There is clearly a paradox here. How did a highly plural and assimilative society like India's, which consciously adopted secularism as one of its crucial guiding principles at Independence, come to be, or allow itself to be, dominated by a particularistic and parochial ethno-religious politics within the course of barely four decades or so?

And how did the party-level expression of Hindutva-the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or its earlier avatar, the Bharatiya Jana Singh (BJS)which for long years commanded roughly seven percent of the national vote, and only a modest number of seats (such as 20 to 35) in the 540-odd-strong lower house of the parliament (the Lok Sabha), meteorically rise to pre-eminence with the number of its seats galloping from two (1984) and 85 (1989), to 120 (1991) and now 183 (1999), with its vote-share rising from 7.4 percent of the vote cast at the national level (1984) to 11.4 percent (1989), 20.1 percent (1991) and 26 percent (1998), to fall only marginally to 23 per cent (1999)?

The BJP's tenure in power in India's national government for five and a half years also raises a number of other questions. How strong, committed and enduring are the party's social base and organisational structures? What is the source of its political appeal? What is its relationship with other organisations and movements which are members of that collectivity called the sangh parivar or sangh combine-the 'family' defined around the fulcrum of, and dominated by, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)? What are the strategies that allowed the BJP to break the social and electoral barriers the Bharatiya Jana Sangh faced for over a quarter-century, and thus to come into the 'mainstream' in the late 1980s and the 1990s? What larger social, economic and political processes explain the BJP's growth and the spread of its influence? What is unique about the BJP's policies, its political strategies, and its management of parliamentary processes and elections?

It is equally relevant to inquire into other, related, issues. Has the experience of power at the national level brought about a change in the BJP's ideological orientation, its practical politics and its approaches to international relations, economic policy and to global and regional issues of security? Has it transformed its relationship with the rest of the sangh parivar, in particular, the RSS? If so, what does that spell for the Hindutva collective?

Within the past five years or so, the BJP has lost power (and votes) in a number of states, including important ones like Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, mid-sized ones like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and smaller ones like Himachal Pradesh and the Capital territory of Delhi. Recent opinion polls show that its national approval ratings are in decline. But has its political influence really plateaued decisively and with finality? Can the BJP regenerate and reinvigorate itself, and return to power in New Delhi in a multi-party alliance, like the 24-party coalition which it currently heads? What is the likely future of Hidnutva and its impact on South Asia?

This article will provisionally attempt to answer some of these questionsroughly the first half of those listed above. We start with the premise that the BJP is not just a ordinary political party, but both a political formation and a social movement which is integrally related to and driven by the agenda of establishing a society and state based on the primacy of the Hindus, who form 82 percent of India's population.

The roots of the Hindutva phenomenon go back to the colonial period, in particular the late 19th century, when the encounter between Western modernity and 'traditional' Indian society produced a range of effects and crystallised many social processes, including, especially, what has been called 'disorientation', the reinterpretation of traditional cultures in order to preserve them and at the same time to give them a contemporary sense or new meanings.²

In India, a substantial section of the Hindu middle class which was exposed to Western education and modernist values adopted a broadly liberal orientation, which aspired to reform tradition and combat hierarchy and superstition (which were integral to that tradition). However, a significant minority of Hindus felt threatened by modernity, and by the restructuring of the Indian state under colonialism, and the 'reforms from above' undertaken by the state to abolish certain customs like widow-burning and child marriage.

Some conservative Hindus began to reinterpret their religion and tradition by imitating Western concepts and models in order to preserve the core of that tradition, especially its intensely hierarchical and Brahminical aspects. Some posited the 'Golden Age' of Hinduism, such as the Vedic Age or the 'Aryan period' or some other notion of a 'pure' state of India, identified with dharma (religion), quintessentially Hindu, which preceded the country's 'invasion' by 'aliens' such as Muslims, and later Christians.

