CHAPTER 5
Ramraksha: Ram-ifying the
Society and Modi-fying the
State
Privileging the Gandhian concept of civil society and the heritage of non-
violence, I argue that the centrality of religion and social morality is quite
crucial to understanding the Indian public space. The multiple and com-
plex sites of social production of memory are the crossroads where the
religious feelings and values and the political processes meet and interact.
A cursory look at some of these sites, symbols, and sociopolitical processes
such as riots, elections, and policy promulgations reveals that the shrewd
political acumen of Indian civil society is not to be hijacked by the Sangh
Parivar and that the popular myths and memories are open for compro-
mise but closed for control.
CIVIL SOCIETY: A GANDHIAN HERITAGE
The debates on civil society, with its emphasis on human agency and
the political aspects of human society, have been aided enormously by
practitioners-cum-theoreticians such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik,
who played a crucial role in the collapse and disintegration of the state-
socialist formation in their own respective countries. Not believing in the
blind forces of history but in human action, both Havel and Michnik have
made important contributions to the concept of civil society. The most
important thing for Havel (whose performance record as the leader of the
Czech republic was rather mixed) is that human beings should be the mea-
sure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that humans
be made to measure for those structures.^1 Likewise, Michnik contends that