On Mar 11, 5:53 pm, Straydog <arthu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
-------------------------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
That is a straw-man thesis. Hindu nationalism is neither aggressive
nor exclusive. It is assertive of the right of the majority to be free
from the tyranny of the minorities wielding undue power, and it is
inclusive of all the people who respect the democratic majority and
its rights.
It's like asking "Why does the stupid dog Straydog hate his mother"?
> `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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