Thus began the formation of ethnic or ethno-religious nationalism, which received a major impetus in the 1920s, especially in a reaction to the khilafat (Caliphate) movement, the mobilisation of Indian Muslims for an apparently 'global' cause in which the mainstream party of Indian nationalism, the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885) also took part. Central to this ethno-religious nationalism or communalism was the stigmatisation and simultaneous emulation of the supposed enemy-conquerors-the 'threatening others'.³ Equally important was the project to reorganise society as a means of producing 'a new kind of people'. This new movement of 'Hindu Sangathan' was to produce organisations like the Arya Samaj, Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Of these, the RSS (founded in 1925) was the most important and in some ways the most militant: it was a paramilitary organisation right from the outset and stressed physical fitness, exercise, and training in armed and unarmed combat. The uniform of the RSS was derived from the attire of the colonial police and the British Indian army. The RSS was the direct progenitor of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, and later the BJP.

The principal appeal of these Hindutva groupings lay in their ability to exploit the sense of inferiority that many upper-caste Hindu strata felt, and the attraction of their project of re-creating or reviving a mythological 'Golden Age' of Hinduism based on 'racial purity', dharma and unadulterated devotion to religion in its most puritanical and Brahminical forms.

The sense of inferiority was itself rooted in a certain reading of Indian history, largely through colonial eyes, as a succession of periods or epochs based on the religion of the rulers. The 'glorious' Hindu age of Antiquity was followed by the dark agea series of alien invasions. In this period, docile, undisciplined, unorganised and unarmed (because unmilitarised) Hindus were conquered and subjugated by aggressive, militant and well-armed invaders and marauders. The conquerors looted, impoverished and ruined prosperous India along with its thriving civilisation and supposedly unparalleled achievements in all fields of science and the arts.

The most stigmatised and vilified of the conquerors, and allegedly the most brutal, were the Muslims. But a more persuasive view is that Muslims came to India's Western shores as traders, not conquerors. Islam took roots in India well before it did in Southeast Asia or parts of Africa. There was flourishing interaction between Indians and Arabs, Persians and Turks long before Mahmud of Ghazni arrived as marauder. There were centuries-long transactions between Hindus, Muslims, and followers of other faiths, reflected in India's composite culture, its languages (many of them influenced by Persian or Arabic), music, dance, cuisines and eating habits, the sciences, and even in the birth of new religions like Sikhism. Distinct communal identities were formed only in the 1860s.⁴

A paranoid, pathological kind of Islamophobia has been integral to all currents of Hindutva. That set their priority: the Muslims were their greatest enemy, the dire 'threat from within'. No wonder the RSS shunned participation in the anti-colonial nationalist movement which had acquired mass dimensions by the 1920s. Its appeal and membership was largely confined to upper-caste Hindus, especially Marathi-speaking Brahmins in Western and Central India, with a sprinkling of shakhas (or branches, the basic unit of the RSS) in areas of the North where Hindu-Muslim riots had occurred, the exception being the Punjab, which had a large number of shakhas. The RSS had no significant presence in the South.
The two most influential theorists of Hindutva before Independence were Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, both Maharashtrian Brahmins. Savarkar pioneered the 'Two-Nation Theory', which argued that Hindus and Muslims could not co-exist within the same nation. Golwalkar developed the ethnic-racist and national content of the concept of 'Hinduness' and invested Hindutva with its highly disciplinarian, puritanical, ritualistic and rigid hierarchies which defined it as an all-male secret society led by a small cabal.

Golwalkar was notoriously fascinated by Nazism and Italian fascism and directly praised Hitler's view of racial purity: 'To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic racesthe Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well might 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 Hindustan to learn and profit by.'

Gowalkar defined the RSS thus: 'The ultimate vision of our work … is a perfectly organised state of society wherein each individual has been moulded into a model of ideal Hindu manhood and made into a living limb of the corporate personality of society.' For Golwalkar, 'the mission of the RSS was to fashion society, to 'sustain' it, 'improve' it, and finally merge with it when the point had been reached where society and the organisation had become co-extensive.'⁵

All the different currents of Hindutva remained fairly marginal in their influence until the 1940s, but then registered a sharp rise, partly as a reaction to the Muslim League's adoption of the Pakistan agenda at Lahore in 1940 and the increasing likelihood, even seeming imminence, of the formation of Pakistan.

The most notable act of Hindutva's adherents in the 1940s was the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948. This was committed by a former RSS member who regarded Gandhi as effete and dangerously pro-Muslim, and a disarming and emasculating influence on the Hindus. The RSS was banned following Gandhi's assassination but was later restored on condition that it stop conducting itself as a secret society and become open to public scrutiny, a condition it is yet to fulfil.

