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The Hindu Communal Challenge: 1964-84

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Rakesh Batabyal

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Academic Staff College, JNU

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 The Hindu Communal Challenge: 1964-84

Rakesh Batabyal

All human solidarities claim a telos of virtue and a moral horizon. Substantive freedom and good

life is invoked for such moral communities. The evolution of societies in India too has seen the

emergence of such solidarities organized to expand human freedom. In more recent times,

communalism has emerged as an idea invoking such solidarity to be organized within the

boundaries of a community defined by religion (and sometimes, culture). The politico-historical

horizon of such a community, it is claimed, would help expand the political and social well being

of the people.

The operation of the logic of invocation of communal solidarity, however, has brought serious

impediments to human life and well being in the sub-continent. It is therefore very significant

that the claims of communalism have been seriously analyzed by the political leadership and

intellectuals in India, and have also been seriously contested. The context of democratic space

within which the claims were presented and countered provided the contest with a character of

deep ideological and hegemonic character. The period between 1964 and 1984, in many senses,

seems to be most crucial for determining the contours, particularly of the Hindu variant of the

communal challenge.

2
The phenomenon of communalism in India has been studied from two different traditions of

scholarship.1 There is the one in which the communal phenomenon is examined, explored and

explained to test certain models already developed in the academia, particularly outside India. 2

Which model of governance induces more violence than others? Is inducing communal violence

electorally more profitable, or for that matter whether religious conflicts are inherent in plural

societies? These are the questions that are tested with social scientific models, and certain

conclusions are derived. Recently, the question whether the rise in communal conflict in the

cities is related to the decline in associational civic life in the same way as it has induced urban

violence has been explored using large scale samples from a couple of dozen Indian cities.3 This

analysis however begs the question as to why the civic life did decline in the first place.

Communal violence or the rise of communalism has been linked with the decline in the civic life

in most of the cities that have been examined and not the other way round, as the premise was

set. With the rise of a voluntary sector linked to the global policy making entrepreneurship, such

models are then applied back to the societies by the global NGOs. Therefore, for example, the

newly circulating idea in certain intellectuals circles that we should have proportional

representational system instead of the presently working representational system comes from the

argument for ‘consociational model’ of governance proposed by political scientist Arend

Lijphart way back in 1977 in which he had argued that in societies where minorities and groups

are represented in the governments, religious conflict are less than where they are not
1
I acknowledge with thanks hundreds of teachers from across the country with whom I have been interacting at the
Academic Staff College in JNU and with whom I have discussed issues of contemporary India at great length.
Interaction with them offers me a rare opportunity to know perspectives from across the country with their myriad
differences and nuances.
2
For a discussion on the historiography of communalism in modern India see, Chandra, Bipan, Communalism in
Modern India, Vikas, Delhi, 1984; Panikkar, K.N. (Ed.) Communalism in India: History, Politics, and Culture,
Manohar, Dehi,1991; Habib, Irfan, History an Interpretation - Communalism and Problems of Historiography in
India, (www.sacw.net/India…/IhabibcommunalHistory. html); Batabyal, Rakesh, Communalism in Bengal From
Famine to Noakhali 1943-47, Sage Series in Modern Indian History, Sage Publishers, New Delhi, 2005, pp.1-43.
3
Varshney, Asutosh, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, Yale University Press, New
Haven, 2002

3
represented.4 He had put India as one of the exceptional cases where conflict had nothing to do

with representation. But with the rise of conflicts in the 70s and eighties, he had come back on

the issue by including India in his model, suggesting that India also satisfies conditions of his

model.5 The conflict in India was less in the 1950s and 60s, when the communities were richly

represented in Nehru’s government, while later their representation had been reduced and this

had a direct correlation with the new spate of violence. 6 The model has been countered on the

basis of the fact that as far as minority representation is concerned, it is the other way round: the

period after Nehru, i.e., the post 1964 period, is precisely when the minorities had more

representation (consociational) and the number of conflicts too were large in number. 7

Significantly, no counter point is presented. The idea of communal representation that the

‘superior’British colonial policy makers had introduced (well before this model was developed

by the academia in recent years) which had led to the development of communalism in many

colonized countries including India, is not addressed by both sides. Nor is it recognized that

people in these societies have been trying to not only get out of these policies but also the deeply

entrenched dividing ideas of proportional representation, in a manner specific to their own

context. The argument then is proposed that societies with plurality may not be, for all practical

purposes, conducive to democracies.8 Incidentally, proponents of such arguments for other

societies have come primarily from the United States, a society that prides itself on its plurality.

4
Lijphart, Arend, Democracy in a Plural Society, 1977, Yale University Press, New Haven,1977
5
Lijphart, Arend, ‘The Puzzle of Indian Democracy’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, 2, June, 1996, pp.
258-268.
6
Ibid.
7
Wilkinson, Steven I, Votes and Violence, Princeton University Press, 2003.
8
See arguments of inevitability of violence in plural society are approvingly cited by Wilkinson, It says, ‘ The Plural
Society, constrained by the preferences of its citizens, does not provide fertile soil for democratic values or
stability.’ Rabuska, Alvin and Kenneth A. Shepsle, Politics in a Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic
Instability, Charles E.Merrill, Columbus, 1972, p.92, cited in ibid., p.236, fn.1. Sri Lankan anthropologist Stanley
Tambiah also reaches such a conclusion at the end of his political commentary, quite unlike his regular ethnographic
work, that ethnic violence is the destiny of democracy. Levelling Crowd: Ethnonationalist Politics and Collective
Violence in South Asia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996.

4
It was for these scholars initially a factional fight (between the Hindus and Muslims in India),

which led to conflicts - a methodology developed in the fifties and sixties in America to study

the native Indians and African tribal polity, and then tested in studies on Indian society. 9 The old

‘factions’ theory has, with time, become outdated with the Political Science peer group, and been

replaced with the idea of ‘fights over religions’. Now clashes were read as pogroms - the Russian

term used for killing the Jewish people in tsarist Russia. 10 There are also richly documented

works, which begin by accepting the original claims of the communalists with regard to certain

definitional criteria, and then use these definitions to conform to the academic currency and
11
western European models of nation building. In these works, concepts of religious or

communal conflict or Hindu and Muslim nationalism have been generally applied without much

disagreement with the claims of the communal groups. They serve as rich documents of the

times but they somehow fail to give us a sense of the deep and intense contestation that had

existed or continues to exist, which would establish the claims or contest those claims about the

concept, ideologies and politics of the communalists.

The second tradition, prominently visible in the writings of Indian intelligentsia, locates

communalism in the historical processes in Indian society and polity, and its implications for the

democratic polity and the historical evolution of a civilization. 12 There is a sense of urgency in
9
Brass, Paul, Factional Politics in an Indian State, Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh, University of California Press,
1965; Production of Hindu Muslim violence in contemporary India, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2003.
10
Brass, Paul (ed.), Forms of Collective Violence, Riots, Pogroms and Genocide, Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon,
2003.
11
Hansen,Thomas Blom, The Saffron Wave, Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India, Princeton
University Press, NJ, 1999; See also, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004,
Christophe Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, Princeton University Press, NJ 2007. After collapsing the
categories, historians would then search for Hindu nationalism everywhere and try and prove mainstream
nationalism as Hindu nationalism, see Bhagwan, Manu, ‘"The Hindutva Underground: Hindu Nationalism and the
Indian National Congress in 40s and 50s’, Economic and Political Weekly, September 13, 2008; see also Bhagwan
Manu, “The Historical Context.” In Understanding Contemporary India, Edited by Sumit Ganguly and Neil
DeVotta. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003, pp. 17-40. ( There is no wonder why contemporary India is so little
understood)
12
Shakir, Moin, Khilafat to Partition: A Survey of Major Political Trends Among Indian Muslims During 1919-
1947, Kalamkar, Delhi, 1970; Dixit, Prabha , Communalism- A Struggle for Power, Orient Longman, Delhi, 1974;

5
these writings as communalism is seen as an idea and a phenomenon to be seriously engaged

with. It is with this understanding that many contemporary historians have approached the idea

of communalism. The period during the 1960s has been seen by historians primarily in terms of

the evolution of the nation, through trials and tribulations. The nascent nation state is seen as

trying to solve, and to some extent as solving, the intricate issues of the demand for the

formation of linguistic states, separatist and secessionist movements, dealing with violent

political opposition to the governments in the states, and finally trying to secure an equal and just

national and international social order. The nation building and nation making exercise has been

captured by locating the process in colonial, national and communal contexts. 13 The colonial past

and the struggle to gain freedom, and the framing of a democratic and just path of evolution of a

large society have also informed the larger body of modern and contemporary historians. 14 While

this gradual evolution of the process of the nation-in-the-making has been recorded by historians,

there have also been contestations from the colonial and also what is known as communal

historiography. The former, most often, is seen as emanating from the Imperial centers of

Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India, Vikas, Delhi, 1984; Randhir Singh, ‘Theorising Communalism: A
Fragment - A Note in the Marxist Mode’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23 July 1988; Asghar Ali Engineer,
Communalism and Communal Violence, Delhi, 1989; K.N. Pannikar, ‘What Is Communalism Today’, Selected
Writings on Communalism, Delhi, 1994; Achin Vanaik, Communalism Contested, Verso, London, 1996, Batabyal,
Rakesh, op.cit.
13
Chandra, Bipan, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, Delhi, 1979, ‘Stages of Colonialism’, Journal of
Contemporary Asia, 1980; Chandra, Bipan, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence,
Penguin, New Delhi, 2000; Damodaran, Vinita, and Maya Unnithan, Postcolonial India: History, Politics and
Culture, Manohar, 2000; Bhambri, C.P., Indian Democracy, NBT, New Delhi, 2009; Francine Frankel, India’s
Political Economy, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006.
14
See for example the writings of Mahajan, Sucheta, Education for Social Change, MVF and Child labour,
National Book Trust, 2008; and Chandra, Bipan and Sucheta Mahajan,(Eds.) Composite Culture in a
Multicultural Society, Pearson publishers, Delhi and National Book Trust, 2007, Kudaisya, Gyanesh, Region,
nation, "heartland": Uttar Pradesh in India's body-politic, Sage Publications, Delhi, Thousand Oaks and,
London, 2006, Virmani, Arundhati, A National Flag for India. Rituals, Nationalism, and the Politics of
Sentiment, Permanent Black, New Delhi , 2008, Pai, Sudha, Dalit Assertion And The Unfinished Democratic
Revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party In Uttar Pradesh, Sage publications, Delhi, Thousand Oaks and, London,
2002;, Mishra, Salil, A Narrative of Communal Politics: Uttar Pradesh 1937-39, publications, Delhi, Thousand
Oaks and, London ,, 2001; Menon, Visalakshi, From Movement to Government, From Movement To
Government: The Congress In The United Provinces, 1937-42, Sage Publications, publications, Delhi, Thousand
Oaks and, London , 2003.

6
knowledge; while the latter has largely been an indigenous product taking recourse to the

intellectual presuppositions derived from nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship. In

European history, the nation has more or less been coterminous with either language or religion,

and there had been no tolerance for religious or linguistic diversity during the long history of the

continent, and this is best exemplified by the rise of the Nazis. This anathema to heterogeneity

and the premising of the nation-state on religion becomes the inspiration for the communal

historiographical trends.

Nation and nationalism have been deeply contested concepts in these historiographies.

While the Indian nation, theorized by a large section of intelligentsia, is understood as having

grown out of the people’s struggle against the colonial rule and therefore a wholly modern

phenomenon, which is not yet fully developed, there has been a historical trend which believed

that India has always been a nation – nation being defined in terms of the religiously defined

community, i.e., the Hindus. Thus the Hindus constituted a nation and since they were living

here since ancient times, India was always a nation. Only its freedom was snatched by foreign

rule - here, the Muslims, against whom the fight has been going on for centuries. This historical

trend has no quarrel with the British colonial rule. The broader ideology of Indian nationalism,

which had guided the national movement has been seen by this historiography as not real

nationalism but false nationalism. The former’s understanding of secularism is denounced as

pseudo secularism. Significantly, the premises of the section denouncing the national movement

have been interpreted by historians as communal, and most often lacking historicity since it is

based on the communal projection of the present into the past. 15 The colonial historiography, on

Though there are not many well trained historians who will apply all communal political digits into a complete
15

historiographical treatment, the communally coloured history writing has been quite popular as it is simplistic and
does not involve much rigour and analysis of historical evidence as also certain basic presuppositions on which the
historical understanding is premised upon. The school text books, which the premier educational body for primary
and secondary education, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), published in 2002,

7
the other hand, sees Indian nation and nationalism as merely a Hindu upper caste manipulation of

self interest. It therefore sees nothing new in the communal or caste assertions, but would rather

recognize them as representing real historical processes rather than the false pretenses of

nationalism by the Congress and its leaders. 16 There is yet another trend of historical scholarship,

which too saw the nationalist intelligentsia, including Nehru and the latter day nationalist and

Marxist historians, as propagating this false nationalist history by suppressing the voice of the

real community or people’s history. For them, this history has been all lies (“sab jhoota hai”).17

Since the ‘nationalist elite’ needed to project the ‘other’ as bad to glorify themselves they

imposed the term ‘communalism’ on events which were, as these historians tried to show,

manufactured communalism, and creating communal stereotypes to denigrate ‘genuine popular

assertions’ as communal assertions.18 This they did by taking recourse to the colonial knowledge,

colonial sociology and the power derived from the colonial authority. For a real and genuine

history of the people, terms like communalism have to be rejected along with the politics of
19
nationalism too, according to this view. In this reading of history, therefore, an incident like
can in fact be seen as the first complete set of historiogrpahical enterprise to be placed at the heart of pedagogic
discussion.
16
One of the classic works in this genre is that of Anil Seal. See Seal, Anil, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism:
Competition and Collaboration in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, London,1968. This was
followed by a further elaboration of the colonial thesis in Anil Seal’s collaboration with Gallaghar and Johnson. See
Gallaghar, John, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal, Locality Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics 1870 to
1940, Reprinted from Modern Asian Studies, 1973, Cambridge University Press, London, 1973. The contemporary
follow up of the same thesis is Chatterjee, Joya, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, USA, 1994 (the Indian Imprint, Delhi, 1994). On a more expansive scale
for normalizing colonialism by making the colonized the agents of colonial expansion see Bayly, C.A, Local Roots
of Indian Politics, Allahabad 1880-1920, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975; Rulers, Townsmen and Bazars North
Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1879, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1883, Indian Society
and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1988.
17
See, Guha, Ranajit, Subaltern Studies, Writings on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University Press,
1982, Vol. 1., acknowledgment and p.1.
18
Thus Gandhi became an assortment of rumors, which is what constituted him as Mahatma according to Shahid
Amin’s Events, Metaphor and Memory:Chauri chaura 1922-1992, Princeton University Press,1995. Popular
assertions in the late nineteenth century eastern UP were depicted as communal riots by the British ethnographers,
and then taken over by the nationalist writers as communal riots in Gyannedra Pandey’s Construction of
Communalism in Northern India, Oxford University Press, 1990.
19
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and Colonial World: a Derivative Discourse, Zed Books, London, 1986.
For a detailed discussion as to how communalism could have ‘arrived’, see Gyanendra Pandey, Construction of
Communalism in Northern India in the 19th Century, Oxford University Press, 1990.

8
communal conflict, in fact, should be celebrated as it reflected popular assertions, and what

instead needed to be rejected was the language of western liberal knowledge imbibed by the

nationalist intelligentsia.

Communalism has been a political phenomenon and the ideologues of the communal

groups too have been arguing for the last century in much the same way as the ‘subaltern’

scholars, that the terms of discourse used by the modern nationalists in India have been false and

they needed to be discarded. The authentic language of the community, which constituted the
20
true ‘nation’, should be accepted. The communal groups and parties have been not merely

articulating this idea, but trying to act upon it by changing the contours of not only the

intellectual discourse but of politics and society. It is quite important to locate here another set of

writings, as we would see, that has emerged from this deep contestation between the challenge of

communalism and those who are opposed to it in India.

