Gramscian
process of building up hegemony through molecular permeation. Then, in the early
and middle 1980s, came the efforts of Indira and Rajiv to play the ' Hindu card',
communalising the state apparatus on an unprecedented scale through the anti-Sikh
pogrom of 1984 and the subsequent cover-up of the guilty, and further eroding the
rule of law through rampant corruption. All this directly prepared the ground for
the Ram Janmabhoomi blitzkrieg of the Sangh Parivar, now spearheaded by the VHP.
It must not be forgotten that it was the Congress government that updated the Ramayana
epic into a pseudo-nationalist TV serial, and allowed access in 1986 to the idols
installed inside the Babri Masjid by stealth and administrative collusion in December
1949, under an earlier Congress regime. The Sangh Parivar's war of position now gave
place to a spectacularpositive intention, as the term 'instrument'
suggests, or more through accommodation to circumstances."(4) The Indian situation
is significantly different above all because of the absence of any major threat to
propertied interests from organised labour or apparently impending socialist revolution.
The scale and nature of the economic crisis is also not quite comparable. In post-Depression
Germany, Nazism arguably could have appeared to many business groups "as the
last available means of preserving the capitalist system" (5), while Fascism
in Italy had had a developmental, if anti-popular, 'passive revolution' aspect that
Gramsci realistically recognised even from within a Fascist prison. Neither feature
is particularly noticeable so far in India, where Narasimha Rao has been carrying
through wide-ranging changes in economic policy with a degree of determination and
skill conspicuously absent in his handling of Ayodhya. The Jan Sangh and the