, as some see it, has become an accomplice in corporate rivalries. Masquerading its motives in protectionist rhetoric, it has co-opted largely clueless RSS busybodies into its disruptionist games.

Consistency has never been a virtue with the SJM. Its founding charter swore to protect India from foreign control and transnational capital. In the year-long debate on the privatization of Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum, both state-run companies, it has happily junked this principle. The initial suggestion was that “petroleum is a strategic sector” and should not be privatized. When that logic proved untenable, other elements in the SJM complained that privatization hitherto had not brought foreign money into the country. They argued that every government-run company sold had an Indian buyer and that multinational corporations should be given preferential treatment in the cases of Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum.

It is widely acknowledged that the SJM’s maneuvering is directed at thwarting possible purchase bids by Reliance Industries, India’s largest business group.9  Such jockeying may be expected of Reliance’s business rivals. The SJM’s entry into the picture has not done this quasi-formal lobby group any credit.

The Future of Globalization in India

Where does this leave the BJP? Some of its 182 Members of Parliament in the Lok Sabha draw sustenance from the SJM or the BMS. Far more have had a grounding in the RSS itself. Yet a good number of these MPs recognize that the BJP’s growth as a political, election-ready machine is dependent on the operational autonomy it can grab from the Sangh. Globalization is an inevitability, even a reality. Vajpayee and Advani are reconciled to this, perhaps the latter more than the former. The next generation of BJP leaders actively welcomes it.

There is no quick solution for the BJP-Sangh-globalization conundrum. The BJP tacitly admits economic stagnation, if not recession, is likely to damage it in the October 2004 Lok Sabha election. Should that happen, how will the party react? The facile answer is that it would act like any Indian political force – displaying broad commitment to globalization when in government, turning populist and critical when in opposition. In other words, if the BJP is voted out of office at the end of next year, it could blame globalization for its failure. At least in the short run, it could be tempted to equate support for globalization with political suicide.

 There is another, more audacious route: a partnership with the VHP. The third part of the Sangh triptych, the VHP is primarily a religious interest group. It has been at the forefront of the Ram temple movement in Ayodhya, seeking to build a temple at the site of a 16th-century mosque that, it is believed, was itself built on the ruins of a Hindu temple. The BJP was more than receptive to the argument a decade ago but, once in government, has sought to keep a distance.10  Since 1998, it has ruled India through a coalition of parties that are political rather than ideological allies. They have forced the BJP to retreat somewhat on Hindu nationalism, particularly on its outright support for the VHP’s temple cause.

There is, however, a difference between how the executive wing of the BJP and how ordinary party workers or even back-bench MPs perceive the VHP. The election on December 12, 2002, in the state of Gujarat was an indicator of the political efficacy of a VHP-BJP compact. With sedulous, parallel campaigning by the VHP, the BJP won 126 seats in the 182-strong state legislature.

The violence in this state earlier in 2002 set the tone for the Gujarat election of December 12. In February 2002, VHP activists coming back home from Ayodhya – where they had gone to demonstrate in favor of building a Ram temple at the former site of the Babri mosque – were attacked at Godhra railway station in Gujarat. The train compartment they were travelling in was set on fire and 58 of them burnt alive. The assailants were identified as militant members of a local Muslim community. The incident triggered religious clashes across Gujarat. In the two weeks that followed, over a thousand were killed, mostly Muslim. Chief Minister Narendra Modi (BJP) was accused of not doing enough to restore law and order and not cracking down on VHP cadres. At the same time, Modi sensed that the anger against militant Islamism in general and Pakistan-backed terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir in particular had found fertile ground in post-Godhra Gujarat. With the VHP’s help, he swept the election.

The Gujarat election there harnessed religious passions and a sense of societal and national injury.11  Yet Gujarat has long been an aspiration for the rest of India. It is one of India’s most “globalized” states, an economic powerhouse with an entrepreneurial spirit and a historical memory of business-induced migration. Gujarati communities in the US, in Britain, in Belgium, in Africa and elsewhere are exemplars of Indian capitalism.12  They also share a symbiotic relationship with their homeland. Their sense of Gujarati or – as an extension for many – Hindu pride has been channeled adroitly by the VHP. Among all Sangh affiliates, the VHP is most alive to the collective prowess and reach of the global Hindu-Indian. With a network stretching from Trinidad to Bali to California, the VHP was in a sense a pioneer in recognizing the Indian diaspora’s potential.

