Fearless Freedom Page 12

  Challenging the gender division of labour at home by requiring men to bear a fair share of the burden of domestic labour, and demanding that the employer and the state bear greater burdens of social reproduction, by providing welfare measures, water, fuel, food, messes or canteens providing cooked food, pensions for the elderly, healthcare, maternity benefits, education and child care, transport, as well as paid weekly and festival holidays are all very much part of working-class struggles that assert women’s rights to greater autonomy and leisure.

  6

  Constructing a

  Fascist Patriarchy

  Patriarchies produce a potentially hospitable space where racism, casteism and communalism could meet.

  —Kumkum Sangari1

  The chronic lack of autonomy for women in India provides a fertile ground for a variety of communal, casteist and fascist political forces to breed. We’ve seen in previous chapters how the RSS in India uses the bogey of ‘love jihad’ to unleash an organized political attack on women’s autonomy, and use ‘protection of women’ as a pretext for violence against Muslim men. Few political forces (except the Left) in India have even paid lip service to, let alone seriously promoted women’s autonomy. By tacitly condoning attacks on women’s autonomy (as, for instance, Congress governments have done in Haryana) these political forces have contributed to creating a patriarchal common sense that has stood fascists and communalists in good stead. But among political forces in India, it is the RSS and BJP alone that articulate an ideology and develop a practice that is explicitly, proudly patriarchal and hostile to women’s autonomy. No other political force, for instance, organizes a countrywide network to track and attack interfaith relationships and marriages, or organizes yearly attacks on couples celebrating Valentine’s Day.

  Why bring in politics when speaking of women’s rights, you may ask? Moreover, if one is talking about political parties and organizations, why single out the RSS and BJP?

  It’s true that all political parties in India can boast of gross misogyny by one or the other of its prominent leaders. Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party said, ‘Boys will be boys,’ to trivialize rape, and also suggested that ‘gang rape’ was a physical impossibility.2 Anil Basu of the CPI(M) compared Mamata Banerjee to the sex workers of Sonagachi, and Susanta Ghosh, another CPI(M) leader, took a dig at Banerjee’s unmarried status at an election rally: ‘Karo kopaley jodi lal na jotey, taholey tar lal dekhlei rag hoy’ (A woman without the good fortune of bearing sindur [vermilion, the symbol of her marital status] on her forehead is bound to become infuriated if she so much as catches a glimpse of the colour red).3 Banerjee referred to the rape at Park Street as a ‘sajano ghotona’ (cooked-up case) while her then Sports Minister Madan Mitra asked what the divorced mother of two children was doing at a nightclub so late at night.4 The Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), that spoke loudly about Hadiya’s rights, issued death threats to a Christian man, Harison, who married a Muslim woman, Shahana, because they too see women as the property of a community.5

  The misogyny displayed by all these parties and their leaders must, of course, be called out and held accountable. Political leaders should have to suffer electoral consequences—lose votes—for perpetuating rape culture, victim-blaming and misogyny.

  What makes the BJP a ‘party with a difference’, however, is the ideological vision of its parent organization, the RSS. The RSS’s goal is for India to become a Hindu Rashtra. What will be the place of women and sexual and gender minorities in that Hindu nation? What will be the position of religious minorities and oppressed castes in that Hindu nation? Seeking answers to these questions also gives us clues about where the RSS picked up the idea of branding love between Hindu women and Muslim men as ‘love jihad’. Knowing the genealogies and lineages of today’s political ideologies can also help us be better armed and better warned to avert repeating disasters that the world has experienced before.

  Lineages of the ‘Love Jihad’ Bogey

  In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler accused Jewish men of seeking to deliberately ‘pollute’ the ‘Aryan’ race by seducing and encouraging black men to seduce, white ‘Aryan’ women:

  The black-haired Jewish youth lies for hours in ambush, a Satanic joy in his face, for the unsuspecting girl whom he pollutes with his blood and steals from her own race. By every means, he seeks to wreck the racial bases of the nation he intends to subdue. Just as individually he deliberately befouls women and girls, so he never shrinks from breaking the barriers race has erected against foreign elements. It was, and is, the Jew who brought Negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates, by persistent bastardization, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend to them as its masters. He deliberately seeks to lower the race level by steady corruption of the individual . . .6

  Sounds familiar? In India, the ‘love jihad’ theory propagated by communal outfits claiming that Muslim men deliberately set out to seduce and ‘steal’ Hindu women as part of a ‘jihadi’ campaign shares many features with such an ideology.

  One of the key aspects of Nazism—the racist ideology of Hitler’s party that claimed superiority for the ‘Aryan’ (white German) race and unleashed atrocities and genocide on the Jews, gypsies and many other minorities—was the deterrence and prohibition of interracial relationships between men and women. Note how Hitler, in the passage quoted above, claims that Jewish young men steal unsuspecting Aryan girls ‘from their own race’. He describes non-Jewish women as unsuspecting victims who are the property of ‘their race’ rather than women with control over their own minds and hearts. The RSS, in exactly the same way, claims that Hindu women who fall in love with Muslim men are ‘girls’ who cannot be trusted with decisions about their own lives, and who are moreover the property of the Hindu community.

