ABSTRACT
Maharashtra’s politics has long been contested by varying ideas to include religion in the political space. Hindu Mahasabha leader V. D. Savarkar coined the term Hindutva for the establishment of a brute majoritarian state. A parallel discourse on majoritarian religion and culture as a nation was propagated by M. S. Golwalkar, who was successor to the founder and head of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Keshav Hedgewar. These two streams faced ideological opposition from differing ideologies which restricted use of religion for electoral purposes. The Marxist stream of thought, apart from mobilizing and organizing workers and landless labourers with limited success, built a strong secular narrative in the society forbidding the use of religion in politics. This narrative was popularized, albeit in a diluted form, by the Congress party as well as the socialist groups. In contrast to secular ideas against politics of religion, the Gandhian movement emphasized religiosity in politics, focusing upon character-building values from all religious texts, but mainly from the Bhagavad Gita. The third process that contested Hindutva politics was the social movement led by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar of conversion to Buddhism. The politics of religion was critiqued by bringing into the public domain a strong counternarrative of practices of oppression and exclusion in the same religion. The fourth factor temporarily constraining growth of politics of religion was a farmers’ movement led by Sharad Joshi in the 1980s. Ironically, none of the ideological streams or movements that purposely took a position against politics of religion, majoritarian polity or communalization of social spaces gained electorally in Maharashtra. The communists, the Gandhians, the Ambedkarites and the farmers’ movement remained on the fringe of electoral politics with regard to percentage of votes and number of seats in the state legislature. The social groups that have been threatened by conservative politics in the 20th century – be it minorities, Dalit, tribes or women – relied upon charismatic leadership and formidable organization of the Congress Party to defeat the politics of religion. This chapter critically analyzes the ideological roles played by different movements in Maharashtra in the latter part of the 20th century vis-à-vis religion and its use in politics.
In 21st century, the political situation has been turned on its head in the state of Maharashtra. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose national president Amit Shah had dedicated his personal website to V. D. Savarkar, emerged as the largest political outfit leaving much behind its sectarian ally Shiv Sena. It was a slow but steady process of communalizing the society through riots and reconstruction of histories in the popular domain. While the Shiv Sena pioneered the art of rioting, the BJP and its parental-paternal organizations engineered a historical narrative that delegitimized the secular history of constructing an Indian nation state. This twin onslaught resulted in a change in public discourse and a falling apart of the ideological resistance to religious majoritarian project. While the BJP successfully utilized the erstwhile Gandhian movement’s terminology of religiosity in politics to project its political rivals as enemies of the majority religion and the nation as a whole, the anti-establishment sentiments generated by the farmers’ movement were also usurped by BJP. On the other hand, the Dalit movement fell short of constructing its politics around an egalitarian Buddhist identity. Similarly, the Marxist narrative of interconnectedness between globalization driven by capitalism and communal-sectarian forces did not cut much ice with the masses. This chapter analyzes in detail the process of dominance of religious identities in electoral politics in Maharashtra, particularly the religious identity of majority community and its implications on the deprived and marginalized sections of society. The chapter also explores the emerging trends in Maharashtra’s politics in the context of emergence of the BJP as the single largest dominant force in the state.
