Ramesh Tamiri

It was a unique experience to attend this year’s annual Jaipur Dialogues Meet.

I had also attended last year’s meet.

Last year the meet was spread over 2 days and sessions were conducted in only the main hall.

This year, the number of panellists was so large that the meeting was extended to three days and three sessions were held simultaneously.

The number of delegates was also twice the number of last year. Many had come from abroad and other cities of India, like Kolkatta, Patna, Kerala, Bangalore, etc. Interestingly, most of the delegates had a science background in education.

The majority of the panellists were experts in their own fields.

The themes chosen found traction with the delegates. After the session, the delegates would engage the panellists separately to get answers to their queries.

Major General Rajiv Narayan’s presentation on the evolution and how the deep state worked was an entirely new thing. Contrary to the popular notion that ‘ where there is a state there will be a deep state’, the general trashed the view that every state had a deep state. He held that the global deep state had its tentacles in every country.

Another interesting presentation made by Pranik Kanungoo was on how to deal with madrassa education and ensure that modern education was made accessible to all Muslims.

There was no session on Kashmir but it was discussed in the context of cross-border terrorism and the possible break-up of Pakistan.

There was a general consensus among panellists that:

  1. Pakistan was going to break up sooner than expected and the problem for India was how to deal with the fallout of that implosion.

2.It was held that our weakness in dealing with national security stemmed from unwillingness of the state in recognising ideological dimension of crossborder terrorism.

A delegate, who taught in an American university, confessed that he had no link with BJP-RSS in the past.He had an opportunity to read books on Indian civilisation in his university library and was shocked to learn how Nehru allegedly worked against Hindu civilisation.

Many others I interacted with here too did not have a Sangh link and had a science background. Concerns to see India emerging as a power and rooted in its civilisation drove them there.

This is what some scholars have started calling NEO-HINDUTVA.

NEO-HINDUTVA is not concerned with cultural nationalism as espoused by Sangh Parivar and has a view on state that does not strictly conform to BJP-RSS view.

NEO-HINDUTVA specifically is concerned with 3 things-

1.Building capacities of the state to deal with burning core issues confronting the country.

2.Recovery and enhancing of Civilisational confidence.

  1. Nation-building through integration, rejecting multi-culturalism

At a glance at times it looks that these represent many variants of Hindu nationalism.

It is not so.These different variants are basically a single world-view characterised as NEO-HINDUTVA.

Emergence of NEO-HINDUTVA is both independent as well as closely linked to BJP’s 10 years in government.

A few people blamed PM Modi for not doing enough.There has been an element of truth in this.

Many delegates had partial answers for this.They explained:

1.Though BJP was the government but the state it worked with was still controlled by Nehruvites or the ” old state”. This required both time and will in BJP to transform the state.

2.Nehruvian-Left Liberal ECOSYSTEM.It is held that though Left has been marginalised politically but it still had powerful sway over academia and media. Unless this ecosystem was changed even best intentions of the govt. would not bring desired changes.

General view was that nationalist thinking was expanding but had yet to reach a critical mass to influence a change either in the ecosystem, or the state or even in the Sangh Parivar.

That was the rich message delegates carried from this great conclave.