[sacw] SACW Dispatch #2 (August 21,1999)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch # 2
August 21 1999
---------------------------
[ PART II -
The Pragmatics of the HIndu Right,
By Tanika Sarkar,
Economic & Political Weekly, July 31-August 6, 1999]

Secular feminists haunted by the rapid growth of the Right and a sense of
guilt arising form failing to stem its growth sometimes go on to an
extreme to declare that the right has seized the initiative even in the
women's movement from the hands of secular forces. This is paranoia, based
on total ignorance of facts and figures. In fact, women's movements and
organisations are one area where Left and radical forces enjoy an
overwhelming edge over the Right a fact that Left parties probably will
not like to advertise. The All-India Democratic Women's Association alone
has a membership between 50-60 lakhs and it has grown rapidly in the last
decade. The bulk of the force is recruited from rural women.17 Dalit women
of AIDWA have been very active in the movement and the AIDWA too is active
among dalits. Recently, Brinda Karat led an anti-untouchability campaign in
Tamil Nadu. The Samiti, on the other hand, admits that they still have to
open an account in villages, and that they so far cover cities and district
towns.18 They had said the same thing 10 years back. Obviously, rural, poor
or low caste women are not targeted as part of the potential female
cadre-base of the parivar to whom the Samiti brings the full benefits of
Sangh education and training. Add to the AIDWA a very large number of
autonomous women's organisations across the country that are engaged in
radical movements and programmes, and we get numbers that are impressive by
any count, certainly breathtaking by Sangh-Samiti standards. We need to
remember that the growth in Leftist womens' organisations occurred in the
teeth of adverse circumstances. While the last decade has been a fortunate
one for the Sangh, Left forces have not done well except in this sector. In
contrast, even in Delhi, which has for very long been a Sangh stronghold,
the membership stands static at about a thousand. The Left, always very
insignificant in the city, numbers about 47,000 in the CPM-affiliated
Janwadi Mahila Samiti 19 more than doubling itself in the last decade,
without the benefit of a corresponding growth in the strength of the parent
organisation.

The Samiti has, however, two important new growth areas in Delhi. In some
trans-Yamuna slums in east Delhi, and in the Jawaharlal Nehru University,
the Samiti runs fairly regular shakhas among daughters of domestic
servants, though the JNU wing is also patronised by some students.20 It is
significant that the areas are strictly segregated, so the middle class and
the lower class segments do not mix with each other. At the same time, it
is equally or more significant that for daughters of domestic servants, the
Samiti has started full shakhas, since these are instruments for creating a
cadre base.

In the early 1990s, the Samiti was engaged in a variety of programmes. It
ran a fairly substantial monthly magazine 'Jagriti', it provided
orientation courses for wives of RSS men who had come from non-RSS
families, 21 it provided correspondence courses for newly married Samiti
members who had joined non-RSS families and who found it difficult to
attend shakhas. They were also meant for young girls who lived in areas
which did not have shakhas.22 All these programmes have been discontinued.
The only new addition has been to open discussion groups for old women.23
This is obviously a success, but the reasons are interesting. Eighty-five
year-old new recruit, Kanchan, instantly sympathised with Samiti plans for
saving the young from western cultural influences. She has never before
been exposed to Sangh politics, but she fully shared the distaste for the
new westernised generations. Would the decline in possibilities of
mobilisation among girls, and the new interest in older and elderly women,
indicate an interesting retreat from the new generation among upper and
more solvent sections of the middle classes where the Sangh had started
recruiting massively during the Ram janmabhoomi campaigns?

Here again the distinction between the cadre base and the electoral base is
vital. These upper categories of the middle classes will still vote BJP but
will they come under the hegemonic pedagogic schedule of the Sangh parivar
that the Sangh itself counts as crucial for the making of Hindu rashtra?
There had been earlier tendencies in that direction. The Ram janmabhoomi
campaigns occurred at the peak of the Sangh mobilisation efforts when there
seemed to be a possibility that the true citizens of Hindu rashtra would
subscribe to the full range of Sangh values. If now, a split develops
between a core and fully-integrated group and a very broad support-group
which is, nonetheless, very thinly integrated with the Sangh, then already
it is a retreat from its totalitarian hegemonistic perspective. This
reminds me of some research that some of us did on RSS-run schools in Delhi
1994.24 The school children were loyal enough to the school, except when it
came to cultural activities. They were unhappy about the ban on western pop
music and they were sarcastic about the fact that at school picnics, they
had to sing bhajan after bhajan. This might sound like the usual conflict
between generations, but we need to remind ourselves that the RSS
self-definition is that it is a 'cultural organisation'. From its
inception, it has remained committed to taking over the entire political
and cultural universe of its young volunteers. Its central agenda has
always been the training of the future citizens of Hindu rashtra: young,
upper caste, affluent, educated men and women.25 The possible partial
failure in this respect is significant.

