My thoughts on how Communists help RSS trash the Indian Liberal

Liberals includes the the Congress Party

The RSS is wrong about Hinduism.  Its Hindutva policy is simply disguised Hindu Supremacism. Its economics is geared to serving Crony Capitalists, with whom it has a symbiotic relationship, that treats the bottom two-thirds to the income pyramid as hosts to feed off.  Its politics is clearly fascist, designed to keep the the host society quiescent. To contain the discontent of denied masses, a police state becomes necessary.  The new theory of state, propounded by the NSA and CDS,  that pits Govt against civil society, in a 4th generation warfare, is clearly a prelude to some sort of a police state, that will result in a complete negation of our liberal democracy.  Given all these factors, why is RSS winning since 2014, if not 1998?  What gains its ideology new adherents?  Why is it in better tune with voters than liberal democrats?

You cannot fight an ideology without studying, understanding, and mastering it.  You have to know its strengths, weaknesses, and fashion a politics that exposes its flaws, to those who have open minds, as well as its adherents.  The open minds are still at least 60% of the voters.  So all is not lost, if those opposed to the RSS take time to understand both its appeal, and its flaws.

Such a study cannot degenerate into blaming voters, or those who support the RSS.  For one thing, 60% of Indians don’t vote RSS and so can’t be blamed.  And blaming voters in general is self defeating. The blame lies squarely with liberals, and my effort is to explore why liberals have failed to capture hearts and minds of those voters, who still don’t vote for RSS automatically.

Let me begin with three very broad areas in which liberals differ from RW Hindus.  These are: the need for a secular state, the need to give a more fair deal to people at the bottom of the pyramid, and the need for social justice for the underprivileged, in terms of caste reservations, and creating equal opportunities for all. Let us try and understand what these differences are, and how RSS turns each of these to its electoral advantage.

Secularism is a very deep subject although it appears deceptively simple.  I have written about it many times.  So here I will restrict myself to what is essential for the discussion in hand.

We need to clearly distinguish between a secular state, and a secular person. While most states in the modern world - at least democracies - are secular, there are no secular persons.  In fact even an atheist like me is not a secular person.  There is simply no such thing.  Every person has some kind of a faith, usually in religion, or some concept of a personal God.  People have an inherent need for religiosity. So when your secularism becomes sited in a person, it turns into being against religion, which most people reject.  Your secularism then turns against you in terms of popular support.

India’s secularism under Indira Gandhi was captured by her Communist allies, along with her economics and politics.  The Communists believe in no God other than their own deity, Karl Marx, and his chosen Prophets, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.  They were happy to site their secularism in a person, rather than in state, because their ideology is inherently against religiosity at the personal level. So the Communists shifted the focus of India’s secularism from that of Secular State, that facilitates religious freedom for all, to a secular person.  Why does this matter?

As I briefly argued in my tweet of 7th November, appended below, India has a long tradition of Secular sovereigns stretching from the Mauryan Empire down to the British.  There were Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian Sovereigns, but most of them stayed above religious strife, patronizing all religions, and encouraging debate and discussion of religiosity in their courts.  So the idea of secular state in India arose naturally to manage India’s racial, cultural, religious and linguistic diversity, and wasn’t born in religious wars, as in the West, that necessitated a divorce between church and the state. India’s tradition of a secular state dates back 2500 years. It is an organic part of our culture.

However, Indian society is suffused with religiosity.  And being very religious, it naturally accepts a secular state, but not a secular person.  It doesn’t understand a secular person simply because in its experience, there is no such thing.  So when the Communists moved the locus, or site in their jargon, of India’s secularism from the State, to the person, they defeated secularism to further their own religion Marxism.  The Congress, bereft of any intellectuals of its own, failed to notice this strategic shift of locus.  The result was disastrous.

Secularism thereafter became synonymous with being anti-religious.  Since 80% of the religious were Hindu, it became anti-Hindu.  This unfortunate conflation was accentuated by the need to coddle the minority communities for votes.  Combine all this, and secularism came to be synonymous being anti-Hindu.  RSS and the BJP were quick to exploit the flaw.  What was merely a strategic error, unwittingly triggered by the Communists, became a mill around the Congress’ neck.  The party is still stuck with an anti-Hindu image.

Thus secularism has tuned into a dirty word.  Such is the much vaunted  intellectual acumen of our Communists.  The tragedy is that the liberals are even dumber.  They lost their key electoral advantage because of Communist stupidity and dogma.  Congress has paid a heavy price for its anti-intellectualism, because a family has a monopoly on all thinking in the party.  Others are may not think.  Period.

Now come to economics.  They say Nehru was a socialist.  He claimed to be one.  But what socialism did he do?  He not only let the private sector flourish, but also created development banks for them, so that they may have the Capital to invest. He was asked why should the Tycoons be allowed to continue. His answer was everybody should be free to contribute to India’s development.  And that is the essence of economic freedom that socialism expressly rules out.  In Socialism, there is no economic freedom; only central planning.  Nehru’s 5 year plans were plans for Govt infrastructure in order to coordinate development, much like Modi’s post-planning Commission plans.  They were not for private sector, nor did they constrain it.