Synchronising with a new economy, which celebrates markets without borders, these

historians too celebrate society without nation and valorize a community life. Nationalism and

also its attendant idea of Secularism, for these scholars, are both authoritarian ideas as they

impose their authority over other categories like community or communalism. What for them

seems most important is to attack the idea of nationalism as it obtains in India, and reexamine the

notion of secularism by placing it on the same discursive plane as communalism. 21 Therefore,

20
Significantly one of the early contributors to this historiography has been Swapan Dasgupta, who later became
(and continues to be) the chief intellectual spokesperson of Hindu communalism. See, Dasgupta, Swapan, ‘Adivasi
Politics in Midnapore, c.1860-1924’, Subaltern Studies, Oxford University Press, Vol.4, pp.101-135.
21
For a recent representative example, see Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Predicaments of Secular Histories’, Public
Culture, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Transnational Culture Studies, Vol.20, no.1, 2010, pp.58-73. This new
advocacy for transcending “ ‘nation’ ‘nationalism’ and ‘secularism’”, significantly is in alignment with anti modern,
anti secular and anti nation treatments so characteristically resonating the academic trends, which philosophically
advocate a hedonistic celebration of the new consumer world with no larger commitment except to the body and the
self. Communities are invoked - but not equality, justice or larger libratory premises. See for instance, Ashis Nandy,
‘Coming Home: Religion, Mass Violence and the Exiled and Secret Selves of a Citizen-Killer’, Public Culture,

9
historiographically the targets of their criticisms have been the nationalist and Marxist historians,

and not the communal or colonial historians. It is in this milieu that there is a new saliency of

historical writings with a strong colonial stereotype, which has gained currency with a new

intellectual fringe, in fact sharing its new found prosperity, aiming at throwing off the struggling

past of the nation as something to be discarded as a bad dream. While the communal history

wants to unite the present with a mythical Hindu and Muslim past, this history tries and unites

with the good British past.22 The communal project goes completely unchallenged.

II

The Turbulent Sixties: Struggle of the Communalists to Enter the Mainstream

The Chinese army launched a major offensive against India in 1962. Beginning around 10 th

October and ending with the unilateral ceasefire by the Chinese on 21 st November 1962, this war

left behind a completely shattered Indian army and a humiliated leadership. At the same time,

coming as it did merely seventeen years after Independence; the nation was in a flux and tried to

mobilize itself afresh.23 The Chinese attack made the Congress and Nehru particularly, the focus

Vol.22, No.1, 2010, pp. 127-47. Intellectual criticism of secularism also has other contributors like sociologist
T.N.Madan. See Madan, , T. N. ‘Whither Indian Secularism?’ Modern Asian Studies, Volume 27, Issue 03, July
1993, pp 667-697. Interestingly, critique of secularism has been a burgeoning academic enterprise. See Bhargava,
Rajiv, Secularism and its Critics, Oxford University Press, 1998 for such an intellectual enterprise. Significantly this
enterprise has coincided with the rapid rise of the communal forces which see Indian secularism as its chief target.
22
Typifying this is Desai, Meghnad, Rediscovery of India, Penguin, Delhi, 2009. For a critical review of the work
see, Aiyar, Mani Shankar, The Supple Spine, Outlook, 1 march, 2010.
(http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264331, accessed on 29 July, 2010)
23
With the conclusion of the Chinese revolution in 1949, China emerged as the second biggest Communist country
in the world, after the Soviet Union, with the erstwhile nationalist forces of Chiang Kai Shek confined to the island
of Formosa. However, China’s emergence in the new world coincided with the heightening of the cold war, where
the United States and the western bloc bitterly posed themselves against the communist powers led by the Soviet
Union. The People’s Republic of China, which was the Communist China, was considered as the satellite of the
Soviet Union and was not allowed to occupy a seat at the United Nations, while its permanent membership at the
Security Council which remained being occupied by the Taiwanese representative with the active support of the
West. United States of America did not give political recognition to the People’s Republic of China. It was India,
and particularly Jawaharlal Nehru, who advocated granting of China its rightful place in the comity of nations. India
fought for China’s inclusion in the United Nations. Nehru constantly reminded the world of the independence of

10
of attack by the Opposition. It brought the Socialists, and the Jana Sangh which articulated a
24
Hindu communal position to come together in their attack on Nehru. The aggression was

caused by the changes in both the internal changes in China and the international situation. By

1956, India had emerged as the leading voice for the third world, and this was so particularly

after the Suez Crisis in which Nehru played not only a crucial role for his bold stand but also a

role for moderation and did not allow the crisis to become anti west. In fact, he found the USA

too against the move by the French and the British. It appears that China wanted to take on the

China from the Soviet position, and that Chinese communism was not merely an onward march of World
Communism that, as the cold war theoreticians proclaimed, had to be contained. Nehru had discerned nationalism
rather than communism in the expansionist drive of China a fact which finally demonstrated itself in the late fifties.
Nehru’s policy thus seems to be correct.
24
On its way to consolidate its territorial boundaries, Communist China, just after the revolution, looked towards
Tibet, the region which was strategically extremely important and which it considered a region under its sovereign
control and had tried many a time in the past to capture. Not only that it began to push claims by defeating the
Tibetan army at Chambdo in 1950 and forcing Lhasa to recognize Chinese sovereignty in 1951, the Chinese were in
control of the area by 1951. With these changes and the territorial boundaries now coming under close scrutiny, the
Indian and the Chinese representatives met at Beijing in 1953-54 and at the conclusion of the series of meetings, the
Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and Pandit Nehru in their joint communiqué in June 1954 recognized the five principles
of coexistence (Panchsheel or Pancha sila) as the foundation for their future relations. The principles were, viz,
mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non aggression; mutual non interference
in each other’s internal matters; equality and mutual benefit; peaceful co-existence. Later on, in the Bandung
conference of Asian and African nations, this was popularized and Panchaseel became widely recognized and
adopted as principles of international and inter-state relations. In fact, on the conclusion of the 1954 meetings China
seemed to be in agreement with India, and did not object to many of the Indian positions on the border, which later
became the point of objection. Nehru, at the conclusion of this Beijing conference, joyously coined the slogan,
Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers). However, it was soon after this, that the Indian
intelligence came to know that the Chinese were developing infrastructure in the Aksai Chin area. They planned a
road from China to Tibet and from there via Karakoram Range to Sinkiang and Mongolia, and back to China. Aksai
Chin obstructed this road and soon China began publishing maps showing the area as belonging to China. Chinese
claims now came along with assertions that it had never accepted the McMahon line demarcating the Indo-China
border. Couple of meetings between Zhou En lai (1898-1976) and Nehru failed to resolve the situation. To further
impel the dynamics of the situation, the Dalai Lama, the temporal and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, crossed
over to India in March 1959 with 20,000 of his followers. The Indian Government provided him with appropriate
hospitality. This apparently was construed as humiliation of the Chinese leadership, and they attacked Nehru as a
tool in the US led anti-Communist and particularly anti-Chinese bloc trying to sabotaging their position in Tibet,
which the CIA, the American secret agency, they claimed was engaged in. This made the situation grave and the
visit of Zhou Enlai in 1960 to Delhi proved to be of no help. By August 1959, the Chinese army incursions inside
India became frequent. However, it was only from September 1962, when a massive incursion of 600 Chinese
soldiers who crossed Thagla Ridge at Leh surrounding the Dhola post occurred, was there an indication of a serious
and impending aggression. By 10th October, the war was a fact, and on 20th October 1962, the Chinese army
launched full scale major offensive at the Chip Chap valley in Ladakh, which almost wiped out two regiments, i.e.
Rajputs and the Gorkhas positioned there. In the North eastern sector also its attack and advance were fast, and by
18th November, Chinese forces penetrated deep inside the North-east and reached Tezpur, a major frontier town in
Assam. Indian soldiers fought bravely but were no match for the well prepared, strategically located and well
equipped Chinese army.

11
leadership of the third world and give it an anti American slant. The attack on India may be seen

not just as an effort to humiliate India but to finish off India’s moderating role in third world

affairs. While India withdrew for the time being, the American drive against the Communists

worldwide, but closer to home, in Indonesia, was to completely destroy the communist

movement as well as governments with a nationalist legacy, by killing almost 3 million

Communists there and ushering in the military regime.

Established by the efforts of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the Jana Sangh was given its

organizational strength by the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and by 1954-5, it virtually

took over the party by bringing all the latter’s organizers in the party fold. 25 Sunder Singh

Bhandari from Rajasthan, Jaganath Rao Joshi from Mysore, popular Hindu Mahasabha leader

Bhai Paramananda’s son Bhai Mahaveer and Balraj Madhok from Delhi, Nanaji Deshmukh and

Deen Dayal Upadhyaya and his younger colleague Atal Bihari Vajpayee from Uttar Pradesh and

Madhya Pradesh were among its members. Jana Sangh was formed with the core ideas of the

Hindu Mahasabha, that it was the spokesperson of the Hindus, and that Congress and particularly

Jawaharlal Nehru’s secular nationalism has been the bane of the Hindus not only in India but

also in Pakistan. The Indian state must be a strong (read belligerent) state and the final aim

should have been to reclaim the old territory of united India (Akhand Bharat). 26 Therefore,

Nehru’s policy of evolving friendly relations with Pakistan and encouraging it to respect the
25
For a detailed understanding of the circumstances of its origin and the course of its evolution, see, Baxter, Craig,
The Jana Sangh: Biography of an Indian Political Party, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1969; Puri,
Geeta, Bharatiya Jana Sangh: Organisation and Ideology, Delhi A Case Sudy, Sterling, Delhi, 1980; Graham,
Bruce, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: Origins and Development of Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Cambridge
University Press, 1993; Goyal, D.R., Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, Radha Krishna, Delhi, 1979.
26
“There is one fundamental feature of our party’s programme which differentiates it from others. This relates to the
post-partition problems affecting the peace and welfare of the country at large… The Jana Sangh feels that the
partition of India was the biggest tragedy that could fall on the country.” Therefore Akhand Bharat was the political
slogan of the groups: “The Jana Sangh believes that the future welfare of the people of India and Pakistan demands a
reunited India, and it will work towards this end, keeping this as its goal and aim.” Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, ‘The
Bharatiya Jana Sangh’, Statesman, Delhi, 21st December 1951, p.4, cited in Graham, Bruce, Hindu Nationalism and
Indian Politics, Foundation Books, Delhi, 1993, p.31. For a treatment of Hindu Mahasabha and Syama Prasad
Mukherjee before 1947-8 see Batabyal, Rakesh, Op.cit.,

12
minorities inside its territory through the initial Nehru-Liaqat Ali pact in 1950, a matter on which

Shyama Prasad Mukherjee resigned from Parliament, had been the target of attack by the Jana

Sangh. It concentrated on the treatment of the Hindu minority in eastern Pakistan, which it

thought would be better done with a dominating Indian presence and in fact, threat of action.

Alternatively, it also talked of complete transfer of the Hindu population to India, and the

Congress party and particularly Nehru was blamed for not executing this. Thereafter, it was the

attacks on Nehru and his foreign policy in Parliament, which gave the party some much needed

visibility. On 21st August 1959, for example, Atal Bihari Vajpayee moved a resolution in the Lok

Sabha to refer the Tibetan issue to the UN. Thus, by the time the Chinese began a full-scale

attack, there were already very powerful attacks on the government.

On the other hand, this also gave the Jana Sangh a handle to target its other political

enemy, the communist flank, in the newly surcharged nationalist upsurge. The communist

position that the boundary questions were created by the colonial masters and should be solved

by mutual discussion could no longer be voiced, as it would be construed as supporting the

Chinese position at the time of a massive nationalist upsurge. Taking advantage of the situation,

the right wing and communal parties targeted the communists throughout the country but the

democratic core of the nation, represented by Nehru, saved the Indian polity from becoming anti

Communist, the way it happened in Indonesia, Malaysia, and in many other places, quite often

with the active support of the Western democracies. The Parliament and the leaders, both

Communist and non Communist alike, saw to it that while the sentiments found expression, the

nationalist upsurge did not lead to a tyrannical regime.

While these attacks on Nehru were aimed at projecting Jana Sangh as a strong

‘nationalist’ articulator, it was the attack on the Communists which was strategic, as the party

13
needed a physical enemy to establish its own ‘nationalist credentials’. This nationalism, as has

been discussed by many scholars in great detail, is what has been defined in the Indian

intellectual tradition and political leadership as communalism.27 Communal idea of a nation as

developed by the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim league was in direct opposition to a

nationalism, which had developed in the course of countering colonial rule. The communal idea

was that a community of religious people sharing the same cultural attributes, language and

world view would constitute a new nation – this became the basis for the demand of a new nation

of Pakistan by the Muslim League, while the Hindu Mahasabha began advocating that India

needed to establish a Hindu nation. Both of these ideological and political strands, by the end of

the 1930s began to attack pan Indian nationalism. On the other hand both these strands, theorized

as communal and the politics as communalism, were not only shown to be reactionary politics,

but as having a false history and false notion of Indian society and nation. However, since

Pakistan was created much to the chagrin of the nationalists, Hindu communalists retained their

self raison d’être to ideologically consolidate for a future real Hindu nation, as opposed to, and

also in many ways to complete, the phenomenon of what has been articulated in many circles as

the civilization fault line of the Hindu – Muslim division. Thus, in self definition Hindu

communalism has always been Hindu nationalism, while Indian nationalism to it has been

Congress nationalism – false and unreal, based on ideas like pseudo secularism. The Rastriya

Swyamasevak Sangh founded in the 1920s became the ideological and cultural centre for

propagation of this “real nationalism”, while initially it was the Hindu Mahasabha (1915), and

27
See for example Nehru’s views on communalism, Gupta, N.L. (ed.) Nehru on Communalism, SVC, Delhi, 1965.
For the vision of many other leaders see Batabyal, Rakesh, Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches, Penguin,
Delhi, 2007.

14
from 1951 onwards it was the Jana Sangh which became its political face, attempting to entrench

itself into the democratic polity.28

On the other hand, in the situation that obtained across the world in the 1960s, where the

cold war saw the western world trying to contain Communists everywhere and by all means,

arguing that the biggest ideological opponents and enemies of the Indian state were the

communists, at a time when Nehru was following the policy of political engagement, would have

been disastrous even for the polity. In fact, the presence of Nehru was, in many ways, the sole

guarantor of the survival of democracy, as Nehru had been warning that democracy and

nationalism could be throttled in the newly independent countries in the name of suppressing

Communism. As mentioned earlier, this is what finally happened in many parts, i.e., large scale

massacre of the communists as in Indonesia in 1964-65 followed by other countries in the region.
29
Had they been more powerful than what they were, the Hindu communalists could have

seriously affected the nascent democracy.

III

The Aligarh University: Creating an enemy metaphor

In 1965, the then education minister M.C. Chagla sent a renowned educationist and Indian

Diplomat Ali Yavar Jung as the new Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, to raise the

university to the level of a world class centre of excellence in scholarship on Islamic history and

28
The best work on the RSS remains that of D.R.Goyal. See Goyal, D.R., Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Radha
Krishna, Delhi, 1979.
29
Crib, Robert (ed.), The Indonesian Killings of 1965-66, Studies from Java and Bali, Center for Southeast Asian
Studies, Monash University, Victoria, 1990, Brackman, Arnold C., The Communist Collapse in Indonesia, WW
Norton, NY, 1969. See for recent engagement with the issue, Alatas, Syed Farid, Democracy and Authoritarianism
in Indonesia and Malaysia : the Rise of the Post-Colonial state, St. Martin’s Press, NY,1997; Rocamora, Jose
Eliseo, Nationalism in Search of Ideology : the Indonesian Nationalist Party, 1946-1965 / by Cornell, 1974,
microfilm, 1977

15
culture. However, things moved in a direction that could not have been predicted by the minister

or by the Vice Chancellor. On April 25, the university was having its court meeting when a big

clash took place between the students and police, leaving many injured. But before the police

came in, the students had already disrupted the court meeting and attacked the Vice Chancellor

to the extent that he had to be hospitalized for serious injuries, and as it later came to be known

resulted in his loss of hearing. This was the beginning of a long haul, which saw the University

completely losing out academically; and more importantly the University became the metaphor

of communal politics.

