labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/dezembro 2015 - juillet/décembre

‘Hindutva[1]  Feminism’? Challenges to the Indian Women’s Movements

Nandita Dhawan

Abstract

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come to power with an absolute majority in May 2014, and among the 23 ministers in Narendra Modi’s cabinet, six are women, out of which one is a lower caste, and another a Muslim. These identities become especially important in the present context because of the fragmentation of the universal category of ‘woman’, which makes it impossible to speak of women without reference to their class, caste and community. The Hindu Right has come a long way since the time when the first women’s organization of the Sangh Parivar[2], Rashtra Sevika Samiti (Samiti) was established in 1936, eleven years after the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) was set up. Samiti was a space for women created in the form of a compromise gesture, though the RSS stuck to its policy of keeping women strictly outside its exclusive male preserve. Gradually, however, the Sangh Parivar expanded the space given to women, and spawned its own women’s organizations which claim to be representative of the actual desires of Indian women and the sole alternative to the Indian women’s movement that is invariably termed as ‘western’. My paper tries to study the challenges that these organizations have posed for the Indian women’s movements.

Key-words: Indian women, women’s movement, organizations

With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) having won the 16^th Lok Sabha elections in India with an absolute majority in May 2014, among the 23 ministers in Narendra Modi’s cabinet, six are women. Out of these six women, one is a lower caste, and another a Muslim. For the BJP, it is not just Sushma Swaraj and Nirmala Sitharaman who assumed office as ministers; they also have Uma Bharti, Najma Heptullah and Smriti Zubin Irani in ministerial posts. It is important that Najma Heptullah, the Minister of Minority Affairs, a few days after being sworn in as a Minister, refused to consider Muslims as minorities and instead referred to the Parsis as minorities, completing the process of defining minorities quantitatively— a course of action initiated in colonial India. Thus, her understanding of minorities was clearly in numerical and religious terms, not in terms of power. Sushma Swaraj, the Minister of External Affairs and Overseas Indian Affairs, was responsible for changing the slogan used by women’s organisations of the Hindu Right from, ‘Hum Bharat ki Nari Hain, Phul nahin Chingari Hain’[3] to ‘Hum Bharat ki Nari Hain, Phul aur Chingari Hain’[4]. Uma Bharati, the ‘fiery sanyasin’[5] and now the Minister of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation[6], had been expelled from the BJP under L.K.Advani’s leadership for being an ‘undisciplined’ and controversial member of the party. She made her return to the party and was successful in raising debates within the party on the issue of Women’s Reservation Bill[7], demanding caste-based quota within quotas, fighting the hegemonic leadership of ‘ideal’ leaders like Sushma Swaraj in the party.

Smriti Zubin ‘Tulsi’ Irani, the Minister of Human Resource Development (HRD) is the ‘new Indian woman’ of the Modi cabinet, who had begun her career in the glamour world by competing in the Miss India contest and later became popular as the ‘star bahu’[8] of Indian television. In a programme organised by The Art of Living Foundation[9], the Minister initiated her speech by commenting on how women do not have a problem in speaking but instead have a problem in being heard. She went on to use Sanskrit quotes, cited ‘Indian’ values learnt from the Bhagvad Gita[10], Ramayana[11], Arthashastra[12] and referred to Mahatma Gandhi to explain how India’s culture had infused feminine virtues in pursuit of a strong nation. She described poverty, illiteracy and race for ownership of resources as reasons for conflict laying the premise for the policy of ‘development with Hindutva’ which was being followed by the Hindu Right. She talked about issues like female infanticide and foeticide, rape, thereby raising her voice for ‘empowerment for women’, education of women and the need for their employment. She saluted motherhood and ended by expressing the importance of women leaders in connecting the world like a family.  In a programme which had women global leaders, Smriti Irani seemed no less than a ‘feminist’— one who wore her religious identity on her sleeves. What kind of challenges does this situation pose for Indian feminists? How has the Sangh Parivar re-strategised with regard to issues of gender, caste and religion? What has the role of women leaders and Hindutva women’s organisations been in this regard?