Now the 'Jagriti' has been discontinued, replaced with an annual
news-sheet, Sevika. The difference in nomenclature is interesting, for
'Jagriti' (Awakening) had a dynamic, forceful ring to it that tried to
merge into mainstream women's movement and its language. The cover depicted
a young girl resolutely stepping out of darkness into a circle of light.26
Again, the visual self-representation would not jar on the sensibility of
the womens' movement. The articles talked mostly about womens' problems in
modern cities, and provided some instructions about how to negotiate them
with strength and dignity. They also discussed citizenship rights and how
to realise them. There was a strong note of protest against discrimination,
an untheorised yet implicit recognition of patriarchal oppression. Even
though shakhas did daily brainwashing about the plight of Hindu women at
the hands of Muslims, the journal was concerned, by and large, with women's
problems if not so much at home, then certainly in public places.

The new news-sheet firmly puts the Samiti woman in her appointed place
that of service. It is concerned about distinguishing itself from
aspirations of the womens' movement, not about appropriating and subverting
some of them. The Samiti calendar for 1999 lists a ritual event for each
day of the year, and most days, there are many more than one event. Many of
them require a visit to the local temple, a pilgrimage and/or the
intercession of a priest. There is no political event that is recognised on
the calendar, not even December 6, though their women remain very proud of
it. The point is that the women of the Samiti are now given a purely ritual
identity, not really and overt, active political one. Here, the larger
interests of the parivar are important. All local temple networks are
co-ordinated by the VHP which also has great influence on the priestly
establishment. Women of the Right have to ensure that the entire mechanism
of temples, domestic ritual events, pilgrimage sites and priests is
efficiently fuelled through a constant rota of scheduled activities. The
VHP published an 'Achar Samhita' or domestic code for Hindus in 1987, even
before it published its Rashtra Samhita.' It has identical instructions
about temple visits for all householders.27