It is necessary to dwell at length on the origins and ideology of Hindutva in order to understand where some of its appeal lies for the upper-caste, upper or middle class Hindus. But being limited and narrow, that appeal cannot explain how the BJP managed to win vastly greater influence than the RSS some six and a half decades after the sangh was set up. Nor do the RSS's origins or ideology provide adequate guidance to the practical strategies and tactics which lie at the root of the BJP's phenomenal growth, such as forging identities, gaining influence, recruiting cadres, fighting elections and entering into alliances with other parties.

Two other factors are vital to this understanding: The decline of the Congress (which has ruled India for fourth-fifths of its independent existence) and the political vacuum created by Hindutva's adversaries, the decline of the Left, in conjunction with other major changes in India's competitive party politics; the growth of new forms of aggressive ideologies, such as social Darwinism, bellicose nationalism and militarism within Indian society, as well as other changes..

The BJP's original avatar was far less lucky than itself. The Jana Sangh was sponsored in 1951 as a political party by the RSS, which has always sought to pretend as a 'cultural' organisation.⁶ The BJS employed a whole range of strategies to gain political influence: ethno-religious mobilisation, (apparent) moderation of hard-Hindutva to gain support from conservative right-wing and feudal classes, such as the former princes; electoral alliances; ideological appeal to anti-socialist ideas (the favoured platform of the Congress in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s); interest-group mobilisation focused on traders, businessmen and white-collar workers etc.

Above all, the BJS used communal violence and riots as a means of polarising political sentiment, building cadres and mobilising itself politicallyan exact replica of the tactics of small groups of Muslim fanatics like the Jamaat-e-Islami in certain parts of India.⁷

The BJS consciously projected itself as a Right-wing party in addition to being Hindu- communal: A formation that represents socially conservative values such as respect for the (unequal and hierarchical) caste status quo and one which advocates pro-trade policies, defends privileges inherited from feudal and colonial regimes (like the Privy Purses awarded by the deputing British to former Maharajas and Nawabs) and opposes land reform and good labour standards. The Jana Sangh was strongly supportive of the United States and the Western bloc in the Cold War-contrary to India's long-standing (but now abandoned) policy of Non-Alignment and in sharp distinction to most other political parties. It even went to the extent of supporting America's war on Vietnam, which was deeply unpopular in India.

The Bharatiya Janasangh had by the late 1960s perfected a certain equation and a well-defined relationship with the RSS. The RSS was the Jana Sangh's mentor, ideological guide and political master. It was also its organisational gate-keeper. It would be the arbitrator of all internal conflicts within the BJS. The RSS pracharak (proselytiser-preacher) was crucial to Jana Sangh's vote-gathering strategy. The RSS needed the BJS as its loyal representative in the field of party politics. The two maintained some autonomy from each other. But in a dispute, the RSS would always prevail. The RSS had the last word in the parivar.

None of the various combinations of strategies it tried could help the BJS break its isolation at the political margins for yearsnot even the huge windfall opening produced by the Congress's miserable performance in state after state in the 1967 elections, thanks to the alienation of the middle castes (officially called the Other Backward Classes, OBCs) and the formation of multi-party 'United Fronts' against the Congress, especially in the Hindi heartland.

The BJS's national vote share fluctuated between 3.1 and 9.4 percent in the Lok Sabha elections in the period 1962-77. The average works out to 6.4 percent. The number of Lok Sabha seats held by the BJP varied between 3 and 35 (the highest it ever bagged as the Jana Sangh). By contrast, the Communists alone were at least twice as strong, and their influence and social base was wider and their implantation deeper and more evenly spread. The Left as a whole was at least three times stronger than the Hindutva Right. The BJS was especially badly hit by the 'Left Turn' taken by Indira Gandhi in the late 1960s with the nationalisation of commercial banks and the 1971 slogan of Gharibi Hatao (Abolish Poverty!).

However, in June 1975, the declaration of a State of Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave the Jana Sangh a 'dream' opening. The vilification and the jailing of Jana Sangh leaders by Gandhi's government put them in the same bracket as her centrist and left-wing opponents and bestowed a degree of legitimacy upon them. Most important, RSS and BJS cadres were able to infiltrate the 'J.P. movement', the (somewhat deceptively) credible, respectable and broad-based mobilisation led by the ageing Gandhian leader and former socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, especially in states like Bihar and Gujarat.