The constitution of the Modi cabinet has reflected a ‘Hindu turn’ in national politics, as envisaged by the Hindutva ideologue Savarkar[13], when he said, ‘Hinduise all politics’. For him, Hinduism was just a derivative of Hindutva and Hindu culture encompasses the essence of Indian identity (Savarkar 1923). It implies ‘assimilation of religious minorities in a Bharatiya[14] nation through removal of the external signs by which their adherence to a particular community is designated’ (ibid: 2). There is the need that minority religious practices be withdrawn into the private domain and minorities pledge allegiance to Hindu religious symbols, which are national symbols. Thus, it is not surprising when K.S.Sudarshan[15] asks, ‘What harm will come to the Muslim way if they were to accept Ram[16] and Krishna[17] as their ancestors and Ghazni, Gauri and Babar as foreign invaders?’[18] One finds a perfect resonance in 2014 when Goa’s present deputy BJP chief Minister Francis D’Souza, calls India a Hindu nation and himself a Christian Hindu. He said, ‘Hindu is my culture, Christianity is my religion. When I say Hindu, it’s my culture, not my religion. Hindu culture is 5,000 years old, my religion is 2,000 years old. When I say Hindu, I am not talking about a religion’.[19] In addition to this we have the comments by Uma Bharati, Smriti Malhotra Irani, and Najma Heptullah, as already discussed above. This is what I shall refer as the political discourse of the ‘Hindu turn’, where the BJP has been successful in apparently asserting an essentialised cultural homogeneity in its cabinet, following the path shown by their ideologues.

The ‘ideal’ Indian women are the Sushma Swarajs and Smriti Zubin Iranis, who are ‘empowered’ and economically independent and yet do not hesitate to proudly flaunt their marital status through markers like vermillion and mangalsutra. Marriage has been an institution which provides a mechanism for middle classes to preserve their dominance through the reproduction of hierarchy and exclusion (Dhawan 2010, 2011). Sushma Swaraj and Smriti Irani belong to two diverse backgrounds of the middle class, and their social positioning and ‘respect’ for the institution of marriage helps them connect in ways different from their association with Uma Bharati. Bharati, the rebellious sanyasin, who belonged to the OBC by birth, allegedly had a ‘love affair’ due to which she was forced by the party to take to asceticism. Thus, it had to be Smriti Irani who has the potential to be the ‘Sushma Swaraj’ of the new generation. While Smriti Irani’s past of getting married to a divorcee out of her own choice was not considered a ‘crime’, Bharati was ‘punished’, with instances of ‘undisciplined’ sexuality in her life looked upon as culturally ‘inferior’ by the patriarchal Sangh Parivar. The ‘indisciplined’ Uma Bharati had further insulted the BJP patriarch L.K.Advani and questioned his authority in the full glare of the media. The agency of the powerful juxtaposed with their structural superiority reinforces the interests of the dominant classes, and therefore it was not surprising to find Advani to have mastered the exit of Uma Bharati from the BJP. In contrast, Smriti Irani portrayed the image of an ‘ideal bahu’ on television who was the protagonist displaying religious symbolism of Brahmanical order. Her joining the workplace of ‘politics’ for the development of the nation reflected a ‘modern Hindu woman’ who ensured that the Hindu ‘tradition’ was kept intact while she was in her workplace as well, unlike Bharati.

An important feature of the ‘Hindutva Gender rhetoric’[20] is the othering of Muslims, and a complete prohibition of inter-community marriages. This helps to reinforce the image of Muslim men as ‘villains’ and strengthens the myth that they marry Hindu women for converting them to Islam. These have formed subjects on which Sadhvis Ritambhara and Bharati have given public speeches during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement[21]. Their speeches had highlighted the perpetual injustice done by Muslims against Hindus. Whether it be reinforcing the supremacy of the Aryan women whose condition deteriorated with the Islamic invasion, or it be the destruction of many temples by Muslim rulers, these were propagated as ‘true history’[22] by Hindutva leaders. They not only changed perceptions about how agency of women could be used in politics, they even made us reconsider assumptions about relation between women’s agency, religion and violence in politics. The Hindu Right also exploited faith of ‘pious women’[23] and motivated them into active political action. Though the secular state is envisioned as the representative body of all religious communities, and the judiciary is supposed to be ‘neutral’ towards all religions, the religion of the majority has ultimately exercised the decisive influence in functioning of the state.[24]

