The material below helps to explain the attitudes of a number of
Indians on these newsgroups..... It is tragic that while most people
are reasonable, there are always a few in every crowd that show the
things discussed in the article below.
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http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy/article_1566.jsp
The political psychology of Hindu nationalism
Rajeev Bhargava
Why does Hindu nationalism take an aggressive, exclusive form? This is
a question of psychology
as well as politics. Rajeev Bhargava, in New Delhi, examines the
worldview of activists who use
`Indianness' as a weapon against their Muslim, Christian, and secular
fellow-citizens.
5 - 11 - 2003
Hindu nationalists think of themselves as a large Indian joint family,
a parivar. And perhaps rightly
so, for they are propelled by a family of closely-related ideas and,
put together, all their networks
and organisations constitute an enormous right-wing platform, a
massive arena that showcases all
known varieties of illiberalisms.
The movement brings together fundamentalists, traditionalists, anti-
modernists, and right-wing
conservatives who covet a form of modernisation radically different
from the one begun by
secular humanists such as Jawaharlal Nehru. Under its wings, there are
proponents of
old-fa****oned terrorism, authoritarianism and fascism packed closely
together with those who
reluctantly submit to the constraints set by representative democracy.
Present in the movement are
people with a rigidly hierarchical cast of mind who fail to shed their
strong upper-caste leanings as
well as half-hearted egalitarians who, for strategic reasons,
grudgingly include the lower castes
within their fold.
Among its many organisations is the avowedly culturalist Rashtriya
Svayamsevak Sangh
[Association of National Volunteers (RSS)] whose members determinedly
work deep in the
undergrowth of civil society. But the movement also has political
organisations like the Bharatiya
Janata Party [Indian People's Party (BJP)] whose sole purpose is to
capture state power, and is
affiliated to the religious Vishwa Hindu Parishad [World Hindu
Organisation (VHP)]. Given these
different strands, its actions are bound to be octopus-like: each
tentacle appears to move
independently and yet all come together to push the body in the
desired direction.
It might be expected that a movement with such seemingly opposed
tendencies would in the long
run have split, if not collapsed. This has not happened because four
features cement all the various
groups:
* First, abiding and pervasive anti-liberalism.
* Second, repugnance for the left or to anything that even
remotely smells of it.
* Third, commitment to a distinctive and exclusivist variant of
nationalism. Hindu nationalists
aim to unite all those who are seen by them as part of the Hindu fold
and to create (or, seen by
their own lights, to reinstate) a strong, disciplined nation of such
united people: the Hindu
Rashtra.
* Fourth, and above all, relentless antipathy to Muslims, and to a
lesser extent, to Christians
and to the secular-minded who desire equal citizen****p for all
Indians.
The pathology of `perverse comparison'
To explain why the Hindu nationalist movement took an extreme, largely
negative, form centred
around xenophobic religious identities, it is im****tant to understand
the mindset of the earliest
protagonists of the movement. Like other anti-modern traditionalists,
they were insecure and
vulnerable in a world that they could not call their own. But unlike
them, they were cursed with
the need perversely to compare themselves with others.
It is of course true that identities are formed in relation to others,
and that a constitutive link
exists between identity and recognition which forces a frequent
comparison with others. But also
at play here is a pervasive pathology wherein people never perceive or
understand themselves
unless a comparison is made with others. Perverse comparison in such
cases is a precondition for
any self-understanding.
What is worse, these comparisons are mostly self-deprecating. A person
can carry the cru****ng
weight of these negative feelings only up to a point, however.
Insecure selves, constantly in search
of affirmation from others but burdened by over-dependence and low
self-esteem, try to
overcome this unbearable tension.
They attempt an escape in three ways. First, by being envious,
jealous, bitterly competitive and
eventually resentful of the very persons on whose affirmation they
rely. They try to recover
self-esteem by interpreting their deprivation as caused not by their
own disability but by the
actions of others, and by holding them responsible for their own
failure. For them, envy and
resentment are the means by which equality and independence is
reasserted.
Second, they project self-hatred outwards, on to others, whom they
saddle with a range of wildly
exaggerated, negative qualities that function to justify this hatred.
They manufacture a feeling of
superiority by conjuring up a relentless, comprehensive devaluation of
the qualities of others and
by a cultivated blindness to any good they might possess.
Third, when hatred and impotence find no resolution, and negative
emotions remain repressed,
without an outlet, a horrible embittering of the personality occurs
[on these points, see Max
Scheler: On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing, University of Chicago Press
(1992), pp. 116 - 143].