This gave Hindutva politics the miraculous opening it was looking for an entry into the respectable mainstream from the margins on the Far Right. Thus, when the State of Emergency was lifted and general elections announced in 1977, the Janata Party was formed as a conglomerate or de facto coalition of all the major non-communist parties, both national and regional. The Jana Sanghis became a part of the Janata, piggybacking on Jayaprakash Narayan and on media magnates like The Indian Express's Ram Nath Goenka.

The Janata Party put up straight single-candidate fights against the Congress in a majority of constituencies in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections. The Congress was wiped from the entire Hindi-speaking belt. Of the 294 Janata MPs elected, between 80 and 100 are estimated to have been former Jana Sanghisa number representing the tripling of the BJS's highest seat holdings in the Lok Sabha till then! This was a gain beyond most optimistic projections of the old Jana Sangh.

By 1980, however, the Janata experiment ended in disaster thanks to internal contradictions within the uneasy conglomerate. A major contribution to the disintegration of the Janata Party was made by former BJS members, who tried to smuggle in the RSS's sectarian agendaon issues of religion and politics. The Janata's former socialists resisted this and there appeared huge rifts in the party edifice. In 1980, Indira Gandhi romped back to power, with the Janata reduced to a mere 31 seats in Lok Sabha (of which no more than one-half was estimated to be the former Jana Sangh's share).

In April 1980, the former Jana Sanghis got together and launched a new organisation, the Bharatiya Janata Party. The new party promised that its leaders, especially Atal Behari Vajpayee, would be free of the Jana Sangh's jaded ultra-conservative image and some of its ideological constraints. It would put a more liberal facade on Hindutvawithout compromising with its core agendas. It would in particular emphasise the 'values' of the JP movement and thus widen its base.

Vajpayee emerged larger than life as the BJP's pre-eminent leader, a good orator and campaigner, with a 'soft' style a deceptive appearance, (as we see below). Even sanghi hardliners like Lal Krishna Advani were now advocating a moderate and pragmatic line. For instance, a 1980 issue of RSS journal Panchajanya interviewed Advani, who said: 'In India, a party based on ideology can at the most come to power in a small area. It cannot win the confidence of the entire countryneither the Communist Party nor the Jana Sangh in its original form.'

Panchajanya: 'But by ignoring the ideological appeal will you be able to keep together the cadres on the basis of these ideals?'
Advani: 'Effort is being made to make them understand. That is why I want the debate to go on.'
Panchajanya: 'However, despite its ideological anchorage, the Jana Sangh's appeal was steadily increasing.'
Advani: 'The appeal increased to the extent the ideology got diluted. Wherever the ideology was strong, its appeal diminished'.⁸

The tumultuous events of the early 1980s, including the outbreak of a secessionist militancy in Punjab, Indira Gandhi's political disorientation and her turn to soft-Hindutva (she took to visiting Hindu temples by 1982), and her assassination by a Sikh bodyguard following the storming of the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, further polarised Indian politics along religious lines, to the advantage of the Congress which was now courting the Hindu voter. The Congress cynically drove this advantage home by mounting a paranoid and hysterical Lok Sabha election campaign in 1984 about 'the nation being in danger'.

This marginalised the Hindutva party once again. The BJP was reduced to a mere two Lok Sabha seats despite having won 7.4 percent of the national vote and having emerged as the second largest party displacing the Communist Party (Marxist). As the RSS organ, The Organiser, put it: 'It was a Hindu vote, consciously and deliberately solicited by the Congress party as a Hindu party. And this is what steered the party to a grand victory, decimated the “revisionist” BJP and reincarnated Cong (I) as BJP.'

The BJP once again ran the risk of being isolated from support of the RSS and its committed cadres. It vacillated and prevaricated, including on its much tom-tommed yet remarkably ill-defined ideology of ‘positive secularism’ meaning a politics that purportedly rejects Congress-style minority ‘vote-banks’ and of 'Gandhian Socialism', a homespun set of ill-digested and mutually incompatible ideas, as far removed from socialism as they conceivably could be, which divided the party's ranks. The vacillation was not to last long. In the early 1980s, the RSS revived the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which launched religious propaganda and proselytisation work and focussed on the issue of temples which were allegedly destroyed by 'invading Muslims'.