The initiation of the process of mainstreaming of the Hindutva rhetoric took place in the mid-1980s, when the liberal and secular minded persons could not respond to large scale sexual-cum-communal violence which occurred in the country. The issues of Roop Kanwar sati and the Shah Bano controversy followed by the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) debate initiated the process of right-wing appropriation of slogans of the progressive women’s movement after the former’s appropriation of the feminist agenda of the UCC.[25] The feminists were accused of being anti-national, western and elitist. It was to dilute the charges of the Hindu Right women’s organisations that the women’s movement strategically used Hindu religious symbols of female power like kali[26], at a time where the state and political parties were still not seen as communal, a perception which was to change by the mid-1980s. The Supreme Court’s emphasis on the UCC raised old fears that it would be an instrument for imposing Hindu hegemony, which led feminists to retract their demands for a UCC. The controversies over the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights upon Divorce) Act in the 1980s, and the Women’s Reservation Bill in 1990s affirmed the importance of caste and community and the impossibility of articulating a politics of gender not inflected with these identities. All this led the women’s movement to reach a more complex recognition that under different political processes of mobilisation, women united more as ‘dalits’, ‘Muslims’, ‘working class’ and much less often as ‘women’.

The Hindu Right neither approached the UCC for attaining gender equality nor was it in favour of reservation for the lower-castes as specified by Mandal Commission recommendations. And yet they had initiated the process of social engineering with the Mandalisation of politics, and the sought to mobilise lower caste groups. While in the Mandal era, the BJP abused the dalits, for the RJB movement, they were defined again as Hindus and mobilised for Hindu unity against Muslims. This is because the Hindutva ideology believes in universalising the lifestyle and ideals of upper caste Hindus by silencing the plurality and heterogeneity of the rest of the Indian society.  They have premised their upper-caste character and communal ideology by drawing force from brahmanical religious vision. This is contrary to the ways in which feminists have critiqued religious texts for being anchored in unequal gender and caste relations. Feminists have linked religion with politics and violence and have been self-reflexive on how women have become agents of communal violence. The Hindu Right’s appeal to everyday religiosities seemed to have been more successful than articulations of antagonisms of caste society by feminists.

There have been diverse challenges from dalits and Muslim women’s organizations, and sexuality movements on issues of collective politics and feminist theory.  Tharu and Niranjana (1994) in the mid-1990s had warned of the possibility of the discourse of the ‘new Indian woman’ legitimising the middle class, upper caste Hindu woman as the hegemonic subject. After almost twenty years, things do not seem to have gone as they predicted.  The definition of the middle class has itself undergone a change with phenomena like embourgeoisement, classisation of caste, economic liberalization, and cultural globalisation adding to the complexity of bourgeois revolution in India (Stern 2003). The dominant discourse does not look at poor as the focus of change; the latter are rather being viewed as recipients of incidental trickle-down effects of the bourgeois revolution. Further, the divisions within the feminist movement have failed the project of normalising the feminist subject as Hindu, upper-caste and middle class. The feminist subject is not unitary, pure or non-contradictory — it cannot be hegemonic anymore, and this is where lies the ‘defeat’ as well as the ‘victory’ of feminism.  It is a partial ‘defeat’ because the challenges for feminism are manifold — from dalit, Muslim and LGBT groups; feminists also have to look for strategies to counter multiple patriarchies. It is a partial ‘victory’ because feminism has been self-reflexive and self-critical to open up its space for different kinds of politics, for varied and rich experiences. It has learnt to encounter allegations, face contradictions and challenges, and hence its richness and pluralism.

