The term “fundamentalist” derives from an episode in the history of American Protestantism. In the early 1900s a group of conservative Protestant theologians published a series of books on what they called “Christian fundamentals”, written in opposition to the liberalism that had encroached on the religious scene. As far as I know, it was liberal critics rather than proponents of these writings who first spoke of “fundamentalists”–that is, the designation had an undertone of disapproval. It still does: “Fundamentalists” are “those other guys”–reactionaries, fanatics, adherents of obsolete orthodoxies. I would prefer a less pejorative usage–to designate individuals who profess the absolutely certain truth of their particular worldview. Fundamentalists may then be religious or secular, defined not by their specific views, but rather by the manner in which these are held. Understood in this way, fundamentalists are indeed a significant phenomenon, with far-reaching political implications.
In its issue of December 20, 2014, The Economist carried a story about the ideological roots of Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India since May 2014. These roots are very strongly in Hindu fundamentalism, and an urgent question is whether the Modi government will domesticate this heritage now that it has been elected into power in the world’s largest democracy (about 20% of its population is Muslim). The ideological mentor of the Hindu right was Veer Savarkar (1883-1966), who in 1922 published an influential pamphlet entitled “Who is a Hindu?” Savarkar proposed that Hinduism is not a religion (he himself was an atheist) but a civilization deeply shaped by Hindu values, which he called hindutva: Ergo, every inhabitant of the subcontinent is a Hindu and owes allegiance to hindutva, even if he is also a believer in a non-Hindu religion. Not surprisingly, Muslims in particular were not enthusiastic about Savarkar’s proposition (before the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, Muslims were actually 25% of the population).
Savarkar created an organization, the Mahasabha, which unsuccessfully tried to compete with the Congress party for leadership of the independence movement. Congress rejected the idea of hindutva and, after independence was achieved, defined India as a secular state with Hindus enjoying the same rights as members of other religions (in sharp distinction from Pakistan, created as a state primarily for Muslims). In 1925 the Mahasabha created a paramilitary militia known by its acronym RSS (I will not parade my non-existent command of Hindi by spelling out its full name.) The RSS, not content with anti-Muslim (and, to a lesser degree, anti-Christian) violence, eventually created a political party, the BJP (another Hindi acronym), which represented the hindutva ideology, while, more or less, observing the etiquette of democracy. This gets us to Modi. He started out as an RSS cadet in his early youth. In 1985 he joined the BJP, which he came to lead and under whose banner he won election as prime minister in 2014.
The big question is to what extent Modi, elected on a platform of much-needed economic reform, will press for policies in accordance with RSS ideology. His political career is not reassuring. Its climax before this year was his having been chief minister of the state of Gujarat, where he pursued very successful growth-oriented economic policies. The big ugly spot on his career was a massacre of Muslims in 2002, while he was chief minister. He has been accused of standing by inactively while Hindu fanatics killed large numbers of Muslims. What is not disputed is that the police did very little to stop the killing. Modi never apologized for his role during these events. He did express regret about the victims in a rather unfortunate way: He said in an interview that he felt regret as he would regret the death of a puppy run over by a car which he did not drive but sat in as a passenger. (This was interpreted by some commentators as implying that the death of a Muslim is the same as the death of a dog. Of course that was not exactly what he said–he was saying that he didn’t do it–but, to say the least, it was an offensive analogy). Since he was elected as prime minister, Modi has made some conciliatory gestures toward Muslim citizens and even toward Pakistan. High hopes have been invested in his economic policies finally pushing India toward its enormous potential. By all accounts, Modi is a pious Hindu. It remains to be seen to what extent his earlier ideology can be domesticated for the purpose of realizing his project for Indian greatness.
