[sacw] SACW Dispatch # 1 (August 21, 1999)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
August 21, 1999
------------------------
Contents:
[1.] New Edition of Book 'Fascism of Sangh Parivar'
[2.] A Reality Check on Pakistan
[3.] The Pragmatics of the Hindu Right [PART I]
------------------------
[1.]

New edition of Book by EKTA (Committee for Communal Amity, Mumbia India)

Title: Fascism of Sangh Parivar
Author: P.R. Ram
Date: (Second Edition 1999)
Pages: 100pp.

This book gives a brief review of the development of Fascist Phenomenon in
Europe and its characterstic features.It goes to trace the political
backdrop in which RSS was formed and gives the ideological underpinnings of
this organisation.Further it traces the role of Hindu Mahasabha and RSS in
=46reedom Struggle and murder of Gandhi by Godse.The book also outlines the
devlopment of concept of Hindutva by Savarkar.In further chapter it tries
to discusss the social base of RSS before freedom struggle and the current
base of Sangh Parivar(SP), giving the summary of the debate on the nature
of SP: Religious Nationalist ,Fundamentalist or Fascist.It also deals with
the SP and its attitude towards the exploited ,oppressed sections of
society, (Workers, Dalits, Women and Minorities).

=46rom the review of the book By Dr. V.N. Rai (Indian Journal of
Secularism-1999,Oct.-Dec.) It is a priceless book...... on a
subject which we need to understand inorder to combat the menace of
=46ascism. EKTA, a Committee for Communal Amity, Mumbai, has done a real
service to the people and to the cause of secularism by publishing this
scholarly book which is a store of data and information about RSS and its
ideology, Hindutva. More than a sociological analysis, or a guide to
political action, it is a narrative of history - history of fascism in
Europe, history of the evolution of Hinduism and Hindutwa, a bit even of
the history of the freedom struggle and the role of Hindu Mahasabha and
RSS in it. What is most important about the book is that it has tried to
expose with facts and figures the falsehood spread by the Hindutwa
ideologues about minorities, Muslims and Christians and about culture and
history of India.

The author P.R. Ram has done hard work in drawing upon more than a dozen
sociologists and their work. He has not only discussed their views and
shades of difference between them

=2E......." Price US Dollars 2./, Rs. 20. For postal Delivery send the
draft in the name of C.D.R.A.,add,US dollar. 1 (Rs.15)for postage. Mail
your orders to 1. Dr. Uday Mehta 5, Gujarathi Club Beasant Marg,
Santacruz (W).Mumbai, India 2.Irfan Engineer (CSSS, 9 B, Himalaya
Apt.6th.Rd Santacruz (E), Mumbai- 400055, India,
------------------------------
[2.]

INDIAN EXPRESS
Saturday, August 21, 1999
Op-Ed.

A reality check on Pakistan

By Mushirul Hasan

Information is power. That is certainly what the colonial powers believed
in. From Francis Buchanan's survey of Mysore and eastern India to the last
census in 1941, the British developed a vast corpus of knowledge about the
``natives''. They conducted census operations to create social categories
by which India was ordered for administrative purposes. They studied
language and literature as part of the colonial project of control and
command. The very Oriental imagination that led to the antiquarian
collections and archaeological finds were in fact forms of constructing an
India that could be better packaged, inferiorised, and ruled (Bernard S.
Cohn). In short, colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced
by it; in certain important ways, knowledge was what colonialism was all
about (Nicholas B. Dirks). The relationship between knowledge and power
changed after World War II, but not in significant ways.

In the fifties and sixties, the United States and its allies were in
competition with theSoviet bloc to buttress their claims in the newly
liberated countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their bitter
confrontation led to the revival and establishment of several ``academic''
bodies in different parts of the world. The project of such institutions
though tailored and trimmed to suit the post-colonial world, was not very
different from what was conceived and implemented by the erstwhile
colonialists in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. In some ways, the
activities of various US ``educational'' agencies, especially in Latin
America, would have put the likes of Warren Hastings and Curzon to shame.