In the early 1990s, the Samiti saw itself as performing the same functions
vis-a-vis the women's fronts of the Sangh which the Sangh performs
vis-a-vis its own subordinate affiliates. It claimed that all these
subsidiary women's fronts were trained by them, their leaders were
simultaneously, Samiti members. Now they repudiate all amibition of
repeating the Sangh's role within the cluster of women's fronts within the
Sangh parivar. They do mention that BJP MPs Sumitra Mahajan and Vijayraje
Scindhia as well as Krishna Sharma from the VHP Mahila Mandal are Samiti
members but they do not claim that it indicates a substantial pedagogical
function for the Samiti.28 If anything, they try to gesture at a growing
separation among the various affiliates of the Sangh, though the Sangh does
contain, train and nurture all of them.29 Especially, there is an attempt
to differentiate between the Samiti and the BJP women politicians.
The transiting to a ritual/domestic from a public activist role does not
bespeak a return to the so-called peaceful, maternal bosom of faith from
the turbulence of modern politics. The urge for violence, destruction,
revenge, for trampling over Muslims and Christians, is, if anything, even
more strident today, but the Samiti transmits it in a different way. Both
Poonam Gupta and Asha Sharma indignantly refuted my timid suggestions that
Rithambhara's audio cassette and her call for a slaughter of Muslims might
be a "bit" problematic. They both said, in identical words, that these
things needed to be said, and that Rithambhara "was the only one who could
have said them". Poonam Gupta referred to Rithambhara's current work with
an orphanage and her low-keyed existence in the middle class Agrasen
apartments at Patparganj with some regret. At the same time, an equal
agency in violent politics does not seem to be on the agenda. The heady
hopes of going into war under the banner of the Samiti icon of Ashtabhja
Durga are no longer articulated. Samiti is content, as we shall see later,
to remain a transmission belt for the RSS, conveying stories about Muslim
and Christian 'atrocities' against Hindus. There is a retreat to older
female functions and roles where women gossip about things that they have
not seen themselves but have heard from their men.
Retreat from active violence or public politics does not mean an emphasis
on women-centred work. Samiti office-bearers often refer to the 'social
work' that their women do so well from their homes, but when they are
pressed to specify, they fall back upon "writing letters to newspapers
about oppression of Hindus and about sex and violence in western movies and
TV shows".30 The Samiti celebrated its 60th year in 1996 with a national
seminar on this theme. They also conduct workshops on the Vande Mataram
hymn of Bankimchandra which the RSS considers to be the authentic national
anthem for the Hindu nation. These workshops were held in public schools
and in colleges like Shivaji College, Janaki Devi College and S P Mukherjee
College in Delhi. The seminars and the letters to the editors seem to be
the only other things that they do, apart from running shakhas. Despite
five years in Delhi government and access to its funds, they have not set
up shelters and counselling or legal help centres for battered women, or
significant schemes for employment-generation or slum welfare. Elsewhere,
too, a picture of minor, sporadic activity emerges. They run a girls'
hostel at Nagpur, a new one has been opened at Jullunder in Punjab.
Interestingly, perhaps as a rejoinder to Graham Staines' work, they proudly
referred to a hostel at Bilaspur in Madhya Pradesh where girls from homes
afflicted with leprosy are enrolled. However, they hastened to assure me,
the girls themselves are 'healthy' and they remain segregated from their
infected surroundings, as do the sevikas who cater to them. A more telling
contrast to Staines cannot be imagined.31 They have not started any schemes
for training women members of panchayati institutions, nor do they have any
ideas about how women function within them. Again, the contrast with the
Left and radical womens' organisations comes readily to mind. Despite great
opposition and obstruction from patriarchal and state agencies, Left and
radical womens' organisations provide precisely these services and
empowering resources to women.
Shiv Sena women corporators, who represent wards with substantial slums,
could say nothing much about alleviation schemes that they had started,
although they spend a lot on bus shelters that display Sena posters and
portraits of Bal Thackeray. Shraddha Yadav said that she has used
corporation funds to build a local Sena office. On the other hand, they all
expressed great interest in 'beautification and development' of their wards
which would obviously require much slum 'clearance' and displacement and
uprooting of poor people from homes and places of work. They were all very
silent about poverty in the slums.32
Whereas in the early 1990s, women did spend a few words on the question of
poverty and expressed confidence that their organisation would develop the
nation, now there is a strange and deafening silence on the theme. If you
ask them about what problems the country faces at the moment, none will
refer to poverty. If you drag it into the conversation, refer to the
accumulating, visible, everyday signs of its growth in Delhi that nobody
possibly can miss, they say there is no need to degrade our country in
public. We should think about our achievements predictably, the Bomb not
problems.33 They will not even make gestural, token, minimal suggestions
for alleviation which their organisation might supposedly by planning.
State power seems to have put a closure to an acknowledgement of the
phenomenon this, even after the recent state elections have made it
abundantly clear that the failure to think of poverty cost them so dear.
When I appealed to their swadeshi instincts, they refused to link
globalisation with problems of the withdrawal from the social sector and
subsidies, with the effects of structural adjustment on the withdrawal of
public sector enterprises. They would only talk of the plight of Indian
manufacturers who suffer from foreign competition to their products. If
these are not threatened, they said that they had no objection to foreign
products.
Social questions are abhorred as divisive of national unity and they are
avoided in the boudhik or ideological sessions of shakhas. Shakhas remain
central to their enterprise. They see them as mobilising points for entire
localities, since through intimate relations with the women, they gain
entry into their homes. Since each shakha trains 20/25 women at the most,
relations are warm and close, spiced with 'enjoyable' activities like
storytelling and games.34 Parents who do not subscribe to Sangh ideology
would still like to send their daughters to shakhas since they teach
deference and obedience, they inculcate conservative values like arranged
matches, good homekeeping, modesty in dress and behaviour and diligent
service to men and elders. Girls themselves like to go because of the
physical training programmes which are invaluable ways of gaining a control
over their own bodies when they have control over so little. The sense of
physical well-being, strength and empowerment remain valued resources, even
when no other kinds of empowerment are offered. Also, the ideological
instructions about services to a militaristic, aggressive Hindu nation, of
vengeance against its enemies, about heroic qualities of legendary men and
women who resisted 'enemies' of the nation, fulfil aspirations for a life
above pure self-interest, release frustrations built up through being girls
in orthodox families. Moreover, they are not told anything that offends
mainstream patriarchal, Hindu nationalistic values and myths.35 Although,
they do admit that young girls are not the most enthusiastic members, they
do not prohibit all the new pleasures in the name of fighting western
culture. Girls are encouraged to look good the modern way. They can visit
beauty parlours and spend money on buying up beauty products provided,
most of them are home-manufactured. Though mini-skirts and shorts are out
since they expose the body, jeans are all right if they suit their figures.
If they do not have the right figure, then they must cultivate one. 36
These are important concessions. The new consumerist self-absorptions of
the middle class woman, fanned by the ad-culture and the flood of
beauty-aids, cosmetics and household-gadgets, are encouraged, since they
provide the economic survival of much of the country's
manufacturing-trading classes. And this class is also the major basis for
the political support of the Sangh parivar.
What cannot be tolerated, however, and what is powerfully and continuously
denounced as the fruit of the western poison tree, is the notion of equal
gender rights. Poonam Gupta said that there has been far too much talk
about the rights of Indian women, it has led to domestic competition,
unhappiness, broken families, blighted children. 37 It was the poison