The students apparently were protesting against the academic council’s decision to allow

50 per cent of the seats in the technical institutions of the university to students who had done

their prior studies outside the University of Aligarh, as compared with 25 per cent previously

allocated to them. They regarded this as unjust to deny University of Aligarh students special

consideration. The practice of the University previously was to allow 50 per cent seats to outside

students but a recent Vice Chancellor had reduced their quota to 25 per cent. The University

Grants Commission, on the other hand, in the interests of admission on the basis of merit had

favoured allowing 25 per cent to students already enrolled in the Aligarh Muslim University. It

was the effort of the admission committee to restore the balance between the home students and

outside students which was the occasion for the outbreak of the violence.

The event angered M. C. Chagla, the education minister, who announced in Lok Sabha

on 2 May that “the violence was organized by the illiberal, rowdy and communal elements inside

the campus”. Secularist to the core, Chagla was in the process of bringing changes to the Aligarh

and Banaras universities through two separate Bills. The BHU Bill, which was being discussed

in the final round during 3 -12 November 1965, and was almost on the verge of being passed,

16
had proposed to change the name of the University from Banaras Hindu University to Madan

Mohan Malviya Kashi Vishwavidyalaya, and drop the “Hindu” from its nomenclature. 30 He was

planning a similar move in Aligarh too. The Hindu groups under the leadership of RSS and the

local vested interests in Banaras began to campaign against the bills and the minister. Soon, it

was violently opposed by the Jana Sangh members in the House and a complete mobilization

was in place. The BHU had been the scene of incidents for some time as the vested interests

were aligned closely with the local RSS members and the caste network had been organizing

violence, which very soon made the university the site of strikes and processions. The senior

Socialist leader and professor of Political Science, Prof. Mukut Bihary Lal, was garlanded with

shoes by the Hindu elements. Thus, the proposal to change the names of Aligarh and Benares

saw the mobilizing of Muslim communal elements as well as Hindu ones. Incidentally, Chagla

was portrayed as a Hindu communalist in Muslim garb by Muslim communalists, while there

were ferocious attacks on him for intervening in the Banaras Hindu University. The RSS had in

fact saved the University for itself, while at the same time it had saved the Aligarh to keep

brandishing it for future onslaughts.

A new organization called All India Muslim Majlish –e Mushawarat came into existence

to apparently save the interests of the Muslims in the light of the attacks on the community’s

interests in Aligarh.31 On the face of it, it looked like a simple issue and one could argue that

Muslim communalists were the real actors in Aligarh. And a committed nationalist, Chagla also

drew the same conclusion. However, on looking at the overall picture one soon realizes that the

30
The name was in fact suggested by those like Prof. Tara Chand who had been close to Malaviya who argued that
the name of the university according to even Malaviya too should have been Kashi Vishvavidyalaya. Dr.Tara
Chand, Banaras Hindu University Amendment Bill, Rajya Sabha, 3 November, 1965, Rajya Sabha Debate, 3
November, p. 168
31
Qureishi, Zaheer, Masud, Electoral Strategy of a Minority Group: The Muslim Majlis e Mushawarat, Asian Survey,
1964,p.976

17
Muslim communal position had got strengthened in the university at a time when a progressive

section was beginning to assert itself, precisely because there was a Hindu communal

mobilization constantly targeting the university. Four years back, in 1961, Jana Sangh and the

local RSS led a vicious campaign against the university, in what was essentially a student affair,

leading to violence. Aligarh University, which had become the intellectual center of the Pakistan

movement, was limping back to normalcy after partition under the soothing hands of its Vice

Chancellor Dr. Zakir Hussain. However, since the 1950s it was beset with problems like mass

migration to Pakistan, and a Visitorial enquiry which killed in some sense the life of the

University for some time to come. It had, by the mid fifties, begun to get back to its academic

moorings when the RSS and the Jana Sangh began to make Aligarh, Muslim and Urdu the

metaphors of the enemy of the nation. Significantly, the chief target was the un-nationalised

Muslims and the ‘communists’ in Aligarh. In fact, the Communists in Aligarh were a new breed,

and their presence was in some ways helping the University to connect to the larger life of the

nation in a serious manner. Obviously, from the Hindu communal viewpoint, this was not to be

encouraged at any cost.

The police firing in Aligarh in 1961 during the students’ disturbance, in which a couple

of students died, found the Jana Sangh leaders from the local to provincial to the national level

very well linked, and the attack against the University was well orchestrated. It was soon to

prove that the Aligarh issue was part of the “separatist act”. Vajpayee claimed that “as long as

the university was not emancipated from the clutches of the communalist-cum communist

incubus, the danger of recrudescence of communal trouble in western UP would always

persist”.32 Jana Sangh appointed its own enquiry committee under Pitamber Das and Shiva

32
The Statesman, Delhi, 5th February 1961, p.1; 9th February p.1;.10th February, p.1. cited in Graham, Bruce, op.cit.,
p.125, fn.73

18
Prasad, and gave its verdict: “there seemed to have been a tacit collaboration between Pakistan

agents and communists in creating the trouble”. Jana Sangh in its national general council in the

same year in Varanasi came out with the demand that the AMU should be Indianized. 33 Soon

Vajpayee and Balraj Madhok moved a resolution in the Parliament demanding that the time has

come to “nationalize and Indianise” 34. Both terms were interchangeably used by Madhok and

Vajpayee. The term Bharatiyakaran was used for Indianisation. Jana Sangh’s clamour was if

there was any enquiry, it had to be only into ‘the communal and anti national character of the

university’, because as Madhok declared, “The two nation theory was born and cherished in the

Aligarh University. They say they have a separate culture. When you have a separate culture,

separate language, separate history, then you are a separate nation. It is this talk of separate

nation, separate culture and separate history which goes against Indian nationalism”. 35 It also

talked about a mentality of anti nationalism, of which Aligarh was the symbol. The leaders

declared that:

By and large Aligarh University still continues to be the centre of that very mentality

which resulted in the partition of this country. We are not against any individual, a

particular person (sic) or professor, but against this mentality. So long as this mentality

continues, we will continue to raise our voices against this university, because we think it

continues to be a plague spot of India. Until and unless this plague spot is cleared of its

plague symptoms and made a national organization, there will be danger. Let the

professors be all Muslims, let the students be all Muslims, but let nationalism be taught

there”.36

33
Central General Council, Varanasi, 10th October 1961, BJS, iv, pp. 121-22.
34
Lok Sabha Debates, 20 June, 1961, Vol.lix,
35
Lok Sabha Debates, Second series, LVI, 11 August, 1961, p. 1722.
36
Ibid.,pp.1722-23, 120-129

19
Now there was no confusion among the rank and file of Indian intellectuals and political class

about the Jana Sangh’s proclamations of nationalism. The freedom struggle was afresh in

people’s memory, and the inglorious part played by the Hindu Mahasabha and the assassination

of the Mahatma were too fresh not to understand the ideas of the Jana Sangh and RSS. The party

had also articulated its idea of nationalism when Madhok and Vajpayee along with Bhai

Mahaveer, Deen Dayal Upadhyayay, Golwalkar and Deoras spoke on the issue at various

platforms. Madhok in fact was representing them when he wrote in the RSS mouthpiece, the

Organizer:

Nationalism as conceived and preached by the Congress and its allies had given a new

lease of life to Muslim separatism and has become the biggest ally of communism. It has

still failed to draw inspiration and sustenance from the ancient roots of Indian national

life which has stood the test of time. It is neither national nor secular. It is based on

compromises with separatism and communalism which it seeks to employ for the

political gain of the Congress. But in doing so it is cutting at the roots of Indian

nationalism. It is un Indian, un Hindu and un Bharatiya. 37

This is the Hindu communal idea which had been attacked by generations of leaders and

intellectuals in India since the 1920s. Its ambition to replace the newly evolving nation is what

has been the telos of the RSS and communal parties. While the opposition parties opposed Nehru

on many counts, there was a template of unity with regard to their social philosophy. Even the

Marxists who had an ambivalent position on the nation and had declared Indian independence as

false (yeh azaadi jhoothi hai), debated more on the social questions. Jana Sangh notwithstanding

its bold proclamations was intellectually and politically on the fringes. Therefore, there was an

37
Organizer, 18 October, 1954, pp. 5 and 12. Graham, Bruce, op.cit.,98

20
extra amount of sensitiveness within the University, which felt under siege in the current crisis. It

was therefore an opportunity for the vested interests and the Muslim communal elements to take

the lead in such a situation.

The evolution of the Aligarh Muslim agitation to a Muslim communal agitation gave

fillip to the Hindu communal groups to target the Muslim separatist trends in an atmosphere of

fear and suspicion, as Pakistan was involved in the aggressive posturing along the western

borders in 1965. A major violent upsurge of a sub-continental level had erupted in 1963 which

soon took the shape of Hindu- Muslim conflict over the issue of the theft of the “prophet’s hair”

from the Hazratbal Mosque in Srinagar in Kashmir on 26 December 1963. From January to

March 1964 series of riots starting from Khulna (East Pakistan ) soon travelled to Calcutta and

then back to Dacca (East Pakistan) and afterwards to the steel cities in eastern India, namely

Jamshedpur and Rourkela.38 It was a ground which could have reaped a rich sectarian harvest, as

the bruised national psyche after the Chinese war could have been mobilized to assuage itself by

targeting one physical enemy of the nation. This was the reason for the stridency of the RSS and

its various organizations, who were trying to make anti Muslim pronouncements, linking the

AMU to Pakistan. The Muslims, feeling the loss of Nehru as the big protector and the agitation

going on around the Aligarh crisis, must have felt insecure. It is in this situation that the

escalation of indo –Pakistan conflict began to take place, which ended up in a full-scale war in

1965. Now the second part of the nationalization thesis unfolded itself, when there was talk of

the pro Pakistan elements within India, and therefore the need to Indianise was very important.

The Jana Sangh in its Delhi meeting of the central committee resolved that “There should be no

political bargaining with Indian Muslims. They must be guaranteed all constitutional rights due
38
Feldman, Herbert, ‘The Communal Problem in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent: Some Implications’, Pacific
Affairs, vol.42, No.2, 1969, p.148. see also Chakrabarti, Gargi, Coming Out of Partition, Refugee Women of Bengal,
Shristi Publications, 2005 for a detailed treatment of some aspects of the 1964 riots in Calcutta.

21
to them in this secular state. But all separatist tendencies and attitudes betraying a pro Pakistan

bias must be curbed and the outlook of Indian Muslims must be nationalized”.39

It was to cater to these insecure times that orgnisations like Majlis-i-Mushawarat etc.

came up, which further made easy the task of the communal groups to paint the Muslim

community as having such separatist tendencies. Throughout the seventies while the University

was trying to secure its autonomy from the bureaucratic and administrative imprisonment that it

found itself in after 1966, the communal attack on it by the Hindu communalists strengthened the

Muslim communal groups’ claims as the defender of the University. Both these forces attacked

the intellectuals and those who wanted the University to find its way to fulfill its intellectual

promise and align with the larger intellectual and historical forces operating in the outside world.

From the 1970s, the groups fought over the possible university act, which finally came into

place in 1981. The more the communalists reigned inside, the easier the Hindu communalists

found it to keep the University as the metaphor of the essential Muslim separatist psyche, which

was un Indian, and needed to be Indnianised – but how this was to be done was never spelt out. 40

Those who fought those elements inside and forged a linked with the larger Indian political and

cultural life were attacked by the Muslim communalists within the University, and provided the

fodder for the Hindu communalists from outside.41 While the Muslim communalists were

39
Central Working Committee, Delhi, 15th August 1965, Bharatiya Jana Sangh resolution passed by Bharatiya
Pratinidhi Sabha, 17th, 18th August 1965, and Working Committee on 27 th, 28th September 1965, pp.9-12. BJS
documents iv, 77-79, cited in Graham, Bruce, op.cit., p.88, fn.89. (Graham indicated some discrepancy in the
wordings of two documents and says that the statement is attributed to Central General Council of 17 th August.
40
There were attacks on the students who wanted to join any political event anywhere. Their political acts were
always construed as Muslim communal acts and there was deliberate communal suppression in this. See, attacks on
them on 10-11 May 1979, Sengupta, Vivek, ‘Aligarh: Back to Violence’, Sunday, May, 20, 1979,p.21.
41
The best example of the former has been Prof. Irfan Habib, the foremost historian of medieval India. He was
attacked grievously in the 1980s by the Muslim communalists inside the University. See Akbar, M.J., ‘Aligarh’s
Communal Student Leaders’, Sunday, 1st February, 1981, pp.10-14. The intellectual community too rose up against
such attacks on him. See, Chandra, Bipan, ‘AMU and the Communalist: Dangerous game of Appeasement’,
Mainstream, March 7, 1981. The Hindu communalists have always found Habib the first target to attack as a
communist historian. Prof. Habib on the academic side, however, is an anti colonial scholar par excellence. This
shows how close the communal position is to the colonial position historiographically.

22
shouting that the University symbolized the identity of the Muslims in the subcontinent and

required protection as a minority institution, the Hindu communal attack on this further

entrenched their position. The political class however, did not come out successfully from this

conundrum as it increasingly saw in Aligarh, as the Hindu communalists had planned, a political

and not an educational issue. Therefore, only the administrative and political solutions for the

University’s character was sought to be attended to, leaving the academic needs and demands

unsatisfied. In this sense, the Hindu communal effort to attack the University since the fifties

resulted in a front ranking university becoming a stultified place, groping in the dark for a

glimmer of hope.

IV

Language and other Divisive Tactics

While Urdu, for the Jana Sangh, was a language which was artificial and a symbol of separatism,

and henceforth should be resisted and in fact rejected, Hindi was the language which it thought

was the only source of Indian unity, and thus any opposition to its imposition in the wake of the

language agitations of the 50s, it claimed, was an anti national act:

People who demanded the continuation of English for the sake of unity were no lovers of

Indian unity. It is only a clever ruse to beguile the innocent people of the country. In fact

when they say so they give a veiled threat that if you do not continue the use of English,

we shall secede. This veil must be cleared. National unity is an article of faith and not a

matter of compromise. If there are some people who can think of disrupting unity simply

because Hindi comes or English does not remain, they definitely have no faith in unity. 42
42
Upadhyayay, Deendayal, Political Diary, Organiser, 22nd February, 1965,pp.13, 14, as cited in Graham, op.cit.,
p.135, fn.101

23
 The Socialists and the Jana Sangh were the two anti English and pro Hindi political

formations, most vocal in the 1960-65 anti English agitation which precipitated the anti Hindi

agitation in southern India and partially in Bengal. This stand was tested in Punjab where the

Akalis began the demand for the Panjabi suba movement, which took an immediate turn in late

1966. Here the Hindi-Panjabi controversy and agitation saw the Jana Sangh campaign for Hindi,

and for the united state. Now the whole agitation was a significant test for democracy, with

regard to change in policies by acceding to people’s wishes. The Jana Sangh, however, was clear

in one thing - its stand on Hindi was firm. Hindi had made the nation, while Urdu was unmaking

it. In Punjab, there was another dimension that began to come into sharper focus - the Jana Sangh

was in a dilemma while dealing with other communal groups. The Akalis were bent on having

their demand fulfilled vis-à-vis the Jana Sangh and RSS demand. The Jana Sangh could not take

any stand against the Akalis for two reasons: one, because its only electoral successes in the

region were dependent on an alliance with the Akalis, and second, the success of the Akalis

would lead to a Hindus, whom the Jana Sangh wanted to mobilize, gravitating towards the

Congress.

