The rise and fall of the BJP; in little more than 20 years, the Hindu right had gone from being on the fringe of Indian politics to one of the nation's most powerful parties. How were they finally defeated?

Human rights activist Teesta Setalvad counts May 13, 2004 as one of the happiest days of her life. It was the day that the Indian National Congress scored a resounding victory in the Parliamentary elections, defeating the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its governing coalition.

The revival of the Congress party is the comeback story of the decade. The BJP's rapid ascendancy throughout the 1990s, with its politics of Hindu supremacy had caught India's progressives unaware. From the demolition of the Babri Mosque by Hindu mobs in 1992 to organized attacks on Christian missionaries and the Muslim community--the growth of the BJP had been accompanied by some of the worst human rights violations that India had ever seen. These politics of hate culminated in the Gujarat massacres of 2002. India had not seen riots on this scale for nearly a decade, since the aftermath of Babri Mosque. But unlike the 1992 riots, the Gujarat riots were covered live on 24-hour-television news channels. Though the national press stepped up its criticism, the BJP still won assembly elections in Gujarat six months later, much to the dismay of activists like Setalvad who had been working to rehabilitate victims of the riots.

"The decade stretching from the fall of the Babri Masjid in 1992 to the post-Godhra victory of the BJP in December 2002 has been a period of progressive regression in India's profile as a secular society and state," says Rajeev Dhavan, a Supreme Court lawyer in India.

In 2003, using tax money, the BJP blitzed the media with its multimillion-dollar "India Shining" ad campaign in preparation for the Parliamentary elections. BJP leaders took credit for the economic growth rate, the software industry and even the Indian cricket team's victory over Pakistan. They launched a campaign against the foreign origins of the Congress party's Italian-born president, Sonia Gandhi. Even the early exit polls were tipped in favor of the Hindu nationalists. Therefore, its defeat came as a complete surprise to political pundits.

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"The results were marvelous because they show that despite all the hype and propaganda and the massive domination established over the media by the BJP, a large part of the Indian electorate still thinks for itself and tries to learn from its own experience," says activist and academic Jairus Banaji.

The election results were also an indicator of the deepening disparity between India's elite, who were reaping the benefits of the BJP's "reforms," and the majority of India's rural and urban poor to whom the slogan "India Shining" sounded like a bad joke. Analysts across the board agreed that the BJP lost because it had failed to balance economic growth with social equity.

"There is almost no government in the country that has ill-treated its farmers and not paid the price, that has hurt agriculture and not been punished. India has never seen so many farmers' suicides as in the past six to eight years," says P. Sainath, an award-winning journalist who has written extensively about India's poorest states. In his analysis of the elections, Sainath said the Indian electorate had also rejected the BJP's politics of divisiveness and intolerance. "Even in Gujarat, the Congress party seems to have made its gains in the areas worst hit by the bloodshed of 2002. It suggests that many Hindus, too, have counted the costs of the past few years."

In a press conference following the elections, former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee admitted that not dismissing Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat after the riots was a big mistake. "The impact of the Gujarat riots was felt nationwide. This was unexpected and hurt us badly," Vajpayee said.

Vajpayee has remained the moderate face of the BJP since it assumed power in 1998. But his deputy, L K Advani, often referred to as the architect of the BJP's meteoric rise to power, pushes the Hindutva hard line. In his first press conference after the party's shocking defeat, Advani said, "We remain firm and unapologetic about our espousal of Hindutva. Hindutva is the basic identity of India." The difference in tone between the two leaders is part of a "division of labor," according to Christopher Jaffrelot, a French scholar who has done extensive research on the BJP's rise to power in India. The contradictory statements are part of a calculated ambiguity that the BJP and organizations affiliated with it, under the banner of the Sangh Parivar, have perfected over the years.

