When Doordarshan’s Ram reached Ayodhya

When Doordarshan’s Ram reached Ayodhya

Jawhar Sircar

(5^th April, 2020. Times of India)

It is more than just interesting that Narendra Modi’s government has decided to telecast the two great epics of India once again after three long decades, just when it was assured a mammoth captive locked in audience. Let us delve a little deeper into the connection between these two record-breaking serials of Doordarshan and the rise of communal politics in India. This will also help those who are still struggling to understand how the Modi comet appeared in 2014 and completely blazed out all traces of 67 long years of secularism practised by the Indian republic, sometimes quite sincerely and rather patchily in others. At the same time, this little historical excursion would tell us not to apportion so much credit to a single person or his cohorts, even if their narcissism so demands.

Let us zoom without further ado to the exact year, 1989, when the latest model of Ram emerged victorious from the television screen before the freshly charged Hindu masses. 1989 is also when the infant Bharathiya Janata Party (BJP) began its first public country-wide demonstration of communal fury and aggressive Hindu politics started rocking the box office of Indian politics. We see that from this date, it took undisguised Hindu extremism, represented by Narendra Modi, exactly 25 years to capture power. It may also be worthwhile to introspect why the left liberals lost the battle so hopelessly, when they had a full quarter of a century to devise an effective response. And, what is more intriguing is that reasonably secular governments had held sway during almost the entire period. The Congress party ruled or led the ruling coalition for over 16 of these 25 years and a not-so-virulent Vajpayee for 6 years, a squeamish but secular VP Singh for a full year. In other words, the present deadly uncontrollable virus of communalism actually grew and prospered during secular rule, through recurrent riots, the post-Babri barbarity and Gujarat-type pogroms, which our colonial administration had tutored us to treat as ‘law and order’ problems.

But to reach 1989, we need to go over the incubation period that started in 1986, when Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress that had shattered electoral records to win the Lok Sabha elections of November 1984, had already begun to display panic once the Bofors gun deal controversy appeared. This is when Rajiv passed the retrograde Muslim Women (Protection on Divorce) Act, to appease Muslim hard liners. His Act nullified the orders of the High Court and Supreme Court in the Shah Bano case declaring that divorced Muslim women must be maintained by their ex-husbands. The ‘secular’ Congress’s reversion of this order is among the many irritants that rankle Hindus, which the BJP soon capitalised. In late 1986, Rajiv Gandhi’s minister in charge of information and broadcasting, Ajit Kumar Panja, approved the commissioning of a religious serial, Ramayan, on state-controlled television, Doordarshan. Why the age-old policy of the secular state not to glorify one religion was violated remains a mystery that I could not unravel even as the CEO of Prasar Bharati that supervises Doordarshan. Not everything is noted in the files. The Ramayan serial started telecasting from January 1987 and went on till July 1988 and we all know how wildly popular it was among the people. In playing to the gallery, the television version of this epic and the next one, Mahabharat, that followed it from October 1988 to July 1990, did not or could not reflect India’s argumentative and intensely tolerant culture. As we know, popular television serials harp more on emotions and reduce everything to ‘lowest common cultural denominators’.

What is more remarkable is the behavioural transformation of the common, non-communal Hindu, once the magic of this new wonder called colour TV actually brought Ram, Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman to real life. The television metamorphosed distant bookish characters, whose tales were confined earlier to monotonous recitals by pundits and old people, into vibrant, real-life, close-to-touch ‘deities’. My submission is that Doordarshan inadvertently helped the Sangh parivar ride the new wave of popular religious enthusiasm, as we may note from the dates we shall see soon.

Though the impact of the televised epics on the growth of Hindu politics has engaged the attention of foreign academics like Christophe Jaffrelot, Barbara Stoler Miller, James Hegarty, David Ludden, Victoria Farmer and Philip Lutgendorf, Indian scholars have hardly studied this nexus. One could locate just two exceptions who hinted at or examined the relation between this decision of the secular Congress and the outburst of communalism in India. New York based Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (2001) is, indeed, welcome and comes close to the magisterial overview of Richard Hoggart’s Mass Media in a Mass Society: Myth and Reality (2004). Fewer Indian academics, mostly left liberal, took the trouble to attempt any detailed empirical analysis to prove, or disprove, the links between the Ramayana serial and the Rama-Janambhoomi demand. The Mahabharat serial has somehow managed to draw a little more attention and we have an Indian researcher like Ananda Mitra publishing his Television & Popular. Culture in India – Study of Mahabharat, as early as in 1993. James Hegarty of Cardiff is, however, more explicit in observing how Doordarshan’s Mahabharat offered “televised darshan of deities” and describes the atmosphere generated as “politically chilling”. As a Sanskrit scholar specialising in this epic, Hegarty feels that the TV serial offered “no room for ‘the other’ at all…. and it explicitly excludes all those who do not subscribe to its historical vision” (“The Plurality of the Sanskrit Mahabharata and of the Mahabharata Story” in DN Jha, 2013: 179).