In a democratic set up like ours, information and knowledge have a
different role to play both in the domestic sphere as well as in dealing
with the rest of the world. At least in one particular area, we have the
resources, though meagre, compared with what the West can mobilise, and yet
we have failed to develop the wherewithal to study and understand our
neighbours.

How much do we knowabout Bangladesh, a country we helped to liberate in
1971? I am afraid, very little! How much do we know about Sri Lanka, except
that the Tamils and the Sinhalese have disfigured that serene and beautiful
island through acts of violence and aggression? Surely, not enough to
develop a viable strategy to resolve long-standing differences with the
people and government of that country. Our knowledge of Nepal society and
polity is, to say the least, appalling. One would have expected our
universities to produce renowned specialists on Pakistan, our chief bete
noire in the region. Sadly, this has not happened. Thanks to the Institute
of Defence Studies, we monitor Pakistan's military strength and strategy
with ease. Thanks also to the Ministry of External Affairs, we are well up
on that country's diplomatic manoeuvres. But, what about the people and
society of Pakistan? Most of us draw a blank on that score. That is why our
image or images of Pakistan, the cause of much mutual ill will and animus,
rests onpreconceived notions and mistaken assumptions. We think we know,
though the reality is that what we know is not always right.

Consider our media -- print and TV -- and its projection of Pakistan as
traditional, oppressive, backward looking and, to top it all, Islamist.
These magisterial generalisations do not end at that. Women, we are told,
are kept in seclusion, while the menfolk go around their business with
their flowing beards. Such impressions conform to our own conception of a
typically Islamic ethos. One can dismiss all this as utter rubbish, but
what does one do with the false images, now part of our national psyche
after Kargil, created and sedulously cultivated by politicians?

The real problem is this: by portraying Pakistan as an archetype of a
highly traditional and unchanging society, we seem to be demarcating sharp
boundaries between ``us'' and ``them''. Some of us, in the academia,
worship the rising sun to gain favours and rewards from the political
establishment, but most intellectuals,especially in left circles, have been
relentless critics of our society and polity for well over five decades.
They bask in the glory of their own self-pride and ideological conviction.
This trend was dormant in Pakistan, as in Latin America, Africa, West Asia
and in the south-east Asian Archipelago, because of repressive
authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships. But the resurgence of
democracy has emboldened the Pakistani intelligentsia to strike a
discordant note, to lead sustained campaigns in defence of civil rights,
women's empowerment, nuclear disarmament, and in opposition to political
Islam. Today, the voices of dissent and protest can be heard loud and clear
on the streets of Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. Today, the democratic
forces, even though bruised and battered by General Zia-ul-Haq, call the
shots at different levels of Pakistan society.

If the election results are any indication, the Jamaat-i-Islami's project
of creating an Islamic state and society has very few takers. The lessonsof
the Khomeini revolution in Iran, followed by the seemingly endless war in
Afghanistan, have not been lost on the voters. They realise that the
militant Taliban and their allies in Pakistan pose a serious threat to
regional peace. They also fear that the ideology and movement of the
Taliban-Jamaat combine would ultimately retard the progress of Pakistan
society, and lead to its fragmentation.

Pakistani intellectuals, having survived the nightmare of Zia-ul-Haq's
rule, are now beginning to ask some new and some awkward questions. Ayesha
Jalal, better known for her book on M.A. Jinnah, has talked of the
hollowness of civil society, the weakness of the institutions of the state,
and the ideological contradiction in the self-projections and
self-perceptions of the Pakistani State. The real problem in Pakistan, she
points out, is that the structures inherited from the colonial state were
not realigned with the dominant conceptions which had fired the Muslim
struggle for equality, solidarity and freedom. Sothat Mohammad Iqbal's
lofty equation of Islam and civil society has been lost sight of in the
litany of confusion surrounding conceptions of national identity and state
sovereignty. What next? Ayesha Jalal calls for sustained debates on
citizenship rights towards forging a collective ethos as a nation-state,
and a national dialogue to create the necessary consensus to begin
rebuilding anew.