injected by the colonial state and its educational policies, said Asha
Sharma. The colonial, foreign education is the biggest single problem in
India today, she said, especially because it taught women all the wrong
things. A proper Hindu educational system would restore to her the ancient
knowledge about how to be pure wives, good mothers. When I asked her how
she would distinguish herself from other women's organisations as a Samiti
activist, she said immediately, "They teach women about their rights, they
tell them to fight their men about these rights. We teach them how to
sacrifice themselves to keep the family together. Rights may be there, but
it is wrong to fight for them. Women lose more eventually that way. Don't
you remember your mother? Did she need to go to the law court to be happy?
My mother was worshipped like a queen in the family. A good, pure Hindu
woman can achieve such respect, such happiness by being a mother. Why do
they want to throw it away by fighting for rights?" When I asked her how
women will cope with dowry demands, domestic violence, desertion and
discrimination, she said, "We teach them how to do it, how to possess
honour, dignity and authority in the family. They do so by being good
mothers, nothing can take that away from them. If they suffer in every
other way, and they still nurse their children lovingly, then who will not
honour them for that? How can they be good wives, good mothers, if they
think all the time of how to be the equal=DDof men, of doing better than
them, of competing with them and fighting with them over rights?" 38 Poonam
Gupta used a colourful analogy to make the same point. "Because seats are
reserved for women on buses, they get only the reserved seats to use, but
no more than that. If seats were not reserved for them, all the men on the
bus would give up their seats to each woman who did not have one. Talking
of laws on equality deprives women in this way." 39
Their critique of the concept of equal rights and their legal guarantee is
based on an absolute silence on gender problems. The old 'Jagriti' was
equally silent about problems within the family. But it had a lot to say
about discrimination in public spaces, in state agencies, in workplaces.
The sevikas now refuse to discuss even that. When I asked 'pracharika'
Poonam Gupta what she would consider to be the biggest problem for Indian
women, she could not think of a single issue to say for a long time.
Eventually, she came up with rape. That, of course, paves the way for the
well-worn theme of alleged Muslim lust for the pure Hindu woman. Similarly,
when I asked Asha Sharma the same question, she mentioned the British
education policy which closed women's eyes to questions of "nationality,
patriotism, culture and motherhood" by teaching them about "struggles, law,
fighting men." She shrugged off my queries about dowry and domestic
violence impatiently as things that do not merit a discussion. At length,
she said that rape was a problem of great proportions.
Of course, the new phase of Left-secular-feminist women's movement
consolidated itself around rape as a symbol of the most violent expression
of patriarchal values, of the complicity between the state and the violent
man. 40 The founder of the Samiti, Lakshmibai Kelkar, had also urged for
shakhas for women when she saw a wife being assaulted in the presence of
her husband and concluded that since Hindu men cannot defend their wives,
the wives must learn to protect themselves. The present reasoning of the
Samiti is different from both understandings. Rapes occur, they say, since
women have forfeited their older modes of honour and motherhood status by
being addicted to struggles and enmity with men. Moreover, the western
films and cable-TV programmes have created a vulgar preoccupation with sex
and desire that was unknown to Hindu society of past. The resolution,
unlike that of their founder, is not physical empowerment of threatened
women. It is the retrieval of past honour by the recuperation of the
motherhood ideal and by the banning of the media products. 41
Banning, prohibition these become very important words at a significant
point in their discourse. When I asked her about the 'Fire' controversy,
Asha Sharma expressed her revulsion against what she called
"inter-relationships among women" she could not make herself say the word
lesbianism. She was emphatic that such 'vikriti' a product of western
culture should be banned, as well as its sympathetic portrayal. When I
asked if some other categories of women should not lose their rights, she
was perfectly willing to extend the boundaries: Hindu women do not know how
to be unfaithful, but if some degenerate elements do indulge in impure
activities, they cannot have any rights at all. 42 So rights are to be
whittled away at both ends. Certain kinds of rights right to 'perversion'
should not exist at all. Certain kinds of persons who do not conform to
Hindu standards should not possess any rights either. Above all, the very
notion of rights is inducement to rape, to domestic unhappiness. It is the
sole cause of male oppression of women. Happiness and safety versus rights
and equality. Moreover, women have a duty to forgo such dangerous ideas,
since they are western, alien, colonial. If they succumb to that seduction,
they ruin their faith, their culture. It is, therefore, a form of
unchastity, a kind of adultery in itself, an unfaithfulness to their lords
and masters.
Her critique of the theory of equal rights began with 'Fire'. Once the word
ban had been uttered in that connection, it acted like a drop of
quicksilver that immediately stretches out and crawls rapidly in all
directions. Almost immediately, interdictions spread over an immense
variety of activities and persons. The floodgates opened and one could see
that the words 'our culture and its vikriti' or perversion were
free-floating signifiers, that encompass anything, from Muslims to the Left
anything at all that demands equal rights for elements that can be branded
as not a part of our culture. The immediate subtext this was after the BJP
had lost the no-confidence motion was, of course, Sonia Gandhi. At the
same time, the point of entry is noticeable 'Fire' enabled the utterance
of the word 'ban' and it immediately incorporated the practice of
lesbianism, its representation in the media, and the women and lesbian
groups that defended the showing of the film. It is a sideways attack that
begins at the margins, from the corners, from the least-known and
least-theorised of issues in our context, unlike other gender issues or
themes of class and caste. Asha Sharma presumed that I would share her
point of view. Beginning with such obscure, unnoticed beginnings, the
notion of interdictions could swell and flow like an oncoming tide, till
the notion of fixed rights gets tattered and meaningless.
Rights are pitted against 'our modes of being' which, in their turn, are
guarantors of happiness and harmony the pure wife, the good mother, the
Hindu woman. They militate against both culture and virtue a very big
burden of sins! Let me cite a few instances of opposition and denunciation.
Ashok Singhal, quoted reverently in the Samiti's commemorative number of
1996, 'Vishwambhara': "Vedic sages gave all responsibility to brahman women
for the welfare of the family... Today our women are competing with men
about same rights. This shows the downfall of women...Nudity is more valued
than purity...under western influence, they feed their own babies from
bottles, not from their breasts...they value their youth more than they
value their wombs, they will kill their own foetus to protect their
looks...It is vital that they return to their Hindu roots..." 43
If this seems like the lunatic fringe, let us turn to an article by Sumitra
Mahajan, BJP MP. At the Beijing conference of women in 1995, she found out
to her horror and grief that the Indian delegates no longer recognised that
Hindu women need to be different from their western counterparts. They even
organised demonstrations "without shame or grace" to protest against the
behaviour of their own men. "Saman adhikar ke liye mahilayen lalayit hai"
(women are lusting after equal rights)...They are greedy for "adhikar aur
upabhog" (rights and pleasure)...they were content with two small meals a
day, but now they are so greedy that they will serve beer to men at beer
bars in Mumbai late at night so that they can make more and more money." 44
The leader of the Sangh's trade union front, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh,
Dattopant Thengde asserts: "Nari vikas ka adhar adhikar aur andolan nahi"
(the basis of upliftment of women is not rights or movements). Predictably,
he counterposes the wife and the mother, thus making the woman in movements
for rights necessarily a non-wife and a non-mother. 45 In fact, motherhood
and wifehood are made incompatible with employment and public identities.
It is assumed that women seek jobs for consumerist desires. Asha Sharma
forbade jobs except in cases of dire economic compulsion. 46
Let me cite the Samiti prayer at some length on this;

