BOOKS
The Sangh Parivar and Rewriting History
An excerpt from Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India
By Tanika Sarkar
shift in Hindu popular common sense. Irrespective, again, of who does what in the coming elections, this shift, I think, will be irreversible for quite some time. How is such hate produced and sustained, how does it become hegemonic? More importantly, what does it hope to achieve, in the broadest sense? Much can be explained, I think, by the critical role of the historical lessons that the Sangh conglomerate produces. What the ‘science’ of race difference was to
The BJP administration, led by PM Narendra Modi, has established an ethnoreligious and populist style of rule since 2014. As this majoritarian ideology pervades the media and public discourse, it also affects the judi- ciary, universities and cultural institutions, increasingly captured by Hindu nationalists. Dissent and difference are silenced and debate increasingly sidelined as the press is muzzled or intimidated in the courts. Edited by Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot, Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India traces the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. It is a collection of essays that offers rich empiri- cal analysis and documentation to investigate the caus- es and consequences of the illiberal turn taken by the world's largest democracy. The following is an excerpt from Tanika Sarkar's essay "How The Sangh Parivar Writes And Teaches History" of the book. Let me begin with two Muslim names—Junaid Khan and Afrazul Mohammad—who have been flogged and hacked to death respectively. A fourteen- year-old filmed Afrazul’s murder and posted it on social media for general enjoyment. Their killers were ‘respectable’ men of some substance and education: not at all the stuff that mobs are usually made of1. I have plucked their names at random out of many others who have met the same fate in recent years. Both were killed by perfect strangers, in public places, and neither victim was accused of any wrong- doing, real or imagined. They were killed, not during riots, but in normal times: or let us say, in times when a new normal is being made. They were killed simply because they were Muslims. Muslim bodies have become legitimate arenas where the most gruesome violence can be freely, joyful- ly, performed, with perfect impunity. Irrespective of electoral fortunes, such events do indicate a tectonic
Image Courtesy: Indian Writers Forum
Nazi ideology, the discipline of history is to Hindutva2: a claim to ‘formal knowledge’, which exalts political mission as accredited Truth. But whereas Nazi power lasted twelve years, the Hindu Right has been pursuing knowledge-production and dissemination for ninety- three years now3. Restricted till independence to the
54 www.indiaparentmagazine.org
May 2019
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