We, in the Indian academia, must follow such debates with care, and, in the
process, disperse the clouds of ignorance about our neighbouring country.
With India fast emerging as a major player in Asia, the need to do so is
much greater now than ever before.

Copyright =A9 1999 Indian Express Newspapers
(Bombay) Ltd.
----------------------------
[3.]
Economic and Political Weekly
July 31-August 6, 1999

[PART I]

Pragmatics of the Hindu Right: Politics of Women's Organisations

By Tanika Sarkar

I Introduction

LET me begin with a rather obvious methodological and conceptual
distinction which will gesture at my discomfort with much of the current
critiques of the Right. It will also help to explain why I seem to labour
some obvious points about the Hindu Right in the rest of the essay. The
distinction is one between identity and display. Identity would relate to
the nature or essential characteristics of a particular kind of politics.
Display refers to the rhetorical tropes, representational strategies and
ideological manoeuvres that belong to the self-expression of that politics.
So far as the Hindu Right is concerned, we all seem to know the identity,
even without much hard research into its social composition. It is assumed
to be the agent of the Indian bourgeois that activates lumpen elements from
time to time in order to defend the interests of global and Indian
capitalism, the latter also subsuming a hefty dose of feudal elements
within itself. And it has identifiable fascistic analogues in other
histories. Largely impressionistic or stray journalistic data, or even
suppositions that require no footnotings, suffice to assume all that 1 And,
once we know the identity, the display becomes irrelevant =F1 at the most, a
mask, a lie, a cover that can be taken off the book neatly, without any
damage to what lies within. All that we need then to say about its
self-display is to point out factual irregularities and inconsistencies, or
to dismiss it as ideological mystification.

I do not quarrel so much with the substantive conclusions of the critiques
as with their methods. They speak of a certain laziness that is content
with a range of a priori generalisations. Without research into different
facets of the identity, or without deep probes into the functioning of the
display, the Right looks like a somewhat timeless and featureless construct
into which we pour all that we do not like: it could be post-enlightenment
modernity and godless secularism for some, or Indian capitalism or
post-modernist excesses for others. Or, it is dissolved into violence as a
transcendental analytical category, scrubbed of political particularities,
stalking across times and spaces with innate, fixed tendencies and drives
of its own that defy social, historical or political determinations of any
sort. The submergence of the Right into violence makes it an existential
rather than a political problem. Violence becomes the subject, the proper
noun that activates the verbs, the action. Indian men and women become mere
sites and props in a theatre through whom violence moves and speaks, while
the Right itself recedes from our horizon of concerns, a search for its
specific history endlessly deferred.

I will use a very simple example to try and place identity and display in a
different relationship to each other. We all know that the Right is opposed
to equalising of entitlements, hence the question of poverty does not
interest it at all. Give this basic identity, we dismiss all that it may
say about poverty alleviation measures as simple hypocrisy. Let us,
however, assume that, up to a point, it says a lot on the matter =F1 without=
,
of course, acting on it. Then, if we notice that it has stopped discussing
the question of poverty altogether, and more, it actually says that such
questions distract from primary concerns of national self-strengthening,
and therefore they must not to be raised, do we not conclude that its
fundamental strategies have taken a new turn and it has entered a new phase
in its history? And does that not then indicate a shift in identity? And do
we then not need to explore what activated its earlier self-display about
concern with poverty, and why that has become unnecessary or threatening at
this conjuncture? In other words, we then have to assume a structural
relationship between self-display and identity, and we need to look closely
and focusedly into both. We also need to see how they interanimate each
other.

