Indian voters deal setback to Hindu nationalism

For India's former ruling party, the BJP, the vote-counting was barely over before the finger-pointing began.

Just hours after the Bharatiya Janata Party lost power last Thursday to the left-leaning Congress Party, BJP leaders came under harsh criticism, most of it coming from the Hindu nationalist party's staunchest supporters. The focus of their attacks was the BJP's 79-year-old popular prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who they claimed diluted the BJP's core values.

Over the past five years, the BJP under Mr. Vajpayee's leadership won plaudits, both in India and abroad, for speeding up the pace of economic reform and cutting back on India's stifling government bureaucracy and regulations. But by focusing on economics, at the expense of social issues - such as rewriting the Constitution to reflect Hindu values, and removing special privileges for minorities - the BJP has angered a half-dozen social organizations that make up its core base of support. Now, these activists want their party back.

"The BJP has deviated from the path of Lord Ram [a Hindu god] and adopted that of Ravana [the mythical demon that Ram slew]," said Praveen Togadia, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a militant Hindu social organization that supports the BJP. "Hindus have taught the BJP a lesson."

To many observers, however, the lesson of the election was that economic disparities could no longer be trumped by appeals to Hindu unity. In fact, in a sign that Hindu nationalism may be on the wane, voters seemed fatigued with identity politics. The BJP fared poorly in regions most affected by the violent controversies surrounding Hindu nationalists' struggle to unite their brethren around a sense that India is first and foremost a Hindu nation.

For nearly a century, India's Hindu hard-liners have played a persuasive but marginal role in Indian politics. During British colonial days, some Hindu social groups were created to counter the influence of aggressive Christian missionaries.

Unlike the Congress Party nationalists like Mahatma Gandhi, who worked to create an egalitarian Indian society that respected all of India's diverse cultures, Hindu nationalists worked to create a common Hindu identity and culture as a way to bind the polyglot, multiethnic nation together. Their goal was to bolster the Hindu majority and to confront enemis, both external (the British) and internal (minorities such as the Muslims).

The Hindu right showed their contempt for Mr. Gandhi from the outset. Gandhi's assassin was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a quasi-military group that makes up the largest of the pro-Hindu social organizations. Early RSS thinkers like M.S. Golwalkar found inspiration in curious places, such as Adolf Hitler's Germany, which was also promoting the purity of a national culture.

"To keep up the purity of the Race (sic) and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the semitic Races - the Jews," wrote Mr. Golwalkar. "Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan (sic) to learn and profit by."

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