Hindutva's Islamic echo

Mr Peer's book shows that the parallels between two leaders are striking

Less than a fortnight after an imam mounted the pulpit of the Hagia Sophia to deliver the Friday khutba after a gap of 86 years, a bhoomi pujan was conducted in India on the ruins of a four-centuries-old mosque to consecrate the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, ending a seven-decade controversy. Some 5,000 km separate Istanbul and Ayodhya, but the political impulses linking the two events couldn’t have been closer. 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former prime minister who engineered his rise to a dictatorial presidency in 2014, attended in suit, tie and mask (but no cap), at the July 24 prayers accompanied by the sonorous Quranic litany in classical Arabic, which most Turks cannot understand. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who harbours similar presidential ambitions, went one better. Dressed in priestly garments, he presided over a ceremony that was so overtly political that many orthodox Hindu priests took umbrage.

Muslims are the Enemy Within for Mr Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party but he would have instantly recognised Mr Erdogan’s Islamic brand of politics. A muscular religious nationalism harking back to a supposedly glorious past underpins their quest for absolute power in the multi-cultural nations they lead. Mr Modi is pursuing his version of Ram rajya  located in the mists of pre-Islamic and -Christian  itihasa. By reviving the brief Islamic past of a monument that was the centre of Orthodox Christianity and entered the modern era as a museum, Mr Erdogan seeks to align himself with Sultan Mehmet II, who defeated the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI in 1453, to consolidate a powerful Islamic empire.

These parallel ceremonies offered an opportunity to re-read Basharat Peer’s book A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen  published by Columbia Global Reports. Mr Peer, an opinion editor with the New York Times , wrote this book in 2017, long before these developments. It was, nevertheless, prescient in spotting the roughly similar trajectories of politics in both countries. 

Turkey and India, Mr Peer writes in the Prologue, “are large democracies, which grew out of the collapse of empires, and which were led by charismatic founding fathers inclined towards varying degrees of European modernity. They are also multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies where religion and secularism are among the dominant faultlines. … [Now] India and Turkey are being ruled by strongmen who are business-friendly politicians, men from humble origins, who came of age in traditions of controversial religious politics,” he writes in the Prologue.  He could have added that both are extremely popular, too. 

Much water has flowed through the Bosphorus and the Ganga since 2017, not least in Mr Peer’s home state of Jammu & Kashmir, but A Question of Order retains its relevance as a cautionary tale (or rather two)  of the cult of “illiberal democracy,” to use Fareed Zakaria’s term, which is gaining traction globally. 

The book follows both leaders’ political trajectories in separate sections. Much of this narrative is familiar, but set side by side and strengthened by careful reportage is certainly thought-provoking. Both leaders’ anti-secular instincts stem from notions of religious victimhood. Hindutva has a complex origin, bound up in imperial divide-and-rule policies and the politics of the freedom struggle that morphed  into an imagined history of oppression under Islamic rule in modern India and exacerbated by cynical vote-bank politics by the Congress. It is a persuasive narrative in a populous country jostling for scarce jobs and where living standards for most are poor. When a highly trained IT professional whom Mr Peer interviews earnestly reveals his pride in the claim that Vedic Indians knew all about plastic surgery, the basis of Mr Modi’s popularity becomes clear. 

Turkey’s Islamic revivalism, on the other hand, has its roots in the aggressive secularism of Kemal Ataturk which, among other proscriptions on religious practice, banned the headscarf in public places and workplaces. Mr Peer begins his account of Turkey with a description of how newly elected MP Merve Safa Kavakci from the AKP party (which Erdogan later came to dominate) was hounded from parliament by MPs of the ruling party before she could take her oath for wearing a headscarf. The outlawing of religion in public life and Turkey’s tumultuous politics after Ataturk’s death in 1938, including military coups and economic stagnation, eventually opened the door for the kind of dogma that helped Mr Erdogan to power.

Mr Peer’s book shows that the parallels between the two leaders are striking — there are too many to recount in this space — though it should be said that Mr Erdogan’s popularity also grew thanks to a decade of economic expansion (since dissipated) in his early years. Mr Modi is yet to demonstrate economic success. But Mr Erdogan has gone further down the road to illiberalism, and in some respects offers a vision of India’s potential future. 

A Question of Order was to be published in India soon after the US launch but never was. Initially, the problem was the representation of a truncated map of India, that irritating error that US publishers persist in making. After that: A loud silence. A Kindle edition was available then. 

Now, the book is unavailable in all formats on the Amazon’s Indian site. No surprise there.

Pandemic Perusing is an occasional column on books and reading by our writers and reviewers