A Reply TO

“The Struggle for India's Soul”

by Mira Kamdar

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The article "The struggle for India's soul" by Mira Kamdar (World Policy Journal, fall 2002) exemplifies the confusions bedevilling the communalism debate, especially among avowed secularists and their NRI friends. In the present paper, I will not posit any new thesis but merely draw attention to the logical fallacies and factual mistakes so typical of secularist polemic against Hindu nationalism.

1. "Hindu fascism"

Mira Kamdar tells us about a paradoxical combination of opinions in her father: "My immigrant Gujarati father is both a liberal Democrat and a supporter of Hindu fascism. This is not as unusual as one might think."

Before discussing this paradox, we need to focus on the use of a single word which does more in conditioning the mind of the non-specialist reader than any thesis developed at length in her paper: "fascism". If the Hindu ideology under consideration were really "fascism", then its combination with liberal anti-racism would be highly unusual and problematic, requiring a thorough explanation which Mira Kamdar's paper fails to offer. Of course, if some of the groups concerned were to call themselves "fascists", it would be normal if we were to do likewise. But that is not the case at all: they describe themselves as "Hindu nationalists", "Hindu revivalists" or "genuine secularists". So, in a scholarly paper, as opposed to a partisan political pamphlet, the decision to describe them as "fascists" can come only at the end of an analysis showing how in spite of their own self-description they really do satisfy the definition of "fascism". But no such analysis has been given here. The term "fascism" is thrown in at the outset without any justification, in an obvious attempt to condition the unwitting reader into a mood of hatred against the targeted Hindu activists.

I have analysed the discourse on "Hindu fascism" in detail in my book The Saffron Swastika (Voice of India, Delhi 2001), and will offer a few arguments against the notion below. For now, I may limit the explanation of my skepticism about it to the following observation. The Hindu nationalists, presently in power in Delhi, are not "fascists", and the best proof is the very fact that this allegation is made so routinely. In an age in which this is the ultimate insult and the most terrible allegation, no authoritarian government would let opposition voices get away with uttering it day in and day out. Yet, for today's Indian intellectuals, levelling grim allegations against the Hindu nationalists, including that of "fascism", does not entail a risk of landing in prison or in a torture chamber, not even of being censored or fired. On the contrary, it is a very smart career move. It can get you a job with prestigious media and institutions, and it will earn you invitations to the American lecture circuit. Get rich quick!

Farther down in her paper, Mira Kamdar continues in the same vein: "The president should condemn strongly the genocide in Gujarat and attacks elsewhere against India's Muslims". (emphasis added) Killing 2000 people is terrible, but in a population of millions, can you seriously call it "genocide"? This kind of hyperbole betrays a purely polemical rather than scholarly purpose behind her paper. Or the prevalence of the polemical mode against Hindutva to such an overwhelming extent that scholars sheepishly adopt it even without having the intention of straying from scholarly deontology.

She also writes the following line about Ashutosh Varshney's latest book: "Varshney presents, almost sotto voce, a secondary line of argument where, I believe, he more accurately nails the beast of Hindutva to the wall." Another brief remark on terminology is in order here. Communism killed over 100 million people, yet, what academic journal would accept a paper describing Communism as a "beast"? Anyone using such terminology would at once be derided as "McCarthyist" and worse. But in writing on Hindutva, the normal rules are suspended.

2. Inequality, racism and Islam

Mira Kamdar doesn't seem to realize that she is providing a good entry point into a justification of the "anti-Muslim anti-racism" paradox where she details her own family's anti-racist commitment: "Even our parents' 'mixed marriage'�my mother is Danish American�was to be understood not so much as a love affair as a salvo in the war on racism."