None other than the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi lent a helping hand to the BJP. In adopting an 'even-handed' policy of appeasing both Hindu and Muslim communal hardliners, Gandhi brought in a Bill to override a Supreme Court judgment providing marginal support to an old Muslim widow under the Code of Criminal Procedure-widely seen as a concession to ultra-conservative mullahs who stiffly opposed any reform of personal law or practices. Simultaneously, he had the locks to the Babri mosque opened, thus allowing Hindus to offer prayers at the images of Lord Rama which were surreptitiously smuggled (with official complicity) right into the heart of the monument in 1949.

Both moves helped the VHP mount a strident campaign against 'Muslim appeasement' by the Congress and other 'pseudo-secular' parties, and for the demolition of the Babri mosque and the construction of a 'grand temple' to Rama at its site. In the intervening period, the VHP had gathered additional momentum by launching a 're-conversion' movement to bring back into 'the Hindu fold' Dalits at Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu who, oppressed, harassed and humiliated by upper caste Hindus, had decided to embrace Islam in 1980.

Initially, the temple movement only evoked a feeble response, although propaganda about 'appeasement' appealed to many middle class Hindus who are prone to a supercilious and patriarchal view of all religious minorities and deeply cynical about democratic politics in which they only see manipulation of 'vote banks'. But soon, the term 'pseudo-secular' entered the vocabulary of the mainstream media as if it conveyed some profound truth. In reality, by using that term, the BJP was scoring points against whoever rejects Hindu primacy and supremacy. 'Appeasement' is a loaded pejorative term (Correctly, it should only be used in respect of inimical forces). It completely misrepresents the reality of Muslim life in India, which is even grimmer than the life of the average Hindu.

In the mid-1980s, the temple movement too began to pick up momentum when the VHP-RSS leadership, with the BJP's encouragement and participation, launched a series of powerful mobilisations using religious symbols and gestures, for example a campaign to collect bricks for the temple, carrying Ram-Jyotis or lamps in processions, and holding special pujas (worship) in cities and towns, especially near mosques.

Some of the most committed early participants in the movement were highly politicised sadhus and upper-caste cadres of the sangh parivar. But it soon began to draw in some low- and middle-caste Hindus, many of them first-generation literates. For them, the temple movement's principal appeal was that it provided a pan-Indian or pan-Hindu and a homogenous, respectable and 'Sanskritised' identity to them, as distinct from the subaltern, marginal and oppressive reality of their (typically rural or semi-urban) existence.

As soon as the BJP saw the rising popularity and potential of the Ayodhya mosque/temple movement in 1980s, most of its leaders actively joined it. In 1986, Advani replaced Vajpayee as BJP president. But even before that, a change of strategic orientation had begun, towards a Hindu 'Sanghatanist' style of organisation and an ethnio-religious strategy of political mobilisation. The BJP by 1987 had clearly formulated the three 'trident' issues, greatly and long agitated by the Jana Sangh, as its principal focus and concerns: A ban on cow slaughter; abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution, which gives a special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and imposition of a Uniform Civil Code detached from a gender-just, human rights-based, reform of personal lows.

The late 1980s saw many strategy meetings being held among the top-most leaders of the sangh parivar, including the BJP and the RSS and various 'fronts' of the latter such as the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (labour federation), the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (students' union), the so-called think tank called Deendayal Research Institute and the newly formed Bajrang Dal.

Each of these 'fronts' and parivar members has a special function and a special relationship to the RSS. They are said to number between 150 and 300, spanning such fields as education (the Vidya Bharati network of over 20,000 schools), labour (the BMS claims to be among India's top three union federations), and women (the Bharatiya Mahila Sangh, which loathes modern feminism and women's liberation and believes that the traditional, highly patriarchal, Hindu family provides the best example of the women's rightful place in society).

No less important are organisations like Vanavasi Kalyan Sanghwhich purports to work for tribal welfare but usually does proselytising work among India's indigenous people, as in Gujarat, and the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, which advocates a fiercely nationalist (but strongly-anti-internationalist and almost autarkic) economic policy, itself opposed to the BJP's naïve and blind dedication to unequal globalisation.