II Some Antecedents

Having put in a plea for looking at the Right's nature and
self-representation seriously to consider the thing itself and not any
others I am afraid that I shall briefly veer away from the project and
look into some past antecedents. I do not suggest that these are direct
lineages as such. They are more like ingredients that slowly composed a
context in which the Right as well as its political adversaries need to
function today. We will then consider in what specific and very distinctive
ways the Right negotiates with this context through its particular modes of
self-display.

Pundits of modern Indian history have kindly and patronisingly allocated
the entire sphere of womens' history to a 'lower' rung of women and
feminist historians as a domain of no great importance in itself. But they
have done so at some peril even to their own conception of the important
issues of our history. For, a history of Indian women in modern times is
also a specifically Indian history of rights at the level of concept and
movements. It is also a history of resistance to the discourse of equal
rights. In colonial times, there were some efforts to rectify some extreme
aspects of brahmanical patriarchy which had percolated down to the
normative worlds of all upwardly-mobile segments of Hindu castes. The mode
of intervention was legislative change most notably in the sphere of
banning of widow immolation, the legalisation of widow remarriage, the
escalation of the age of consent. For the first time, Hindu marriage was
debated and discussed in the public sphere where a few women participated
as critical and privileged commentators. Also, for the first time,
law-making became a public activity, a transparent process, even when the
actual law was framed by a closed colonial state.

As a result of the public debates where multiple alternatives were arguing
with one another, not only were several distinct paradigms of thinking
about marriage, family, intimate human relationships articulated, they were
also required to compete with one another in terms of self-justifications
and mutual critiques. If earlier marriage codes and custom however diverse
and plural were non-negotiable prescriptions that were given as fixed,
natural order of things, now all alternatives needed to defend themselves
in public, in the presence of women, to persuade and to convince a
diversified public opinion. Because they needed to convince, all shades of
opinion liberal, orthodox, revivalist began to go beyond the statutory
references to scripture and custom, and to claim that their particular
alternative safeguarded the woman's best interests. More, that it enjoyed
the woman's will, consent, pleasure. Of course, most such claims were
manipulative, dishonest, products of instrumental reasoning. It is still
important to point out that in the process of such arguments, the woman's
will or consent gained acceptance as a new ground for normative
constructions. 2

Neither liberal reformers nor revivalists nor the colonial state
articulated the notion of a female selfhood based on an absolute possession
of rights. Yet, their arguments in public created a space for at least a
qualified acceptance for the notion of the woman's assent to her prescribed
condition. The new discursive ground was reinforced through the emergence
of the discourse of political nationalism and its anti-colonial agenda.
This developed and refined the concept of self-determination by people as
the site for nation-formation. Even before Gandhian nationalism and Left
anti-imperialism had in their different ways recognised labouring classes
as the privileged subjects of anti-colonial nationalism, 19th century
nationalists had started talking about the innate right and capability of a
people to decide on the basic nature of governance. Political nationalism
acknowledged self-determination as a moral imperative, if only in the
sphere of nation-making.

Hindu revivalism or cultural nationalism, however, provided a very
different moral imperative. Instead of self-determination as a right of the
female individual or the people, it referred to the uniqueness of the
culture of the Hindu volk. It also referred to the powers over individuals
that the volk or community required in order to preserve itself from
extinction when faced with a different and triumphant cultural system. Here
the Hindu woman was allotted a unique responsibility as the site of past
freedom and future nationhood, since the Hindu man had already supposedly
compromised his cultural authenticity. On her fixed, unchanging obedience
to community presecriptions would depend the life of her tradition and
religion. She was, therefore, the source of authenticity, nation-making,
freedom. But this huge political role depended on an abdication of all
agency and self-determination in actual practice. The discourses of liberal
reformism and political nationalism on the one hand, and that of Hindu
revivalism and cultural nationalism on the other, can be differentiated
from each other on this ground: are people a site of autonomy and
self-determination, or of authenticity and culture preservation? Is the
woman a rights-bearing individual, or a culture-bearing one?