In November 1966, with the new Prime Minister at the helm, it appears that the RSS and

other organizations wanted to use the political flux to further strengthen the Hindu consolidation.

While it may be true it was a Hindu communal party, there were few signs that Hindu religious

organizations had any enthusiasm for the politics of Jana Sangh. It is therefore with an issue,

which was sentimental and sensitive that a front could be galvanized. In a move, which would

become characteristic of the Hindu communal organizations in later years, there was a

mobilization of its ranks and blackmailing of the system with big processions. On 7 th November,

a meeting of sadhus and thousands of people was organised as the culmination of a month long

24
agitation demanding the ban on cow slaughter. The meeting was prompted by a Member of

Parliament, Rameshawaranand. The Jana Sangh leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee was on the

improvised stage set up on Parliament Street in Delhi. It was reported that an incendiary

comment led to the crowd bursting barricades, indulging in arson and damaging property in the

area. Later on, the Jana Sangh and Vajpayee in particular tried to disassociate from the whole

incident. It is from this point that the RSS and its organisations were mastering a new form of

mass action, which went against the tradition that was initiated and organized by the Indian

National Congress during its agitational phase from the 1920s onwards. At the core of the latter

was the principle of the leadership taking the responsibility for mass actions, while there was a

complete guideline for action for all the participants.

Another dimension of the party’s behaviour became obvious, its diversionary strategy.

While it completely dissociated itself from the event by claiming it was not organized by the

party, it also attacked the government and in fact charged that there were provocateurs who

incited the mob. However, it was soon revealed that the Jana Sangh and RSS senior activist

Kedar Nath Sahni had sought permission for the meeting, exposing the fact that the Jana Sangh

was hand in glove with the whole incident and this was a ploy to evade the responsibility of the
43
party for the incident. The argument given by the Jana Sangh was that the government was

jealous of the Jana Sangh’s popularity.44 The modus operandi of the RSS, which was clear even

in the 1940s, made for an interesting read again, as it worked through different formations and at

times of crisis disassociated itself from all responsibility.

43
Kedar Nath Sahni, the Secretary of Delhi state Jana Sangh had applied for permission to hold the rally, Jaisukhlal
Hathi, Minister of state for Home affairs’ statement, Parliamentary Debates, Rajya Sabha, Vol. LVIII, 10 Nov.
1966, c.817
44
Vajpayee, 16th November 1966 : “Why are these people being arrested? Again, why are those opposed to the Jana
Sangh defaming us? Is it because the leaders of the Congress are disturbed by the increasing popularity of the Jana
Sangh”, Parliamentary Debates, Rajya Sabha, Vo. LVIII, 10 Nov. 1966, cc.1449-57.

25
 Democratic polity as it was evolving world wide, required the institutional rooting of its

machinery. This fact was shown by the leaders and intelligentsia of the nationalist movement

since the 1880s and came to fruition when the post Independence government tried to

institutionalize democratic practices. The disavowal of responsibility reflected Jana Sangh’s

attitude to democracy. One sees the point of the arguments that many voiced, particularly those

who premise their arguments from the Nazi experience that democracy is the system which
45
allows the anti democratic forces to hijack democracy. The forces ranged against the

democratic and secular forces in many parts of the newly independent world have later even

been used by outside forces to derail the experiment of any kind of democracy.46

Consolidation of the Communal Ground

The war with Pakistan in 1965 had a protracted time frame as Indo-Pakistan hostility had been

there for some time already, creating a war like situation. The anti Muslim communal

propaganda at this time was reaching its most vulgar level, when a person of the stature of

President Zakir Husain was also made the object of such propaganda, when he was rumoured to

be under house arrest. The propaganda began to implant now the idea of a ‘fifth columnist’ - a

Muslim being a potential Pakistani inside Indian territory. Pakistan, Muslim, Urdu and Aligarh

45
In fact many of the exiled intellectuals from Germany in the 30s had seen how Hitler emerged from the
democratic Weimar Republic, and hence were very suspicious of democracy. The best example is of Theodor
Adorno. See Bernstein, J.M., Frankfurt School, Critical Assessment, Routledge, London, 1994.
46
Best example is the overthrow of many democratic governments by the CIA operatives, using the most
authoritarian and undemocratic parties and groups throughout the world. The US Political Scientists had given two
preemptive policy frames for such actions in the new independent states. One, the most modernized institutions
should be brought to govern the country as they were to be the best guarantor of stability and possible modernity,
( Read Military the most modernizing institution as influential political scientist like Lucien Pye would advocate, see
Pye, Lucien V., Aspects of Political Developments, Little, Brown and Co. Boston, 1966) and second, a counterpoint
which Samuel Huntington proposed, is to slow the growth rate in these countries as a foreign policy objective of the
United States. See, Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of Future: Modernisation Theory in Cold War America, Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, 2003. To propagate such Political Scientific ideas, the group of Political Scientists
received liberal funds to start and train workers for “Developing societies” in the third world countries. Many
institutions and intellectuals in the third world were the product of such benevolent grants.

26
now formed the template for the potential Hindu consolidation. However, ideological

consolidation required time and space. Jana Sangh and the RSS, even at this juncture, did not

have the respectability and reach. Seen by the Indian middle class and in regions other than

northern region as merely the representative of the small town shopkeepers and semi literate

intellectuals of north Indian towns with a large refugee population, it tried to gain respectability

by accepting a philosophical core. In its 1965 meeting, it accepted what was called “Integral

Humanism”, a collage of some Indian philosophical ideas woven into some kind of political

doctrine. It was neither philosophically deep nor politically elating for the youth, to attract them

to the party’s programme, particularly at a time when the youth all around the world were

looking for new ideas. However, the nomenclature itself bore resemblance to the philosophical

basis of fascism, integral humanism. The philosophy of integral humanism needed a political

definition of the self through a comparison with the outsider. And it is here the template of

Muslims as other came into operation, and the RSS was quick to use this in many regions for

propagating its own ideas.

The 1967 elections had brought a coalition ministry in Bihar where the Jana Sangh had a

presence precisely due to the RSS ground work in parts of the state. 47 Ranchi was the head

quarters of the largest district in the country at that point of time, in the heart of the tribal belt of

central India. A new industrially developing township with high rate of literacy and chain of

missionary educational institutions, Ranchi had been the centre of RSS propaganda both against

the Christian missions as well as against the sizeable Muslim population settled there for

47
1967 elections were very keenly watched as it was to provide solutions to the enigma of Indian democracy to
many political and policy analysts. See such keen analysis, Palmer, Norma, D., ‘India’s Fourth Elections’ Asian
Survey, Vol. VII, No.5, May, 1967, pp.275-291. There were however interesting counter point by other political
scientists who saw the Indian elections as raising the political consciousness and not necessarily to the instability of
the system as such, see, Verma, S.P., and C.P. Bhambhri,( eds.)., Election and Political Consciousness in India,
Meenakshi Prakashan, Meerut, 1967. See also some contemporary studies on the elections, Pattabhiraman, M. (ed.)
General Elections in India,1967, Allied Publishers, Bombay, 1969; Navaneeth, Congress Debacle in Bihar, EPW,
3,34, 24 August, 1968.

27
centuries. It also had a sizeable business community from Rajasthan and the Panjabi and Bengali

refugee business community, which could have played host to the RSS.

But in reality, the RSS and other Hindu communal groups still had a minuscule presence,

and were primarily engaged in an ideological war game by targeting Indian Muslims. In 1964,

news of communal riots in East Pakistan saw communal violence in Calcutta, Jamshedpur,

Rourkela and tensions in other places in the rich industrial belt of Chotanagpur. The new

industrial development already had seen new populations moving into the area, taking away the

land and livelihood of the local population who also were in a quandary. Communal polarization

therefore also suited a segment of these new migrants into the area. The 1965 war with Pakistan

had allowed it to carry out extremely insensitive propaganda against the substantially high

Muslim population. The ideological penetration of the propaganda launched on Aligarh and

Banaras were also reaching the region, as not only were these places geographically close but

also Aligarh was a centre of education for hundreds of Muslim students of the region.

It was in this climate that the political demand for Urdu being the second language of the

state came up. There were processions demanding this to be implemented. However the RSS and

Jana Sangh had shown its displeasure with Urdu long back in UP and this time the demand by

the Muslims suited them well to connect it with the ongoing project of creating an ‘enemy’. On

12th August, the Jana Sangh organised a procession and meeting in Ranchi opposing the demand.

It distributed hand bills referring to the undesirablity of making Urdu the second official

langauge of the state. The hand bill announced that participation in the procession and the

meeting would save the country from further partition and the claws of Pakistan. It claimed that

the question of language which had led to the partition twenty years ago had been raised by some

28
Pakistani and anti national forces.48 Significantly the opposition was not a one stop matter, and

was well coordinated. Golwalker, the chief of the RSS, speaking in the Ramlila ground at Delhi

declared:

The Indian Muslims are trying to orgnaise themselves around the slogans of Urdu. Any

status or recognition to Urdu would help the process of the separatist Muslim

organisations, which would result in another partition of the country.49

Very soon a masive riot took place in Ranchi, leaving many dead and resulting in a

dreadful communal polarisation. The Hindu communal mobilisation was led by the local

business community. The administration initially showed its lethargy and the army was called in

quite late; by that time many Muslims had lost their lives. The Raguvir Dayal Comission

enquiring into the riots found that the weakness and compromising character of the coalition

ministry in the state was one of the most important reasons for the violence.

The post 1967 Ranchi increasingly became a kind of nerve centre of Hindu communal

mobilisation, and a kind of head quarters for the RSS penetration into the tribal region of central

India. The Muslim insecutiries resulting after the riot also led to the ghettoisation of the localities

and this gradually changed the shape of the city and its culture, which had evolved over a century

in a predominantly tribal milieu with its own kind of freedom and relaxed atmophere. The work

of the Hindu communal consolidation however proceeded at pace and within ten years another

site in the vicinity witnessed a similar demonstration of the penetration of this ideological group.

This was Jamshedpur, barely 230 kilometers away from Ranchi, and more cosmpolitan in nature

with a prosperous Muslim community engaged in different occupations in the relatively rich

economy of the industrial city.

48
Secular Democracy,( hereafter SD) September, 1980, p.21
49
Ibid.p.21

29
 The Ranchi riot was meant to create a communal core in eastern and central India. In the

west, it was the series of riots beginning from the prolonged Ahmedabad riots in 1969, followed

by riots in Bhiwandi and Jalgaon in Maharashtra, which would create the communal core of the

region. While the riots demonstrated the organization, both physical and ideological, that had

gone behind each of these riots, they also showed the depth of the new cultural codes that were

scripted at the sites of this violence. Madon Commission enquiring into the Bhiwandi and

Jalgaon riots had stated that “communal tensions does not spring up over-night. It is built up over

a period of time, suckled on communal propaganda, nursed on communal incidents and fed on

rumours, until men’s hearts are filled with hatred and their thoughts turn to violence.” 50 The

enquiry commission also gave detailed accounts of how and when the riots began to take shape

in the minds and hearts of the organisers and the people. Bhiwandi branch of Jana Sangh was

established in 1964, and in October Bhagwan Prabhashanker Vyas was elected the president of

the Bhiwandi Branch. On 10th March 1968, Bhiwandi district Jana Sangh convention was

organized coinciding with Bakra-Id (sic).51 It was therefore a predictable progression of events

by the time the final riots began in 1969. The way people were provoked and others threatened

have been diagnosed by the commission and it listed 27 common themes of communal
52
propaganda. They include, decrying of the religion, customs and traditions of the other

community; the charge that Muslims, with a few exceptions, are anti national and harbor extra

territorial loyalty to Pakistan; the appeasement of the Muslims by the Congress government with

a view to secure their votes by upholding their so called unreasonable demands in detraction of

the rights of the Hindus; the atrocities committed by the Muslims at the time of partition; the
50
Madon, D.P., Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Communal Disturbances at Bhiwandi, Jalagaon and
Mahad, Vol. 1., Part II, pp.60-61
51
SD, September, 1970, p.23
52
Ibid., p.63-64

30
atrocities committed by Pakistan against Hindus residing in their country; the destruction and

desecration of Hindu temples and idols of Hindu gods by Muslim rulers in the past; the forcible

conversion of Hindus by the Muslim rulers; the charge that a Muslim has publicly slaughtered a

cow; the charge that a Muslim has desecrated and offered insult to a Hindu temple or the idol of

a Hindu god; the charge that a Muslim has kidnapped or raped a Hindu girl or outraged her

modesty; advocating sending away all Muslims to Pakistan; advocating the Indianisation of

Muslims, by which is really intended the Hinduisation of Muslims; the charge that the Hindu

majority is out to crush the Muslim minority and to wipe out its religion, culture and language;

the Muslim in a minority will never get justice or fair play in India the charge that the Muslim in

a minority are discriminated against in service, employment and other matters; the charge that

Muslims are persecuted in India.53 In fact the exhaustive list had their full play in all the riots in

Maharashtra, where the RSS and Jana Sangh have been joined by another formation, which had

come into the field by first beating up the south Indians and which now found the Muslims as its

new enemies.

The Ahmadabad riots in 1969 was for all practical purposes one of the most organized

instance of communal violence, notwithstanding the denials of the RSS and Jana Sangh.54 The

ideological aim of the riot was to obliterate Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy, which formed the

political core of Indian nationalism. It was organized in Ahmedabad, which was to be the centre

of the nationwide celebrations of Gandhi’s birth anniversary. However the Parliament saw some

of the most powerful repudiation of communal politics and violence by the Congress and

Communist leaders. People like Bhupesh Gupta, Hiren Mukherjee and many others tore into

Jana Sangh and its ideology as did many Congress leaders. Unfortunately, Gujarat had also

53
The Vythayathil commission report and Justice Jaganmohan Reddy commission report on the Ahmedabad riots
also give details regarding the way in which the communal riots were organized by the RSS and Jana Sangh.
54
See, the relevant proceedings of the Parliamentary Debates on the issue.

31
become the centre of the Swatantra party, which did not have any core political ideology to argue

against the Jana Sangh’s politics, and hence could not even identify the danger to its own

existence in the province.

VI

Communalism Confronted: The Creation of a New Milieu

1969-70 also saw the coming together of the three different ideological cores to the forefront –

the aggressive Hindu communalism, split in the Congress organization and thereby a kind of flux

in the whole polity, and the newly emerging trend of the Indira Gandhi government moving

towards populist and socialist policies thereby attracting the intellectuals, the left and Socialists

to its ambit. The Hindu communalism, in a rearguard action, heightened its rhetoric of

“Indianisation” of the Muslims. Significantly, the anti communal attack this time was

spearheaded by a large intellectual front, which had come up, with a strong counter to the

communal propaganda.

From March 1970 onwards, there was a definite combative tone adopted by the Congress

leadership towards the RSS and Jana Sangh leadership. The debate on the Ahmedabad ,

Bhiwandi and Jalgaon riots had given rise to a very aggressive Jana Sangh and RSS leadership.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee spoke of how the Hindu will become ugra or aggressive if the Muslims

were communal. Challenging his assertions, Indira Gandhi took the floor and countering his

theory of indianisation, doubted that bhartaiyakaran was a very innocent or obvious slogan. “If

therefore Shree Vajpayee wants every Indian to love his country and to be patriotic, nobody can

quarrel with that and I certainly do not do so; nor is any special theory of Indianisation required.

