August 23, 2015
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Communalisation of the State Apparatus

Prof. C P Bhambhri

A MYTH has been spread by the bourgeois writers of democracy that the state and its apparatuses are "neutral agencies" and the rule of law is implemented in an impartial and unbiased manner by all managers of the capitalist democratic state. This non-historical and non-empirical view has been challenged and contested because the state in a capitalist country is an "executive agency of the ruling exploiting classes" and it has also been historically established that the "class state" of the capitalists governs society on the basis of "an ideology" to legitimise the oppressive and exploitative system in a capitalist country. If on one hand, advanced monopoly capitalist systems rule over the mass of people by establishing its ideological hegemony on the basis of adult franchise and representative systems of democracy in which people elect their political representatives, on the other, in "transitional societies" like India the emerging capitalist state systems are engaged in establishing an "ideological consensus" for hegemonising the whole society. Such an ideological consensus is yet to emerge in India and this is the reason that capitalist classes and strata of private property owners including big businesses, property holding professionals, upwardly business classes, surplus producing land owning peasantry and the large trading classes are still struggling to evolve any "consensus" on an ideology for the governance of the whole of India, and one stream of such an "ideology" which is making every effort to capture the imagination of the whole society is that of "religion-based" social and political order which is based on ancient traditional religious values of Vedic-Brahmanical Hindu religion and the goal of this stream of ideology is to establish Hindu Rashtra or Hindu Nationhood in the country. The struggle is to capture state power with an aim to make India a Hindu State and political agency of Hindu rashtravadi Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its 45 affiliates including Jan Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party. This ideological programme of 'Hinduisation' of the whole society and knitting the whole India around the ideology of Vedic-Brahmanical Hinduism has been carried by the Sangh Parivar during the last almost seventy years of post-Independence India and the RSS , the "fountain source" of Hindutva, has participated in politics to win elections and penetrate in the state apparatus and the Jan Sangh and BJP have successfully used electoral democracy, especially from 1967, to win some state Assembly elections. The main purpose of the Jan Sangh/BJP government either at the Centre or in the states of India is to push forward its agenda of Hinduisation by appointing or nominating its own ideological followers of the RSS at crucial and critical levels of state apparatuses like bureaucracy, police forces, and as school, college and university teachers. It's a myth that if Jan Sangh/BJP get defeated in an election, the impact of their ideology also gets wiped out after the electoral defeats. The state functionaries with BJP and Sangh Parivaar ideology continue to serve Hindu cause whether they are in bureaucracy or police or educational institutions, and this process has continued in an uninterrupted manner beginning from 1967 to 2015. It deserves to be mentioned that during the early years of post-Independence India, police had to inquire into the "antecedents" of personnel entering the civil or police services and especially the candidates with "Communist" background were blacklisted by police and their entry was barred. The RSS which is gaining strength has opposed the system of police scrutiny of entrants to the civil and police services with RSS background. How can state apparatuses be neutral while dealing with the citizens if they are committed to carry forward the ideology of Hindu Rashtravad which is in reality based on the idea that Hindus are first-class citizens and other religious minorities like Muslims and Christians are second-class citizens? This is the context which explains the present public debate on the communalisation of the Indian state apparatuses where Hindu Rashtravadis are openly following their ideology of Hindutva while in government job or while wearing Khaki uniform. The skeletons have come out in the public domain and hidden fact of creeping communalisation of state apparatuses beginning with 1967 when Jan Sangh governments came to power in some states, even for a brief period, has assumed dangerous proportions because some facts which have been highlighted by judicial commissions appointed to investigate inter-religious riots especially after December 6, 1992, when the BJP and the army of Sangh Parivar demolished Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. The post-Babri Mosque demolition led to a series of inter-religious riots especially in Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993. Justice B N Srikrishna who investigated the "riots in Mumbai" had clearly identified "police-in-uniform" as biased and prejudiced against Muslims and they actively created a situation where Hindu mob targeted the life and property of innocent and helpless Muslims because Mumbai "police" had not provided protective umbrella to the besieged Muslims. This is a fact as mentioned by Justice B N Srikrishna on the riots of December 6 to 10 in 1992 and January 6 to 20, 1993 and later on bomb blasts of 12th March 1993. Justice Srikrishna in a later interview on August 1, 2015 observed that "there does appear to be a cause and effect relationship between the two riots and the serial bomb blasts". Justice Srikrishna further observed "if the state is complicit in the communal riots, police will take a Nelson's eye towards the real aggressor and round up the real victims, as happened in Mumbai riots and Delhi riots". How can prosecutor be free to put facts before a judge when the communalism has taken over the state apparatus? Justice Srikrishna laments "as long as the inherent state bias is not removed, there would be no change in the situation". Has state bias come to an end or has it grown further in communalisation of state functionaries? The post-Babri Mosque violence was repeated in post-Godhra riots of Ahmebadad in 2002 and more than thousand innocent Muslims were killed and more than 3,00,000 Muslims fled from the villages to secure themselves in refugee camps. Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan while investigating the Babri mosque destruction "indicted" many senior BJP and RSS leaders and mentioned that it was "Hindu terror". Kalyan Singh, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who presided over the destruction of Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992 has been "rewarded" by governorship of Rajasthan by the Narendra Modi government. The Hindu activists involved in anti-Muslim riots in Muzaffarnagar in 2013 have been rewarded by the BJP and such identified persons are BJP MPs and MLAs. The moral of the story is with the BJP in government and RSS membership not a "disqualification" for public service, the neutrality of the state while dealing with citizens as equals before the law is a pipe-dream. A former home secretary of the UPA-II government just after retirement joined the BJP and is a BJP MP in the 16th Lok Sabha. The civil bureaucracy, the men-in-khaki uniform, and numerous functionaries of the government at every level are getting "indoctrinated" in the ideology of Hindu Nationhood and in its process, minority communities are getting alienated from the mainstream of secular Indian democracy. This is a challenge before India. Fundamentals of Indian constitutional democracy are in danger because the Hindu Rashtravadis do not accept this constitutional philosophy because for Hindu Rashtravadis India has "two kinds of citizens": 'Hindus', the first special category, and "Others" like Muslims and Christians as second-class citizens and functionaries of the state are treating citizens on the basis of "first-class" and "second-class".