The Hindu Right has inherited this structure of possibilities and problems
and it has had to steer a very delicate and difficult course. When it
emerged in an enduring, organised form in the 1925 as the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), political nationalism, Left anti-imperialism,
womens' movements and low caste protest movements had, despite their mutual
differences and conflicts, already formulated concepts of rights and
self-determination. These had entrenched themselves as a deeply ingrained
value in the political sphere. So hegemonic was this that its overt and
explicit refutation would be suicidal for any political interest striving
for hegemony and power. The Right's displayed political articulations
needed, therefore, to verbally affirm a democratic, constitutional mode of
governance that is based on notions of universal citizenship rights on the
one hand, and on affirmative supports to historically disadvantaged groups
on the other. More, it had to work within that conceptual framework, to
adapt its politics to contingencies created by that. A fundamental
commitment to " Manusmriti " that, however, cannot rely on its authority
any longer, and that needs rather to publicly genuflect before Ambedkar and
occasionally borrow his words a formidable undertaking! It is interesting
how carefully the Right abstains from public references to Manu. Only at a
moment of profound crisis the anti-Mandal hysteria of 1990 the "
Organiser " would burst into references to ancient sanctions and
prescriptions. This recourse proves that those texts of power remain deep
resources, but also that they cannot be displayed in ordinary times very
overtly.

The formal, displayed commitment to a politics of rights does not constrain
the Right's authoritarian, anti-emancipatory agenda unduly. For it can
simultaneously rely on and bring to play another resource that has also
come down from the 19th century: the intentions and the discourses of Hindu
revivalism and cultural nationalism. Through its arguments around the Hindu
woman's ideal mode of being, 19th century cultural nationalism had created
a larger theoretical justification not only for the brahmanical form of
conjugality, but by implication, of the entire complex of the brahmanical
hierarchical system. It was now defended on the ground of an embattled
Hindu cultural and religious authenticity. Revivalistic cultural
nationalism tried to reinforce an adherence to this system by branding all
projects that had any emancipatory potential however slight as borrowed,
alien, a surrender to colonisation of culture and minds of Hindus.
Nineteenth century debates on Hindu conjugality and their larger,
historical implications for caste, class, and the poor and the dissident
are extremely significant. For the assumptions that were developed about
the condition of the woman could serve as a metaphor and a protean argument
for a freeze on any discourse of equal rights. The woman's figure has a
central narrative function in the organisation of a discourse of social
power for her condition provides the tropes that can be most usefully
deployed to translate power as affect and intimacy. All kinds of hegemonic
agendas have relied on this function. The gender perspectives of the Hindu
Right especially those of their own women therefore provides very vital
clues to the making of ideological interpellation.

The Hindu Right today has been able to manoeuvre very skilfully with this
inherited tension and debate. When it does use the language of rights
seriously, it is to exalt the rights of a religious majority only if this
majority is made co-terminous with its own politics. At the same time, the
counterfeit nature of the reference becomes soon evident, for a discourse
of rights must include within itself a design for accommodating rights of
all. When it comes to the rights of any kind of minorities or, what appears
to the right as deviants religious, political, cultural or sexual the
Right will not provide a design that is coherent or consistent. What it
will do in such contingencies is to cast the very intention of
emancipatory, libertarian politics of equal rights into doubt by branding
it as an alien product that dooms the future of Hindu cultural
authenticity.

The Hindu Right today stands at a transitional moment in its history when
it still tries to hold on to the possibilities generated by both kinds of
discourses rights and self-determination, on the one hand, and cultural
authenticity on the other. It attempts a resolution by stitching the two
together. Hindus become signs of both weakness and strength as the
majority community, and as threatened culture or as endangered nation. In
either capacity, they are to be granted superior rights that preclude
generalised notions of equality.