The functions of these front organisations are instrumental and well-defined. For instance, the VHP was set up by the RSS in the early 1960s to serve as an explicitly religious-cultural front and to recruit lumpenised sadhus and disaffected sanyasis. The VHP participates in communal and political activities of various sorts and operates worldwide amongst the Hindu diaspora. The Bajrang Dal functions like the modern-day equivalent of storm-troopers and uses physical violence to intimidate opponents. Bajrang Dal goons and ruffians periodically smash public property and burn churches and mosques, as happened in Orissa, where an Australian missionary and his two young sons were burnt alive in 2001. This is just when Prime Minister Vajpayee was calling for a 'national debate' on religious conversion!

The typical relationship between these fronts and the RSS-and most are more loyal to the RSS than to the BJP--is that of the hub-and-spokes variety. They relate to one another not so much directly as through the hub that is the RSS. Some of them are designed and deployed to occupy the space of opposition to BJP policies, and thus to marginalise the true ideological-political opposition.

With the 1989 Lok Sabha elections and the installation of the minority V.P. Singh government in power in New Delhi, the BJP intensified its religious mobilisation campaign. The most eloquent expressions of this intensification were periodic semi-religious mobilisations in Ayodhya, with volunteers pouring in from all over the country, as well as Ram Shila Pujas in different cities. Of particular importance was the Somnath-to-Ayodhya rath yatra launched by Lal Krishna Advani, now deputy prime minister and home minister of India ,in a souped-up Toyota van in 1990 made to resemble the cheap commercial-film version of an ancient chariot.

This yatra (procession) left a trail of blood in numerous states. There was a close fit between its route, especially between the cities and towns where it evoked the greatest response and ferocious anti-Muslim violence. The most frequently chanted slogan during Advani's rath yatra was: 'There are only two places for MuslimsPakistan or kabristan (graveyard)'.

Advani was finally stopped and arrested in Bihar by Laloo Prasad Yadav's government. But it was clear that the temple campaign and inflaming rank communal passions through hate-speech and open provocation and instigation to violence would become the BJP's principal political strategy.

The BJP was only waiting for the right moment to convert the Ayodhya mobilisation into an actual, physical act of destructionmeant to 'avenge history's wrongs'and then use that to its electoral advantage. The moment would come with the installation of a weak, compromised and collusive government in New Delhi. This would remove the last barrier between the plans of the Hindutva movement to raze the Babri mosque and its actual demolition. The sangh parivar had for years described the Babri mosque as the most potent symbol of subjugation of the Hindus by Muslims ‘an 'ocular' insult’, as Advani put it.

That moment came at the beginning of the decade of the 1990s when the Indian judicial and administrative systems retreated time and again in the face of the mounting Hindutva assault, and in particular when P.V. Narasimha Rao's Congress government took office after the 1991 elections following Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. This government was in a parliamentary minority for half its term and entered into an informal or unstated half-alliance with the BJP which had by now emerged as the principal opposition party.

The Rao government not only failed to hold the BJP-VHP-RSS down to their specific legal commitments not to disturb the status quo in Ayodhya, it allowed them to escalate the tempo of their hysterical mobilisation and close in on their target. The Babri Mosque had by now become both an emblem of, and a kind of litmus test for, India's commitment to secularism and to defending its multi-religious composite culture against the majoritarian onslaught. Through 1991 and 1992, more and more kar sevaks (volunteers) were mobilised at Ayodhya. At these gatherings, replete with pseudo-religious rituals, they would be treated to highly inflammatory speeches and stormtrooper-style propaganda.

The chain of events leading to the razing of the Babri mosque on December 6, 1992, and the developments of the day itself, could not have occurred without the collusion of the national and state (Uttar Pradesh) governments. With the mosque's razing, India suffered a terrible trauma, the worst blow since Partition to the very idea of peaceful co-existence between different religious communities.

It is impossible to understand the pusillanimity of the Rao government of Congress Party in the face of the Hindutva assault except by reference to far larger social and political processesin particular, the erosion of the 'Nehruvian paradigm' or 'consensus' of democracy, secularism, non-Alignment and socialism (in reality, a modicum of distributive justice). This erosion was reflected in many phenomena: The exhaustion and discarding of the model of import-substituting industrialisation adopted in the early 1950s; the historic decline of Congress party, indeed the 'Congress system' of governance; the shrinking of the Centre-Left space within Indian politics; and the ascendancy of a new illiberal middle class and upper-caste elite detached from the mass of the people, driven by intense consumerism and acquisitive hedonism, and inspired by new, restless, bellicose forms of nationalism.

