Gita as a political project

On July 7 1937, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the author of Hindutva: Who is a Hindu — the first real charter of Hindu nationalism — delivered a speech entitled ‘Ek hi dharm-pustak nahin, yeh achcha hai!’ (There is no one religious book: This is good!)

Today, more than 60 years after Savarkar, many of his legatees are going against that very sentiment. Last week the Haryana Chief Minister announced his government’s decision to introduce Bhagavad Gita lessons in schools across Haryana. In December last year, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, called for designating the Gita as a national book: the proposal implicitly legitimising the superiority of the Hindu religion above other faiths. Speaking at an event to “celebrate the 5,151 years of religious book Gita" organised by an RSS-affiliated organisation, Swaraj said “The Prime Minister has already given it (the Gita) the stature of national granth by gifting it to US President Barack Obama.” At that same event, the Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar underlined that the Gita is even above the Constitution. Taking cue, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad president Ashok Singhal soon demanded that the Prime Minister declare the Gita the national scripture. 

As one of the founders of intellectual Hindutva, Savarkar himself was keen to use the Gita in founding a Hindu Rashtra. But unlike Sushma Swaraj and others in the Sangh Parivar, Savarkar was against elevating the text to the status of a national book. Now, a general clamour has begun for explicitly making the text a part of the BJP’s political and ideological project. The Prime Minister, the sole mover of his government is maintaining silence, as usual. Meanwhile others are debating and considering the implications of putting forward a proposal like this in a multi-religious country like India: a country currently witnessing a spate of attacks on minorities in the form of riots of different scales and hate speeches, including by ministers in the Union Cabinet.

The proposal to make the Gita a national book or introduce it in schools is perceived by many as one more attempt to steer India towards a majoritarian political and cultural direction. One major strand of the discourse around the Gita has been to press the text into the service of nation building. Or, put in other words, in the creation of a Hindu Rashtra. “For Savarkar, the creation of historical knowledge that embodied key ideas from the Gita was necessary for transforming the individual and the nation. He claimed that it ultimately motivated individuals to adopt violence for the creation of Hindu India,” writes the historian Vinayak Chaturvedi in his article ‘Rethinking knowledge with Action: VD Savarkar, The Bhagavad Gita, and Histories of Warfare.’ But, Prof  Chaturvedi argues, Savarkar did not want the Gita to be treated as the sole or “monolithic” text in the building of the Hindu Rashtra. Though a seminal work, the Gita, Savarkar advised, should be read alongside other literary texts representing the various strands of thought within Hinduism.

Prof Chaturvedi points out that “Savarkar’s claim for textual pluralism was a direct response to contemporary arguments that Hindus needed to elevate the Gita to the status of the Bible in Christianity or the Koran in Islam as a way to strengthen the foundation of Hinduism in the making of modern India.” Still, despite this open-endedness, Savarkar did use the Gita to justify the use of violence against non-Hindus in India.

This argument gains particular importance in the contemporary context of a resurgent Sangh Parivar’s attempts to homogenise Hinduism, if only to facilitate its easy use in the propagation of Hindu Rashtra. According to Dhananjay Keer, Savarkar’s biographer, following his arrest by a police officer in London in 1910, Savarkar made this statement: “We are Hindus. We have read the Geeta.” In his biography Keer says that in the 1950s, Savarkar fell back on the Gita to counter the “intolerant” and “unjust” conversion attempts of Hindus by Christians.

In calling for the institution of the Gita as the national book, the BJP is not only cherry-picking specific Savarkarite interpretations that suit its cause. More importantly, it is wiping out many other significant interpretations of the book. There is a body of work around the Gita — including important contributions by Gandhi, Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghose — that helps articulate different ideas about whether the Gita’s message of disciplined warfare ought to be taken metaphorically or literally.

Tilak, for instance, exhorted Indians to take up arms and fight oppression by using the principle of karma yoga. In contrast, Gandhi wrote against reading the Gita as a text justifying violence. In his metaphysical interpretation of the Gita, Gandhi said that the physical battle in the book represented “the battlefield of the human body.” That Krishna and Arjuna represented conflicting moral tendencies in life.

In his book Evil and the Philosophy of Retribution: Modern Commentaries on the Bhagvad Gita, political scientist Sanjay Palshikar, underlined the danger of reading the Gita and leveraging it to demonise specific communities. This serves a clear political and electoral purpose. In the Gita, the concept of evil has multiple manifestations. Without reading the text in its proper context, the transposition of evil to contemporary events, is fraught with severe implications – politically and socially.

The Sangh Parivar and the BJP are deliberately ignoring a rich and complex history of debates around the Gita. In doing so, they are following a practice that has by now become familiar to everyone. Since the BJP took over the reins at the Centre, barely a day has passed without the party’s leaders and/or ministers making communal statements of some kind. When confronted, they always have the same rebuttal: that what they are invoking is not ‘Hindu’ per se but part of the ‘ethos of Indian culture and civilisation.’ Such attempts only polarise society and feed into the Sangh parivar’s political agenda. In the context of the Gita, the BJP and its allies know they cannot own up to the multiple histories of the text because doing so would undercut the ideological message that flag-bearers of Hindutva want to send.

The author is Editor dna of thought