Here's why Irfan Habib and the Hindu fringe are mirror images of each other

There is a certainly a climate of intolerance and over-the-top (OTT) opinion-mongering going on. However, this is not a new thing, and looks new only in the context of who is in power and who is not, and who controls the English language media (ELM). Right now, the pseudo-secular-left is licking its wounds after the May 2014 drubbing, and is getting more vicious in its attacks on the Modi government because the latter is seen to be stumbling on several “secular” tripwires. On the other hand, there is the so-called “right”, short-hand for the BJP and the Sangh parivar, which is certainly not economically right-wing, but may be called culturally so. I would call the Sangh the pseudo-right. The “right”, even if we accept the mainstream description of the Sangh, sees its coming to power as a entitlement to some respect from the media and rivals. It is thus lashing out in anger at attacks from the “usual suspects.” Put another way, the “growing” intolerance is the result of the extreme hostility between the pseudo-secular-left and the pseudo-right. Neither can tolerate the other. Consider “eminent historian” Irfan Habib’s suggestion that “when it comes to ignorance and idiocy, RSS and Islamic State are just the same.” [caption id=“attachment_2496076” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representative image. Reuters[/caption] As if to prove him right, we had an obscure BJP politician in Karnataka threatening to chop off the Chief Minister’s head if he ate beef. It is interesting that Habib wants to compare RSS with the loathsome Islamic State whose atrocities have known no bounds. He could easily have compared the RSS to the Jamait-e-Islami, or even a Tablighi Jamaat, or even the MIM (a combination of religion and politics), or some such cultural organisation that wants to consolidate co-religionists on the basis of an imagined unifying idea. But he chose Islamic State. This makes his strategy clear. By comparing RSS to Islamic State he wants to put its alleged narrow-mindedness on a par with someone we all loathe, but not organisations we may not agree with, but are not beyond the pale. This is exactly what Pankaj Mishra did last year around this time, when he wrote a New York Times op-ed, and made the same reference to Islamic State and the Sangh. He claimed the new government and its ideological fountain-heads were anti-West in the following terms: “Largely subterranean until it erupts, this ressentiment of the West among thwarted elites can assume a more treacherous form than the simple hatred and rejectionism of outfits such as Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban.” In a sense, Mishra embodied the same idea. Mishra is one example of a “thwarted elite” following the rise of Modi, but with the difference that his “ressentiment” relates to Indic thought, his Indian roots. Habib also went back in history to claim that Guru Golwalkar, the second RSS chief, admired Hitler, but saw no irony in the fact that the Indian Left saw heroes in mass murderers like Stalin and Mao, too. It is also worth pointing out how the pseudo-secular strategy of the “thwarted (Lutyens) elites” is panning out, and how it will be extended. The idea will be to provoke the “pseudo-right”, get it to make outrageous statements and mistakes, so that the description of it as “worse than Islamic State” will be seen as a plausible hypothesis in the western media, even though it is wrong. One can count on the Christian right in the US and outlandishly anti-India publications like the The New York Times to tom-tom every mistake made by the pseudo-right. But there is one thing that unites the Habibs, Mishras and the Hindu fringe: the pseudo-secular-left and the pseudo-right are mirror images resulting from the same colonial process that deracinated all Indians. As I wrote some time ago in Firstpost . For the sake of simplicity, I am reproducing relevant excerpts here. “These two extremes (the pseudo-secular and right fringes) were created by centuries of colonial rule where Hindu society was either painted as evil, or in glorious terms by evangelists and colonial historians, respectively, for their own purposes. “The first lot – usually the Marxists and card-carrying secularists – have internalised the criticism of Hinduism so deeply that they associate it with a sense of self-loathing. They are seeking to atone for their alleged past sins by taking on aggressive positions on caste or communalism. For this group, which includes the Indian Left, and which believes it has the sole right to classify people as secular or communal, it is not enough to be secular, but be seen as publicly secular, as aggressively anti-Hindu. “The secular group believes (or at least professes to believe) that Hindus are more communal than the rest even though the evidence is just the opposite. In the whole of south Asia, secularism survives only in India, thanks in part to Hindu pluralism. The Pakistanis have more or less cleansed themselves of Hindus, the Bangladeshis have managed to reduce Hindus to a third of their 1947 population (from 31 percent to around eight percent), the Kashmiris have ridden themselves of the Pandits, and in Sri Lanka a Tamil separatist movement has been wrongly labelled as “Hindu terrorism” – when V Prabhakaran was a lapsed Methodist, his son was Charles Anthony, and his best supporters in Tamil Nadu (Vaiko) have Christian roots.” “None of this bothers our secularists, since they are fighting an internal battle to rid themselves of the demons of caste or bigotry – real or imagined – having internalised degrading colonial criticism of Hinduism. “Our secularists make matters worse by presuming that non-Hindus have a right to assert their identities, but not Hindus. Sudhir Kakar, one of India’s best known psychologists, notes that privileging minorityism cannot really be secular nor is communalism peculiarly Hindu. In his book on communalism, The Colours Of Violence, he demolishes the idea that communalism means only Hindu communalism and concludes: “…the solution is to build a state which protects the equal rights of Hindus and Muslims to be different.” “For secularists, Modi-bashing is no different from Hindu-bashing. They will attack a Bajrang Dal for vandalising a Husain, but not speak out on the ethnic cleansing of the Pandits or the abduction of Hindu girls in Pakistan, or the attacks on Taslima Nasreen. It is the way they have chosen to combat their own sense of self-loathing and guilt. “The other Hindu group- also singed by this same colonial process – has taken the opposite route: of believing that everything Hindu is great. This group has internalised another myth – that Hindu society is weak, and secretly envies what it believes is the stronger faith of the Muslims and Christians – and seeks to reinvent Hinduism in a more monolithic, Abrahamic mould. Hence the battles over Ayodhya (our one holy place) or Ram (our main god) or other Hindu symbols. Hence the fight over AK Ramanujam’s 300 Ramayanas. In a monolithic faith, 300 Ramayanas cannot coexist. Constantine and early Christianity could not live with many versions of the Bible after the First Council of Nicae, or the Prophet with many versions of god. “Hinduism’s diversity will not allow Hindutva to head in this direction, but that does not stop some people from attempting to do so. For this group, which is very touchy about real or imagined slights to Hindus (MF Husain, 300 Ramayanas, etc), Modi is the imagined messiah. “Clearly, Modi is important to both Hindu groups – the glorifiers and the self-flagellists. He is the strong Hindu leader that many Hindus wanted. He is also the “embodiment of evil” that the secularists have been trying to create in order to justify their own self-hate.” Irfan Habib is surely not a self-loathing Hindu in the Pankaj Mishra mould, but he certainly finds it easy to hang his own prejudices on the dirty washline of pseudo-secularism provided by the Mishras and Romila Thapars of the world.