Why does the notion of weakness carry such potent resonances within its
cadre-base, if Hindus are a majority? It is not entirely a sleight of hand
or optical illusion. The discourse is received by an upper caste, middle
class cadre-base of the Sangh (as distinct from a far more generalised
electoral support-base of the BJP) which is acutely aware of its own
minuscule size and disproportionate power within the Hindu community. It
knows that it is indeed, a minority, even if Hindus as a whole are not. The
awareness of real numerical weakness counter-posed to real material
strength of the Sangh cadre-base, creates the grounds for the reception of
this multivocal message. We need to note what is actually being attempted
by the simultaneous occupation of the two contradictory sites at the same
time by the same political formation that of strength and that of terminal
weakness. 3 Since the Right, in its claim to represent Hindus, fills up the
entire discursive space all on its own, there are groups that disappear
from sight: the poor, the low caste, people with non-heterosexual
preferences, non-Hindus of any sorts, tribals and displaced people. Hindus
as a whole, rather than these categories, become the marginalised people
par excellence, threatened by alleged Muslim demographic proliferation and
treachery, and by western cultural onslaughts simultaneously.

The task is obviously not tension-free. The tension forms a language that
to secular ears sometimes sounds like either doublespeak or incoherence. In
the area of womens' conditions, a critique of Muslim polygamy or sati, the
foregrounding of women politicians of the BJP, are aligned to songs of
praise to traditions of brahmanical Hinduism, and to occasional
fundamentalist pronouncements even by women leaders of the Right.4 Amrita
Basu considers that it is futile to look for any logical structuring behind
the incompatible issues, they are dictated by sheer political expediency,
decided according to vote banks and constituencies. 5 While this may hold
true for the BJP, for the Sangh parivar as a whole, I think it is possible
to uncover an underlying logic that is extremely complicated and tortuous
but that nonetheless binds the contradictory stances together.

III The All-Male RSS

The RSS, founded in 1925, has steadfastly remained an all-male organisation
down to this day. Its founder Hedgewar had initially refused to consider
the opening of a women's wing. However, in 1936, 11 years after its
beginning, the RSS responded to the pleas of Lakshmibai Kelkar, mother of
an imporant Sangh member. The Rashtrasevika Samiti was founded in 1936 with
daily shakhas that provided physical, martial arts as well as ideological
or 'boudhik' training. It remained however a small and low-keyed affair.
Though the second oldest womens' organisation affiliated to a political
body, it was overtaken and completely overshadowed by nationalist and Left
womens' movements. It participated in no mass struggles anti-colonial or
for womens' rights and it was not foregrounded by the RSS in any of its
own activities. The second 'sarsanghchalak' and supreme ideological guru of
the RSS, M S Golwalkar, saw no reason to specify a distinctive or important
role for it within the Sangh complex. His strictures to the women of Sangh
families taught them how to run their homes, to bring up their children
with correct Sangh values. The Samiti was not required to play a
significant part in RSS self-fashioning.6

Around 1989-90, in a sudden and dramatic spurt of activities, the Sangh
parivar threw up a large number of womens' organisations and women leaders
into dazzling prominence the BJP Mahila Morcha, the VHP Maitri Mandal and
Durga Vahini with their different regional versions. Thousands of
karsevikas participated in the attacks on the Babri masjid and in its
demolition and their role was highlighted in the Sangh media products the
Jain Studio videofilms, the VHP fortnightly magazine 'Hindu Chetna', Hindi
video newsmagazines like 'Kalachakra'. On January, 1993, a month after the
demolition of the Babri masjid, a women's celebratory demonstration was
held at Ayodhya where Sadhvi Rithambhara was a guest of honour.7 Women were
active and prominent in the bloody riots that swept across India in course
of the Ram janmabhoomi movement in Bhagalpur, at Ahmedabad, in Bombay.8
The role of Rithambhara's audio-cassetted speech and Uma Bharati's
propaganda tours in stoking ferocious anger and aggression against Muslims
was memorable.9

I did some fieldwork among Delhi-based women of the Hindu Right between
1990 and 1993, at a time when the Sangh parivar was simultaneously engaged
in a mass movement of violence against Muslims and in an electoral bid to
capture state power at the centre. This was also the time when the Sangh
began to flaunt its women for the first time in its history, in public
places and roles. It was a special moment, very upbeat and self-confident,
a moment of spectacular growth and spread, a phase of mass mobilisation and
movement all of which were new and heady departures for the Sangh and its
women. At the Samiti office, office-bearers told me of an internal struggle
that had preceded the Samiti's decision to allow and train women as
karsevikas. They said that it had been the young members who forced the
hands of the Samiti.