Benevolent, auspicious Hindu Land
I dedicate my life to you...
Your ideas about holy chastity
Embrace your beloved daughters...
Bless our meek, pious, devout women
Dedicated to their religion and tradition
We are the blessed mothers
Of this powerful nation...

Hindu women are made in the image of Motherland herself. An unfaithful
surrender to alien values like equality and rights will, therefore, ruin
not only themselevs, but Hindu rashtra too. 47
To counter dangerous ideas, Asha Sharma explained that she teaches the
ideal of obedience. Girls must submit to parents, wives to husbands.
Otherwise, homes will break up and children left bereft of solace and
shelter. The motif of the suffering child is used as the most powerful
anodyne. Western ideas like widow remarriage is sought to be brought under
control. Widows with children must not remarry, for then they will lose
both parents. Mothers may work only under dire economic necessity. Broken
homes are caused by self-indulgent women who seek to satisfy desires and
seek pleasure. Pleasure, desire and rights are aligned together as the
other of motherhood and tradition. To teach them young, a detailed code of
'decent' behaviour and dress is elaborated to shakha members. If they
conform, they will be protected from rape and gain happy homes. 48
The major political function of the Samiti remains the dissemination of
communalism. Women are taught to 'analyse' current affairs and newspapers
at shakhas. They are told about Hindu rashtra, about Christian-colonial and
Muslim misdeeds of the past, about "Christian aggression and violent
attacks on Hindu women, men and temples in all parts of the country in the
past year". They are fed with horror stories about attacks on Hindu women
in communal riots. They are told that no Hindu has ever attacked a Muslim
or a Christian not a single Muslim or Christian has been killed by a
Hindu. But Christians annoy Hindus by inciting dalits. 49Dalits are like
ignorant children, said Poonam Gupta with a contemptuous laugh. "You just
smile at them, say a few sweet things, and they have lost their hearts to
you." The tone strongly suggested a mongrel wagging his tail at a morsel
thrown at him. 50The communal perspective slides into social hierarchy
smoothly. They reiterate all the time: "We do not approve of reservations,
whether for women or for some castes. It does not help anyone, merit must
be observed." 51

