Niraja Gopal Jayal is a professor at the Center for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the author of several books on Indian democracy, including Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History.From her interview with Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker:
Has the rise of the Hindu right, especially over the past couple of decades, made you think differently about the design of the Indian constitution and Indian democracy? Or do you think that any democratic system is vulnerable?--Marshal Zeringue
This is not something that came up only in the last fifteen years. The Hindu-right ideology has been there since the nineteen-twenties. It has never been the dominant strand of political ideology until recently. The Ayodhya movement was really the starting point of the B.J.P.’s growth and its emergence as a strong alternative to the mainstream parties. In the thirties, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar [a leader of the Hindu-nationalist movement] enunciated the idea of the two-nation theory—that Hindus and Muslims are actually two nations—even before the Muslim League [which pushed for the creation of Pakistan] took it up. Today, everyone identifies the two-nation theory with [Pakistan’s founding father] Muhammad Ali Jinnah, but actually it was Savarkar who first articulated the two-nation theory.
In a sense, the ruling party now actually avows that perspective. It does believe that this is the unfinished business of Partition. They do have a certain adherence to the idea that this is the national homeland of Hindus, and everybody else is a second-class citizen, here only on sufferance. It’s an ideological strand which has been around for a long time. It has not been hegemonic for a long time. It is now hegemonic.
How much do you think that, especially in the last several decades, the weakness of the “secular” establishment, often in the form of the Congress Party, is responsible for where India is today?
I think you are...[read on]