32
But I think his theory is not quite innocent. Shri Vajpayee would not waste his energy in stating

something which is so obvious. He and those of his way of thinking have a very definite

purpose.”55

She argued that the Hindu communal groups are evidently taking upon “themselves to be

the judges of who is Indian and who is not…. That is what I think, most sinister. Whenever any

group sets itself up to decide who is an Indian and who is not, there is bound to be trouble.” She

further wondered: “If this task of Indianisation was so simple why should it arouse fears in the

minds of some sections of our people?” 56 Vajpayee countered by saying that it was Mrs. Gandhi

and her party that was “carrying on a deliberate propaganda to mislead the minority. I am sorry

to say that the Prime Minister does not stand for national integration. She wants division in the

society.”57 Madhok came in by saying even she needed to be Indianised.” Indira Gandhi

countered by saying that she considered “every child who is born of mother India is a good

Indian. There is the law of treason and there are competent courts to decide if anyone is guilty of

treason. This cannot be left to be decided by any political group or party. No oratoreal devices

can hide the real intentions of those who advocate Indianisation of their fellow countrymen.” 58

Therefore she concluded that either “Shri Vajpayee’s doctrine means the obvious” and needs “no

reiteration, or it is hiding something.” She in fact pointed out how “Vajpayee’s colleague Shri

Madhok is a better guide. He bluntly says what he means and the house is aware of his numerous

utterances on the subject.”59 She continued taking on Vajpayee’s aggressive tenor by counter

aggression when on 14th May, in reply to Vajpayee’s speech on riots where he mentioned that

Hindus are retaliating the Muslim communalism, she argued:

55
Speech in Parliament, SD., June, 1970
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid.

33
 Some hounourable members shouted that Vajpayee’s remarks should be

expunged. I am glad that the deputy speaker did not expunge it. I would like those

remarks to remain on record and be read by future generations and by the people

so that they could see what is really in their minds, not the sweet sounding

beautiful Hindi that he paraded before us, from time to time, but what is really

behind those words. And today we saw behind those words naked fascism. This is

what fascism has been.60

The lead taken by the leadership now seems to be more coordinated. When the All India

Congress Committee met on 13th, 14th and 15th June 1970, the party president Jagjivan Ram

talked about the urgent need of “the party to fight the communal tendencies”. Significantly, a

resolution attacking the idea of Indianisation was moved by the Congress veteran Kamalapati

Tripathy, who described it as “anti national, anti Indian and anti Hindu”. 61 He went on to say that

“if anybody needed Indianisation, it were the RSS and Jana Sangh who were guilty of falsifying

our history, our tradition, our culture in the cruelest manner.”62 The resolution which was moved

was against communalism and communal organistions and there was a hint that there were

voices demanding a ban on these organizations. The resolution said,

“Para military communal organizations like the RSS and Jamat-e-Islami have no place in

our secular society. The government should seriously consider whether such

organizations should be allowed to continuously poison our society with communal

violence and hatred.”

60
Ibid.p.20
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.

34
 Indira Gandhi, speaking on 14th June made it clear that the priority was providing security to life

as the recent riots had shown that it was the security of life which was in peril. If a man is not

going to be alive, she said,

what does it matter to him what kind of economy you have or you don’t have, what does

it matter to him what kind of social system you have or you don’t have. Therefore, the

first necessity is to give security of life to our people regardless of what religions they

practice or what caste they happen to belong, what language they speak or what area they

live in.63

At the same time however she tried to underline the ideological fight against the

communal forces. “The government cannot be wholly successful unless we have people in every

village”, she argued, “in every street, helping us in this task. The police can help, but the police

by itself cannot be as effective as our party could be if it geared itself to this task. Because the

task is not merely of hitting back or punishing; that should certainly be done. The task is to try

and remove this poison from people’s mind, to try and create an atmosphere in every

neighborhood where a citizen can feel he can live in peace,” 64 Now many in the party thought the

groups such as these must be banned. However the Communist leaders who had been in the

forefront, fighting the communal groups, did not think so. Sripad Amrit Dange, the leader of

CPI, argued that bans are not going to help. “They will go underground.” He on the other hand

was of the view of letting “those who have democratic values to push forward in this country

through both parliamentary struggles and defending the exploited class. Let them come together

and launch a new movement of democratic unity in this country.” He also berated the National

Integration Council in which he said “ there are members who themselves riots because they are
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.

35
represented in this house and committee must be composed of all parties in the House.” Dange

was advocating a united battle. The close cooperation between the communist leaders of the CPI

with the Congress on the economic front could be seen, and now on the communal question it

was realized that a movement needed to be launched.

The coming together of these two forces was also the result of the substantial intellectual

climate that had been created by the assertive intelligentsia. Some of the most creative and

respected cinema artists, for example, visited Bhiwandi and Jalgaon riot sites and condemned the

communal groups. Some of the respected members of the film fraternity, namely, Dilip Kumar,

Balraj Sahni, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Sahir Ludhianvi, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chandar

Gulabdas Broker, Mahendraanath, Gajanan Jagirdar, Pragji Dosa, Shri Premji Manmohan

Krishna, issued a statement in those crucial days intervening in the issue. It said:

we the following artistes and writers, were deeply shocked at the shameful and tragic

happenings in Bhiwandi and Jalgaon. We unequivocally condemn the orgy of rioting,

arson, incendiarism, regardless of who was responsible for it. This brutal violence and the

senseless destruction negates our traditional humanitarian values. These horrifying

massacres which arise from the gospel of hate and intolerance which is being preached on

all sides are a cancerous communal outgrowth that is spreading fast, as is retarding our

efforts to usher in an era of just and egalitarian society and to evolve a healthy, national,

secular set up. It is imperative to stamp out this monster of communalism, and it is high

time for all secular, non communal and humanitarian forces to unite in all out efforts to

maintain peace based on tolerance, goodwill, coexistence and secularism.65

65
Ibid.

36
 The period which is generally seen by some political scientists and outside observers as

the breaking up of the centrality of the Congress, in fact can be seen as a transition of the party to

a different ideological sphere. It could be a paradigm shift. While it had almost no solid

organizational structure in place, and it had only ideology left to itself to energise its workers, the

period beginning with 1969 saw the party acquiring a new “ideological umbrella”. For the first

time since Independence, the party was accepted as an agent of radical change by the Communist

party as well as the intellectuals in the hot radical climate of 1969-70. Coming together of the left

intellectuals, anti communal activists, erstwhile Socialist youth leaders and the personal

ideological position of Indira Gandhi, is what coloured this new ideological field. Scholars have

emphasized the role of economic policy as the basic determinant of these changes. But it seems

that the communal threat to ideas and institutions may have proved to be the catalyst for this new

found unity of perception.

The most important development in this regard was the coming of age of an indigenous

intellectual tradition, which used the autonomous space that freedom and democracy had

provided. While the idea of “Indianisation” and “communal interpretation of history” came to be

in direct confrontation with the intellectual developments taking place in the country, the

constant attack on institutions by the communal groups must have precipitated this desire for

unity among the democratic forces. Historical scholarship since the early sixties had now

matured to such an extent that there was an outright rejection of many of the ideas that the

colonial historians had injected in understanding Indian history and society. Thus, the writings of

D.D.Koshambi R.S.Sharma, Satish Chandra, Bipan Chandra, Irfan Habib, Barun De, Athar Ali

and many others thoroughly rejected the colonial constructions and demonstrated that the ideas

the RSS was propagating stemmed from illiteracy. The Indian History Congress, the body

37
founded in 1935, was now dominated by the ideas of such scholars since the sixties, and had

contributed to the democratization of the discipline and the spread of new ideas and scholarship.

By the time the Aligarh University historian, Prof. Nurul Hasan, became the Education minister,

the Indian historians had already changed the academic historical discourse to an advanced level.

An issue which generally escapes analysts’ eyes is the fact that it is from the mid seventies that

there was a sharp decline in the standard of education and particularly of the centers of

excellences in most universities and colleges in the country. Therefore it is very interesting that

the Hindu communal groups began to capture alternative and parallel spaces made available in

the new educational establishment and the declining institutions. .66 Significantly this is the phase

when many of the restrictions in the academia and intellectual world were removed, quite often

with the Prime Minister’s personal intervention, and many Communists got jobs and positions in

universities, which in the sixties was not open. Indian leadership was contesting the dominance

of the developed world and the intellectuals were coming up with a sophisticated critique of

colonialism precisely at this point of time. It was through this critique of colonialism that

scholars demonstrated how Hindu communalists, as well as their Muslim and Sikh counterparts,

were in fact following the trajectory laid down by the colonial politics and historiography. 67 By

1969, this intellectual section became the major bulwark against the communal ideas, and more

so in the case of the Hindu communal idea of Indianisation, which it attacked as unhistorical and

even undemocratic as it was concocted to attack the Muslims. They argued that the idea of India

66
Here the debates on education in the sixties and low performance of the school education helped the communal
organizations, Hindu, Muslim and others. In 1966-7 the Universities were allowed to switch over the vernacular
medium. Without any preparation, without any sound literature available in translation, the universities and colleges
were soon filled with locally written and published text books, without any check on the standard and facts. Such
curricula soon would be the breeding ground for hundreds of graduates with no proper grounding in many
disciplines. This was virtually an open field for the communalists to proliferate in. The situation would deteriorate in
the eighties when most of these graduates in many states would start teaching in colleges and universities.
67
Thapar, Romila, Bipan Chandra and Harbans Mukhia, Communal Interpretation of Indian History, People’s Book
House, 1969

38
has historical underpinnings, and it is trained historians as well the democratic policy of the

modern state which will be crucial elements in determining Indianness, and not communal

groups like the RSS or Jana Sangh. On the contrary, they argued that these groups had a very un-

Indian philosophy. Therefore, when the Prime Minister was speaking in parliament on the

question of Indianness, she was not only representing the nationalist political ideology but also

the intellectual tradition which had come to fruition in the post-Independence culture.

VII

The War with Pakistan:1971

The elections of the 1971 saw a major drubbing for the Hindu communal groups. However the

crisis in eastern Pakistan provided these groups with a new front to open its activities. The

demand for the partition of India was based on the two-nation theory propagated by the

communal parties, particularly the Muslim League which under the leadership of Mohammad

Ali Jinnah made the demand for a separate nation state of Pakistan its sole political plank. 68 The

Hindus and Muslims constituted, according to him, two nations defined by their religion and

could not cohabit the same nation state. Thus, religion was argued to be the basis of the nation,

and the Muslim majority districts were partitioned off from India and combined to form one

nation state of Pakistan.

68
The interesting argument recently voiced about Jinnah being secular and not wanting partition voiced by a
member of the successor to the Jana Sangh – the BJP, Jaswant Singh, was significantly a rehash of the thesis of
Ayesha Jalal ( The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge
university Press, Cambridge, 1985). For her, Jinnah never wanted Pakistan, it was basically thrust on him by the
Congress. See for a critique of Jaswant Singh’s position, Misra, Salil, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, Biblio,
Delhi, September- October, 2009, pp.3-4 For a detailed historiographical treatment of the issue of partition see
Mahajan, Sucheta, op.cit. The new turn to partition studies, actually stems from an interesting politics that wishes to
undermine and suppress the very idea of independence. With a few interviews or oral testimonies of some
individuals many of such studies present themselves as counter to events and processes analysed historically with
the weight of evidence.

39
 Not very long after Independence, difference began to crop up within the two physically

distant zones, the East and the West Pakistan. To make matters worse, Mohammad Ali Jinnah,

now the Governor General of Pakistan, on his official visit to East Pakistan, declared that Urdu

was going to be the national language, an announcement which not only made the Bengalis

angry but also apprehensive. There appeared also strong communal hatred and violence almost

sponsored by the Pakistani state against the strong Hindu minority. There were official efforts at

purifying the cultural profile of East Pakistan, of what was called the Hindu element. By late

fifties and sixties, the problem took a serious turn when there was apparent and perceived

discrimination by the West Pakistan elements against East Pakistan, heightening the popular

resentment against the West Pakistani domination. The military take over of the Pakistan

government after 1955-56 and its tightening grip over the polity and society, also meant a control

of the west over the east as the Pakistan military was more or less Punjab dominated. Thus, in a

crude sense it began to be seen as the Panjabi domination over the Bengalis. In the 1970s,

elections to the Pakistan Parliament were provided in the new constitution and the

demographically dominant as well as politically more conscious and mobilized eastern part sent

the party of Mujibur Rahman who had emerged by this time as the most respected leader of East

Pakistan, to the Parliament with a huge majority. In terms of the overall seats in the Parliament,

Mujibur Rahman should have been invited to form the Government, which the West Pakistan

establishment including politicians like Bhutto, would not allow to happen. Seeing this

completely unjust behavior, the East Pakistan rose up in anger and there was a popular upsurge.

General Yahya Khan, who had appointed himself President in 1969, had given the job of

pacifying East Pakistan to his junior, General Tikka Khan. The later ordered a general

crackdown on the Bengalis on 25th March 1971, leaving thousands of Bengalis dead. Mujibur

40
Rahman was arrested the next day. There were also massive attempts to disarm the Bengali

troops in the army. All of this led to the exodus of the Bengalis- almost 10 million (more than

half of them Hindus) crossed the Indian border and entered into west Bengal, Tripura,

Meghalaya, etc. The burden of sustaining such a vast number of refugees fell upon the Indian

government, which appealed to the international community to help solve the situation so that

the people could go back home.

The international community was not very forthcoming and in fact United States began

to show openly its bias towards Pakistan, which was its closest ally at the time. The American

President Nixon was trying to use Pakistan to improve its relations with China. China too was

Pakistan’s ally, and India was in some sense isolated. 69 On the other hand, within the country the

Jana Sangh and the RSS began to use this opportunity of a crisis to bring the language of

communalism into the open. The Muslim communal propaganda was actively making it a

Muslim versus Bengali issue, while there were those who made it a Bihari versus Bengali issue.

But more dangerous was the Hindu communal angle which directly impinged on the diplomatic

action of the government. The show of intransigence towards Pakistan in the speeches and

propaganda of these parties had the effect of making the issue get a communal colour. The

Government was equally concerned that its mobilisation of public opinion around the world was

towards solving the East Pakistan crisis, and it was not aiming at dismembering Pakistan. From

mid 1971, the Jana Sangh more than any other party began to push the government for

immediate action to punish Pakistan. It is to the credit of the leadership that it never allowed this

issue to erupt into a Hindu-Muslim conflict, as perceived by the communal groups. It was in such

a tense situation that the Pakistan air force triggered the first apparently pre-emptive attack. The

69
The most illustrative account of the whole diplomatic angle from the side of the United states has been the
Foreign Relations of the United states” South Asia, Volume 1971.

41
actual war began at about 5:40 pm on 3 rd December 1971, when Pakistan Air Force (PAF)

combat aircraft struck nine Indian airfields along the Western borders.70 Prime Minister Indira

Gandhi’s speech on 3rd December 1971 scotched any communal agenda:

I speak to you at a moment of grave peril to -our country and to our people. Some hours

ago, soon after 5.30 p.m. on December 3, 1971, Pakistan launched a full-scale war

against us. … Since last March, we have borne the heaviest burden and withstood the

greatest pressure, in a tremendous effort to urge the world to help in bringing about a

peaceful solution and preventing the annihilation of an entire people, whose only crime

was to vote for democracy. But the world ignored the basic cause and concerned itself

only with certain repercussions. The situation was bound to deteriorate and the

courageous band of freedom fighters have been staking their all in defense of the values,

for which we also have struggled, and which are basic to our way of life.71

In another address to the army she did not invoke belligerence but larger principles, “The people

of all regions, all languages, all religions, and all political parties are united as never before.

They are determined as you to defeat the aggressor. They are imbued with boundless faith in

their cause and in your capacity to meet any challenge…. You and we are fighting in defence of

the great principle that people of all religions are equally our brothers. We are defending the
72
great ideals of equality and brotherhood, which are life and blood of our democracy.”
70
Indira Gandhi launched a diplomatic offensive in the early fall of 1971 touring Europe, and was successful in
getting both the United Kingdom and France to break with the United States, and block any pro-Pakistan directives
in the Unted Nations Security Council. Indira Gandhi's greatest coup was on 9 August when she signed a twenty-
year treaty of friendship and co-operation with the Soviet Union, greatly shocking the United States, and providing
India with insurance that the People’s Republic of China would not be involved in the conflict. China, an ally of
Pakistan, had been providing moral support, but little military aid, and did not advance troops to its border with
India.
71
The Year of Endeavour, Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi, August 1969- August 1972, Publication Division, pp.
490-491
72
Message to the Armed Forces, Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi, August 1969- August 1972, Publication
Division, pp. 610- 611.

