Orissa: A Gujarat in the making
With little resistance to its aggressive onslaught, the sangh parivar looks well set to meet its 2006 deadline for reshaping Orissa into the next ‘laboratory for Hindutva’
BY ANGANA CHATTERJI
In Gujarat, Hindu extremists killed 2,000 people in February-March of 2002. Muslims live in fear there, victims of pathological violence.
Raped, lynched, torched, ghettoised. A year and half later, Muslims in Gujarat are afraid to return to their villages, many still flee from town to town. Ghosts haunted by history. Country, community, police, courts — institutions of betrayal that broker their destitution. This is India today.
The National Human Rights Commission recognised the impossibility of achieving justice in Gujarat. The Best Bakery murder trial flaunted dangerous liaisons between government, judiciary and law enforcement. Those who speak out are vulnerable. Outcry against the consolidation of Hindu rightwing forces in India is subdued. In a world intent on placing Islam and Muslims at the centre of ‘evil’, Hindu nationalism escapes the global imagination.
Orissa is Hindutva’s next laboratory. This July, in a small room on Janpath in Bhubaneswar, workers diligently fashioned saffron armbands. Subash Chouhan, state convenor for the Bajrang Dal, the paramilitary wing of Hindutva, spoke with zeal of current hopes for ‘turning’ Orissa. Christian missionaries and ‘Islam fanatics’ are vigorously converting Adivasis (tribals) to Christianity and Dalits (erstwhile ‘untouchable’ castes) to Islam, Chouhan emphasised. He stressed the imperative to consolidate ‘Hindutva shakti’ to educate, purify and strengthen the state.
Western Orissa, dominated by upper caste landholders and traders, is a hotbed for the promulgation of Hindu militancy, while Adivasi areas are besieged with aggressive Hinduisation through conversion. Praveen Togadia, international general secretary of the VHP, visited Orissa in January and August 2003 to rally Hindu extremists. He advocated that Orissa join Hindutva in its movement for a Hindu state in India. ‘Ram Rajya’, he promised, would come.
In Orissa, the sangh parivar is targeting Christians, Adivasis, Muslims, Dalits and other marginalised peoples. The network divides its energies between charitable, political and recruitment work. It aims at men, women and youth through religious and popular institutions. The sangh has set up various trusts in Orissa to enable fund raising, such as the Friends of Tribal Society, Samarpan Charitable Trust, Yasodha Sadan, and Odisha International Centre.
There are around 30 dominant sangh organisations in Orissa. This formidable mobilisation is the largest base of organised volunteers in the state. The RSS, responsible for Gandhi’s death, was founded in 1925 as the cultural umbrella. It operates 2,500 shakhas in Orissa with a 1,00,000 strong cadre. The VHP, created in 1964, has a membership of 60,000 in the state. Born in 1984, at the onset of the Ramjamanbhoomi movement, banned and reinstated since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Bajrang Dal has 20,000 members working in 200 akharas in the state.
Membership of the BJP stands at 4,50,000. The Bharatiya Mazdoor sangh manages 171 trade unions with a cadre of 1,82,000. The 30,000 strong Bharatiya Kisan sangh functions in 100 blocks. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, an RSS inspired student body, functions in 299 colleges with 20,000 members. The Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, the RSS women’s wing, has 80 centres. The Durga Vahini, with centres for women’s training and empowerment, has 7,000 outfits in 117 sites in Orissa.
Intent on constructing the ‘ideal’ woman who decries the ‘loose morals’ of feminism, the sangh seeks to train Hindu women to confront the ‘undesirable’ sexual behaviour “endemic” to Muslims and Christians. Such training endorses ‘masculanisation’ of the Hindu male looking to protect the fictively threatened Hindu woman.
In October 2002, a Shiv Sena unit in Balasore district in Orissa declared that it had formed the first Hindu ‘suicide squad’. Responding to Bal Thackeray’s call, over 100 young men and women signed up to fight ‘Islamic terrorism’. The Shiv Sena appealed to every Hindu family in the state to contribute to its cadre. Squad members, it is speculated, will receive training at Shiv Sena nerve centres in Mumbai and elsewhere.
Why Orissa? The state is in disarray, the leadership labours to sustain a coalition government headed by the Biju Janata Dal and the BJP. The government is shrouded in saffron. As the sangh infiltrates into civic and political institutions seeking to ‘repeat’ Gujarat not many are paying attention. For the 36.7 million who reside in Orissa, Hindutva’s predatory advance aggravates and capitalises on social panic in a land haunted by inequity.