The Samiti was in an excited and hopeful mood, claiming credit for the
growth of womens' wings and activism.10 It was launched onto a course of
developing a strong, wide-ranging and dynamic female cadre-base for the
Sangh that would enjoy a powerful public identity and political function,
and that would also claim equality in political work, without overtly
claiming social equality. The enterprise was fraught with some tension
since political equality already showed a few tentative signs of overspill
into the social and the domestic. The Samiti had to its advantage a
pedagogical and organisational structure that through institutionalised as
well as informal networks and relationships could develop and thoroughly
train an active, engaged, cadre base among middle class, urban, upper caste
women who would spread the networks further down to ensure a much larger
electoral base for the Sangh parivar.

I observed at that time that the Samiti had come a long way from the
parameters laid down by Golwalkar about pure domesticity. The women of the
Sangh come from conservative, domesticated urban, middle class and upper
caste backgrounds. They were now beginning to go in for some education, and
even into jobs and political work for the first time. The Samiti trained
such women for their newly-gained public roles and identities. Although the
primary focus remained on women within the home, for a new generation of
more active women, it could impart self-confidence and competences. I had
also observed that these new possibilities had opened up some fractures
within the established pattern of work and ideas. The Samiti's journal
'Jagriti' reflected deep ambivalences about the women's movements, with
older Sangh leaders warning against their disruptive influence, but
ordinary contributors occasionally identifying themselves with them. There
were articles about the woman's empowerment needs against male domination,
discrimination and violence.11 Young girls from RSS families at Khurjah
complained that their political activism was cruelly thwarted by early
marriage and the burden of housework from which their families would not
exempt them.12

The tension, however, was structured by and contained within a generally
conservative domesticity a modernised and somewhat loose and flexible
version of brahmanical patriarchy that allowed and encouraged education,
employment and a more informed and activist politicisation only on the
basis of communal violence and commitment to an extremely inegalitarian
social perspective. Male discrimination was questioned if at all in
public spaces and in the workplace, rather than at home.

I found the fieldwork a profoundly disturbing and disconcerting experience.
As feminists, we had always celebrated the release of women from pure
domesticity, their politicisation had always been assumed to be an
emancipatory possibility, and the relationship between communal violence
and women had been seen as one of male-inflicted violence and female
victimhood. Recent experiences confounded fond certainties and forced new
trajectories.

IV Sangh Parivar Today

The last year of the century finds the Sangh parivar in significantly
changed circumstances. The 'mass phase' of this fascistic formation
extremely limited and gestural as it was is closing down, movements being
replaced with rhetoric and even their few feeble populist gestures are
dying out fast. Designs for expansion, especially among lesser social
strata which are not the traditional Sangh strongholds, are now replaced
with shifting, tactical and insecure alliances with 'low caste parties'.
State power, or its very close proximity in a loose coalition with many
political groups, has necessitated a sharper differentiation between the
electoral front of the BJP and other Sangh affiliates like the Samiti, the
VHP or the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. Much accommodation has been made with
globalisation in state policies and its cultural impact, in particular, has
led to acute discomforts among the old guard. In short, an unprecedented
preoccupation with the grasping of state power and with its maintenance,
has led to prospects of the dilution of the old Sangh character, with a
need to juggle with its different affiliates at different times with
amazing dexterity. While doors had to be opened, perforce, to new allies,
constituencies and policies hitherto unthinkable for the Sangh, there has
been an acute need, also, to revive and preserve old values and to harden
old convictions within the parivar. It is my impression that the women's
wing has been entrusted with the conservation of old and inner values.