This self-poisoning of the mind, precisely what Friedrich Nietzsche
called ressentiment, is a
pronounced quality infusing the modern, xenophobic nationalist
mentality and movement. Its
perversity brooks no rational arguments, nor any political
alternatives.
A discourse of resentment
Once the other is essentialised and inferiorised, and a Manichean
world of good and evil is
invented, a final manoeuvre to overcome negative feelings of acute
inadequacy is sometimes
deployed. A supplementary discourse is created which begins by asking
why a self-evidently
superior people with an infinitely superior civilisation have fallen
into such bad times? Why do
people with poor moral qualities advance and why those with better
moral fibre lag behind? Why
does victory fall easily in the lap of the mean-spirited and persons
with high culture and noble
spirit become their victims?
Such questions are answered in two ways. First, by admitting that the
logic of power and worldly
success is different from the high morality of world-transcending
pursuits or even the simple
moral requirements of ordinary life; and second, by accepting that in
the current context the
acquisition of negative qualities such as cunning and aggression,
essential constituents of the
personality of others, is paramount and unavoidable.
Thus, the good and the virtuous, they claim, are forced to borrow from
the victors precisely those
inferior qualities that they despise. To emulate the very people that
are stigmatised is the pressing
need of our times, they say. Other than this, what option do the weak
have if they are to prevent
evil from overrunning them? Resentful nationalism is constructed out
of a discourse shaped by
this radically other-dependent, negative mindset ready for virulent
counter-assertion.
The politicisation of this mindset leads inexorably to a militant
strategy that invests heavily in the
construction of a pure culture, is sharply focused on a particular
kind of narrow, hardened,
identity-formation and uses uncompromisingly belligerent techniques to
build a national identity
grounded in the newly constructed and sanitised culture. It is in the
logic of this thinking that
Hinduism acquires a primarily negative form and is ultimately reduced
to nothing but a set of
anti-somethings.
For example, the first cow protection movement started at the end of
the 19th century and sought
to unite all Hindus against the alleged barbarian practices of Muslims
who were positioned as a
threat to the natural order of Hindu society. The cow, believed to be
sacred by many, has long
been a symbol of upper-caste Hindu identity and is therefore invested
with great potential for
mobilisation and political manipulation. However, the permanent
subtext of such campaigns is
their anti-Muslim character because the Muslim population are assumed
to be the only beef-eaters
and consequently a permanent body of cow-slaughterers.
Perverse comparison - feelings of inferiority, envy, resentment and
negative stereotyping of the
other - continues to propel extreme Hindu nationalism today.
The politics of prejudice
Yet, against these powerful tendencies, it can appear that the basis
of the persistent psychological
animus undergirding extreme Hindu nationalism has declined. After the
partition of the country,
Muslims constitute only 11% of total population. Other minorities are
much smaller. British
imperialism is present only in the traces it has left behind. The
prestige of western culture has
declined considerably in direct pro****tion to the growth in self-
confidence of Indian culture and
civilisation, something that was bound to happen after over half a
century of democratic self-rule.
Comparisons with other cultures need yield feelings of inferiority and
inadequacy no longer.
Upper-caste Hindus dominate all political institutions in independent
India and are economically
and culturally powerful. Most of all, organisations that sustain Hindu
nationalism have become
considerably stronger since the 1980s. The power and visibility of the
RSS and its associates like
the VHP have grown. The BJP has gradually increased its voting
strength against its main national
rival, the Indian National Congress, and currently leads the coalition
in the capital, New Delhi.
Why then should the mindset typical of resentful, crippled and
powerless people short on
self-confidence still be around? Why do many members of the majority
in India feel and behave
like a persecuted minority?
Here, it appears that there is an instrumental but also dialectical
relation****p between
psychological need and political strategies. Hindu nationalists have
been quick to discover that
their strategies do not merely fulfil pre-existing psychological
needs, but help to resuscitate them
just when the need for them appears to be vani****ng.
Earlier, the mindset created the strategies it needed. Now, these
strategies rekindle the mindset in
turn - for instance, by reproducing the conditions that beget a
minority-complex in the majority.
Thus, from being a predominantly personal or collective device to
overcome the simmering
tension within the soul of a marginalised group, low on self-esteem,
all the Hindu nationalist ploys
have become the central axis of a grand political strategy to seize
total hegemony and power in
society.
Hindu nationalists now make a free, instrumental use of memory,
emotion, prejudice, religious
difference and generalised deprivation to militantly advance their
extremist agenda. They are
inventing a new anti-Muslim Hinduism, which helps them form a `vote
bank' first to capture and
then to retain political power.
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