As soon as the Ramayan serial had created a new, unprecedented bond between the god and common Hindus, as never before, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) swopped down on the small, dusty down of Ayodhya. It rode the Ramayan wave to remind all that this corporal symbol of Ram’s birth needed to be ‘rescued’ from the clutches of ‘Muslim invaders’. The Sangh strategy was to arouse all Hindus by painting them as victims, not only under Muslim and British rule, but also under the ‘pro-Muslim Congress’. But let us fast forward to the events of 1989, the landmark year, when a new nine-year old party, the BJP started utilising Ram right from January. By November, Bhagawan Ram’s instant-delivery blessings showered them with an incredible number of 85 Lok Sabha seats in that month’s elections were held — up from a paltry number of 2 seats in 1984.

The VHP opened the innings by announcing its determination to set up a Ram Mandir at the disputed site in Ayodhya, come what may. It declared that it would hold its sacred shilanyas ceremony at the venue in November that very year. The All India Babri Masjid Action Committee, in turn, started forming ‘defence squads’. But the Hindu programme was better timed as the Prayag Kumbh Mela was the perfect occasion to harvest roaring support from the millions gathered, literally soaked in religion. Even the Sant Sammelan, held alongside in February, obviously pledged complete assistance. The year-long campaign turned belligerent and secular forces were completely on their back foot, as they failed to gauge how much the masses had been mesmerised by the Ramayan serial. Having kept an antiseptic distance from Hindu epics and purans, left liberals just could not fathom how a mythical character could re-define politics and kindle so much Hindu fervour. Doordarshan, incidentally, kept running the Mahabharat serial throughout 1989 and well into 1990, infusing thereby weekly shots of holy adrenalin into Hindus. The Sangh parivar’s unique and imaginative campaign of requesting every Hindu or each group to subscribe to just one brick for the temple, worked wonders, despite the scorn it received from liberal secular forces.

Excitement and tension ran high throughout the year and the two major events of November 1989 were obviously inter-twined. The Sangh parivar organised its long-awaited Ram Shila Pujan to demonstrate its serious commitment to building the Ram Mandir, and the BJP sailed through the Lok Sabha elections that very month — bagging a whooping number of 85 seats. The party thus emerged as the indispensable ally of Prime Minister VP Singh whose minority government (December 1989 to November 1990) depended on this large chunk of BJP seats. We will not get into greater details of how Singh was arm-twisted by the BJP for this support and how he retaliated by splitting the Hindu votes, by shrewdly accepting the Mandal Commission Report in August of 1990. He split the Hindu vote by reserving 27 percent of seats in education and jobs for ‘Other Backward Castes’ (OBCs).

The cornered BJP responded by riding once again the Ram-Ayodhya wave. Its President, Lal Krishna Advani, criss-crossed the country in September-October of 1990 on his war chariot, the Ram Ratha Yatra. This whipped up the desired passions and mass hysteria, leading to several police firings, communal riots and left hundreds dead. But, the BJP had finally managed to shake, quite threateningly, the monopoly of the secular-democratic narrative that had ruled for the first four decades after Independence.

Even foreign commentators realised what was coming next but the new government under Narasimha Rao, that was almost bankrupt in more than one sense, just looked the other way. In the USA, noted classicist, Barbara Stoler Miller, devoted much of her presidential address to the Association of Asian Studies in 1991, more than a year before the Babri incident, on how the serials of the two epics on Doordarshan came “with religious intensity, linked with politicized communal feelings, that has made the Ayodhya situation so compelling. The way militant Hindus have structured the narrative of Ayodhya’s sacred history and bent the epic universe to their definition of Indian national identity is a striking example of how vulnerable the past is to the passions of the moment”(Miller, 1991: 790). There is little point in recalling the destruction of the masjid on 6th December 1992, which led to large scale riots and counter riots and terrorism, like the serial explosions in Mumbai. These broke down Hindu Muslim relations in secular India, beyond repair, but Rao’s ‘secular’ Congress government shamelessly abdicated its responsibilities, while the learned publications by secular intellectuals proved to be as effective as pea-shooters. The masses had surely moved away.

We have just raced through these facts to explain that the Sangh parivar has been on the task of generating Hindu fervour since then and that communalism did not suddenly burst on the scene from 2014. We may analyse some other time how the interregnum of a quarter of a century between 1989 and 2014, was hardly be utilised by secular parties that had held power for most of the time. The bitter truth is neither they nor the left intelligentsia, that was outsourced the task of scripting what was to be taught in educational institutions, could construct any appropriate response. In fact, the deliberate distancing of the left liberal forces from religion left the field wide open to the Hindu right, and it thrived on the secular syllabi of schools and colleges that portrayed Muslims as brutal invaders. We will close this discussion here, as our present purpose is to focus on a widely ignored area, the Doordarshan connection. We observe how the small screen poured out unending streams of piety and also how these were quickly and effectively converted into venom — for a Narendra Modi to emerge.

