newyorker | Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India’s founders,
Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a
secular state. India is home to all the world’s major religions; Muslims
constitute about fourteen per cent of the population. As the British
Empire prepared to withdraw, in 1947, Muslims were so fearful of Hindu
domination that they clamored for a separate state, which became
Pakistan. The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired
the largest migration in history, with tens of millions of Hindus and
Muslims crossing the new borders. In the accompanying violence, as many
as two million people died. Afterward, both Pakistanis and Indians
harbored enduring grievances over the killings and the loss of ancestral
land. Kashmir, on the border, became the site of a long-running proxy
war.
India’s remaining Muslims protected themselves by forging an alliance
with the Congress Party—Gandhi and Nehru’s group, which monopolized
national politics for fifty years. But the founders’ vision of the
secular state was not universally shared. In 1925, K. B. Hedgewar, a
physician from central India, founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
an organization dedicated to the idea that India was a Hindu nation, and
that Hinduism’s followers were entitled to reign over minorities.
Members of the R.S.S. believed that many Muslims were descended from
Hindus who had been converted by force, and so their faith was of
questionable authenticity. (The same thinking applied to Christians, who
make up about two per cent of India’s population. Other major
religions, including Buddhism and Sikhism, were considered more
authentically Indian.)
Hedgewar was convinced that Hindu men had
been emasculated by colonial domination, and he prescribed paramilitary
training as an antidote. An admirer of European fascists, he borrowed
their predilection for khaki uniforms, and, more important, their
conviction that a group of highly disciplined men could transform a
nation. He thought that Gandhi and Nehru, who had made efforts to
protect the Muslim minority, were dangerous appeasers; the R.S.S.
largely sat out the freedom struggle.
In January, 1948, soon after
independence, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a
former R.S.S. member and an avowed Hindu nationalist. The R.S.S. was
temporarily banned and shunted to the fringes of public life, but the
group gradually reëstablished itself. In 1975, amid civic disorder and
economic stagnation, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended parliament
and imposed emergency rule. The R.S.S. vigorously opposed her and her
Congress Party allies. Many of its members were arrested, which helped
legitimize the group as it reëntered the political mainstream.
The
R.S.S.’s original base was higher-caste men, but, in order to grow, it
had to widen its membership. Among the lower-caste recruits was an
eight-year-old named Narendra Modi, from Vadnagar, a town in the state
of Gujarat. Modi belonged to the low-ranking Ghanchi caste, whose
members traditionally sell vegetable oil; Modi’s father ran a small tea
shop near the train station, where his young son helped. When Modi was
thirteen, his parents arranged for him to marry a local girl, but they
cohabited only briefly, and he did not publicly acknowledge the
relationship for many years. Modi soon left the marriage entirely and
dedicated himself to the R.S.S. As a pracharak—the
group’s term for its young, chaste foot soldiers—Modi started by
cleaning the living quarters of senior members, but he rose quickly. In
1987, he moved to the R.S.S.’s political branch, the Bharatiya Janata
Party, or B.J.P.
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