Recep Erdogan was elected president of Turkey in 2014; he was prime minister from 2003 to 2014. Erdogan’s political party has been the AKP (an acronym for its Turkish name–I will not spell it out here–my incompetence in Turkish is about the same as that in Hindi). The AKP has been commonly described as “moderate Islamist”, which is (as of now, still) fairly correct . (Curiously, the two men have something else in common besides having long been in bed with religious fundamentalists: Turkey under Erdogan has been successful economically, as Gujerat has been under Modi.) Moderate or not, the election of an Islamist party to run the government was widely seen as an end of the Kemalist era, which began with the establishment of a secular republic by Kemal Ataturk in 1923. In the beginning there were high hopes, in Turkey and internationally, for what was soon called the “Turkish model”–a regime that was Islamic and democratic, friendly to the West and with a thriving capitalist economy. The AKP affirmed its acceptance of the secular character of the state. As some of its spokesmen said at the time, “We want to be good Muslims in a secular republic”. This sounded good, especially as the disastrous consequences of the “Arab Spring” unfolded all over the Middle East. Some measures revoking anti-Muslim policies of the Kemalist regime (such as the prohibitions of headscarves in public places) could be plausibly presented as fostering democratization, as did the sharp reduction of the power of the military (which had been a bastion of secularism). Turkey, long a member of NATO, started preliminary talks about joining the European Union.
More recently things began to change. The Islamist credentials of the AKP were more conspiculously displayed. A rival “moderate Islamist” movement, the one led by Fethulah Gulen, was charged in court with conspiracy. Domestically, the AKP government became more authoritarian, interfering with the judicial system and jailing journalists. But, so far, the fears of radical Islamization were not realized. The changes in foreign policy were much more far-reaching. One could say that Erdogan showed little signs of wanting to imitate Saudi Arabia; he did show an ambition to become Suleiman the Magnificent. Turkey began to throw its weight around in the region. It showed sympathy for radical Islamist movements in the Arab world. Its interest in joining the EU flagged (partly, I think, because many Europeans were not enthusiastic about Turkish membership). Turkey developed a strongly anti-Israeli policy, culminating in the launching of a flotilla to break the blockade of Gaza, after which Erdogan publicly insulted Israeli president Shimon Peres as a killer at an international meeting. While condemning the atrocities committed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Turkey has been very reluctant to join in the U.S.-led military campaign to fight it. The most shocking expression of this reluctance was the failure to come to the aid of Kobani, a Kurdish town in Syria very close to the Turkish border. It was under siege by ISIS forces, who would surely stage one of their genocidal massacres if they took the town. The Turkish military had deployed a strong contingent of troops on the border, which could easily have broken the siege; instead they just sat there, watching the desperate battle from nearby. Turkey saw ISIS as less of a threat than the Kurdish nationalists. (One is reminded of the Soviet army which stopped its advance into Poland toward the end of World War II, and sat inactively while the Germans eradicated the Warsaw Uprising. That had been undertaken under by Polish Home Army, which adhered to the exile government in London, which the Soviets saw as an obstacle to their plan to set up a Communist regime in Poland.)
Every case is different. India is not Turkey. Modi is not Erdogan. [I’m not sure that I’d want to spend a sociable evening with either one.] Yet some more general lessons are suggested by these two cases. Both have to do with the domestication of fundamentalism, attempted or failed. Right now the two men seem to be going in opposite directions, though this could change. Both the BJP and the AKP started out as populist rebellions against secular elites, respectively personified by Nehru and Ataturk (the latter was more ideologically secular). The AKP, with its Islamist position, was more openly religious (though not fundamentalist); the BJP was pushed toward the Hindu fundamentalists by its conservative constituency, and by defining itself against Congress. One lesson is that violent fundamentalism can occur within any religious tradition, not just in the monotheistic ones (as Hindus like to tell us, as incidentally also do Buddhists–naked holy men in Gujerat have encouraged the murder of Muslims, as saffron-garbed monks have in Myanmar).
But there is a broader lesson: If you have secularist projects in a country with strongly religious demographics, beware of democracy! The Kemalist elite in Turkey is still struggling to come to terms with this (the Congress party had Gandhi in his loincloth reminding its English-educated leadership that there was a gulf between the sophisticated club world and most of India). This lesson is quite relevant for the United States—has the religiously tone-deaf Obama administration finally gotten this?
Then there is the truism, which nevertheless is true: Democracy depends on compromise. The current deadlock in Washington is caused by the clash of two fundamentalisms, neither of which is basically religious or secularist (though there are both religious and secularist undertones). Progressive fundamentalism seems to be firmly in control of the Democratic Party, though the Tory Party is no less fundamentalist (overlapping though not identical with religious fundamentalism. As an authentic representative of moderate Massachusetts Republicanism told me the other day: “We have to get rid of our kooks, the Democrats have to get rid of theirs”.