Fascist Origins

The BJP came into existence in 1980, as the successor to the Jan Sangh party. The Jan Sangh functioned as the political arm of the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in the 1920s as a "cultural and social organization." One of its mentors, Balkrishna Shivram Moonje, was fascinated by the organizational abilities of Italian fascists. He was disillusioned with Gandhi's politics of non-violence and believed that the fascist model would work well in India. Italian scholar Marzia Casolari has revealed the RSS's links with Mussolini's fascist regime, which include excerpts from Moonje's diary describing a visit to Italy in 1931. "The idea of fascism vividly brings out the conception of unity amongst people ... India and particularly Hindu Indias need some such institution for the military regeneration of the Hindus," Moonje wrote.

When Moonje returned to India, he began to work on the foundation of a Central Hindu Military Education Society. His dream was to make the RSS a nationwide organization. Even today, the RSS "shakhas," or schools, are similar in structure and organization to the fascist youth organizations that Moonje admired.

When India became independent in 1947, the Indian National Congress, which had led the freedom struggle against the British, took over the administration of the country. The Congress banned the RSS after Nathuram Godse, a former member, was convicted of assassinating Gandhi. The ban was lifted in 1949, but the party grew slowly, failing to develop into a significant opposition to the Indian National Congress. Also, the party was identified with the Hindi-speaking heartland of the North and its brahmanical interpretation of Hinduism did not take with the masses.

However, the RSS was slowly making inroads into society with its cultural work. It set up "sister" organizations--the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP or the World Hindu Council) and a youth wing called Bajrang Dal. The VHP incorporated religious leaders and took upon itself the responsibility of preventing Christian missionaries from proselytizing in tribal areas and offering conversion to India's untouchables. It also aimed at preserving the "Hinduness" of the Indian diaspora and collecting funds from them.

The RSS gained significance in the '70s, when the Jan Sangh joined the Janata Party to defeat the Congress, which had been the ruling party since independence. With this newfound power, the RSS began to expand. Though it was gaining cultural currency, politically the party was still on the fringe. In the parliamentary elections of 1984, the BJP won only two parliamentary seats.

Following the party's dismal performance, Advani became president of the BJP. The BJP and the VHP launched a political campaign centering on certain key religious symbols. The campaign set out to reclaim Ayodhya, the "birthplace" of Ram (a mythological Hindu god). Where there was now a mosque, Hindu ideologues argued, there had once stood a temple that had been destroyed by invading Muslim rulers. The campaign called on Hindus to restore the "glory" and the "pride" of ancient Hindu civilization by demolishing the mosque and building a temple in its place. "They mastered the art of dressing up political objectives in a quasi-religious rhetoric," writes lawyer and political commentator AG Noorani in his book The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour.

Secondly, the BJP, RSS, VHP and their impressive nationwide network of social and cultural organizations, together called the Sangh Parivar, began mobilizing ordinary Indians to participate in spectacles like chariot processions and re-conversions of Christians to Hinduism. They mounted a campaign against Christians and Muslims, telling Hindu voters that the Congress was going to extreme lengths to "appease" minorities. The Sangh Parivar leadership went on the offensive against charges of communalism. "When Muslims, Sikhs and other communities practice their religion, then we call them secular, but if parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena practice Hinduism, then we are branded as communal," Advani said.

Advani's speeches struck a chord because of a high-profile case involving the payment of alimony to Shah Bano, a Muslim woman. The Supreme Court had ruled that Bano's husband had to pay her alimony even though there is no such provision under Muslim law. However, a month after this ruling, Parliament passed a special Muslim Women's Bill, to override the Supreme Court's ruling. The BJP launched an aggressive campaign for a "Uniform Civil Code." This campaign was instrumental in winning over Hindus who were not communal but thought that the Congress government had gone too far in appeasing Muslims. "In BJP's political advancement, Shah Bano contributed as much as the Ram Temple," says Usman Merchant, political editor of The Asian Age.

All these campaigns boosted the BJP's performance in the 1991 elections, turning it into a significant opposition party with 120 parliamentary seats. By 1992, the Ram Temple issue had assumed mammoth proportions. On December 6, Advani led a chariot procession to the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, followed by nearly a million devotees. Crowds of frenzied people ambushed the historic Babri Mosque (dating to the 16th century), attacking the dome with pick axes, stones and anything they could find until the structure collapsed. The aftermath of this demolition was terrible. Communal violence left more than 3,000 people dead. Mumbai, a largely cosmopolitan city, saw the worst of the riots and its secular fabric has not recovered.

