Religion, Recipe & RSS: Atul Kochhar’s Cauldron of Communal Curry

RSS backing Atul Kochhar: What works better than some pan-seared hate to feed their sense of victimhood!

Any opportunity to dredge food, or anything linked with it, up again and whip up a hysteria over hurt Hindu sentiments is not missed by the RSS.

Photo: Altered by Shruti Mathur/The Quint

When chef Atul Kochhar tweeted this week about Priyanka Chopra’s role in the drama series Quantico and made what he thought was a casual remark about Islam having “terrorised India for over 2000 years” – and subsequently fired by his employers at the JW Marriott Hotel in Dubai – the RSS was quick to jump to his defence.

Food is the messiest, meatiest politics in this country and has been so from inception. By which I mean ever since the partition created the modern states of India and Pakistan where the eating of beef and pork was the theatre of so much violence. Any opportunity to dredge food, or anything linked with it, up again and whip up a hysteria over hurt Hindu sentiments is not missed by the RSS.

Here's the much talked about tweet that Kochhar later deleted from his timeline and then apologised profusely for.

Problem Kya Hai?

What has Kochhar said that is objectionable – RSS spokespersons said the same on TV as did trolls online. “It’s not as if he was stating something that was not historical,” said RSS spokesperson and lawyer Raghav Awasthi on a TV debate.

He added some more masala to the pot by pointing to the fact that the anchor he was speaking with – Nidhi Razdan – was Kashmiri Hindu. Awasthi said this as a means of calling out to other presumed angry Kashmiri Pandits who have had to flee the Valley during the genocide of 1989. “The depredations of Muslim invaders is very well documented. As a Kashmiri Hindu, (Nidhi) you would be aware of… and I’ll just take one example… what Sikandar Butshikan did to Kashmiri Hindus in Kashmir.”

Now the communal cauldron was properly stirred by RSS master-chefs to cater to the middle class’ frustration with the political elite. What works better than some pan-seared hate to feed their sense of victimhood!

The basic myth that forms the base for the flaky pastry is what Atul Kochhar tweeted – 2,000 years of Muslim fanaticism and terror, alleged forced conversions, the desecration of temples, and villainous creatures better suited to The Game of Thrones or Harry Potter than history.

If Islam came to India in waves from the 6th century onwards, so did Christianity and a few centuries before these two, Hinduism spread to tribal areas and non-Hindu keepers of animistic faiths.

Digging the Roots

If Muslims were all universally invaders and not people who settled here and made India what it is, then going back another 2000 years, the Aryans were also invaders. Either both were or neither was.

Then there is the question of the destruction of temples. Religion and state were one and the same thing. Every ruler – Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or others – used religion to establish supremacy. Historians that wrote after the 1940s, particularly after the end of the World War II, started to look at each period of time for its own peculiarities.

They understood that expecting to see secular politics at a time when the concept didn’t exist would be like faulting Gandhi for not being on Twitter.

If Aurangzeb imposed the strictest Jizyah, he also built more temples in Bengal, for instance, than any other Mughal ruler. He had to keep his subjects happy. There was no mass-media and he couldn’t even get to most places he ruled over. So, he did the next best thing – build more temples. And destroy some for strategic reasons.

The Religion Recipe

The most widely regarded and one of the most prolific historians on medieval India, Richard Eaton explains this the best possible way. With particular reference to Hindutva-cookbooks, Eaton said that South Asian history cannot be written...

“as if they were dishes prepared according to recipes in a cookbook authored by some unidentified Master Chef…People don’t always follow normative recipes, often preferring to concoct their own religious traditions. Or, they might disagree over which recipe is “right”. Indeed, they might not even be aware of the existence of a recipe.”

Richard Eaton in the <i>Journal of Asian Studies</i> – essay called <i>Rethinking Religious Divides, Volume 73, Issue 2, May 2014</i>

In concrete terms, the period of “terrorising Islamic rule” that chef Atul Kochhar tweeted about falls apart when you look at actual examples of the time. Consider the fascinating story of Shitab Khan, the Bahamani king who snatched power away from the Tughlaqs in the south, in the Telugu speaking kingdom of Warangal in 1504, described in verse by a Brahmin poet in his Sanskritic avatar as Sitapa Khan or Chittappa Khan, that Eaton points out can be seen inscribed in pink granite in the Warangal fort.

Pulao-Biryani Families

This story is by no means an exception. The conversion to Islam by millions of Indians took place not over a few years but a few hundred years. There are records for those who care to look, of surnames of families, especially in Punjab and Bengal - where the partition happened.

Many families had one child take an Islamic or Arabic name and the other - a Sanskritic or Hindu name. The pre-modern world in India was one where religion and politics was the same thing and it was perhaps astute of parents to appease the Mughals and Marathas, the Bahamani and Vijaynagar kings at the same time.

Much like people today with one sibling in the Congress, the other in the BJP. Ravi Shankar Prasad is a BJP leader and also currently the Union Minister for Law and Justice. His sister Anurradha Prasad is married to Rajeev Shukla of the Congress party. The sons of the freedom fighter and long-time Congress party leader Lal Bahadur Shastri are also in two separate parties – Sunil Shastri is in the BJP, Anil is with the Congress.

Going Back to the Cook Book

It's time to return to the example thrown up by the TV debate over Atul Kochhar’s tweet. What about the persecution of Kashmiri Hindus in the 1400s, by the evil Sultan Sikandar, called Sikandar Butshikan by the RSS – the word means iconoclast – the destroyer of idols. There is an interesting take on this on a website called Lost Kashmir History.

Whatever the veracity of the site, one question cannot be ignored. “Even if Sikandar in his zeal for his own religion, transgressed the limits of moderation…what happened before he was born?” The site quotes Chinese travellers at the time – Ou-K’ong who came to Kashmir in the year 759. He had read Sanskrit texts about 300 Buddhist monasteries in the area but couldn’t find them on the ground. Were they erased, he asked.

Many historians have spoken of how the Persian rulers that entered India in the medieval period actually copy-pasted the methods of their predecessors. Much like the RSS claims Modi and the BJP is doing now. Every time the question of bigotry comes up or of violence against Muslims, they say – but what about the Congress’s transgressions.

The RSS spokesperson brought it up this week predictably, over the sacking of Atul Kochhar. Why are people offended and where is his right to free speech, RSS’s Raghav Awasthi asked. Where was free speech with the Congress government banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses? In asking this, the RSS made a point that actually backfires when projected back.

If they say they have merely borrowed the concoction of mixing religion with politics that the Congress has always practiced, then how can they not see that the Mughal rulers did the same?

As recipes go, the RSS master-chefs may need to look at the flat-pastry type history they are re-creating and ask themselves how many more times they can offer up the same dish before people get bored. Once hate is served up medium-rare and its consumers’ bellies are full, they are going to want to go back to the drawing board and ask some uncomfortable questions. And look for their grandmother’s cookbook spattered with this, that, and the other.

(Revati Laul is an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Delhi. She tweets@revatilaul. This is a personal account. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)