The Deep State | Christophe Jaffrelot Interview

To complete 100 years for any organisation is a great achievement. In the mid-1920s, when the RSS was formed, there were many European movements of the same kind. None of them has survived. So, you have something very special there, very specific.

You can explain this resilience by pointing out that this movement has always been very cautious, very prudent. They have not taken risks under the British. They did not take part in the freedom movement. Even after Independence, they tried to remain below the radar. They made promises, they made concessions, they made friends among the ruling Congress party. Remember the letters that (Madhukar) Deoras wrote to Indira Gandhi during the Emergency saying, please let us be legal again and we'll support you. Their priority is to continue to expand, to survive.

They have the ability to penetrate society. This organisation is not power-oriented. Political power, or to capture power, is not their priority. The priority is to capture society. This is what makes them resilient, because they penetrate society gradually, slowly, persistently. They have done that by developing the shakha network. You now have probably 70,000-80,000 shakhas and up-shakhas across the country. Beyond that, they have started offshoot unions—the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a student union; the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the labour union and the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), the peasant union. They have gradually started to penetrate different milieus, different social milieus and different socioeconomic milieus.

The Rashtra Sevika Samiti was a very traditional organisation where women were seen as mothers. They were supposed to stay at home and do what a good spouse and a good mother are supposed to do. Parallelly, the RSS has also developed the Durga Vahini, which added one dimension to their gender policy. They made it legitimate for women to be in the street, to demonstrate, to fight. So, yes, these variations are one of their assets. They adapt according to the generation and the age of their target groups in order to prosper and absorb, or at least reach out.

I would say that these vigilante groups, including Bajrang Dal, are very much rooted in society now. They make sure that Muslims will not try to and succeed in buying a flat in mixed neighbourhoods. They'll make sure that Muslim boys do not marry Hindu girls. They will patrol the highways to ensure Muslim farmers are not taking cows to the slaughterhouse. In other words, they are exerting cultural policing on society. This is very important because even if the BJP loses power in 2029, that will remain. You can't get rid of these groups easily.

How will you tell the vigilantes you're not supposed to protect the cow the way you do? No one will dare to do it. So, this is why the sangh parivar needs to be seen as, what I call, a deeper state. It goes very deep. It will be very difficult to undo what they have achieved on that front. In fact, in some states that the Congress conquered, like Karnataka, they are not undoing some of the things that the BJP has done before, which is, to my mind, a symptom of this point of no return.

The RSS has been very effective because of the role of religion in Indian society. In a secularised society, it’s much more difficult to keep people adhering to an ethnonationalist agenda that does not deliver socioeconomically. What have Indians earned from the RSS in socioeconomic terms? Nothing. It's not an instrument of development, or modernisation or industrialisation. But it is a movement that brings together Hindus. When you believe in Hinduism, when you think that Hinduism is your religion, that it needs to be respected and promoted, you may mistake Hindutva for Hinduism. They have succeeded in making people believe that their version of religion—Hindutva—is Hinduism and they have mobilised people on this. The most successful movement has been the Ayodhya movement that peaked in 1992, with the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, and then in January 2024, with the inauguration of the temple. That would not have happened had secularisation made dense inroads in Indian society.  

This resilience and progress can be seen as a success story. They, however, have divided India like never before on religious grounds. The Hindu-Muslim relations, even the Indo-Christian relations, have probably never been so bad. Then you have another division between the north and the south because of their promotion of Hindi and also their resentment vis-a-vis the very successful economic policies of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. And now, they're also dividing, to some extent, South Asia because India has hardly ever been that isolated in its region if you look at history. So, they have succeeded so far as their own agenda was concerned, but the cost of this success is very high.

Hindutva is an ideology that was codified by Savarkar in 1923. And this ideology is not true to Hinduism. Because, if you read Savarkar, you realise that for him, Hindus are people. Hindus are not believers of Hinduism. Hindus are the people in whose veins runs the blood of their ancestors, of their Vedic fathers. He uses the word jati (race) all the time. So, race is the number one criterion.

The number two criterion is territory. You believe in your matrubhumi because it’s a secret site. It’s a punyabhoomi and a sacred territory. These indeed are the two ingredients of Zionism. You go back to your sacred territory as the descendants of people; religion does not matter that much. To go to the temple is not so important. This is exactly what Savarkar said and did. He was not a temple goer. Many of them are not temple goers. So, this is why Hindutva and Hinduism differ.

They have been trying to attract non-savarans; people who could be seen as low caste, even Dalits. That’s something Deoras was very particular about. In some ways, he criticised, at least implicitly, what M.S. Golavalkar and even Deendayal Upadyaya had said before in the 50s and 60s. Because for these two ideologues, the varn vyavastha was the model, a kind of organic vision of hierarchy, of hierarchical society. Now, the discourse has changed since Deoras. How far it has resulted in concrete achievements remains to be seen.

You have a few pracharaks coming from the lower castes. When you read the autobiographies of Dalits who have been in the RSS, like Meghwanshi’s autobiography, you realise that the stigma of untouchability remains very strong in the shakas. They may be together, but they will not eat together.

When you have low caste swayam sevaks, most of the time they are there for sanskritisation and they are sanskritised. There is no pride in what we could call popular Hinduism. The cults have to be Brahminical, the style has to be Brahminical. The deities, the gods and goddesses you worship, have to be part of the tradition. And this is why some of the Dalits and OBC swayam sevaks go to the shakhas, to get prestige, to get recognition, to join this movement, to be a good Hindu. That’s one of the reasons why it will be very difficult for them to attract Dalits in large numbers.

