scene. This striking repudiation of Hindu nationalist ideology was followed by a
series of other examples: in negotiations with militant hijackers of an Indian
plane, in making contact with a range of militant groups, in declaring and main-
taining cease-fires in the guerrilla war with the militants.
As the BJP-led government presided over an uncertain but discernible
increase in Indian engagement in world affairs, politically and economically,
Western and Islamic countries began to deal with India on purely geopolitical
terms, seeming to regard the ideological considerations of Hindutva as irrel-
evant to geopolitics.
The question in the early years of the twenty-first century concerns the role
of Hindu nationalism, not in world affairs but in the transmutation of domestic
politics. Electorally, Indian politics seems set to remain what it became in the
1990s, an uneasy mix of national and regional parties, able to secure majority
only through coalitions. This fragmentation has occurred through the emer-
gence of a range of political organizations speaking for specific regional and
caste-based interests. In this landscape, compromise and balance are essential,
and that does not make for the success of ideology. There will continue to be
internal institutional differences over exact tactics within the BJP and between
it and other groups in the Sangh Parivar. Arguably, when the BJP was most effec-
tive in keeping its non-Hindu nationalist allies in government happy, the
strongest opposition to it came from other members of the Parivar. In some
instances, there has been a congruence of interests against the BJP, as when its
(admittedly erratic) pursuit of economic liberalization threatens the protection-
ist instincts of both the Farmers Wing of the Parivar and various agricultural
lobbies in other parties.
In short, once the BJP came to power (in a coalition), it was at odds with the
very movement that brought it to power. We have already looked at the political
exigencies of this uneasy relationship, and will shortly look at the fundamental
divide between cultural and political imperatives. But before that, another issue
has to be addressed, namely, the challenge of governance. Without doubt, mobi-
lization and the pursuit of Hindu nationalist ends have demanded a variety of
extra-legal tactics, mostly involving or resulting in violence. The BJP recognized
the self-denying nature of its relationship with such mobilization, which both
brought it hard-core support and alienated everyone else. Indeed, by the elec-
tion of 1998, the BJP has assimilated with some success the contradictions of
Hindu nationalist strategies. It presented itself as the only possible means of con-
trolling unbridled Hindu nationalism, because it could control rather than
merely oppose it. But this assimilation could not work well once it took on the
burden of governance and actually had to assert that control. Civil disorder is
not an effective mechanism for political engineering; and this is simply because
a mechanism needs to be subject to order. A government (especially a democra-
tic one, most especially a coalition) can least afford to use disorder – communal
violence – to maintain sociopolitical stability. (Indira Gandhi had tried to use
communal unrest to maintain her power, and even where she temporarily suc-
ceeded, she did not maintain stability.) So the BJP found itself having to act
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