(Please Click Here to read the article on Times of India’sWebsite)

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/when-doordarshans-ram-reached-ayodhya/

We Need to Dig Trenches Before Phase Two of State Terror Is Unleashed

We Need to Dig Trenches Before Phase Two of State Terror Is Unleashed

Jawhar Sircar
(6^th March, 2020, The Wire)

Last year in December, when agitations against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act had just begun, in an article published in The Wire, I had stated:

“No one can predict how long the public anger will be sustained and how the Modi-Shah duo will retort, and with what ferocity and vindictiveness. One prays that communal conflicts do not break out in this charged atmosphere or are even manufactured to split the movement.”

Now that this riot has been successfully operationalised and lives lost, but no split between Hindu and Muslim protester could be engineered, we need to analyse what we are really up against. Over the last several weeks of sleepless nights, the issue has metamorphosed from independent protests against the Bill to the law to a much wider nation-wide, multi-religious struggle against authoritarianism and communalism.

Three hated abbreviations – CAA, NRC, NPR – finally brought out the hitherto-cautious but harassed Muslims onto the streets, sick as they were of five years of endless torment. He found immediate and wholehearted support from secular India that suddenly sprang out of the dark that it had been pushed into by aggressive majoritarianism. They waved the national tricolour everywhere with patriotic fervour, to swish away fond hopes of those very same mischievous elements who had opposed the adoption of this flag to taint with suspicion the nationalism of all Muslims.

What is more fascinating is that ordinary Muslim women, housewives with babies in arms and angry young educated girls, who had never before stood up to state power, took an unprecedented lead. The younger elements took special care to flaunt a hijab over their heads and shoulders to demonstrate that they could very well be modern, revolutionary and Muslim simultaneously, without any contradiction — defeating the game to wean them away with relief from ‘triple talaq’.

Lakhs of first-time protesters, both young and old, joined the demonstrations. They demonstrated that they had, indeed, conquered the fear of fear and that itself worried the regime the most. Indian history will not easily forget the Sikhs and Hindus who joined the protesters as a mark of solidarity, setting up food camps and providing blankets to fight the biting cold of a harsh winter.

From Shaheen Bagh to Park Circus and a dozen other spots all over the country, the air is thick with endless tales of camaraderie, as countless Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists rejected the special status offered to them by the CAA, to stand beside victimised Muslims.

But having said so, we also need to seriously interpret the events of the last 10-12 weeks and realise that the Delhi riots constitute the first major response of a regime that scorns democratic discourse and its patience is running out. The violent masked storm-troopers sent to smash and beat up dissenters at Jawaharlal Nehru University was only a short trailer of this regime’s new PPP or Private Public Partnership model, under which messy violence is outsourced to experienced goons.

The state guarantees them immunity from police action and the present JNU case is a testament to this. The regime also expects judges to be compliant or face an overnight transfer. To feed the belligerence of a section of trigger-happy policemen, the PPP state then targets them to selective sites like Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University and other trouble spots in Guwahati, Mangalore, Lucknow or Chennai.

It is imperative to realise that Modi is not Indira 2.0. While dictatorial Indira Gandhi surely crushed all opposition and, like Modi, always smelt conspiracies everywhere, she did not inject poison into the body polity that outlived her. Modi’s legacy may take decades of painful chemotherapy to contain, even after his dispensation becomes just a bad memory. He is the first to accord respectability to communalism, and though future India may cap the holes from where racial reptiles emerged, they will still be slithering in rage, under the ground.

The second difference is that Narendra Modi certainly does not share Nehru’s or Vajpayee’s commitment to democracy and no one can predict how he will behave in the face of a debacle. Even autocratic Indira took the electoral rout of 1977 in her stride, but after two unbroken decades in power, at the state and central level, Modi and his extreme proximity to the army are both worrisome. Never before has the Indian public been taught to celebrate and worship the armed forces and the ‘nation’, just because this regime desperately needs to cover up its complete disappearance from the freedom struggle.

The recent riots are actually the regime’s limited-over response to the nation-wide agitation against the attempt to tamper with citizenship laws. It is also home minister Amit Shah’s manner of expressing displeasure at the voters of Delhi for rejecting the BJP in the recent polls, by giving India a dress rehearsal of how vulnerable Hindus are in the face of Muslim belligerence, that led to the death of two police officers.