V The Sevikas and Elections

Sevikas are home- and neighbourhood-based, insulated from contamination from
lesser social circles. There is only one major exception to this. Some of
them - mostly the unmarried pracharikas - work with the Sangh's slum
rehabilitation programmes under the Seva Bharati scheme. Some others train
the teachers who work in the RSS schools under Vidya Bharati. Both are huge
growth areas of the Sangh - the Vidya Bharati competing with the government
chain of Model schools, and Seva Bharati running 1,700 centres in Delhi
alone. Most teachers in the Vidya Bharati scheme are women, and Seva Bharati
work of rehabilitation would seem to require 'womanly' nurturing services.
Yet, Samiti participation even here is highly restricted. The Samiti at best
is an auxiliary to certain fronts under the Sangh.

The Sangh parivar appears to have launched on a curious course of action. It
proudly forefronts elected women members in the higher legislative and
executive bodies. In this respect, its record is far better than that of the
Left. On the other hand, women who are thus exalted, do not come from
women's organisations, nor do they have prominent bases among the women of
their own political clusters. They are quite indifferent to women's issues,
problems, demands. What is the implication of this split between the women's
organisations and women in electoral politics? Incidentally, the same
pattern is repeated among the women of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai. Prominent,
longstanding women corporators and MLAs have no contact with or knowledge of
the Mahila Aghadi. Sudha Chari, founder of the Aghadi and a very senior Shiv
Sena member, has no power or visibility within the party, nor was she ever
given candidacy for any kind of electoral seat.52

The need to field women candidates is obvious, given a steadily growing
women's constituency, reinforced by extremely vocal and active women's
movements. Also, reservation of seats for women in local and state-level
elected bodies makes it indispensable. The interesting thing is the careful
insulation of such candidates from women's issues and organisations even
within the Sangh parivar.