42
Significantly enough, the Jana Sangh leaders at this time were found speaking in a podium where

the backdrop was the map of United India. The ideology lives on.

The mobilisation by and coming together of the democratic and left groups, which had

begun in late 1969 and early seventies, assured that the largest number of political leaders,

intellectuals, artists and left leaders who campaigned not merely for the war but on behalf of the

struggling people of East Pakistan and the democratic and popular dream of those people. They

also highlighted the plight of the people through their poetry, their plays and their songs, and in

this way the crisis which began to be used by the communal groups to propagate communal ideas

was turned into a popular and intellectual engagement. The crisis was soon over with the

establishment of Bangladesh. But the mobilization against the communal forces that was steadily

coming to the fore could not takeoff, as the polity soon began to slump due to the onslaught of

the student movements, which rapidly escalated into what is called the JP movement, first in

Gujarat and then in Bihar, from where it engulfed a large part of North India.

This movement saw the coming together of diverse political formations like the

Socialists, the Jana Sangh, RSS, and others. The Communist parties had divisions. While the

radical and more sectarian Communists (Marxists) were decidedly against the Congress and

remained opposed to Indira Gandhi, the Communist Party of India joined hands with the

Congress. The movement demanded Indira Gandhi’s resignation. The chief mobilizer,

Jayaprakash Narayan’s slogan of party less democracy however, was unheard of in any

democratic theory and hence, created doubts among even those who did not support the

Congress. 73

73
The idea of forcing the Prime Minister to resign, and the call to the army and police to revolt went against the
principles of democracy which were adhered to by the constitutional system established. The limits of protest in a
democratic structure remains an issue to be debated when analyzing such a movement. Bipan Chandra has raised

43
 The more concrete result was that the movement allowed the communal groups to

amalgamate their communal and very personalized opposition to the Congress leader Indira

Gandhi, and provide a cordon sanitaire to their communal agenda. 74 It is therefore not merely

political posturing that in defence of the emergency, Indira Gandhi was talking about the

communal forces operating along with others and posing a threat, for even the communist party

members were aware of the danger. The banning of the Ananda Marg and the RSS during the

emergency had the short term effect of denying the communal parties visibility, but it also

produced the result that Dange had warned of. Not only did they go underground, they also

earned respectability. It is thereof quite significant that more than any other party, it is the BJP

which is likely to portray the Emergency as the most important phase of its history. This was the

best opportunity for the Hindu communal groups to acquire respectability by claiming to lead

some sort of secular movement. The Government that was formed in the post emergency period

saw Jana Sangh come back as part of the ruling coalition, which had the support of the

Communists (Marxist) who were now in ascendancy in Bengal, Tripura and Kerala, and the

Akalis who would be in government in Punjab.

VIII

Communalism Enters a New Milieu

Communalism came to be part of the consciousness of sections of the Indian people during the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of the political, social and economic restructuring

of the Indian society. Colonialism had a major role in this restructuring. Creation of a national

community to counter the colonial exploitative practices and bring about a modern and

developed society saw another development along with this – the emergence of sections of
this question in his book, In the Name of Democracy, Emergency and the JP Movement, Penguin, Delhi, 2000.
74
I have tried to use the term normalization and sanitization in my Batabyal, Rakesh, Op. cit.,

44
communities that felt at odds with the principles and ideology of nationalism, which championed

the cause of the newly emerging democratic ethos, universal values and a notion of freedom

from the authoritarian constraints of traditions, communities and above all the overarching

presence of colonialism. It is not surprising that the Hindu and Muslim communal sentiments

were primarily directed against any extension of this ethos through the national movement.

Communalism was against this notion and spirit of nationalism, and its fight was therefore

against nationalism and not against colonialism. While one communalism defined the Indian

nation as existing even before the British arrived at the scene, the other tried to define a religious

community as entirely different in existential terms from other religious communities, and

therefore constituting the basis of a nation. Thus all shades of communalism bypassed any

critique of colonialism. The clash was always against the other religiously defined community.

This was a product of a new history that came to be written by the British who characterized the

History of India into Hindu, Muslim and Modern phases. Where the Hindu was a glorious

period, Muslim was a dark age, and Modern was a period of development under the British

aegis.75

The early Indian nationalist also argued that India witnessed a glorious history in the ancient

period, thereby agreeing with the historiographical presuppositions of the colonial writers. This

created a problem, which still lingers in the commonsensical understanding of history, and this is

resurrected in the Hindu communal as well as the Muslim communal histories. The early

nationalist historians argued against the colonial assertions that Indian never had a democratic

experience and it never had any sense of popular participation, science, technology and in sum, it

75
The classic work of this genre is James Mill’s History of India. A detailed critique of this communal view of
history can be found in Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra and Harbans Mukhia, Communalism and the Writing of
Indian History, People’s Publishing House, 1969. More recently, a further communal assertion of historiography has
been substantively critiqued by Aditya Mukherjjee, et al, History in the New NCERT Text Books: A Report and an
Index of Errors, Indian History Congress, 2003.

45
was always a backward authoritarian society steeped in spiritualism. This was countered by

evidence to show that ancient India had democratic institutions, science and technology. It was

the golden age of Indian history. Then the obvious question was, how did this vanish? The trap

was clear and obvious: the Muslim period was characterized as the dark ages. Though the

nationalist historians did not want to enter into this period, the teleological understanding of

history in this way entrapped them. The idea of a golden age of ancient India remained strong,

which became the cornerstone for many a fantastic and fabulous stories.

As mentioned earlier, the Marxist historiography, beginning in the sixties, was the first

major breakthrough which tried to take Indian scholarship as well as historical understanding out

of this labyrinth into what one would call a processual history, which tried to argue that history is

about people and not kings and soldiers, and that in this history what matters is larger historical

processes. In these processes, what mattered most was how people lived their lives, what was the

nature of society and what sort of practices were followed in order to legitimize political

authority. Here, colonialism was found to be a major exploitative system, while at the same time

the exploitative social system of medieval and ancient India was seriously looked into. The

notion of a pan-Indian Hindu community was recognized as a construction of the Colonial

historiography as much as the notion of an all India Muslim community. 76 These scholars along

with many non Marxist new generation scholars were in fact making the field of history wide,

and opening up many important issues related to caste, community, politics and religion for

historical analysis, which went against the grain of the communal groups who looked for

legitimation and justification of their present day claims in history. By 1977, however, the
76
For example, the researches of Kosambi, RS Sharma and many others brought out many sides of ancient India,
repudiating the claim of a unified Hindu India. Irfan Habib, Nurul Hasan and others demonstrated how the medieval
and Muslim rule was as exploitative for the peasants, be they Muslim or Hindu, as any other systems were. Bipan
Chandra recreated the milieu of the early Indian nationalists, who were the first to document and analyse British
Imperialism and its debilitating and impoverishing role. In their critique of the colonial system, he showed, the early
intelligentsia was founding the basic principles of the later day Indian nationalism.

46
communal formations were sharing power with the Janata party. One could see the basic and

perceptible shift in the Indian state’s policies, relating to the offices that the Jana Sangh and RSS

members held. The foergin ministry with Vajpayee at its helm displayed a rapid change of policy

towards Israel. India always had been in sympathy with the Jewish predicament after Hitler’s

arrival. However, at the same time India did not endorse the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian

population. The Hindu communal groups interestingly had admired Hitler. But ironically they

also looked towards Israel as a strong state, to be admired and befriended. Here, the Jana Sangh

injected a communal perception into India’s foregin policy, because the Hindu communalists

perceived the Israel-Palestinian conflict in terms of its own anti Muslim prejudice. 77 The other

minister from this group, Lal Krishna Advani, was given the information and broadcasting

portfolio, which meant the media was under his control. But the most opportune moment that the

Hindu communalists got as part of the state apparatus was in the shape of directly intervening in

the education sector: it succeeded in getting certain text books removed from the school reading

lists. This was part of the larger attack on the institutions of historical scholarship, which

included making non-academic appointments in institutions, and awarding projects and

fellowships not necessarily of a high standard that were meant to advance the communal

historiography.

That Indian schools should have text books written by Indians had been an issue since the

early forties. The Colonial government had kept a strict control over the text books and

significantly by the 1940s and fifties, a few British publishers monopolised the publications

scenario. Talking about education, the communist leader Dange had argued way back in 1947 in

the Maharastra Legislative Assembly that some British publishers had monopolised the textbook
77
Significantly such a communal interpretation has entered many scholarly works. Interestingly, these works are
critical of both India’s ‘anti colonial sentiments’ as well as what it sees as the voice of its ‘Muslim minority’ echoing
the Hindu communal historiographical positions. For such recent works, see Kumaraswamy, P.R., India’s Israel
Policy, Columbia University Press, 2010.

47
publication.78 Mahatma Gandhi too gave importance to books written by those who taught

students directly. By the 1960s, Indian schools and college system had all sorts of textbooks of

varying standards. There were therefore two crucial issues before a perceptive education

minister. First, to introduce textbooks written by Indians which would provide a national

perspective rather than the current textbooks Second, to ensure the printing of books within

India, which would be available to all sections of society. M.C. Chagla, the education minister,

was very alert to this and he argued that it was high time that books are written and printed in

India.79 However, school education was in the hands of the states and not the centre, and

education was a state subject. Hence, a national consensus was gradually evolved, where the

model text books were written with great care and after detailed discussions, so that the states,

even if they did not adopt these, could model their text books on these texts. Organisations like

Sampradayikata Virodhi committee, under the dynamic leader Subhadra Joshi, played a key role

in the campaign for new text books which were not communal.

On the basis of a note that emanated from the Prime Minister’s office in 1977, the Education

Minister, Pratap Chandra Chunder, himself a literateur from Kolkata, took the decision to

remove four of these model text books, which were written by eminent historians for the schools,

namely the text book on Medieval India (Romila Thapar), Modern India (Bipan Chandra),

Freedom Struggle (Bipan Chandra, Amales Tripathy and Barun De) and Ancient India (R.S.

Sharma). However, as we have seen, several intellectuals had been at the forefront of the

political battle for some time now and the communal design behind this move was immeditely

understood. Very soon, an all India movement against the removal began, which found its

reflection in the media as well. Beginning in the early sixties with a critique of Nehruvian

78
Bombay Legislative Assembly Debates, 1947, pp. 1668-1675.
79
Chagla, M.C., Roses in December, Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1973.

48
policies, the majority of these intellectuals had developed their own sophisticated analysis of

colonialism and communalism in the newfound freedom of the collective space in the

Universities, rare in any of the other third world countires, which gave them the confidence to do

that. The leadership’s independent stance against major powers during the nascent stage of the

nation’s independence had also emboldened them and provided them with the self assurance and

respect required for intellectual engagement. By the seventies, when the emergency was imposed

it was this trust in the democratic vision of the leadership which was badly bruised. Yet, this also

provided the intellectuals with the confidence to fight their own battles when the text boks were

removed. This act was seen not only as an attack on their scholarship, but was perceived as the

continuation of the communal attack in the garb of what was earlier referred to as Indianisation.

Very soon a stiff resistance ensued. Significantly, a fringe segment of intellectuals now came out

in the open to attack these historans as well as the intellectual traditon that they had developed.

They argued that the revoking of textbooks was not wrong as these intellectuals were patronised

by the Congress regime, and it was natural that the new regime would be patronising a new set of

intellectuals.80 Such arguments were made to normalise the communal aspect of the attack. 81

Secondly, this idea falsified the rich intellectual traditon that had evolved quite independently of

the state.82

80
Some individuals and groups took advantage of the communal attack, and launched tirades against the historians
concerned. The argument was that the Marxists have themselves used state patronage earlier, and hence have no
right or authority to counter the communalists who were now using the state to subvert the earlier regime. See, from
the supposed position of the radical left, Banerjee, Sumanta,‘Devaluation of Marxism by Leftist Academics’, in
Economic and Political Weekly, XIII, 14, April 8, 1978; and from the right, Nandy, Ashis, ‘Self Esteem, Autonomy
and Authenticity’, Seminar, No. 222, February, 1978. These attacks were countered by many, including one of the
maligned scholars Bipan Chandra in ‘Devaluation: Of What and by Whom’, Economic and Political Weekly, XIII,
19, May 6, 1978.
81
See Nandy, Ashis, ibid.
82
While some scholars took this opportunity to attack Marxist historiogrpahy, by avoiding the role of communalism
they ended up seeing this as merely reflecting a different cultural policy – another sanitized version of history, See
Llyod, Rudolph R. and Susanne Hoeber Rudolf, ‘Rethinking Secularism: Genesis and Implications of the Text Book
Controversy, 1977-79’, Pacific Affairs, Vol.56, no.1, Spring 1983, pp. 15-37.

49
 While the attack on the past was organised by having the state apparatus at hand, attacks on

Muslims also were organised, due to the confidence emanating from the wielding of state

power. This time it was in Jamshedpur, the most modern, most developed industrial township in

Bihar. The historian’s call on the planned nature rather than the spurious argument about the

spontaniety of riots is vindicated by the circumstantial evidence, which even the State’s

Commissions of Enquiry highlighted.83 The riots began on 11th August 1979, and by the time

journalists toured the city that was still simmering on the 25 th-26th August, the pulsating

cosmoploitan city was dead and a communal city had been born.84 The way the riot was

organised, the brutality unleashed and the clear hand of larger organisations makes the

Jamshedpur riot an important case-study to understand the communal polarisation across the

Chotanagpur and eastern Indian landscape. The communal clash began on the question of

passing of a procession on the occasion of the Hindu festival of Ramnavami, through road

number 14, a non descript small street inhabited by poor Muslims and close to the tribal colonies.

It appears that the heat generated by the passing of the procession was more because of the new

found confidence of the RSS and Jana Sangh leaders in the area, working in close tandem with

the central leadership. On 31st March, the divisional meeting of the RSS was organised in the

premises of the big cooperative college - a clear violation of the sanctity of educational

institutions. On 1st April, Balasaheb Deoras, speaking in the regal ground in the city reportedly

said that he was sad that Hindus in their own country were not allowed to take out religious

processions freely, while the number of mosques were increasing day by day. In the Arabian

countries on the other hand, Hindus were not allowed to construct temples. The RSS divisional

shakha had created with their drills and formations a military like situation. The anti Muslim

83
Excerpts from Jitendra Narain Commission Report, SD, September,1981, pp.9-23.
84
Ibid.

50
rhetoric of the ordinary shakha goer and the communal rumours must have vitiated the

atmosphere. Now, all of this created an atmophere of confidence among the communalists. The

administration seemed to have acted in a fair manner. But the local MLA, who had just returned

from Patna, played truant and went back on the original promise of letting the procession pass on

the scheduled route. He demanded the release of one Mahant Trivedy, who had been arrested

earlier as a precautionary measure. This was not accepted by the administration and soon after

the riot broke out. It began around 10.45 am and raged on for the next fortnight. The Bihar

military police, which had earlier played quite a commendable role, now did not seem immune

from the communal ideology. Except for the first company, composed of Gorkhas stationed in

Ranchi, other companies showed their communal colours. In many place, there was

indiscriminate shooting of Muslims. For example, in one place, when the Hindu mobs were

chased and apparently driven out, 108 rounds were fired in a Muslim basti. No Hindu was killed

while nine Muslims were found dead.85

In many senses, Jamshedpur was the commmunalists’ dream city. Here, the historical

memories of a riot earlier in 1964, when Muslims were butchered by Hindus excited by real and

imagined torture of their brethren in east Pakistan, remained. The riot brought another dimension

of the working of the communal groups - the use and spread of lies and rumours. This was

reported by the journalists touring the riot torn city. Adivasis were told, and they believed, that

adivasis had been attacked in Delhi, and so they should take revenge in Jamshedpur. Hindus

were told that the administration, which was more or less playing by the rules, had not allowed

the procession despite the permission granted by the High Court. The Muslims were supposed to

have been armed with bullets made in America, China and Pakistan; in other words the

community was seemingly in touch with all the forces, which in public perception were seen as
85
Ibid.