Orissa houses 5,77,775 Muslims and 6,20,000 Christians, 5.1 million Dalits from 93 caste groups, and over 7 million Adivasis from 62 tribes. Around 87 percent of Orissa’s population live in villages. Nearly half the population (47.15 percent) lives in poverty, with a very large mass of rural poor. Almost a quarter of the state’s population (24 percent) is Adivasi, of which 68.9 percent is impoverished, 66 percent illiterate and only 2 percent have completed a college education. 54.9 percent of the Dalits live in poverty. Concentrated in Cuttack, Jagasinhapur and Puri districts, 70 percent of the Muslims are poor. In March 2002, Orissa’s debt amounted to 24,000 crore rupees, more than 61 percent of the gross domestic product of the state.
In 2001-2002, the government of Orissa signed a memorandum of understanding with New Delhi to secure a structural adjustment loan of Rs. 3,000 crore from the World Bank and an aid package of Rs. 200 crore from the department for international development, the overseas development branch of the government of the United Kingdom. This is conditional assistance, laden with extensive and hazardous consequences. People’s movements protested this agreement for tied aid that supports irresponsible corporatisation and works against the self-determination of the poor.
Consecutive governments, including the present coalition, have failed to address entrenched gender and class oppressions as exploitative relations endure between the poverty-stricken and a coterie of moneylenders, government officials, police and politicians in Orissa, perpetuating displacement, land alienation, and untouchability. Floods have affected three million in 2003. Agricultural labourers are faced with serious food shortages with no alternative means for income generation. Scarcity has led to starvation deaths and people have committed suicide. Infant mortality, 236 in 1000, is the highest in the Union.
In the recent past, Rayagada district has witnessed despairing efforts to survive — the sale of children by families. In Jajpur district, a mother, a daily wage earner in a stone quarry, sold her 45-day-old child for Rs. 60 this July. These measures have not evoked reflection and commitment on the part of the State. Rather, unconscionable attempts have been made to show that such action is emblematic of Adivasi and Dalit cultures.
Systematic disregard for the human rights of ‘lower’ caste, Adivasi and Dalit peoples is a social and structural predicament. In December 2000, Rayagada witnessed state repression of Adivasi communities protesting bauxite mining by a consortium of industries in Kashipur that is detrimental to their livelihood. The industries were in breach of constitutional provisions barring the sale or lease of tribal lands without Adivasi consent. In response, state police fired on non-violent dissent, killing Abhilas Jhodia, Raghu Jhodia and Damodar Jhodia.
The absence of adequate social reform, the disasters of dominant development, economic liberalisation and corporate globalisation further antagonise already overburdened minority and disenfranchised groups, pitting them against each other. Hindutva targets the religion and culture of the disempowered as globalisation abuses their labour and livelihood resources. Such conditions produce the contexts in which marginalised peoples embrace identity-based oppositional movements.
The sangh exploits the fabric of inequity and poverty deviously to weave solidarity built on tales of a mythic Hindu past. Hindutva defames history, speaking of Muslims as the ‘fallen traitors’ among Hindus who converted to Islam. This revisionist history obfuscates the severity of inequity within Hindu society that led to conversions historically. Alternatively, Hindutva misrepresents Muslims as ‘terrorists’ and ‘foreigners’, Christians as ‘polluted’. Adivasis are falsely presented as Hindus who must be ‘reconnected’ to Hinduism through Hindutva. Dalit and lower caste people are raw material for manufacturing foot soldiers of dissension.
At the same time, caste oppression prevails in the sangh parivar’s mistreatment of Dalits in Orissa, who have been assaulted for participating in Hindu religious ceremonies. In April 2001, a Dalit community member was fined Rs. 4,000 and beaten for entering a Hindu temple in Bargarh.
Poor Muslim communities are often socially ostracised in Orissa. Cultural and religious differences are diagnosed as abnormal. A Muslim community member from Dhenkanal said, “When Hindus celebrate a puja we are expected to pay our respects and even offer contributions. For them this is an example of goodwill, of how we are accepted into their society, indeed we are no different as long as we do not act differently.”
A Muslim woman added, “Women face double discrimination, from men of our own community as well as from the outside”. Women fear the sangh will perpetrate violence on their bodies to attack the social group to which they belong.