176 Conclusions
that through opportunism and reactionary resurgence. Taken aback by the
Islamic fanaticism growing rapidly around themselves and the internal
erosion of their power by the more assertive and upwardly mobile lower
castes, the Hindu orthodoxy panics and tries to bring things under their
control. When the surrounding "enemy" is spotted within, that provides
a good excuse to mobilize the secondary enemies, whose turn will come
when the Muslims are dealt with appropriately.
The internal Muslim communal elements are not less virulent than the
Hindu communalists either. Both these psychologies are preoccupied
with numbers. Unlike the syncretic legacy of Hinduism, Islam (as well as
Christianity) attaches enormous importance to head count, and reserves
redemption exclusively for the in-group. They measure their strength and
spirituality by number and would do anything to convert the entire world
to their faiths. The Hindu orthodoxy is equally preoccupied with num-
bers, so as not to be reduced to a minority, but would not budge for any
reformation within its domain.
Thus the Hindutva program is an all-encompassing program for
"national visions" that asserts so desperately that Hindus are a nation;
Sanatana Dharma gives the national identity, undivided India is the
motherland, and Sanskrit is the national mother tongue. There is no Mus-
lim or British period in the Hindu history, which is "a history of continuous
Hindu struggle against Muslim invaders and British colonialists." People
who subscribe to "alien religions," which are "enemies of our nation," are
minorities, and the goal would be "to bring our minorities back into our
nation after destroying the deadly intoxication of these ideologies." They
do not accept the partition of the country, and the goal there would be
"to re-unite the whole of our ancestral homeland into our motherland, no
matter how long it takes." By accomplishing all these, the Hindu would
liberate themselves and earn their freedom.^11
What the Sangh Parivar does is to unmake this diversity through selec-
tive appropriation and outright rejection of India's past, present, and
future and remake it in its own nazi-fascist mold. Their simplified history
and symbolic politics would negate all other histories, subject regional
minorities to the centralized authoritarian state, stop the upward mobil-
ity of the dominated castes, suppress women's aspirations, and establish
a polity marked by backward bourgeois nostalgia of an imperial past,
nuclear power, and hallucinations of regional dominance.^12
Thus the three concepts—national history, mythification, and political
socialization—designate the three aspects of a single problematic, namely
the relations between history and identity constructions. As the discus-
sions on the Ramayana, Ramarajya, and the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmab-
humi issue point out, the boundary lines between these domains cannot
be clearly marked, and there is a lot of overlapping. The Sangh Parivar's
program is such an ingenious one that they incorporate all kinds of