This narrative obviously ignores basic facts, that are known even to international media outlets, that it was mainly Muslims who were slaughtered. So, the foreign media is told to shut up. Those who have handled riots know how critical the role of gathering intelligence is as soon as the first wisp is in the air, and how swift pre-emptive arrests can prevent a conflagration.

These were not only absent, but BJP strongman Kapil Mishra was allowed to pounce on the agitators at Jaffrabad and Chand Bagh on Sunday, February 23 — which directly led to the riots. All the rioting was, interestingly, concentrated in a small part of North East Delhi, locally called trans-Jamuna or Jamuna-paar.

This thin slice that lies to the east of the Jamuna river, contains less than 10% of Delhi’s voters and assembly seats and it is here that the BJP recently won 6 of its 8 seats, with one more seat close to it. All the riot-affected areas like Khajuri Khas, Maujpur, Karwal Nagar, Seelampur, Bhajanpura are in this BJP stronghold. It is here that the police acted like mute spectators when victims, mainly Muslims, were killed or grievously injured, and their homes, shops and vehicles set on fire. The rest of Delhi that voted against the BJP was not, or could not be, set on fire — not even Shaheen Bagh and Jamia Nagar.

The point is that Kapil Mishra’s incendiary speeches and tweets violated half a dozen punishable sections of the Indian Penal Code, not only now but even months ago, when he led mobs shouting “Gaddaaro ko goli maro” (kill the traitors). He is given a free pass for such remarks because he represents the core beliefs of the BJP and the RSS. He may well be using a wildly-successful, punishment-free formula of ‘riot and bloodshed’ to catapult himself from state to the national level.

Incidentally, had conscientious judges of the Delhi high court not actually viewed the recordings of Kapil Mishra’s provocative speeches, and had two refreshingly-bold judges of the Supreme Court not pulled up the Delhi Police, the riots would have continued unabated. The most glaring transformation that one notices in the highest courts is that justice and relief appear to be very judge-centric and emanate from a few, while many deliver homilies, without actually fast-forwarding the restoration of human rights. Tragic.

To cut to the chase, we are in for a long haul and need to dig our trenches before selective arrests begin and phase two of state terror is unleashed. But, any going back on the citizenship issue will surely lead to further depredations on badly-cornered Muslims and the vast majority of Hindus who still believe in tolerance and plurality — even if many voted for Modi for what they perceived to be his leadership qualities and the multi-multi-crore big-capital financed convincing campaign.

The fact that Hindu and Sikh protesters have wholeheartedly adopted the very provocative slogan ‘Azadi‘, the poem ‘Hum Dekhenge‘ of the Pakistani anti-establishment poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and even Varun Grover’s ‘Hum Kagaz Nahin Dikhayenge‘ has reassured Muslims of support and also thumbed the nose of the Hindi-Hindu hardliners in the battle for the Indo-Gangetic heartland of India. Even so, the present non-political, crowd-financed agitations have their limitations and we cannot gloss over these issues.

Yet what overrides such mature worries is that it is not just a protest, but has started resembling what Jean Jacques Rousseau described as the ‘General Will’ when people unite selflessly at certain historic intervals for the greater common good, rising far above concerns of the self. The three-month agitation is thus plural India’s long-awaited reply to communal terror and to the blitzkrieg of legislative bulldozing, thanks to a self-seeking, fragmented and rudderless opposition.

It is rumoured that in some states, the police are using non-police weapons while firing at protesters so that casualties cannot be traced back to them. It is also realised that the sheer sadistic brutality with which UP and Karnataka crushed democratic agitations may well be repeated. But these do not deter them and may actually encourage others to join the movement. This unfazed inner strength of Gandhi’s satyagrahis had amazed the world, as the demonic use of state power did not frighten them.

History may be re-enacted by these agitators during Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, when the Modi government only pays lip service to him and many Hindu fanatics openly worship his killer, Godse. The long lathis that police used to crush dissent and smash evidence-recording CCTV cameras are not dreaded any more. Fear is not a deterrent for those who have given their hearts and soul for what they believe.

We appear to be witnessing a historic phase when ‘society’ transcends the individual. This is when the community becomes the centre of all social activities, not the hearth, when, life, laughter, meals, joy and sorrow are all shared in common. We see it somewhat at a few dedicated places of worship and in genuine community service, but a protest camp is much more serious.

What gives us hope is the sheer vibrancy of the culture of protest that has burst out and the deep involvement of the participants. These spawn a spontaneous creativity that is exemplified by defiant poems, challenging songs and teasing slogans that resound everywhere. Equally visible is provocative graffiti and imaginative public art.

What it all hopefully means is that the individual protester has subsumed himself into the ‘greater cause’ and is now willing to fight it out till the end, irrespective of consequences.

(Please Click Here to read the article on The Wire’s Website)

https://thewire.in/politics/delhi-riots-caa-nrc