The Rise and Fall

In 1995, the BJP, along with the Shiv Sena (a state-level Hindu nationalist party) came to power in Maharashtra. This was the beginning of the BJP's dizzy rise to political power. In 1998, the BJP along with its allies had become the single largest party with 182 parliamentary seats.

In just over 20 years, the Hindu nationalists had gone from being on the fringe of Indian politics to one of the nation's most powerful parties. Even the people talking about a Hindu nation were no longer card-carrying members of the RSS--they were ordinary citizens.

Compared to the active hate propaganda of the Sangh Parivar, "secularism" was too passive and abstract a concept. The BJP placed particular emphasis on cultural and ideological work. So Indian history became Hindu history, school textbooks were reoriented to focus on the glories of Hinduism and its superiority to all other civilizations. There was increasing censorship and an intolerance of dissent.

K N Panniker, one of India's leading historians, pointed out that RSS loyalists were rewarded with induction into educational institutions and research agencies like the Institute for Advance Studies, the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Indian Council for Historical Research to work toward bringing about an ideological shift in favor of "Hindutva" or "Hinduness." In his book Before the Night Falls: Forebodings of Fascism in India, Panniker writes, "Like the Nazis in Germany, the Sangh Parivar is engaged in transforming the cultural and ideological world of the Hindu. A change from the religious to the communal identity is the main purpose of this effort."

But it was this kind of rampant communalism that forced a rethinking of the meaning and application of "secular practices." There were significant acts of resistance as well. "The kind of documentary films that were made on the riots, with little or no funding--they have really made an impact," says Saeed Mirza, one of India's most well-known progressive filmmakers. Shortly after the riots, Mirza traveled across the country interviewing ordinary people about what they wanted from a government. "People don't really care about the mosque or temple, they need employment, water, the basics," he adds.

Other voices of resistance were born out of the aftermath of Gujarat. From her one-room office in Mumbai, Teesta Setalvad, a former journalist, has built a strong voice against hate with her magazine Communalism Combat. She is the secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace, a non-governmental organization that is fighting on behalf of Gujarat's riot victims. Setalvad has received death threats for taking on the Best Bakery case, which hinges on the testimony of an 18-year old girl. Almost two years ago, Zahira Sheikh watched as a Hindu mob burned the bakery owned by her family in Vadodara, Gujarat, and killed and burned most of them. Though 21 people were arrested for the crime, all were released. A month later, Zahira told Setalvad that she was forced to lie in court because of threats from the VHP and BJP. Setalvad and the Citizens for Justice and Peace appealed to the Supreme Court to transfer the case to the neighboring state of Maharashtra and order a re-trial. In a historic judgment, the Supreme Court transferred the case in April. It was the first time that Setalvad had won a positive judicial decision.

Though visibly pleased, Setalvad is already thinking of what the new government will do. "Is it going to uphold its mandate? Is it going to meet the expectations of people who have been bruised badly? That's the real challenge," she says.

There is also the challenge of mobilizing secular cultural forces. The "Hindutva" ideology is by no means dead, and analysts warn that the election defeat may just make it more inclined towards extremism. However, there is hope that the end of Hindu nationalist rule will mean less culturally conservative politics as well as the end of the indoctrination of Hindu nationalist themes into education.

"Years from now, the country will still be assessing the damage done to some of our best-known educational institutions," says Sainath.

A new government committee has been appointed to look into the "saffronization" of education and recommend remedial action. As the current school year is already underway, teachers will get guides on offending portions of history textbooks that should be omitted.

But damage control and resistance alone are not enough. Panniker emphasizes the need for secular cultural mobilization. The campaign against communalism, he writes, has been "reactive, sporadic, disjointed and short term." Only active and continuous engagement, he says, can ensure the sustenance of consciousness, which is critical to move from anti-communal campaigning to secular mobilization.

Shefali Srinivas is a freelance journalist who has worked in Bangalore, Los Angeles, South Africa and Mumbai. She was assistant director at the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women in Mumbai.