51
not favourable to India. The rumour was that Pakistani guns had been discovered, thereby

substanitating the communal argument that Muslims were the agents of Pakistan.86

The communal violence that erupted in organised fury and completely polarised the

atmosphere brought out the worst in ordinary people. Sukhdev Prasad complained to the

jouranlists that his nephew Anil Prasad was killed “when he was runing away from the

approaching crowd to save himself, he was overpowered by the Muslims and shot dead and his

body was hacked to pieces.”87

IX

A Violent Decade for the Democratic State

The year 1979-80 was a crucial phase in Indian politics. The Janata phase came to an end with

the clash on the issue of ministers surrendering their RSS membership. However, it may also

have been the strategy of the Jana Sangh to save itself from the unpopularity of the Janata regime

and carve its own niche separately. It refurbished the organisation as the Bharatiya Janata Party,

in its first national convention in Bombay in December 1980.

It is here, in the beginning of the eighties that the most excruciating phase of the history

of communalism began. This phase also marked the return of the Congress to power and a new

and gradually changing economy. The most visible aspects of the latter were the changing urban

landscape, the rise of small scale enterpreneurs and increasing industrial unrest, and the big

industries resorting to violent and extra legal means against the workers and agricultural poor

(particularly the scheduled castes). It was against this background that during the elections of

86
Akbar, M.J., ‘Jamshedpur a Brutal War’, Sunday, 29 April 1979, pp.10-22.
87
People, Saumitra Banerjee and Tirthankar Ghosh, ibid., p.20

52
1980, there was a personal communal attack against Mrs. Gandhi. The most frightening result of

the communal campaign of the previous decade was the sense of insecurity generated in the

cities with a substantial Muslim population. The prolonged communal campaign had its effect in

some of the crucial areas of governance and on the police. One had seen it in Jamshedpur but the

worst demonstration of this was the firing of the police on the crowd offering Namaz (prayers)

in Moradabad on 13th August 1980.

On 13th August 1980, more than fifty thousand Muslims had gathered at the Idgah (the

festivity grounds) of Moradabad. It was during the khutba (reading) that a pig wandered into the

Namaz. A dispute arose between the people and the locally posted policemen as to how the pig

wandered inside, with the policemen arguing that it was not their job to stop pigs. Altercations

took place where the congregation was tapering off.88 Then suddenly there was firing by the

police and their were dead bodies all around. Children, old men and youth – the firing was

indiscriminatory. Thus, the Idgah became almost a graveyard. The local MLA Hafiz Mohammed

Siddique shouted from the loudspeaker at the police to stop. 89 But the police had gone berserk. It

was its own master.

An angry Muslim mob then torched the police station in the locality that night. And now

begins the new story of communalism in modern India. The administration and particularly the

police tried to pass off the issue as a communal one, and in fact tried to provoke a communal

diturbance. This is what characterises the new phase of communal violence, where the

administration and political lack of direction now allowed the communal ideology to dictate the

administration. Taking place just a year after the communal violence in Jamshedpur, where too

the stories of the Bihar military police’s completely partial role in attacking Muslims had brought

88
Visit to Moradabad, a Draft Report by the Minorities Commission, Secular Democracy, March Annual, 1981,
pp.24-28; Akbar, M.J., ‘Id: Day of Death’, Sunday, 24 August 1980, pp.6-11.
89
Ibid, p.7.

53
a sense of injustice and anger, Moradabad was in a perverse way a vindication of that anger.

While the communalised instruments of governance required a strong anti communal and secular

political class and intelligentsia to counter attack and restore harmony, the politics of the eighties

tell a different story. The Moradabad riots also resulted in the Hindu communal groups launching

their new missive of Hindu enrolment, by asking people to proclaim with pride that they were

Hindus: “Garv se kaho ham Hindu hain”. Moradabad violence would now create a backdrop of

the communal mobilisation in which the central government and the Congress party would find

itself lacking support, with the development of autonomous political segments by the

communities feeling insecure.

It was around this time that the Assam movement came up, where the students, literateurs

and common people from across the state began to be mobilised on the issue of foreigners. By

1979, people could see that a volcano was about to erupt. 90 By the time the Congress came to

power, the Assam issue had become explosive and it revealed many more dimensions of a

sensitive and delicate nature. This related to cultural sensitivity about language – Assamese

identity and the linguistic issue were important historically.

The RSS entered the race to capitalise on this issue, by focusing on the question of

demography, a question it was deeply concerned about. It is significant that the first sponsored

book that the RSS got published through the auspices of the ICSSR by the Centre for Policy

Studies in Madras in 2000 was on religious demography. 91 The issue of demography goes back

to 1909 when Col. U.N. Mukherjee published his book entitled A Dying Race, which talked

about the possibilities of the extinction of the Hindu race, as indicated by statisticians on the

basis of Census figures in 1909. In the aftermath of the communal award of 1930, the issue of

90
Sunday, 25 Nov. 1979.
91
Joshi, A.P., M.D.Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj, (eds.) Religious Demography of India, Centre for Policy Studies, 2003.

54
comparitive demography of the Hindus and Mulsims became very important, particularly in

Bengal, and the political discourse, both Hindu and Muslim, began to take on deeply communal

undertones with demographic elements in the backdrop. The partition demand of the Muslim

League too was based on the idea of demographic majority of the Muslims in those areas. The

rise of the Jamat-i-Islami in the seventies saw the return of the demographic argument by the

Muslim communalists, and significantly the forced sterlisation during the emergency was

attacked in the later period by the Jamat members in terms of deliberate reduction of the Muslim

population, which would reduce it to a smaller minority community.

The Hindu communalists concern with the issue of demography was stirred to a rousing

pitch by the Meenakshipuram conversion. Meenakshipuram district is located in southern

Tamilnadu, and it was reported that an entire community belonging to the untouchable caste had

embraced Islam.92 This created a sensation and it was soon raised as a public issue. The issues

raised by the conversion were primarily related to caste atrocities. But in the hands of the the

religious groups and communalists, this came to be perceived as a threat to the Hindu

community, because of the demographic change that was wrought. The Hindu communal groups

tried to build a conspiracy theory showing how the new found money from Arab lands was being

channeled into the region to convert people. This argument of inducement had already been

leveled against the Christian missionaries. Incidentally, the Meeakshipuram incident proved to

be a catalyst for the Viswa Hidu Parishad to rapidly transform into a major communal force and

be seen as the more active agent of propagation of the new and militant Hindu consolidation

movement.93

92
See for a report of the conversion, Sunday, June 7, 1981; a full report by Kuldip Nayar, Sunday 17 Nov. 1982, also
see Shakir, Moin, and H.Ghani, ‘The conversion Phenomenon’, SD, October 1981, pp.15-21.
93
See Katzu, Manjiri, Viswa Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2003.

55
 Coming back to the Assam question, Indira Gandhi had visited Tejpur in 1962 during the

worst of the Indo-China war, when the Indian forces were driven back. The situation was almost

one of surrendering to the Chinese forces, and some Assamese intellectuals have recently argued

on this basis that the Indian leadership had actually surrendered Assam, i.e. Assam was

dispensible. While the 1980s witnessed a critical situation, this time it was not the invading

Chinese army but a completley non violent ‘democratic’ movement that had to be dealt with. It

was at this time that there were indications of RSS activity in the region. The leftist Assamese

intellectuals could see the efforts at penetration of the movement and came out strongly against

this, particularly after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had its session in Gauhati in 1982. The VHP

had been very active after the Meenakshipuram conversion debate, and at this point in Assam it

gave the slogan that Hindus were in danger and under seige. There were attempts by the AASU

(All Assam Students Union) to counter the RSS presence. The apparent success of the RSS in

entrenching itself in the movement at this stage could have been because “Assam has rejected

political parties and the RSS offers some kind of an alternative to a society divided bitterly along

communal lines.”94 Indira Gandhi attempted to attack this aspect rather than the AASU, with

whom she was ready to negotiate. She visited the province and tried to reassure the minorities.

The Hindu communal propaganda seized the opportunity to counter her startegy, by attacking her

for saying “Khuda hafiz” at a meeting. The RSS and its other associates in this manner vitiated

the atmosphere by trying to divide the targetted population into Hindu and Muslim. However,

soon the communal potents of the movement culminated in the Nellie and Gohpur massacre.

Nellie, where about 3,300 people, mostly Muslim villagers were killed mercilessly and what was

worse there was no sense of remorse and the local Assamese administration as well as poltical

94
Link, 21 December, 1980, p.13.

56
class showed their bias, in fact, robbed the movement its innocence. 95 The Nellie massacre

showed the depravity of the communal penetration that had touched the people in the provinces.

The AASU tried to dissociate itself from this, but it was too late. The movement lost its sheen

among many who had seen in the democratic nature of the movement a new hope. One could see

the spiralling effect of the movement in neighbouring Tripura, where the Upajaiti mercilessly

killed the Manadai in 1980.96

While the Assam movement was giving the RSS a much needed all India platform, the

stint in the government and a new profile gave all its organisations a new boost, and the push

towards forming a new organisation. The party was now on its way to recreate the formation of

the Congress party in the previous century. In December 1980, the Bharatiya Janata Party had its

first national convention in Bombay. For all practical purposes, it was a grand conclave of about

56,000 delegates showing the new strength and confidence in the party. 97 The party leader

Vajpayee did not talk about Indianisation at this point but of how “capitalism was on its way out

and hence the new party will work to usher Gandhian Socialism. Its fight was with capitalism.”

The efforts by those who celebrated the Mahatma’s death earlier, to now own Gandhi as well as

present themselves as pro poor were revealed.98

95
See a new book by Diganta Sharma on Nellie 1983: Asom Andolonor Borborotom Gonohatyar Postmortem
Report (Nellie, 1983: A Postmortem Report into the Most Barbaric Massacre of the Assam Movement), Eklabya
Prakashan, 2007. See also, the T.D.Tiwary Commission Report.

96
‘Mandoi Massacre’, Sunday, June 24, 1980.
97
‘Bharat’s new party Convenes, RSS coexists with Gandhian Socialism’, Sunday, 4 January, 1981, p.40. Here one
of the most significant events in the whole affair was first, the active participation of the RSS organizers who looked
after the whole preparation of such a huge gathering, and second, the speech by M.C. Chagla who thought that the
BJP was going to be real secular party. A full blooded secularist of the Nehruvian mould, Chagla had little
experience of the realpoltik and hence the rusty politics of the 1960s left him disillusioned with the Congress on
many accounts. He was angry and sad when Indian government quite unwisely sent its delegation to the Islamic
Countries’ conference in Rabat in 1969. He was also disillusioned with the emergency. See Chagla, M.C., Roses in
December, Bombay, 1980.
98
‘Capitalism is on its Way Out’( Interview with Vajpayee), Sunday, 4 January, 1981, p.41.

57
 The same argument of Arab maney was used when riots broke out in Meerut, situated

close to Moradabad, in August 1981. The tension in Aligarh University, also close to Meerut,

had again reared its head to distort the overall atmosphere. The communal elements in the

university and outside appeared to have the upper hand, a result of the continuous polarisation

and communalization of the atmosphere. The voice of Syed Sahabuddin, (an Indian bureaucrat

who had now joined politics and began to take a strong Muslim communal position) ‘crying for

Moradabad’ appeared to be booming, whereas Irfan Habib who had been fighting against Hindu

and Muslim communalism for years was now physically attacked inside Aligarh University.99

All of this contributed to reigniting the communal mobilisation, and now it was the turn

of Biharsharief in Central Bihar where over a petty altercation, the riot that began on 3 May soon

became a nightmare as the RSS lynchpin in the area was found roaming around freely organising

and attacking the villages. The fury of the communal anger soon left 52 dead in which 50 were

Muslims and there were 12,733 Muslim refugees. The Prime minister had to force the Chief

Minister (who was enroute to Delhi) back to his state and she herself rushed to the place to be on

the spot as it was realised that the edifice of civilised administration was collapsing. By the end

of 1981 one heard the Jamat-i-Islami voices even as the RSS was engineering a push,

aggravating the insecurity and helplessness of the Muslims.

The increasing fury and helplessness were two side of the same political phenonmenon,

and the results were the same. Within a year, now in Meerut, this mobilised communal anger

gushed out in November 1982. Meerut riot was dastardly in its expanse and timeframe, as also

the direct collusion of the RSS activists. The Meerut riot revolved around claims related to a

place of worship. Again, it was noticed that there were slogans about Hindusim in danger, how

the Muslims were breeding fast to take over the country, and how people were being converted.
99
Shahabuddin Syed, ‘Let me cry for Moradabad’, Sunday, 28 September, 1980, pp.18-20.

58
The touring Minority Commission members found that the local population, obviously under

Hindu communal hegemony, felt that the Commission itself should be scrapped. In overall terms,

the demographic logic was used to shut out the democratic life. The campaign also gave the

space to other communal groups to operate in their respective zones, and this was at the cost of

the expanding social and cultural capital at a time when the economy was changing silently. In

Meerut, for example, there were reports that the Congress Hindu MLA behaved like the Hindu

communalist and Congress Muslim MLA behaved like a Muslim communalist. The whole

episode had nothing to tell the civilised world except that the edifice of secular India had

collapsed in the bylanes of Meerut. An articulate journalist wrote these poignant lines while

reporting from Meerut:

My generation has seen the brutal killings of Mulsims at Moradabad, the ugly face of

Hindu fanaticism in Jamshedpur, the bloody ravaging hands of Muslim communalism in

Sambhal and the ridiculous communal wars between these two sections in

Meenakshipuram and Kerala. My generation had till now, known the tense atmosphere of

1947 only through hearsay. But we can feel it now, in the city of Meerut.”100

What is further significant is that the Moradabad and Meerut riots were the beginning of

the two new phenomena, namely administrative collapse and communal enrollment, which

would go a long way in defining the communal map of the country. The autonomy of the

communal situation also indicated that in every town where communal riots took place or where

the insecurities were aggravated, the new phenomemon of local, individual protectors of the

communities became visible. Incidentally, these individual protectors were linked to the larger

100
Sharma, Udayan, ‘Meerut A Divided City’, Sunday, 14-20 Nov. 1982. The city of Meerut, which had a historical
persona, was a different city after the 1982 riots, and never recovered from this.

59
ideological and political organisations like RSS, BJP and Jamat-i-Islami or other new political

formations that were coming into shape. The relation was however of a contract; the nature of

the contract would change in the years to come when protectors of larger groups would appear

with state power in their hands. It is in this sense that the local caste politicians and the Hindu

communalists offered themselves as protectors of the communities feeling under seige. The

romance of Hindu communalism was that it had succeeded by the early eighties to convince the

biggest majority that it was living under a constant seige. The government of Indira Gandhi, with

no organised party in shape and depending on ideological sway as well as political skills, was

finding it difficult to counter the communal ideological attack which was trying to consolidate a

Hindu monolithic psyche of seige.