The reason I emphasize this is that, until the Communists grabbed power under Indira Gandhi, India had a mixed economy.  Nehru brought in the public sector because there were no capital markets then, and the only way to build dams, roads, and steel plants was through money’s raised by Govt.  Where the private sector could find capital, they did so.  Command and control of the economy, and the nationalization of banks, industries etc began with the Communists under Indira Gandhi, not before. IG’s Communists Commissars ran the show.  Even so the private sector survived.

Controls on the economy were dismantled by PVNR and Dr Singh in 90/91.  The results of that liberalization are still with us. Most of the reforms were pushed through, disguised as imperatives dictated by looming bankruptcy.  The Congress continued to mouth leftist slogans, refused take ownership and pride in the economic reforms, even as they bore fruit, and benefited all.  Such was the hold of leftist ideologies on the Congress, inspired by their dependence on communists for political support, that as late as 2014, the Congress failed to take credit for the 40 million people its Govt. had lifted out of poverty.

Astutely, RSS/BJP captured the role of being champions of liberalization, Capitalism, and free markets, simply because there was no one else to take the credit.,  They became heroes of liberalization without doing anything!  The blunder is so colossal, that in another party, the leadership would have been shown the door.  Tragedy is that the same leadership, is still at the helm of affairs in the party, mouthing the same shibboleths, it learned from its communist tutors long ago.

Why then complain if BJP/RSS are the free market champions, selling Crony Capitalism in place of a market based economy?  And yet liberals still take their cues in economics from the discredit Communists.  You may ask me why I regularly support Sitaram Yechury’s tweets with RTs.   The answer is simple.  He still asks the only relevant questions on the Left.  The Congress still doesn’t do its economic homework at all. 

The third area is social justice.  It is the only political arena in which the RSS/BJP could not be winning.  But are. Why?  For the simple reason that reservations have genuinely benefited the beneficiaries helping them scale up the social ladder.  The BJP is careful not to antagonize such successful people.  Instead it cleverly coopts them into its Hindutva project.

The Neo-converts are happy at being “welcomed,” easily forgetting who helped them up, and become the new champions of Hindutva, happy to create a new class of have-nots beneath them.  So what should have been a thing to celebrate for the Congress, again becomes a liability.  It gets blamed for reservations by upper castes, and loses the support of the under-class.  Who said politics is simple?

So why is RSS winning?  It is winning because of flawed ideologies of the Communists that the Congress is unable to rid itself of.  Dr Singh did all the right things for UPA, while the Party negated almost all of it, by its stupidity, and lack of ideological clarity.

If liberals and Congress want to be back in the game, ideological clarity at the top is a must.  Else RSS will walk away with game, set and match. They must eschew secularism located in a person, and revert back to a secular state that facilitates freedom of religion for all, instead being anti-religion.  It must reject failed communist ideologies, and embrace a market based economy.  And it must repackage social justice as concern for the poor, of which caste is a key part, to preserve both reservations and further social justice.

Now tell me how do you explain this to the liberals without having them jump all over you with hobnailed boots?  How do you tell somebody that they cannot win, because their strategies are flawed, without pointing out the flaws?

For a politician to criticize her party is often a prelude to a defection.  I am not politician. I have no party.  And I cannot defect from one to the other.  I am simply trying to bring some clarity to politics, that helps preserve political and economic freedom for all.

If liberals don’t get, so be it.

Tweet of 7th November:

I was going to write an essay on the topic of a secular state in India, and my tweet was merely to sort of fish for what depth I should aim at, in writing the essay.  Many of you must have noticed that I often use tweets for that purpose even as I write.

I am not going to write the essay now.  But so that some of my friends who remain so might understand, I am posting it here as a short precis.

For nearly 500 years, first under Mauryas from 322 BCE to 185 BCE, and then under Kushans, from 1st century BCE to 2nd century BC, Northern India was ruled by Buddhist Sovereigns.

The Guptas, were “Hindu,” and ran a second epoch of centralized empire from 319 CE to 476 CE.

The third centralized empire [ignoring the Sultanates in between] was run by the Moguls from 1526 CE to 1850 CE.

Under each of these 3 sovereigns of various religions, the Indian kings may have had different religious persuasion, but ran a remarkably secular state.

History is replete with examples of Buddhist Sovereigns helping build temples, Of Hindu Kings build Buddhist Monasteries, and Moguls contribution to temple buildings.  Except for a small episode under Shunga, there was never any systematic religious persecution by Sovereigns.  [That doesn’t mean there was no religious strife.  Just that the Sovereigns stayed out of it.]

The Brahmin elites were permanent fixtures in the administration of all the Sovereigns.

The British found no difficulty in running a secular state in the vastly diverse country from 1858 to 1947 CE.  There was no religious persecution under them from the State.

The track record of a syncretic secular state in the South is even better.

Sure, under all sovereigns there was some religious strife, but the State itself remained above the fray.

Fact is RSS/BJP, as the self-proclaimed custodians of our culture, under Modi, are the first, when the Indian state has embarked on a systematic campaign to make second class citizens out of a minority.  In our history, spanning 2500 years, these has never happened before.

IF you want to defeat the Sangh, one of the best ways is to show them as traitors to India’s own fine traditions.

A secular State is very much an Indian syncretic tradition and not an European import.  Unlike the RSS/BJP Nazi ideology of a model nation-state which is an import from  the worst Europeans, the Nazis.

This was the import of the essay I was writing.

Thank you so much for your condemnation.