The BJP moved aggressively into the ideological and political spaces vacated by the Congress. Potentially, the Left could have competed with the BJP in replacing the Congress. But by the 1980s, the Left too had entered a phase of stagnation and decline for a variety of reasons, including the passing away of a generation of pre-Independence leaders; failure to actively develop alternative policies, strategies and perspectives; the contraction of its social base, especially among the urban working class under the impact of policy-driven economic processes leading to the informalisation and casualisation of labour under a neo-liberal model of capitalism; and last but not the least, the disarray in the international communist and socialist movements generated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and ,above all, by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

The rise of the BJP to political prominence and especially to ideological respectability within the middle class cannot be understood without reference to some larger social processes at work in India, as well as the growing weakness of the party's own adversaries. These 'external' factors are probably far more important in explaining the BJP's ascendancy than 'internal' ones such as Hindutva's changed mobilisational and organisational strategies.

Among the greatest phenomena of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, especially in the Gangetic plains of Indiaor its Hindi-speaking 'heartland' or 'cow-belt', were the self-assertion of the middle and lower middle castes of the social order the Other Backward Classes (OBC's), or the 'Forward March of the Backwards'. Secondly, the rise of new tendencies of self-consciousness and self-organisation among the Dalits (the former Untouchables) and the emergence and growth of specifically Dalit parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party. Thirdly, the greater regionalisation of politics, with both state- and region-based (as opposed to national) parties and localised caste organisations, etc, playing a more important role than before.

The BJP could not relate to the first two processes in any organic or integral way. Indeed, the parties representing the OBC's and untouchables represented the very antithesis of the upper caste-dominated content of the BJP's Hindutva ideology with an emphasis on Sanskritisation and its privileging of Brahminical values and the Greater Tradition (of the literate elite among Hindus, as opposed to the 'popular' or folk-based and plebeian Lesser Traditions). But the BJP became an unintended beneficiary of the backlash produced by the two phenomena, especially the political assertion of lower-middle castes.

Thus, when in 1990, Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh introduced a policy of limited positive discrimination in favour of the OBCs, there was a violent agitation opposing it, led by upper-caste groups covertly (but increasingly and forcefully) backed by the BJP. That upper-caste backlash immensely helped the party in the Hindi belt in political and electoral terms.

As for the third tendency, towards regionalisation of politics, the BJP was its biggest gainer through the accretion of regional parties as its potential and actual allies. Although greatly weakened after the mid-1090s, the Congress was still (and remains) India's most broad-based and widely represented national party. Its state-level opponents became the BJP's convenient allies. This was another major advantage of being a late entrant to a position of national prominence, when the early major incumbent stood discredited and in decline.

In the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP emerged as the single largest party. Buoyed largely by the Ayodhya movement, it had by then formed governments, typically coalition governments, in alliance with other parties, in many states of north-central and western India. But this was the first time when it could ascend to power at the national level-albeit for a mere 13 days. So isolated was the BJP, and so extreme and unacceptable the image of its ideology and politics, that not a single party, (of the 40 to 50 significant ones represented in the Lok Sabha), was willing to join hands with it even to form an opportunist coalition.

This isolation ended soon. In March 1998, after barely two years of the rule of the unstable, fissiparous and ideologically divided United Front government of the Centre-Left, the BJP was back in power in New Delhi heading a 24-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA). By this time, strong, even committed, support for Hindutva from the upper-caste, upper and middle class strata crystallised. This core or committed support base, along with varying degrees of backing from OBC layers (and even from some small Dalit groups) explained by local, contingent or transient reasons, was a winning combination.

To form the NDA, which included mainly regional parties and some prominent former socialist leaders like Defence Minister George Fernandes, the BJP offered to make a 'sacrifice': Keep in abeyance trademark Hindutva issues like a cow-slaughter ban, Uniform Civil Code, Ayodhya temple and Article 370 from the post-election common programme, or National Agenda for Governance. But it insisted that it would not compromise on two issues: Reviewing 'the working of the Constitution' (with a view to promote a more centralised presidential oriented government structure) and reconsidering the country's nuclear policy, in particular exercising the nuclear weapons option. Before exercising it, the government said, there would be a 'strategic defence review'.

