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A critical look at VHP
Vishva Hindu Parishad
and Indian Politics
Manjari Katju, Rs. 350.00
The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a prominent member of the Sangh Parivar, is very much in the political limelight these days, thanks to its international secretary, Praveen Togadia. The extensive quotations from a series of interviews by the author Dr. Manjari Katju with the trio, Ashok Singhal, Acharya Giriraj Kishore and Togadia, as well as the other Sangh Parivar leaders for this book, would clearly reveal the VHP's transformation from a loosely knit body of the Hindus, aimed sat promoting and preserving Hindu dharma, into a mass organisation actively involved in mobilising the urban middle classes, service professionals and religious leaders for the creation of a strong Hindu nation.
The author correctly points out that the ideological moorings of the VHP can be traced to the RSS ideologue M.S.Gowalkar who firmly held that Hindus alone formed India's ancient nationhood and took umbrage at political leaders of the freedom struggle like Nehru on the question of Indian nationalism in which religious minorities too had a role.
The VHP, deriving inspiration from Gowalkar, preferred to treat all religious minorities either as "invaders" or as "guests" who had no permanent rights of nationhood in Hindu India. Naturally, the VHP played a strategic role in transforming Hindutva from just "a virtual idea into a broad, militarised and forceful social movement" with the avowed aims "to protect, to defend and preserve Hindu society from the insidiously spreading clutches of alien inimical ideologies," including Communism. The author aptly says: "the VHP set out to combine the asceticism of a sadhu with the dynamism of modern technological age in its endeavour to revitalise Hinduism."
The book under review provides a detailed historical account of the VHP, right from its first international assembly in 1966 at Prayag, which also happened to be the first World Hindu Conference, as an attempt to integrate all those who professed Hindu religion and culture. Early VHP leadership comprised "the intelligentsia, the proprietary classes, the private bourgeois besides various religious sects, some of whom had the political and class background of the Congress like Sardar Patel and K.M.Munshi, besides scholars like Dr. Karan Singh. VHP could add to its strength and widen its influence since mid-1960s at the expense of the internal conflicts of the Congress for class domination as a reaction to Nehruvian left-of-centre political and economic politics. However, the VHP's upper caste dominant leadership exploited religiosity to counter the threat of infiltration of socialist ideology into the Hindu psyche, while its founder president Swami Chinamayananda concentrated on preserving Hindu dharma among the Hindu diaspora.Dr. Manjari Katju deserves kudos for having analysed the growth and spread of the VHP and its role in Indian politics in a systematic and authentic manner through the book which is a condensed and revised version of her doctoral thesis.
K. ARAVINDAKSHAN
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