We are all Hindus now: RSS and its new and improved one-nation theory

It’s not conversion. It’s ghar vapsi or a return to home. The RSS plans a mega event on December 25 in Aligarh where they claim some 15,000 people will “return” to the folds of Hinduism. The very term “_ghar vaps_i” makes the idea of “conversion” fuzzy because it can be presented as returning to some kind of original state rather than a conversion to a different religion. It helps to separate – however expediently - ‘reconversion’ from the proselytizing of a missionary faith trying to increase its flock and presenting its religion as the Chosen One. In fact the entire hullabaloo also allows the BJP’s Venkaiah Naidu to appear fair and even-handed when he says instead of the outrage over the recent Agra “re-conversions” we should “introspect” and look at the “national challenge” and have “anti-conversion laws in all states as also at the Centre.” Likewise a ban on all loudspeakers at all places of worship which would affect some groups way more than others. The phrasing of “ghar vapsi” is meant to show the kinder gentler face of Hindutva. This is not about scaring minorities or showing them their place, but hanging out a sort of “Welcome Home” banner, reminiscent of a grand school reunion. Time, in this case, is elastic and immaterial. The returning prodigal son or daughter could someonewho converted three years ago or whose forefathers converted three centuries ago. “All Christians and Muslims living in India today – at some point their forefathers were Hindu,” says VHP leader Champat Rai to NPR. The objective here is to broaden the category of Hindu into a big tent where everyone can fit – Dalits, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and even Muslims and Christians. It sounds more like a genial host inviting everyone in rather than the angry kar sevak of 1992 vintage pulling down a mosque. But the cat is let out of the bag by people like RSS regional pracharak Rajeshwar Singh when talking about the Aligarh ghar vapsi to the Economic Times. “Aligharh was chosen because it’s time we wrest the Hindu city from Muslims,” RSS regional pracharak Rajeshwar Singh tells ET. He talks about Christmas as being a day of shakti pariksha or test of strength and Aligarh being the city of the temples of brave Rajputs on whose ruins Muslims built their institutions. The antagonism, the persecution complex, the assertion of supremacy, the majoritarianism are all very much there but just hidden under a sugar coating. [caption id=“attachment_1847949” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP.[/caption] That sugar coating allows RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to appear as almost generous in its embrace of everyone else when he calls India a “Hindu nation”. It allows Narendra Modi to tell Times Now the BJP manifesto mentions India as the natural home of only persecuted Hindus because Hinduism is not a religion but a “way of life” and he luckily could point to a 1995 Supreme Court judgement to bolster his case. As Najma Heptullah, the BJP’s minister for minority affairs explained to the Hindustan Times “Anything beyond the Hindu Kush mountains and on this side of the Sindh river is Hind. In Persian they call it Hindustani… where the people of India live.” Thus Hindu becomes the dance of seven veils. It’s a geographical term. A cultural term. A historical term. It’s a way of life. And occasionally, when convenient, it’s a religion. The actual ghar vapsi ceremony is not the main aim but the photo-op moment of a shift in storyline. The shrill paranoia about love jihad is just noise making. What’s really happening here is the RSS and other like-minded organizations have seized this moment, with Narendra Modi as PM, to recast the narrative. Instead of getting into the old debate about whether India is a secular nation or a Hindu nation, it is in effect saying it can be both because it’s broadening the very definition of what it means to be Hindu. Hence, the continual need to reframe the meaning of the very word. Therefore the drive to assimilate Dalits as ‘Hindu’ in the guise of advocating their interests. In a foreword to a new book by BJP spokesperson Vijay Sonkar Shastri, RSS number 2 Bhaiyyaji Joshi writes that Dalits only became “untouchables” after “Arab, Muslim rules and beef-eaters forced them to do abominable works like killing cows” and “foreign rulers created a caste of charma karmas (dealing with skin) by giving such work as punishment to proud Hindu prisoners.” What Joshi is basically saying is that the Dalits who converted to Islam to escape the burdens of caste were really made Dalit by the Muslim invader in the first place. So the Dalit is part of the Hindu family. Even the Muslim convert (who is different from the Arab ruler) can also come back to the family by ghar vapsi. By this logic Hum do, hamara one billion. Bhagwat turns Hindu into the equivalent of Indian, a sort of passport identity rather than a marker of faith. “The entire world knows that the people who live in India are Hindus. Just as the Germans have Germany, the English have England, and Americans have America. … All the people of this country are Hindus,” Bhagwat says. So Muslims, says Heptullah, should not be too “sensitive” if some people call them Hindi or Hindu. That could again be read as more about being inclusive than exclusionary. But it also means if you chose deliberately to not identify as Hindu, by Bhagwat’s own logic you are choosing not to be Indian. And then by extending it further to Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti you are choosing to be a haramzada as opposed to a Ramzada. And as Giriraj Singh, now minister, once made clear good Indians are ones who support Modi, bad Indians are ones who oppose him and their home is Pakistan which becomes not just a geographical nation state but the repository of everything that is non-Hindu and thus by extension un-Indian. This then is the really alarming part of this re-positioning of the new and improved Hindu nationalist discourse. It seems benign and tolerant but as distinctions between Hinduism and Hindutva and Hindu way of life begin to blur so do the lines between non-Hindu, non-Indian and anti-Indian. Followed to its logical end, according to the rightwing world view, we are all Hindu – and everyone who is not a Hindu is ipso facto an anti-Indian foreigner.