Well, there you have an excellent starting-point for a little meditation on the similarities between racism and Islam. If Mira Kamdar's father was in favour of mixed marriages, he had necessarily to be an opponent of Islam. For, Islam forbids mixed marriages, viz. between a Muslim and a non-Muslim. Such marriages are only allowed if the non-Muslim partner first converts, so that it is no longer a mixed marriage but a purely inter-Muslim one. This rule is strictly enforced (and even in Western countries, Muslim social pressure to this effect is very strong) in case of a union between a Muslim woman and a man of non-Muslim origin: Islam as a system of domination does not tolerate a Muslim partner submitting to the authority of a non-Muslim pater familias. In the reverse case, there is more scope for accommodation: care must be taken that the resulting children are raised as Muslims, but in specific social circumstances the non-Muslim identity of the wife may be respected. This asymmetry is exactly like in the racist equation in the American Old South: no white father would ever allow his daughter to go with a black man, but he might allow himself to have a black mistress. The idea is that the natural order is respected as long as the dominant male partner belongs to the dominant class. To be sure, this attitude is not exclusive to Islam or to racism, it appears in most groups pretending to some kind of collective superiority. But at any rate, it helps explain why an anti-racist could logically also be an anti-Islamist.

The combination of liberalism and anti-Islamism has recently been illustrated by the case of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, murdered during his spectacular election campaign in May 2002 by a Dutch leftist. This ultra-liberal sociology professor and avowed homosexual had criticized the illiberal elements in Islam, particularly regarding women, homosexuals and non-Muslims. He was not against Muslim immigration per se ("I have nothing against Muslims, I go to bed with them") but he favoured a controlled slowing of immigration in order to facilitate the full assimilation of the Muslim immigrants, away from their physical and mental ghettoes. When he turned this position into a political programme and stood for elections, he rapidly gained the support of a veritable rainbow of different opinion segments, including emancipated ex-Muslims, native critics of immigration or of Islam, and most remarkably, some of the non-Muslim immigrant groups, especially the Hindu community immigrated from Surinam in the 1970s. There has never been anything particularly right-wing in the voting behaviour of these Hindus, and Fortuyn was not really a rightist anyway, but they certainly were ready to sympathize with the first politician to speak out against the more unpleasant aspects of Islam.

Another groups that combines liberalism and anti-Islamism is the growing circle of enlightened apostate Muslims. Unlike in India, in Muslim countries it takes a lot of courage to be a secularist. It is these brave champions of freedom and humanist values who are shot in the back by the slanderous identification of anti-Islamic positions with "fascism". To be sure, these Muslim-born liberals probably don't hate their compatriots who have not yet outgrown Islam (though in many cases, it is painful personal experiences with true Muslims that made them question the faith in the first place), but that makes little difference. Indian "secularists" treat any and every criticism of Islam, no matter how experience-based, no matter how factual or scholarly, no matter how humanist and liberal, as "hate" and "fascism".

3. The perennial Aryans

The following sentences appear to be an attempt by Mira Kamdar to reinterpret her father's anti-racist sarcasms as actually an expression of secret Nazi sympathies, which in turn are implicitly linked to his anti-Muslim feelings: "More boldly, and more rarely, he would allude to the Nazis' linkage of Indians with Germans in one vast Aryan family. I always took these remarks to be tongue-in-cheek observations that no one, least of all my father, really believed, remarks designed more to provoke than to express his true views."

The key phrase concerns Whites and Indians jointly being "Aryans". Since the mere mention of the term "Aryan" tends to cause hysteria in the general public, and utter confusion among Indian secularists, a little explanation is in order. According to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), cherished by British colonialists, Nazis and Indian secularists alike, and questioned by a variety of scholars as well as by the present generation of Hindutva activists, much of the Indian population is of "Aryan" or effectively of European origin, immigrated through Central Asia into India in the 2^nd millennium BC. In the early 20th century, this theory was used by some Indian emigrants in demanding equal rights with Europeans on grounds of common ancestry or racial identity, both in South Africa and in the United States. While racial equality for all was still considered a long shot, the more limited goal of lifting Indians out of the "coloured" and into the "Aryan" or "White" category did seem feasible, at least rhetorically if not legally. That is why Mira's father had a point in turning the concept "Aryan" against its White originators by using it to claim equality.

She need have no doubts that his use of the expression was indeed "tongue-in-cheek", for he clearly didn't seriously accept the notion of "Aryan" as a racial concept. It had nothing to do with any secret Nazi convictions, much less with his opinion about Muslims.