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Journalism of Courage
At the outset in The Identity Project, The Unmaking of a Democracy, Rahul Bhatia introduces the reader to an immensely affable uncle, who, almost inexplicably, begins to spout venom in 2014. Among many of the writer’s relatives and acquaintances, anger, evidently suppressed for decades, seemed to find vitriolic expression. Arguments, he says, would time travel till they settled on the most suitable villain, the Muslim. Bhatia’s impulse for carrying out the research which has led to this rich study was, therefore, deeply intimate. Many of the characters in The Identity Project bear affinities with a section of his loved ones “who had begun to go mad” a decade ago.
This quest is likely to strike a chord with several readers – this reviewer included – who have had to mute family or school WhatsApp groups or even exit them, unable to stand the poison unleashed against minorities. Family ties have been soured in this othering project.
The Identity Project blends history and ethnography to lay out contemporary India’s poignant story. Democracy is being unmade, Bhatia shows, as people’s acrimony and the state’s discriminatory programmes feed off each other. It’s a story of citizenship laws, identification cards, neighbours turning against each other, and the interminable wait of riot victims for justice, amid a system that shows little enthusiasm to nab the guilty. It’s a search for the roots of the acrimony as well as a layered detailing of its contemporary expression. Bhatia connects the dots between the activities of the Arya Samaj, speeches of RSS and Hindu Mahasabha leaders like K B Hedgewar and B S Moonje, the trauma of the Partition violence with donation drives and campaigns for the demolition of the Babri Masjid and what goes on in shakhas today.
Most of these stories are well-known and at times The Identity Project might even seem like speaking to the converted. But Bhatia’s honesty and his keenness to understand the authors of this project in their multifarious aspects shines through the book, often leading the reader to stereotype-defying characters. The former RSS volunteer, R, for instance. Not a teenager when he joined the organisation, R’s decision was a rebellion of sorts against a leftist father who saw nothing redeemable in the RSS. In the organisation, he asked questions – uncomfortable ones about brutal military campaigns by Hindu and Buddhist rulers, destruction of Vaishnav temples by Chola emperors, the pillaging by the Maratha warriors – and found an “imaginary line” being drawn between him and the other children.
R’s account is an interesting exposition of shakha manners. “His elders answered his questions patiently and he now marvelled at how much they accommodated his questions, but also remembered that their replies did not satisfy their curiosity”. Though for R, the “answers withered under sustained questioning” it’s not difficult to imagine that a less demanding interlocutor would have been impressed by the patience of the shakha members. When a 13 – or 14 – year-old R opposed his shakha leader’s demand for donations to a Ram temple, suggesting instead a library as a more fitting tribute to the deity, the organisation did not treat him as a rebel. They began a funding drive for the library. After all, the RSS too laid great emphasis on information. R’s description of the Sangh’s indoctrination and operational apparatus, its neural network — “it carries enough reason for 99.9 per cent of the population, even though when someone challenges the limits of their knowledge, the whole thing comes apart” – is telling.
Also revealing is the account of another former member, Partha Banerjee, who had left the RSS “far behind,” and yet continues to think of it. Once outside the organisation, he wrote a critique that was so scathing that his father, Jitendra, whose loyalty to the RSS tolerated no question, was heartbroken. Partha’s account, coloured much by political disapproval, shows Jitendra as a dogmatic ideologue, and more. He wanted his son to partake in “the culture of the time”, while his “Islamophobia and racism” were also plain to see. The cost of Jitendra’s commitment to the RSS was born by his wife and children. “We ended living in poverty…But that was the RSS,” Partha told Bhatia.
The Identity Project should be read not as the making of just one kind of identity. It’s also a witness to the dogged resistance of several others. If there’s despair in R’s admission that, “we (those who do not agree with the RSS’s ways) are in such a small minority, that it does not matter in the large scheme of things,” it also bears the longing for empathy and rapprochement, echoed in the sentiments of a riot affected: “They have filled people’s heads with rumour and innuendo, so they hate each other. In the Quran, it is written that wherever you live, you should make it strong. But people don’t read. They don’t read their own books and try to understand”. Even as it details the hardening of communal identities, Bhatia’s account does not gloss over the affection people have for one another. The Identity Project ends with one Shailendra exulting over the victory of a BJP candidate in a local election. But Shailendra also adores Nisar, a Muslim. Therein, perhaps, lies hope that democracy will not be unmade.