Going back to the women of the Samiti in April 1999, opened up new sources
of disturbance for me. It however also brought a few crumbs of comfort. It
we feminists had found the communalised public identity of Sangh women
disturbing, the Sangh men seemed to have found it even more so, for
different reasons. I went back at a moment of deliberate withdrawal of
women's activism and a folding back of the public potential. The women are,
with some exceptions that I shall discuss later, being pulled back into
homes. Golwalkar's restricted and restrictive strictures on domesticity and
the homebound women have been retrieved and refurbished. The Samiti has
been socialised into a less expansive future. I had hesitated to use the
word 'fundamentalism' in the early 1990s, either about the Sangh's gender
ideology, or about its women's organisations. I am convinced that the
fundamentalist turn is now accomplished. I feel, moreover, that it was not
my misrecognition that had earlier missed the point. It was something that
has unfolded later, partly because of the dissonances and paradoxes that I
could observe at that time. But above all, it happened because of a changed
historical situation and its new logic. I shall come back to this later.

Let me, first of all, establish my point about the retreat. The BJP has
been in power in Delhi, till fairly recently, for five continuous years. It
had ruled for more than a year at the centre. Yet, the Delhi Samiti
membership seems to have been halved. It had stood at 2,000 in 1991,
according to Samiti reckoning. Now the same office-bearers put it at 1,000,
or a little more than that. The shakhas have gone down from 60 in the past
year to a maximum of 52 at present. Though a new recruit, Kanchan, put it
at 52, Asha Sharma, 'Karyavayika', Delhi, for the last 10 years, put it
down to about 50 fully-functional ones. Poonam Gupta, the only fulltime
'pracharika',13 put it down to 48 at this moment. Samiti office bearers now
make a distinction between 'regular' and 'irregular' shakhas and membership
that I had not come across in the early 1990s. Again, earlier I had been
given to understand that shakhas meet twice a day, and now there seems to
be only two that do so. Most are bi-weekly affairs.14 The areas of
concentration seem to remain the same those settled by refugees from west
Punjab initially, which are now doing very well, or in old, affluent
trading or middling service-sector areas; Kamala Nagar, Lajpat Nagar,
Rohini, Vikaspuri, Punjabi Bagh, Paschim Vihar, Karolbagh, Rajindar Nagar,
Moti Nagar. The social catchment areas are the same as with the Sangh,
though far less numerous: traders, middle-ranking service people, mostly of
refugee origins, i e, people with bitter memories of partition and riots
that the Samitis do much to keep alive. Poonam Gupta confessed that young
girls are not very active, though middling middle class girls still find
the physical training very useful, and older married 'ladies' seem much
more enthusiastic so that, most popular Samiti timings are 11 am shakhas,
when middle-class housewives gather together. Trading and middle class
service sector families tend to be almost entirely upper caste and
office-bearers did not refute my supposition that most of their members are
also from these circles.

Socially and geographically, there has been stagnation and even decline in
Delhi. On an all-India scale, the total membership has remained constant at
two lakhs over the past decade, even though the Sangh parivar has seen a
rapid growth in its power. The BJP Mahila Morcha has a membership around 13
lakhs,15 but it is to mobilise the women supporters of the BJP for
electoral activities. It does not function as a women's organisation. The
Mahila Aghadi of the Shiv Sena has no records of members and did not claim
much success. It is a very depressed organisation, with a minor status
within the Sena apparatus, and with no links whatever with the Sena women
corporators and legislators. Its office-bearers claimed no achievements in
recent years apart from bringing the film, 'Fire' to the notice of Bal
Thackeray.16 Again, the 5,000 urban sites that the Samiti covers, have
remained fairly constant over the decade, with some recent growth in the
south and Punjab.

[Continued . . .]