Caste is a social institution that is the most complicated one to handle. There are two repertoires and they are in competition. They are very difficult to reconcile. The RSS can try hard to continue to play on religion and persuade the Dalits that they are Hindu first, but it will be very difficult to make them acceptable to other swayam sevaks. And it may not be sufficient because some Dalits believe in Ambedkar. And if there is one thinker who was completely at odds with the RSS, it’s Ambedkar. He was at odds to such an extent that he left Hinduism precisely because he thought that caste hierarchies were inherent in Hinduism. So, caste will remain a challenge, especially when socioeconomic questions will come back. Socioeconomic issue like joblessness among youth, inequalities, the crisis in agriculture, decline of manufacturing are bound to bounce back. Caste is only one of its dimensions.

We have had two repertoires in competition in India's politics for 50 years. It started in Gujarat. It started with (Madhavsinh) Solanki, the KHAM (Koli, Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) coalition, reservations in 1985 and, of course, it continued with Mandal. The rise of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) was what the RSS and its supporters feared the most because it meant a kind of silent revolution. You dislodge from positions of power the elite groups who have been in control for centuries. What could be the antidote? Hindutva was the antidote because they could say, castes are not your main enemy because you're a Hindu. The main enemy are the Muslims. And that's what they did in the 1985 riot in Gujarat when Narendra Modi was the pran pracharak and the sangatan mantri of the BJP. That's what they did with the Rath Yatra in 1990 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

At the same time, this caste-based repertoire remained, especially because inequalities have increased massively. India is the most unequal country in the world today. So, to fall back on the caste repertoire is what the Opposition had to do and did. Asking for a caste census. Brilliant. Let's see how unequal this society has become. How represented in the corridors of power, to use VP Singh’s phrase, are today the OBCs? A demand like that one is very difficult to resist. How can you say no, no, we don't want to know. Caste doesn't exist. How can you say that in Bihar or elsewhere? Especially when Mohan Bhagwat himself has said that caste is a problem. Well, if caste is a problem, let's measure it. Let's see how deep this problem is.

At the end of the day, they had to accept a caste census. And for me, this is not only a victory for the Opposition, but it may well be the turning point. Because the moment you open this Pandara Box again, all the cast groups will say, why not me? Why am I so low in the representation among the IAS, the IPS, the IFS, and among all the public sector employees? The public sector is shrinking because you have the economically weaker sections getting a 10 per cent quota. So, for many reasons, the discourse will shift and it will not be on Hindu versus Muslim only, but on upper caste versus lower caste again. And that may well be the main theme of the 2029 elections.

The Gujarat model is a repeat response to the reservations policy. You see elite groups shifting to the BJP to protect their interest, the Patels shifting from the Congress to the BJP.

Economically, the Gujarat model is connected to big money, to big capital. Crony capitalism is a major ingredient of the Gujarat model, which goes with the third component, that is, the populist leader. You have to resist the lower caste. You have to make progress economically by getting more land, more advantages, more SEZs. These elite groups need someone to achieve this miracle and the man has to have the right ideology. Hindutva is the perfect ideology because it transcends caste and it transcends classes, social classes. So, the third Ingredient of this is Narendra Modi inventing a style nobody had referred to before in the BJP. Advani did it somewhat with the Rath Yatra. But he was in tandem with Vajpayee. He could not be alone. And you need to be alone. You need to be the leader. You need one leader because you need a personality cult.

When you look at the 2002, 2007 and 2012 election campaigns in Gujarat, they are the launchpad for what we see today. Modi could saturate the public space with his discourse and image. But he could do that even more effectively because he could say, I am from the people and create the myth of the chaiwala, of the OBC leader who has climbed the ladder without any help, without any reservation. The self-made man par excellence. The upper caste, elite, middle class love that. You don't need reservations. Look, he could do it.

This myth was made popular because of this use of solid resources, financial resources and because they could buy opposition leaders as well. If there is one party where everyone, every man, has a price, it is Congress. Especially in Gujarat. It's not so difficult to break opposition parties if you have enough financial resources. And that's what they did also to emasculate the opposition. So, the natural conclusion is you can win power that way. The next step is what do you do with power? The Gujarat model is also authoritarian. It means state capture. The first institution to capture is the police; the second is the judiciary. When you have neutralised the police and the judiciary, and the opposition has also been emasculated, that’s it. The other institution you need to capture is the education system. All the vice-chancellors of all universities in Gujarat have been changed. We could see this in MSU in Baroda, and now even in IIM Ahmedabad.

They will continue to try to Hinduise the Adivasis. They don't want to call them Adivasis, they call them vanvasis; the tribals are those who live in the forest, not those who were there before. This is what they said as early as 1953 when they created the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. But yes, they can try to continue to build Hanuman temples, but Hanuman temples don't give you food. There is a limit to this kind of brainwashing. Let's see whether it finally results in a new political consciousness among tribals.

This is very important because when you look at Savarkar, again, it's all about the past. All his books, everything is about the past. The Aryans, the antiquity, of course, Shivaji—they live in the past. This is something to sell. It is national populism. You know, nationalism is historical, history-oriented. You can't be proud of your nation if you're not be proud of your past. The problem is, what is this past telling you? This past is telling you that India has invented surgery, aeroplanes. Well, this is the recipe for obscurantism. This is the recipe for an anti-scientific mind.

How do you progress? China, for instance, is innovating constantly. India is lagging behind in terms of research and development. It now depends on China for its pharmaceutical industry, electronics or solar panels. So, to live in the past is reasonable only if you also look forward and retain your scientific assets. So, there is a big risk there. And the more you destroy universities, the more you shoot in the foot.