However, the feminists have failed to engage seriously with the rise of the ‘feminist’ position within the Hindu Right, especially in the way the BJP has gradually appropriated the feminist rhetoric. We, as feminists, have ignored the appeal of the Hindu Right to the mass of women and have never tried to engage with its impact on women (especially middle class) of the society. With the NDA[27] government pushed out of power in the Lok Sabha elections of 2004, and with the continuation of the UPA[28] for the next two terms, the future of a BJP government at the Centre seemed a bleak possibility. It was taken for granted that coalition politics had become the rule for India. The feminists, in the second phase of women’s movement in independent India, had evolved from the combination of radical left politics and new social movements, and were therefore complacent about the strategies and moves of the Hindu Right. The resurgence of the Hindutva movement, especially with an absolute majority at the Centre, was an eye-opener. This is where lay the danger of the effects of the mainstreaming of the Hindutva rhetoric along with the mainstreaming of the ‘Hindutva gender rhetoric’ carried out by the Hindutva forces successfully not only in India but globally as well. 

Ghoshal (2005: 795) has referred to the communal phase enabling women’s self-constitution as active political agent as ‘dangerously unprecedented’ which has ‘an extremely detrimental effect on the overall context of feminist movement’. The Hindu patriarchal system has used its own weapons to obstruct the progress of the feminists. They have spawned their own women’s organisations which have their own ‘feminist’ language and which refer to women’s essence as wife and mother as their strengths, which we have referred to as the ‘Hindutva Gender Rhetoric’. Their gender rhetoric implied taking up pro-women positions located within the non-threatening ideology of patriarchal family structures. Even if Hindu women acted as violent political agents, their primary identities of wives and mothers were never compromised. The ‘Hindutva Gender Rhetoric’ demanded narishakti (women’s strength) and not narimukti (women’s liberation), with the latter seen as ‘western’. It was the women’s organisations of the Hindu Right who claimed to be representative of the actual desires of Indian women and the sole alternative to the ‘western’ women’s movement. The women of the Hindu Right used slogans coined by women’s movement during riots and Babri Masjid demolition. They were placed on the same side as feminists on the issue of UCC and obscenity of images of women in the media. Thus, the ‘Hindutva gender rhetoric’ had similarities with feminist issues and language.

The Hindu Right forces too have changed their strategies for gaining political power.  It is now difficult to accuse them of working for empowerment of the ‘new Hindu woman’ at the cost of rights of dalit and Muslim women. They have representatives of women from different categories in positions of power, whether it is Muslim, lower caste or upper caste. The Hindu right may endorse class/caste hierarchies, but they no more denounce these identities, though they do reject the demands of equal social relations as ‘abnormal’. They do not intend to work to diminish these inequalities in the society for they think it is ‘natural’, unlike feminists, but they use these identities to further their gains and use them as means to achieve their own ends. They insist on appropriating the language of rights and empowerment for women, without questioning structural oppression and inequality. For the Hindutva forces, it is a more ornamental way to sanction identity politics. There is the need to grasp on to power, need for gaining power in politics to achieve their larger objective.

The Hindu Right has used the strategy of ‘demonising’ and ‘othering’ feminism by alleging that feminism alienates Hindu women from their tradition and culture and is thus marked as ‘anti-national’. The Hindutva forces, therefore, took it upon themselves to construct ‘alternative’ ideals of womanhood, according to the norms set by ‘Hindutva Gender Rhetoric’. This is line with their strategy of emulating ‘others’, especially those they ‘demonise’. My research makes it evident that the argument is much more complex at both ends— Hindutva as well as feminism. It is not the Hindu Right alone who have made such accusations against feminism. The initiation of the process of constructing the middle-class, upper-caste Hindu woman as the hegemonic subject began right from the colonial times. The genealogy of the ‘unmarked citizen’ — universal subject of feminist politics — was inherent in nationalism. She was the colonial Indian (Hindu, upper caste, middle class) woman, whose privileged identity had remained ‘unmarked’. While in Nehru’s vision, modernisation and democracy would bring gender equality, for Gandhi it was in the feminised enterprise of nationalism, that women were seen as agents. Thus, the ‘woman’s question’, like the caste and minority questions, remained problems of nationalism which were unresolved. The ‘new women’s movement’ in the 1980s carried the burden of this uncertainty and began their struggle with the ‘unmarked’ woman as the subject of feminist politics. The debates on issues such as sati and UCC made feminists realise the severity of the problem. They faced the serious challenge of tackling the complicated puzzle of the history of Indian nationalism, where the woman was stuck between her citizenship rights and community interests. There was antagonism created between upper and middle class women, Hindu and Muslim women, and upper caste and dalit women. The feminists therefore faced sharp criticism from groups fighting for community rights, which were not just the Hindu Right but also communitarians, on the one hand, and liberals, on the other. While the former accused feminists of ignoring that women ‘belonged’ to the community, the latter were alleging that feminists were disintegrating the unity of the nation.