A commission to review the working of the Constitution was indeed set up, but the BJP could not find anyone respectable enough to head it. A former chief justice of India finally agreed to chair it on condition that its terms of reference would not include a departure from the Westminster-style parliamentary system centred on the Prime Minister. This review exercise in essence turned out to be a dud.

On the second issue, of nuclear policy, the BJP simply proceeded to exercise the nuclear option by detonating a series of five explosions on May 11 and 13, 1998 without the promised 'strategic defence review' and a discussion of the security environment, indeed without as much as a reference to the cabinet or the defence minister. Also excluded from this decision were the armed services. There is reason to believe the decision to conduct the tests was taken by a small cabal of people, including top RSS leaders and a handful of cabinet ministers belonging solely to the BJP, excluding even Defence Minister George Fernandes.⁹

By nuclearising India, the BJP not only fulfilled its own long-standing nuclear obsession and fascination with militarism and weapons of mass destruction; it successfully mopped up, gave a new thrust to and capitalised on a bellicose form of Hindu nationalism growing in the country. The growth of this nationalism is intimately related to the burgeoning of a new consumerist elite under India's neo-liberal capitalism with its intense dualism and grotesque inequalities.

This elite has set its face against the people, indeed sees them as a drag on its own growth and prosperity. It lacks any commitment to liberal values or the spirit of democracy. It is culturally crass and driven by a peculiar kind of hubris and blind faith in India's 'manifest destiny 'Mera Bharat Mahan (literally, my India is great; more accurately, 'right or wrong, My Great Nation!'). This elite nationalism is highly receptive to the Hindutva notion of India's incomparably glorious past: The Vedic Age or the pre-Muslim 'pure Hindu' period, as the source of everything that is great in the ancient world's arts, sciences and cultures.

This elite, comprising no more than a tenth of the population, is strongly social Darwinist in orientation. As an ideology, social Darwinism holds that only the fittest survive, and ought to survive, in society as well as nature. There is no place for the weak, the underprivileged and the powerless. This is held to be some immutable law of nature. This idea rationalises the horrendous callousness with which India's globalising middle classes are seceding from, and turning against, the mass of the people, the poor and unwashed, the 'laggards' and losers.

This elite is strongly drawn to the culture of authoritarianism and is fascinated by forcewhether to guard borders, settle disputes, secure the family, or deter rape through capital punishment. This is most starkly manifested in the proliferation of repressive ideas and institutions of the sangh parivar, with its 20,000 Vidya Bharati schools, 30,000 RSS shakhas and its penetration of labour and student unions, as well as institutions of culture and higher education.

Of a piece with this is the role of Hindutva as a vehicle for upper-caste domination, with all its anti-liberalism, hatred for the poor, suspicion of modernity, and opposition to the constitutional values of democracy, secularism, pluralism, universal human rights and egalitarianism. Some analysts see Hindutva as an upper-caste and upper class weapon against the weak, who are now asserting themselves and demanding their share in democratic decision-making.

The malign upper-caste orientation of Hindutva, and its utility as an instrument of domination not just of the religious minorities but all underprivileged groups, finds its highest expression in what might be called the Golwalkar Programme, outlined by the RSS's most important ideologue. The Golwalkar Programme consists in systematically assaulting modern-liberal ideas, weakening and undermining all democratic institutions, and using coercion to disenfranchise the minorities politically so as to turn them into second-class citizens without any rights.

The Gujarat pogrom of 2002, in which 2,000 Muslims were massacred with state complicity under BJP Chief Minister Narendra Modi, shows the extent to which the Hindutva forces can go in implementing the Golwalkar Programme. The Vajpayee government has shamelessly colluded with Modi and shielded him in a variety of unseemly ways. This not only proved the secularists' contention that Vajpayee's image as a 'soft' leader or half-liberal is totally deceptive: he is as steeped in Hindutva's toxic ideology and communal politics as anyone else. It also showed that Hindutva remains the most serious and deadly menace to democracy in India.

(Praful Bidwai is former senior editor of The Times of India. He is a freelance journalist and regular columnist for leading newspapers in India and Pakistan).

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