It is to confound the situation that the communalisation and the violence in Punjab

contributed in a big way. Punjab, since the days of Partition itself, had been witnessing a clash

between its own variants of communal interests. The Akali Dal, a unique formation of a political

party based completely on religious identity and appeal, could be seen as a model case for an

Indian communal party that had been demanding in one way or the other its autonomous space of

rule. However, in a democratic order it had to contest with the Congress and other formations,

which too commanded the electoral support of the Sikhs and other components of the population,

on whom the Akalis were trying to assert their claim. In the 1960s, the Akalis began demanding

a Punjabi suba, a separate province, which had a Punjabi speaking majority, thereby dreaming of

extending its own political life. The central leadership, despite hesitation and prolonged

agitation, finally conceded the demand. However, typical of the communal demands, the scope

went on increasing until by the 1970s, there were further demands in the name of autonomy but

in reality for a monopoly of the Akali Dal dominance in state politics. The Hindu communal

60
parties too played their part by aligning with the Akalis. They were in a piquant situation since

they were in no position to attack the Akalis as they would have done Muslim or Christian

communal parties. This was because the Hindu communal organisations viewed Sikhs as part of

the larger Hindu community, an idea which the Akali political formation began to attack in the

eighties. Frustrated by their inability to attack the Akalis, the RSS and Jana Sangh began

attacking Indira Gandhi for the partition of the province.

In a bid to cut down the Sikh communal party’s base, the Congress leadership

encouraged the introduction of a more virulent element, Bhindranwale. The intra party fight in

the Punjab and the new combination of forces which very soon became conspicuous by 1981-2,

began creating a deep communal hiatus.

Call for a National Consensus

Notwithstanding differences of the Congress party with the local politics and the sectarian

rhetoric of the communist left, the intelligenstia, which had been in the forefront in critiquing the

communal interpretation of society and politics in the early sevenites and had withstood the

communal attacks in 1977-79, was still there to counter communalism in its most widespread

and violent phase. Significantly, this was the time when historians were developing a complete

theory of communalism, which was not merely a binary of Muslim and Hindu commuanlism, but

a complete ideology and world view that the long evolution of modern Indian history had seen

developing. The Sikh communalism too could be explanied within this frame. 101 Punjab in its

101
Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India, Vikas, New Delhi, 1984.

61
earlier years, saw quite a serious intellectual and political critique of the Akalis but by the end of

1983-4, voices were either silenced or threatened, except for a few like Satyapal Dang.102

It is to realign itself ideologically by invoking the intellectuals and the other democratic

political sections that Indira Gandhi called for a national consensus in such a communalised

social milieu. She was trying her best to prevent a Hindu consolidation by not allowing the

communal groups to keep projecting her as anti Hindu, while at the same time would not allow

the minorities to feel insecure in the face of such a massive communal attack. While the bigger

left party, the CPI(M) took a position of equidistance between the BJP and Congress, its attack

on the systemic failure would hurt the Congress more, and the other parties were now looking for

fresher pastures. The normalisation of the BJP as a political force began to be accelarated at this

juncture.

It was at this juncture when sensing the crisis that the Congress made efforts to invoke

the conscience of the nation. It organised a conclave of intellectuals, including some of the finest

scientists, historians, political scientists and journalists to deliberate on the increasingly volatile

communalisation, which had been instrumental in disseminating ideas, information and ideology

based on spurious, false and what has been spoken of as “unscientific” data. The conclave

brought out a ‘document on scientific temper’. This was a major effort in the direction to recoup

the intellectual strength of the nationalists, and the forces of reason, modernity and development,

which were the core of the national movement and the ideas that had sustained the nation making

process this far. It appealed to the people not to give in to the unsceintific ideas and slogans in

circulation. The signatories were all established in their fields, and the document was well

prepared.103 Significantly, and also predictably, opposition to the document came from the
102
Dang, Satyapal, Terrorism in Punjab, Gyan Publishing House, Delhi, 2000.
103
‘Document on Scientific Temper’, Mainstream, July, 1981. The signatories included, Prof, Amit Bhaduri, Dr.
P.M. Bhargava, Prof. Bipan Chandra, Prof. V.K. Damodaran, P.N. Haksar, V.G. Kulkarni, Dr. Dinesh Mohan, Dr.

62
section which was against the nation state, development and science. However, the criticism of

the document was more of an abusive attack on the individual signatories, and confused but

polemical: for instance, collapsing science and technology, and then attacking science as

technology.104 This comes close to almost endorsing the later day Hindu communal intellectual

position of glorifying indigenous sciences and rejection of what is called “alien scinces”.

However, a more positive criticism came from the CPI (M) general secretary Namboodiripad

who saw the continuance of outmoded social institutions as the impediment to a more scientific

and humane social milieu. Most of the signatories would perhaps have tended to agree with the

arguments.105 While nation and nation making was the locii around which communalism has

been attacked, the intelligentsia had not left its credo of a social transformation as the basis of the

Indian nation-making efforts. Thus, one of the first theorisations of communalism which came

out during this time was that commuanlism was a complete ideological system and could be

countered only by nationalism as the counter ideology, where the telos was to be a socialist

transformation of the society.106The magazine Sunday brought out a special issue on

M.N.V. Nair. Prof. H. Narasimhaiah, Bakul Patel, Rajni Patel, P.K. Ravindranath, Mohit Sen, B.V. Subbarayappa,
Tara Ali Baig, Shyam Benegal, Satish Dhawan, Prof. Y. Nayudumma, Ashok Partasarathi, Prof. K.N. Raj, Dr. Raja
Ramanna, S. Ramshesan, Prof. C.N.R. Rao, Dr. A.K.N. Reddy, Dr. Anand Sarabhai, Prof. B.M. Udgaonkar, Dr.
M.G.K. Menon, Dr. Rais Ahmed, Prof. Romila Thapar. See P.N. Haksar Papers, Installments I-II, for some details
regarding the Conference.
104
Nandy, Ashis, ‘Counter-Statement on Humanistic Temper’, Mainstream, 10 October, 1981, pp.16-18.
105
Namboodiripad, E.M.S., ‘Part of Struggle Against Outmoded Institutions’, Secular Democracy, November, 1981,
pp.28-29. See also Bhargava, P.M.’Why statement on Scientific Temper’, ibid., pp. 29-31;Chattopadhayaya,
‘Defense of Scientific Method’, Ibid., pp.31-32.
106
Significantly, historian Bipan Chandra was to speak at this time about the danger of communalism swamping any
socialist project and therefore the immediacy and urgency of an ideological fight against communalism. See his
Communalism in Modern India; and also other writings at this time brought together in Essays on Contemporary
India, Har Anand, Delhi, 1993.
While, politically the Indian state was encountering a violent challenge from communal forces supported
by international actors, there were vitriolic intellectual attacks on Indian state and Indian nationalism - many
emanating from Imperial centers. These works, if not supported, legitimized the communal arguments. See,
Subaltern Studies (Oxford University Press, 1982), the first volume of a series that appeared in 1982.
On the other hand, many scholars, who work on India, began to hedge the issues, by either confusing the
terms of reference or rather obfuscating the concepts such as communalism for various reasons. See, for example,
this piece of information by a celebrated historian:
The Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, is the reincarnation of the Jana Sangh and the only former constituent of
the Janata Party that was not the product of the "Congress culture." The party's close association with the
Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has led to its being denounced as "reactionary" and

63
communalism in 1983, and the left and secular historical trends identified and attacked with new

vigor the advancing Hindu communalism. 107

XI

The Second Communal Assassination

The Assam attack and later events saw the Hindu communal propaganda projecting the Congress

and particularly Indira Gandhi as an appeaser of Muslims, and any gesture she made such as

rushing to the site of communal unrests or riots was immediately portrayed as a sign of minority

appeasement and as anti-Hindu. This is where perhaps we can locate a new element in Indira

Gandhi’s political strategy to counter the sense of seige and insecurity that was being fostered

among minorities and the majority alike. It is also possible that she wanted to disarm the Hindu

communalists from attacking her. In this context it may be wrong to describe her visits to Hindu

"communal" by Congress and opposition critics alike. The party's leadership - notably Atal Bihari Vajpayee
and L.K. Advani - is neither reactionary nor communal, but in taking the party on a more secular course, it
has alienated the RSS cadre who form the core of the party's organizational strength and deepened
dissension within the party.
Hardgrave Jr., Robert L., ‘India on the Eve of Elections: Congress and the Opposition’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 57, No.
3 (Autumn, 1984), p.414.
The conflation and normalization of concepts such as communal with ‘fundamentalism’ ‘reactionary’ etc.
would not be of great help. One such concept which began to dominate the intellectual horizon at this stage was
‘Islamic Fundamentalism’. Intellectuals who were the product of the Indian political tradition could immediately
sense the problems and perils of such conceptual borrowings. Girish Mathur, a senior journalist, prophetically wrote:
Some editors and commentators have borrowed the concept of Islamic Fundamentalism from Imperial
brains trust of the Contemporary world, the US Council on Foreign Relations, which employs it to find
scapegoats for the debacle of American Foreign Policy in the west Asia, South West Asia and countries of
South Asia. The Indian borrowers use the concept to analyse and seek explanations for certain
developments in the thinking and behavior of a section of Muslims in the country. But their analysis ends in
a search for the hidden hand and the involvement of foreign money in recent events in which Muslims have
played an activist role. If such analysis finds acceptance at official and political decision making levels, the
result can be disastrous if public opinion comes to link Muslim behavior in India with external factors.
Mathur, Girish, Mainstream, 18 October, 1980, pp.13-16
One can now see how Hindu communalist arguments drew sustenance from this conceptual borrowing and
it helped it to strengthen its claims of representing cultural nationalism.

107
‘The Rise of Communalism’, Sunday, 3-9 April, 1983, pp.15-45.

64
shrines as her turning towards religion. Kuldip Nayar, the eminent journalist, who had been a

severe critic since her early days, commented:

There was a time when she would rush to places of communal riots. During this spell of

power, she did not go to even Meerut, 50 kilometers from Delhi, where communal fires

burnt for weeks. True she is not communal but she had gone out of the way to visit a

temple as if she was trying to redeem some promise.108

It would be equally incorrect to argue, in a manner that struck like a cliché, that she had

turned towards the Hindu side, or professed a soft Hindutva, a term made popular by the western

academia in later years. The communal challenge to the polity had come from different

directions, and it required very delicate handling of the polity as well as the socio-political

aspirations of the people affected by it, while at the same it was necessary to develop the mature

frame of the nation. The evidence from Punjab indicated that religion definitely was the core of

the identities around which a community had been defined, and the life of a community,

imagined or real, lived. It so happened that the identity of the nation that had been conceived did

not follow the pattern of, say, the Serbians or the French. 109 A close look reveals that the Hindu

communal groups, which wanted to supplant the secular nationalism, were actually confused as

to how to configure the Indian diversity within the confines of a unified nationalist conception

that they carried. There seems to be a confusion in the Congress ranks. They, it seems were very

well conscious of the large uncontested spaces which has developed due to the riots, institutional

apathy and partisan attitude of the police and local administration, and was helping the

108
Nayar, Kuldip, ‘Mrs. Indira Gandhi : A Mid term Assessment’, Sunday, January, 1, 1983, p.14. For his views on
Indira Gandhi during her initial years as Prime Minister, India: The Critical Years, Vikas Publications, Delhi, 1971
109
Dasgupta, J.N., Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in
India, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1970; Nayar, Baldev Raj, Minority Politics in Punjab, Princeton
University Press, New Jersey, 1966.

65
entrenchment of communalism. However, a deep cynicism and doubt about the leadership’s

ability to protect them against the onward march of Hindu communal attacks too was becoming a

new belief system. This sense was confounded when one saw the rise of the vocal and articulate

voices which talked about Muslim insecurities in the language of Muslim communalism. The

rise of individuals like Syed Sahabuddin could be explained by this. The Congress leadership

therefore gave a call for a national consensus. It also tried to mobilise the intellectual support

agaisnt communalism. However, the situation had changed as the Emergency had taken its toll

and many intellectuals were not willing any longer to come to the Congress platform. Thus,

instead of directly attacking the communal front, a more sophisticated and slightly broad

platform was organised by the party, which tried to garner support against communal ideological

onslaught, by invoking scientific temper.

The call for consensus came from other sources as well. The disheartened Janata

intellectuals were calling for “unity of secular, democratic and egalitarian forces” in order to

regroup themselves.110 The many shades of the Janata parties, on their way to position

themselves as opposition to the Congress, now began to mobilise the autonomous communal and

caste formations in states, which were witnessing the most virulent Hindu communal

propagation, and a deteriorating law and order situation. The coming together of caste and

communal elements and the projection of Syed Shahbuddin as the Janata Party candidate from

Punia was one of the early indications of these trends. The CPI(M) began to articulate its tactical

line of of equidistance from both the Congress and the communal BJP. The line derived its

inner logic from its political understanding of Congress being supported by the big bouregoisie

and the big landlords, leading to intensified crisis as the leadership has surrendered itself to the

110
Limaye, Madhu, ‘Unity of Secular, Democratic and Egalitarian forces’, Secular Democracy, March (II), 1979,
pp.4-5.

66
bureaucracy.111 Strategically too, the party saw the Congress as its major oppostion in the

provinces where it had somehow begun to entrench itself after the 1977 election. The

ramification is best seen on the Punjab front, where instead of attacking the increasing

communalisation and the Akali militancy the party was trying to organise its cadre against the

Congress ministry and a large section of the intellectuals were targetting Indira Gandhi, in a

manner akin to the attack by the Hindu communal party, BJP, as well as the Akali Dal. 112 Thus,

one could see that by 1983-4, during the Punjab crisis, as it happened in the case of Assam, the

intelligenstia and media now began to link Indira Gandhi’s responses to the crisis with that of the

Hindu commuanl response. On the other side, a Hindu communal polarisation must have been

happening inside and outside the province, fed by the regular news of the killing of Hindus in

Punjab.113 The broad intellectual as well as political support for a secular anti communal and

democratic consensus was no longer available, as it had been in 1969-70. It is this missing of the

woods for the forest that can be seen in the attack against Indira Gandhi for the increasing

communalisation of the Punjab crisis by sections of journalists, intelligentsia and larger political

class. The culmination of the crisis was the administrative decision to attack the heart of the

whole extremist movement - the militants in the Golden temple.

The individualization of the state response culminated in the plot to assassinate Indira

Gandhi, because she was constantly being projected as personally responsible for and

aggravating the Punjab crisis. The Prime Minister was killed by her Sikh bodyguards. She was

apparently warned and was advised to change her guards – an advice she had scoffed off by

111
Ranadive, B.T., ‘Intensified Crisis of the System’, Social Scientist, Vol.9, No.100, 1980, pp.36-54. Naboodiripad,
E.M.S., ‘India 1980: The Political Developments’, Ibid., pp.11-21. Also see Namooditripad, E.M.S., ‘What Is This
call for “Cooperation”’ ? People’s Democracy, February 1, 1981, pp.1-3.
112
See, ‘Punjab: successful Assembly Gherao’, People’s Democracy, 1 February, 1981,p.1-2; ‘The Joint Movement
in Punjab’, ibid., 15 February, pp.6-8. For the overall perceptions and role of intelligentsia during the Punjab crisis
see, Chandra, Bikas, Punjab Crisis: Perceptions and Perspectives of Indian Intelligentsia, Har Anand, Delhi, 1993.
113
Saari, Anil, The Punjab Riots, Sunday, 16-22 May, 1982, pp.32-39

67
saying that this is a secular society. Interestingly enough, it was she who inserted the word

“secularism” in the Preamble of the constitution through the Constitution amendment, an act

which was seen as an act of sheer artificiality. In hindsight provided by historical moments, one

may like to change one’s views seeing the urgency of her act in the backdrop of the Hindu

communal aggression.

The response to the assasination was a large scale attack on the Sikhs across the country

led more often than not by the local Congress party leaders. It further underlined the fact that

communal ideology when it becomes a hegemonic presence will create a situation where

violence against a chosen community will seem to be a normal affair. The increasing commual

pressure on the society for the last couple of years had taken its toll. Identification along

communal lines was present, violence was normalised in the name of communal political

interests, and the worst of all, people were ready to be led to the attack as if it was a normal affair

to kill. Killing of Sikhs seemed normal – almost banal, to use Hannah Arendt’s now famous term

in the context of anti-semitism in Germany. 114 By 1984, it was Hindu communalism which was

on the ascendance.

114
Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking Press, New York, 1963.

68
69
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