All political ‘faiths’ have foundational texts, holy cows; between its leaders and followers there exists a common vocabulary of signs. What is perhaps unsynchronised is when these texts, signs and symbols, or books, poetry and music, may suddenly flip a switch, in a setting already worked on for communal unrest, to turn murderous. Journalist Kunal Purohit came across such an incident one Ram Navami night in Gumla, Jharkhand, in 2019. It is the night, as he says in H-Pop The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (HarperCollins), this book was born. Through three people and their journeys, Purohit shows how a song, a poem, or a YouTube lecture is part of the daily drip and “supply of everyday communalism”, as potent as hate-filled political speeches, each reinforcing the other. Edited excerpts of a conversation with the author:
What made you select Kavi Singh, Sandeep Deo and Kamal Agney as case studies? Were reach and actual commitment to Hindutva the criteria?
Since 2019, as I travelled across the country, I could see, especially in semi-rural and rural areas, how art was mixing with Hindutva seamlessly to create a Hinduva pop culture, through books, music and poetry. The online Hindutva ecosystem has often been the subject of investigative reporting, but what has escaped attention are the ‘offline’ activities of this ecosystem and the real-world consequences they inflict. One strong strand of commonality that attracted me to all three was that their work had a clear sphere of influence beyond the online world: through concerts in Kavi’s case, kavi sammelans in Kamal’s or through publishing of books and the planned establishment of arms- and Veda-training clinics by Sandeep.
Your beats as a journalist have been a mix of development, gender, socio-cultural and their intersections. What made you feel that the subject of pop stars tied to Hindutva needed investigating?
For five years now, I have been focussing on reporting and understanding religion-based hate crimes. A question kept gnawing at me: how could decades-old friends, neighbours and acquaintances turn against each other and assault or even kill the other in the name of religion? We often mistake these hate crimes to be ‘events’, or sudden outbursts of anger and violence. Lying underneath them is a process of slow radicalisation that leads up to that one moment of brute violence. Hindutva pop culture is one crucial way to achieve this everyday radicalisation, through the consumption of a seemingly benign pop culture. You could be tapping your feet to a catchy tune that threatens to obliterate Muslims, or chuckle at poetry that mocks the suffering of Afghani Muslims by insisting that India has many Talibans within it. You are being radicalised while you are being entertained. What can be more potent than that?
Kunal PurohitWas it a challenge to make Kavi, Sandeep and Kamal open up to you? What is their response to your book? They were all very intrigued by my approach, especially since they had seldom been featured in any English-media news coverage before. I give them full credit for showing faith in me when I said that I would tell their stories sincerely, without any judgment. Of course, I would fact-check them and not merely provide a passive platform to what could, arguably, be construed as hate speech. But I was certain that this book had to be as unmediated as possible, an exercise in listening to and understanding the world they were creating and inhabiting, and the reasons behind their doing so. There is an urgent need to understand and engage with the most dominant political ideology of the day. This book is an attempt to throw light on the fears and aspirations of those who are at the forefront of this cultural war that Hindu nationalists believe they are engaged in, even as I hope to make people more cognizant of propaganda disguised as pop culture. Kamal seems satisfied with the book, Sandeep not so much and Kavi is yet to read it.
For the 2024 elections, what are their plans?
All three find themselves at very pivotal points in their lives, facing the 2024 general elections. All of them will be taking different paths to get there, but they will, eventually, be pushing the Hindutva agenda further through their work in the next few months.
Do you think that at some level Kavi, Sandeep and Kamal are the way they are because they have been failed by more than 60 years of India’s liberal project? Ramesh, Kavi’s mentor, began by being a Congress supporter and a Rajiv Gandhi fan and Sandeep was an SP follower…. How exactly did they make the switch where the BJP came to be the natural option and not the social-justice parties and ideologies they may have begun with?
That is a very interesting question. I wouldn’t necessarily say they were failed, but I definitely underline how their lived realities present the limits of our post-colonial dominant secular discourse. If significant portions of our population can relate to their rhetoric that secularism has come to mean an ‘appeasement’ of minorities at their expense, then it surely demonstrates the limits of our secular politics in, at best, communicating its ideals, and at worst, delivering the goods. What it does, surely, point to is a larger failure of the liberal discourse in engaging meaningfully with anyone who does not share the liberal point of view.
As a result, liberalism and secularism have come to be viewed, in the Hindu right-wing ecosystem, as concepts of the elite. It was fascinating to note how some of my characters felt belittled by and shunned from liberal spaces each time they expressed their beliefs or their fears around their Hindu identities. Such shunning only further reiterated for them the notion that secular liberals will seldom engage with anyone who holds differing opinions. This needs to change. More than ever before, we need to now understand what we are up against, if we are to counter it.