In recent years, the VHP has recorded a spectacular growth in domestic membership in recent years as well. As late as January 1, 2000, it had half a million members across India; today it has five times that number.13  The VHP articulates a long latent Hindu-Indian prejudice against militant Islamism, connected to Pakistan-backed terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. This prejudice has been sharpened more recently by the terrorist attacks in 2001, specifically those of September 11 on the World Trade Center and December 13 on the Indian Parliament.14  The collateral impact of the US “War on Terror” on the Indian mind has been immense. The VHP has probably realized this faster than most others.

What does all this have to do with globalization? As things stand, nothing; as things may be, a lot. In a post-Vajpayee period, as the generational shift in the BJP leadership takes place, greater synergy between the VHP and the BJP seems inevitable. Outside of the BJP, the VHP is also the Sangh family member least hostile to economic globalization. Can the BJP make the VHP a co-champion of globalization?

It is interesting that, in the past year, individual VHP and BJP functionaries backed farmers’ groups wanting to sow genetically modified cotton seeds in Gujarat. This was India’s first experiment with genetically modified crops. It was bitterly opposed by left-inclined, anti-globalization groups on economic and environmental grounds.15  Can this convergence of interests between individuals allied to the BJP and to the VHP be replicated and institutionalized on a national scale? Many of the leftist groups that oppose globalization also denounce the VHP’s aggressive Hinduism. At election time, they identify more with the BJP’s rivals. As such, globalization and Hindu nationalism may not have a common cause but, in domestic discourse, they have a common enemy.

Real power in both the VHP and the BJP is steadily flowing into the hands of a generation of 40 and 50 year-olds. For them, Nehruvian socialism was one of history’s great misjudgments; they do not necessarily see it as an economic philosophy blessed with moral virtue, as some of their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s may have. The intellectual diffidence has been buried.

The question now is: can the VHP and the BJP narrow the gulf between them, temper the extremes in both and, finally, weld the combination into a conservative-capitalist prototype that could both politically satisfy and economically serve India? There is no easy answer to this question, not the least because neither the BJP nor the VHP has begun to seriously address it. Sooner or later, the two Sangh siblings will have to negotiate their future relationship. They may find that strengthening the Hindu right and putting India on a solid course towards globalization are mutually compatible.