I would argue that the need to push women into electoral politics is
counter-pointed deliberately by efforts to ensure that this does not add an
edge to gender concerns or to empowerment of women within the Sangh parivar.
Women enter electoral politics and earn the party some kudos for progressive
attitudes, without a concomitant compulsion for the Sangh parivar as a whole
to sensitise itself to women's needs. Moreover, women MPs or MLAs of BJP
cannot enter the sanctum sanctorum of decision-making - the Sangh itself,
which remains exclusively male. Nor are women members of the central
organising committee of the Shiv Sena. The implications of their prominence
in public politics are thus clipped at both ends. Women's organisations, on
the other hand, cannot borrow the lustre of their elected sisters who, on
the other hand, are individuals, unconnected with organised women as a front
within the parivar. I found it interesting that Samiti office-bearers and
pracharikas were quite contemptuous about the issue of women's reservation
in Parliament, arguing that it denoted a tragic dilution of the principle of
merit. One can perhaps make the same point about the Left parties which have
a remarkable absence of women in their central decision-making bodies. At
the same time, their women's organisations are vibrant, dynamic, burgeoning,
innovative and creative fronts, in sharp contrast to the rather moth-eaten
Samiti of the Sangh parivar and the Mahila Aghadi of the Shiv Sena.

VI Conclusion

If the Samiti is now a small, bounded, non-expansive affair, like the good,
modest, non-competitive Hindu woman, then what is the significance of the
new accents and stresses within them? I believe that the pattern has a great
relevance. These women are the custodians of essential Sangh values, of its
authentic ideology, that the other fronts have somewhat diluted and
imperilled in the current war games over electoral power. Since electoral
preoccupations will continue to grow, the conservation of older values
becomes all the more crucial. Hence the Samiti is important as both a
guarantee as well as a mirror.

Secondly, if the battle over electoral power is ever decisively won then the
Samiti will be the nucleus of the new Hindu domesticity. Its women will be
the exemplars, living models for the pattern to be realised in the Hindu
rashtra of the future. Therefore, precisely at a moment of expected triumph
did it need to contract its activities and affirm its purity, domesticity,
conservatism at the cost of its public activism.

We will be quite misled to believe that it is an entirely imposed change
enforced by the male Sangh. Women have genuinely invested in this
commitment. They see a bright future for themselves as the soul of the Hindu
rashtra, as the defender of tradition against the west, as partners in an
internal colonisation over the Muslim and the Christian.

=46inally, the convictions that the Samiti expressed go beyond gender - or,
rather, gender is the pattern, the inspiration for relations between castes
and classes. Since it can mystify its operations of power with intimacy, it
is the most effective argument for all hierarchies. The battle against
equality and rights that the Samiti had undertaken in the name of Hindu
traditions is also a larger, unnamed struggle that the Sangh is engaged in
to re-orient the discursive order of power relations in the Hindu rashtra of
its dreams.

NOTES:

1 This does not mean that scholarly research does not exist at all, merely
that they are not much looked into by the more authoritative critical
statements. For more substantial work, see, among others, Christophe
Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the
1990s, Viking, New Delhi, 1996; also Eva Hellman, Political Hinduism: The
Challenge of the Visva Hindu Parishad, Uppsala University Press, 1993; for a
detailed exposition of the corporatisation of religious interests, see Lise
McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement,
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
2 I have discussed these aspects of the debates in my paper 'Moving towards
Rights: The Age of Consent Debates in Late Colonial Bengal' (forthcoming),
=46eminist Studies.
3 On the trope of impending death in the discourse of Hindu communalism,
see Pradip Kumar Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early 20th
Century Bengal, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1999, chapter 2.
4 See, for instance, S Anitha, Manisha, Vasudha, Kavitha, 'Intervention
with Women' in Sarkar and Butalia (eds), Women and the Hindu Right: A
Collection of Essays, Kali for Women, Delhi, 1995.
5 Basu, 'Feminism Inverted: The Gendered Imagery and Real Women of Hindu
Nationalism', ibid.
6 See Tanika Sarkar, 'The Women as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti
and Ram Janambhoomi Movement', Economic and Political Weekly, August 31,
1991. Also M S Golwalkar, 'A Call to Motherhood' in Bunch of Thoughts,
Vikrama Prakashan, Bangalore, 1980.
7 Interview with Asha Sharma, Delhi, April 1990.
8 See Teesta Setalvad, 'The Woman Shiv Sainik and Her Sister Swayamsevika'
in Women and the Hindu Right, op cit.
9 In the early 1990s, I talked to VHP office-holders at the office at
Ramakrishnapuram, Delhi. They gratefully recalled her signal services to the
cause.
10 Sarkar, 'The Woman as Communal Subject', op cit.
11 Ibid.
12 Interviews with women of the Sanghchalak's family, December 1991. See
Basu et al, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right,
Orient Longman, Delhi, 1993.
13 A Karyavayika is the organising secretary. Asha Sharma has held this
office for the last 10 years. She was a founder member of the Delhi wing in
1960, being then a Mathematics Honours student at Miranda House College. She
now works as a teacher in a school at Sadr Bazar. The Samiti's Prant
Karyavayika or general secretary for Delhi - the person who represents the
Samiti in intra-Sangh meetings - is Radha Mehta, an advocate by profession,
who is a much younger person, has just been appointed to her office last
year. The Pramukh Sanchalika or head of the all-India organisation is Usha
Chati who has taken office in 1994. The Samiti has so far seen three Pramukh
Sanchalikas in office, all of them Maharashtrian upper caste women. All
Samiti office-bearers are nominated. The core-group consists of 24 women,
all nominated. Nagpur, where the Samiti was founded, remains the all-India
headquarters. In this way, the Samiti replicates the earlier history of the
Sangh which grew up in Nagpur and barring the current incumbent, so far all
its Sarsanghchalaks have been Maharashtrian brahmins. A Pracharika is a
woman pledged to strict celibacy, who is a fulltime activist. Her duties are
to supervise the functioning of shakhas. Poonam Gupta, a young girl from a
hardcore RSS family, is Delhi's only Pracharika at the moment, looking after
west and east Delhi shakhas. Senior Samiti members teach others. Interviews
with Asha Sharma and Poonam Gupta in Delhi, April 1999.
14 Interviews with Asha Sharma.
15 See Teesta Setalvad in Sarkar and Butalia (eds), Women of the Hindu
Right, Kali for Women, Delhi, 1995.
16 Interviews prepared under my instructions and conducted by Ramlath at
Mumbai. I am very grateful to her for her in-depth interviews.
17 Interview with AIDWA leader Kanak Mukherjee, Calcutta, February 1999.
18 Interview with Asha Sharma and Kanchan Lalporewala, Delhi, April 1999.
19 I was informed by Indu Agnihotri of Janwadi Mahila Samiti, Delhi.
20 Interview with Asha Sharma
21 Interview with Rekha Raje, Delhi, December 1990.
22 Interviews at Khurjah, op cit.
23 Kanchan, an 80 year-old woman from Rajasthan, was visiting her daughter
in Delhi when the neighbours drew her into such familiar and approved talk.
Though without any previous exposure to the Sangh, and coming, if anything,
with Congress leanings, she promptly recognised the validity of the
discussions, and became a samiti wholetimer. Currently, she is the
'guardian' of pracharika Poonam Gupta, whom she chaperones during her stays
at the Delhi head-office at Patel Nagar.
24 Tapan Basu and I investigated the RSS-run Saraswati Shishu and Bal
Mandirs under the Samarth Shiksha Samiti, an affiliate of the all India
Vidya Bharati scheme, in Delhi in 1993-94.
25 See Basu et al, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: Critique of the Hindu
Right, Tracts for the Times, Orient Longman, Delhi, 1993.
26 See discussion of the magazine in my 'The Woman as Communal Subject', op
cit.
27 Eva Hellman, op cit.
28 Interview with Asha Sharma, op cit.
29 Interview with Poonam Gupta, op cit.
30 Interview with Asha Sharma, op cit.
31 Interviews with Asha Sharma and Poonam Gupta.
32 Interviews of Visakha Raut, Sadhana Mane, Surekha Patil, Umeesha Pawar
and Shraddha Yadav.
33 Interview with Asha Sharma
34 Interview with Poonam Gupta, op cit.
35 Interview with Kanchan Lalporewala, op cit.
36 Interview with Asha Sharma, op cit.
37 Interview with Poonam Gupta, op cit.
38 Interview with Asha Sharma, op cit.
39 Interview with Poonam Gupta.
40 See Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi, Issues of State: Theory and Practice
in the Contemporary Women Movement in India, Kali for Women, Delhi 1992.
41 Asha Sharma, interview, op cit.
42 Ibid.
43 Ashoke Singhal in Vishwambhara, Delhi, 1996.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Interview, op cit.
47 See Vishwambhara, op cit.
48 Interview with Asha Sharma, op cit.
49 Asha Sharma, interview, op cit.
50 Interview with Poonam Gupta, op cit.
51 Interview with Asha Sharma and Poonam Gupta, op cit.
52 Interviews with six Shiv Sena corporators and with Sudha Chari in Mumbai,
March 1999.
----ENDS------