  Remember, Hitler and the Nazis, who viewed ‘Aryan’ women as racial property, regimented and repressed those same women as well. In a speech in September 1934, addressing the Nazi women’s organization, Hitler said that the German woman’s ‘world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home’—something that was expressed in Nazi propaganda as the creed of the ‘three Ks’—‘Küche, Kirche, Kinder’ (kitchen, church and children).7

  In the same way, the RSS, that uses Hindu women as an excuse to unleash violence on Muslim men and women, is also, as we have seen, violent towards Hindu women, using torture to coerce them into giving up ‘forbidden’ interfaith relationships. RSS-affiliated women’s organizations hold camps persuading their cadres to accept domestic violence as chastisement for ‘misbehaviour’.8

  Lynch Mobs to ‘Protect Womanhood’?

  If the RSS took Hitler’s ideology as a model for its own, what did Hitler himself take for his inspiration and model? In 1934, leading Nazi lawyers met to draft the anti-Jewish ‘Nuremberg Laws’: they took for their model the notorious racist ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the US South.9

  African American people, descended from slaves, won freedom in 1863. But between the American Civil War that ended in 1865 and World War II, an elaborate system of racist laws were enacted to ensure racial segregation, curtail the civil liberties of African American people, and prevent them from voting. These racist laws—known as ‘Jim Crow’ laws—were backed by thousands of lynchings. In the era of the ‘Jim Crow’ laws that criminalized interracial sexual relationships and marriages, African American men in the US were frequently killed for having or even being suspected of having consensual relationships with white women. Mob lynching of such men—often on the pretext of allegations of ‘raping’ white women—was extremely common. Photographs of these lynchings were widely sold and circulated, showing crowds of white people rejoicing around the bodies of black men who had been burnt alive or hanged by lynch mobs. In these photographs, it was common to see white men pointing at the body of the victim—the pointing finger was a warning to other African Americans that
this would be their fate if they crossed the colour line.10

  Ida B. Wells, one of the leading campaigners against lynching in the American South, pointed out in a celebrated speech that ‘crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause’ of the lynchings. Wells said:

  What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily—always the same shameless falsehood that ‘Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood’. Standing before a Chautauqua assemblage, John Temple Graves, at once champion of lynching and apologist for lynchers, said: ‘The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race.’ This is the never-varying answer of lynchers and their apologists. All know that it is untrue. The cowardly lyncher revels in murder, then seeks to shield himself from public execration by claiming devotion to woman. But truth is mighty and the lynching record discloses the hypocrisy of the lyncher as well as his crime.11

  The racist mob was not the saviour of women in the American South. And the communal mob is not a saviour of Hindu women in India. The former saw white women as racial property just as the communal mob sees Hindu women as community property.

  The Sangh’s Nazi and Racist Model

  Just as Hitler and the Nazis took the Jim Crow laws of the US as an inspiration and a model, the RSS and its fellow travellers like the Hindu Mahasabha, in the 1930s and the 1940s, took both Nazism and American racism as inspiration and model for their Hindu nation.

  RSS founder M.S. Golwalkar, for instance, wrote admiringly of ‘German race pride’ and Germany’s purge of Jews as ‘a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by’.12 Golwalkar, embracing the Nazi model, wrote:

  [Muslims and Christians] must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights.13

  V.D. Savarkar, too, in his presidential address to the twenty-second session of the Hindu Mahasabha at Madurai in 1940, spoke of how the ‘touch of Nazi or Fascist magical wand’ had proved a ‘congenial tonic’ for Germany’s national health. Savarkar also spoke, in a 1944 interview with American war correspondent Tom Treanor, of how Muslims in India should be treated as ‘Negroes’ in America were.14

  Fascism doesn’t happen overnight. The concentration camps and the pogroms are the endpoint. Recognizing the hallmarks of creeping (or racing) fascism—racial/communal profiling, sexual demonization of the ‘Other’, daily targeted lynch-mob attacks and killings—is important.