Endnotes

1. Neither Pepsi Cola nor Coca-Cola is  making money in India. See an article in The Times of India dated April 6, 2000, “Coca-Cola writes down assets worth $400 million.” Per capita consumption of carbonated drinks is seven units of 300 ml per year. In Singapore, it is 240 units, in Malaysia 120, in Pakistan 15. The per capita figures are sourced from an article entitled, “This Summer’s Cold War,” India Today, June 3, 2002.
2. Thomas Babington Macaulay was a British civil servant whose Minute on Education (1835) was arguably the most influential policy statement in 19th-century India. It opened the doors of Western-style learning, in the English language, to willing Indians. Macaulay’s aim was to train junior functionaries for the English East India Company from “among the natives.” In doing so, to Singhal’s mind – and, indeed, to that of many others not necessarily advocates of Hindu nationalism – he also created a permanent class of compradors, a deracinated elite out of touch with the “real India.”
3. Not all of “Macaulay’s children” worked for the British Empire. Some of them – Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi among them – were at the forefront of Congress’ freedom struggle. Among the pioneers of the Communist Party of India as well as of the Hindu Mahasabha (Hindu Mega-gathering), an early advocate of Hindu nationalism, were also “Macaulay’s children.”
4. After independence from Britain in 1947, the often subliminal tension between “Macaulay’s children” and other classes was further complicated by geography. The term became a shorthand for the divide between the cosmopolitan cultures of metropolitan cities and the more inward-looking smaller towns. The resultant web of social hierarchies and insecurities can be guessed. As an analogy, consider the hypothetical relationship between a working class youth from, say, Macon, Georgia, and a business tycoon’s son from Manhattan.
5. It would be tempting to look at the antipathy some in the Sangh Parivar have for “Macaulay’s children” through the prism of globalization. This would be an anachronism; the antipathy predates globalization as it is understood today. It would also be unfair, ignoring that many in the Sangh Parivar, particularly in the BJP since about 1990, are quite clearly descendants of the original “Macaulay’s children.”
6. The brothers Ram and Lakshman are the heroes of the ancient epic Ramayana, in which Hanuman also figures.
7. The Congress swept the general election of 1952. Nehru had been re-elected twice when he died in 1964. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister two years later. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, took over after her assassination in 1984 by Sikh extremists among her bodyguards. Rajiv lost the election in 1989 and was assassinated in the midst of the 1991 election campaign by a Tamil terrorist group. For the next five years, the Congress ruled India under the prime ministership of P.V. Narasimha Rao. Since 1996, the Congress has been out of power, the longest such period in independent India. Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, is now the Congress president and prime ministerial aspirant.
8. Also in early 1991, India’s hard currency reserves fell to Rs 200 million ($4 million at today’s exchange rates). This was equal to barely two weeks’ import requirements. By June, the Indian government approached the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. In return, the Congress government of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao promised structural reforms, a devaluation of the rupee and opening up of the economy to the private sector.
9. As per the census of 2001, India is home to 1.02 billion people. About 82% of these are Hindu and 12% Muslim.
10. The Jana Sangh merged into the Janata Party (People’s Party), an umbrella confederation of anti-Congress groups that won the general election of 1977. This election was crucial because it came after the two-year “Emergency.” The Emergency (1975-77) was a dictatorship imposed by Indira Gandhi’s Congress after she, then prime minister, had been held guilty by a court trying her for electoral malpractice. During the Emergency, fundamental rights were suspended and opposition leaders jailed. The Janata government fell in 1979 due to its inner contradictions. Of these, the “dual membership” issue was most significant. Socialists in the Janata Party wanted the MPs formerly part of the Jana Sangh to renounce their parallel affiliation with the RSS. When the Janata Party cracked, the Jana Sangh was reborn as the BJP.
11. Government of India Economic Survey, 2001-02.
12. Review 200: Asia’s leading Companies (2002). This is an annual Far Eastern Economic Review publication.
13. The VHP’s Ram temple movement gathered momentum when, in the mid-1980s, the BJP lent political support to it. The presence of a mosque at the site in Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh) of what was historically believed to be a Hindu temple and held by the devout as the birthplace of the god-prince Ram was a politically volatile issue. The agitation mobilized Hindus, sought to single out extremist Islam and, under Advani, was used by the BJP to discredit “Nehruvian secularism” as, in essence, anti-Hindu.
14. In December 6, 1992, the mosque was demolished by gathered VHP supporters who simply went out of control. Over the next month, there was religious violence across India. The BJP felt the Ram issue had outlived its political utility, that the point against the Nehruvian legacy had been made.
15. In 1998, the BJP entered into the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with numerous non-Hindu nationalist political parties. It promised to distance itself from the building of a Ram temple at the former site of the mosque (the area is now under government control though the VHP has demanded it be handed over to Hindu groups) as long as it was part of the NDA.
16. It is interesting that senior VHP and BJP leaders told the author during the election campaign that 9/11 and its aftermath had left a deep impression on the Gujarati Hindu psyche: “People are asking questions. If America can come from halfway across the world to tackle the Taliban, why can’t we sort out Pakistan?”
17. As per Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora (Indian Council of World Affairs, December 2001), there are 20 million people of Indian origin living in 110 countries. No authoritative demographics are available. It is informally believed that the 8:1 Hindu-Muslim ratio “at home” is maintained overseas as well. The VHP says it has chapters in 38 countries and fraternal links with Hindu groups in another 100 countries.
18. Author’s interview with Pravin Togadia, VHP general secretary, December 2002.
19. See a report published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press entitled, “What the World Thinks in 2002.” This report states 90% of Indians think of terrorism as a “very big problem.” Also, see India Today’s “Mood of the Nation” poll published on February 4, 2002. In reply to the question, “Do you support India joining the US-led war against terrorism?”, 65% said “Yes.”
20. Entities like the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) are among leading Indian opponents of GM seeds. They argue that these seeds are up to four times more expensive than “normal” seeds and can be afforded only by rich farmers and that their impact on the human body and, indeed, on nature itself, is still largely unknown. These points are not too different from those made by anti-GM seeds or foods groups in the West. The RFSTE is a participant in the larger anti-globalization movement. Its members were part of the throng that, for instance, sought to disrupt the Seattle trade summit in 1999.