Now nearly 94, Noam Chomksy, the intellectual giant, is also a famous foe of supremacy, possibly the world’s best-known and most persistent foe. He characterizes what is happening in India as a drive to establish a “Hindu ethnocracy”. I think his phrase is a better description of the current thrust in India than any other I have recently come across, but before explaining why I think so, I should mention where and how I heard the phrase.
Hindus for Human Rights, the U.S.-based organization whose name conveys its purpose, had arranged a zoom event for recording statements by Dr. Chomsky and me on the growing number of unlawful detentions in India, including that of the gifted young scholar and activist, Umar Khalid. Fortunately, our statements were quite widely published in India. Portions of our remarks can be found here:
In his statement, Noam Chomsky spoke of “the large-scale governmental effort to dismantle India’s honourable tradition of secular democracy and to impose a Hindu ethnocracy.” A “Hindu State” (or, in Hindi, a Hindu Rashtra) is the avowed goal of influential leaders in the BJP, the party that controls India’s central government and many of its states, but the phrase says nothing about the character of such a state.
Others, critics mostly, have spoken of “a Hindu theocracy”, a goal that might seem analogous to an Islamic theocracy such as the one seen in Sunni-majority Afghanistan, or the different sort of Muslim theocracy earlier sought to be imposed on Shiite-majority Iran. But one seldom comes across a statement of theological principles that India’s “Hindu nationalists” or Hindu radicals want the Indian state to proclaim, or of Hindu religious practices they want the Indian people to implement.
A theocracy requires a theology, which is not to be found in the rhetoric of India’s Hindu nationalists. Yet what they clearly and passionately want is rule by the Hindu race. They are not saying that Hindu ideas, on which unanimity is unlikely, should rule. Their resolve is that Hindu blood must rule. For them, India’s Muslims and Christians are “foreign” unless they say they are Hindu by blood. Repeated at regular intervals, this has been the RSS line since its inception.
Moreover, while any Hindu theology would bring up awkward questions of caste and hierarchy, calls focused on “Hindu blood” can summon Hindus of all castes, including the “untouchables”. In other words, not a Hindu theocracy but a Hindu ethnocracy is what is being sought.
Honoured for original interventions in the science of the mind, Noam Chomsky long ago earned the title, “father of modern linguistics”. Scrutinizing words is a skill he has honed for seven decades. No wonder he is able to find the apt phrase.
“Blood” and “race” are words soaked in emotion. When humanity was in its infancy, it pitted tribe against tribe, race against race, blood against blood, soil against soil. But humanity grew up and found that the stranger was not necessarily a foe. Ere long, knowing the peeda or pain of the paraya or the outsider became the sign of being truly human. Time and again the “foreigner” became a friend, a brother, a rescuer, a beloved.
Humanity’s growth was expressed in art, music, words, poetry, drama, film. And also in constitutions crafted by nations as they learnt from experience.
India’s constitution expressly warns against, and protects against, dominance or inequality introduced by theology, religion, blood, caste, gender, or race. Articles 14, 15, and 16, the “equality” articles of India’s constitution, expressly disqualify and make unlawful any discrimination based on “race”, just as the articles outlaw discrimination on grounds of caste, gender or religion.
Any ethnocracy is racist. Hindu ethnocrats who demand equality for Indians in the rest of the world but want Hindu blood to be supreme in India should be reminded of their racism, not merely of their hypocrisy.