  ‘Women’s Protection’ as Pretext for Communal Violence

  One of the many pretexts for the rash of lynch-mob violence and communal violence against Muslims in India has been the bogey of ‘love jihad’ or ‘rape’. Do you recall seeing a photograph of a Sikh police officer, Gagandeep, rescuing a Muslim man from a violent mob in Uttarakhand?15 I saw a video of the incident: the Muslim man was being attacked for walking in public with a Hindu woman. The mob attacked the woman too, threatening her: ‘Going out with a Muslim? Cut her to pieces!’16

  There have been many other such instances in UP, which remind us that Gagandeep’s actions—which we ought to be able to expect from every police officer—are sadly rare. In September 2017, BJP Mahila Morcha’s Aligarh leader, Sangeeta Varshney, was caught on camera slapping a Dalit woman inside a police station for being in a relationship with a Muslim man. Varshney said: ‘Tujhe itni sharam bhi nahi hai, tu kya zyaada badi ho gayi? Tujhme itni bhi samajh nahi hai ki kaun Hindu hai kaun Musalman hai? (Don’t you have any shame, do you think you’re that grown up? Can you not even understand who is a Hindu and who a Muslim?).’ And the police booked the boyfriend for ‘obscenity in a public place’—instead of booking Varshney for assault!17

  In Meerut on 23 September 2018, a VHP mob barged into a Muslim man’s room, where a woman friend and classmate had come to study. The mob called the police—which, instead of arresting the mob members, took the man and woman into custody. They beat up the woman, saying, ‘You’re a Hindu and you want a Muslim?’18 And they threatened the man with arrest. The police personnel were suspended briefly—and then, lo and behold, transferred a mere week later to the chief minister’s own home constituency, Gorakhpur!19

  The Muzaffarnagar communal violence of 2013 and the resulting communal polarization played a huge role in mobilizing Hindu votes for the BJP in western UP. Muslims were attacked after BJP leaders made provocative speeches claiming Muslim men were raping Hindu women. The rallying cry for the Muzaffarnagar communal violence was ‘Beti Bachao’ (Save Daughters)—which here connoted ‘save your daughters from Muslim men’ (who, it was implied, may either rape your daughter or fall in love with and marry your daughter). In the election campaign that followed, the BJP president Amit Shah made speeches in western UP justifying the violence in the name of women’s safety.

  In an election meeting at Bijnor, addressing Dalits, Shah asked why Mayawati had given nineteen tickets to a community ‘that violates the honour of sisters and daughters (jo behen-betiyon . . . ki aabru pe haath dalta hai)’, while she had only given seventeen tickets to Dalits. This was a dog-whistle indicating to his audience that Muslims were rapists, since the BSP had nineteen Muslim and seventeen Dalit candidates!20

  Addressing a Jat Sabha in the Muzaffarnagar–Shamli area, which had suffered the worst riots in 2013, Shah said: ‘No one is fond of rioting. But when a community violates the honour of our daughters and sisters, and the administration does nothing, people are forced to riot.’21

  In reality, Muslim women were raped during the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar. The rape cases filed by women are yet to come to trial in the past six years, even as ministers in Modi’s cabinet like Sanjeev Balyan visited and supported those accused of riots and rapes during the 2013 violence.22

  It is interesting that the other common pretext for communal lynching—protecting ‘gaumata’, the ‘mother’ cow—is also a gendered one. The Sangh outfits call upon Hindu men to assert Hindu masculinity and kill Muslim men to ‘protect daughters and sisters’, and to ‘protect “mother” cows’. The Cobrapost sting operation Juliet recorded Sanjay Agarwal, who contested municipal elections on a BJP ticket in Muzaffarnagar in 2014, saying that he stoked fear about the safety of daughters and cows from Muslims, in order to garner votes for Modi in the election.23

  The fact is, as the Cobrapost sting exposed, the campaign against ‘love jihad’, far from protecting Hindu women from violence, actually exposes them to intense politically organized and legitimized violence.

  In 2018, BJP MLA from Madhya Pradesh, Gopal Parmar, offered child marriages as a solution to the ‘problem’ of ‘love jihad’—if girls were married off in childhood, he said, Muslim men could not ‘steal’ them once they were adults.24 This statement underlines, again, how this ideology does not see women as persons but as property, and how little it cares for the actual rights of women. Subjecting girls to the crime and real harm of child marriage is, in Parmar’s view, okay, if it can ‘protect’ them from the imagined harm their community will suffer if they ‘lose’ them as adults to Muslim men!

  Social Hierarchy Rationalized as ‘Social Harmony’

  Golwalkar’s unabashed recommendation that Muslims either become Hindus or be made to live as second-class citizens in India, admiration for the Nazi ‘race pride’, etc., have become somewhat embarrassing for the RSS. They will only rarely articulate these views openly. Instead the same views are camouflaged and presented as ‘samajik samrasta’ or social harmony; or the Deendayal Upadhyay concept of ‘integral humanism’. These banal and benign-sounding phrases, on closer inspection, are revealed to be the
same Nazi wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  My reader may ask, why take so much space to speak about attitudes towards minorities and oppressed castes in a book about women? If you have stayed with my book so far, the answer should be fairly clear to you. Maintaining social segregation and hierarchy, between Hindu and Muslim, between white and black, between German Aryan and Jew, all require intense control over women’s sexual and reproductive rights. The South African comedian and writer Trevor Noah explains why in apartheid South Africa, he as a son of a black mother and a white father, was ‘born a crime’. His birth was deemed a crime because his very existence would disprove the central tenet of the apartheid regime: that the white race was superior to the black one, and that the two could never mix.

  In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix — and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.25