I am not arguing that all these groups are neatly compartmentalised. In fact, feminist experience has made it evident that the Hindu Right, feminists, as well as the liberal-secularists are overlapping categories, creating new additive categories in the process. The rhetoric of hindutva forces on gender is itself a ‘changing’ expression. While the Hindutva ideologues had framed the ‘Hindutva Gender Rhetoric’ in a particular framework, its form as well as content has undergone a wide change from its inception when their first women’s organisation, Rashtra Sevika Samiti, was formed in 1936. Moreover, the political and cultural fronts of the Hindutva forces talk in different voices — liberal rights and cultural essentialism — thereby rendering visible contradictions in their gender rhetoric. The liberal-secularists too exhibit varied opinions and ideologies, with women becoming the site on which notions of tradition and modernity are debated and reformulated. While some groups merge the conception of tradition with patriarchal notions of women as submissive and/or sacrificial, others use the idea of modernity to accuse women as anti-national and/or empowered. Moreover, women now are active agents and participants in these debates unlike colonial times. Feminists have to be given credit for the increased visibility and agency of women, especially after the 1980s. However, as we have already discussed, there have been plural theories and practices in feminism as well. There are cultural and difference feminists who have strong overlaps with communitarians and Hindutva forces on certain issues, while there are liberal feminists who will have similarities with liberal and political front of the Hindu Right on some other issues.  To these complexities were added the ‘modern’ forms of caste and community as categories, along with the economic and cultural changes due to globalisation. The discourse of the ‘new Indian woman’ led to her subjectivity being extended from contributing to the larger cause of the nation in the 1990s to a global consumer who continues to signify the nation— the nation which is new and liberalized, open to global consumer capital.

Feminists have a wide range of experiences according to contexts and locations. We have used the language of rights and equality for fighting for justice for women; women’s studies has given a privileged position to socialist feminists; women’s movement has mostly had a left orientation; there has also been an atmosphere of cultural radicalism involved. Feminist theories have been diverse as well, with each having their strengths and critiques, trying to understand hierarchy and inequality in social and gender relations in different ways. It has not been easy for us to radically question intimate relationships; we have faced the consequences of questioning and subverting norms; such ‘deviant’ women have not been readily accepted in different social circles. We have failed to understand how multiple patriarchies work; feminists realise their failure in conceptualising differences in the universal category of ‘woman’. We have been accused of being ‘western’ and anti-national; of not being ‘true’ representatives of women; been guilty of stressing the primacy of one identity (be it class, caste, etc) over the other. We have also been labeled as ‘man-haters’, and have been victims of identity politics. All this has happened over the years within changing meanings of identities and inequalities, in the dynamically shifting social, political and economic backgrounds. As a result of questioning social relations, we have to risk being alienated from our ‘roots’. We have gained in terms of exploring heterogeneous practices of family and collective living; we have redefined relationships, called for a more liberatory language of gender and sexuality. Women’s movements have also made alliances with other ‘marginalised’ movements, in an effort to give rise to alternative politics. This politics has been working for the rights of the marginalised, as well as evolving from the traditional into new ways of doing politics towards more equal social relations.  

Biography

Nandita Banerjee Dhawan is at present Assistant Professor, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research interests lie in the areas of gender, new middle class, Hindutva and marriage. She is currently involved in a research project on gender and labour on auto rickshaw operators and beauty workers in Kolkata. She has coordinated research projects on marriage and domestic violence as well. She has co-edited a jointly edited volume titled, Intimate Others: Marriage and Sexualities in India (Stree 2011) and a reader on Women’s Studies titled, Mapping the Field: Gender Relations in Contemporary India (Stree 2011).

References

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labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/dezembro 2015 - juillet/décembre