By M H Ahssan / INN Bureau
In response to accusations that he is anti-Hindu, Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh has come up with a long list of Hindu things he does to prove he isn’t a Hindu-phobe. Among other things, he says in his blog that his home in Guna district has nine temples, where pooja is performed every day; he is chairman of a trust that runs a Ved pathshala; he fasts on every ekadashi. “All night kirtans are held on every ekadashi at my residence….”
He says this in order to prove that being a Hindu he is the exact opposite of the Hindutva preached by the Sangh Parivar. The Parivar, for its part, sees the Congress brand of secularism as essentially intended to demean Hindus and pandering to minorities. But his post shows that he equates Hinduism with rituals more than anything else.
Then we had Union Minister of State for HRD, Shashi Tharoor, pitching in. “We did not want India to become a Hindu Pakistan as unfortunately one particular political tendency in our country wanted it to become. We are not a Hindu Pakistan,” Tharoor said. This was in the context of Narendra Modi‘s “burkha of secularism” remark.
Now hear what Sir Mark Tully, a former BBC journalist who’s made India is home, has to say in his book, No full stops in India.
India is a Hindu nation forced to wear the ugly, formless garb of Western secularism. Hindu nationalism is a backlash against this pedantic Nehruvian aspiration, the 50-year-old soulless construct that sunders religion from its natural place in Indian public life.
It is good that in the run-up to the next elections, some basic issues about the ‘idea of India’ are being raised. Unfortunately, while politicians with half-baked ideas and acumen and a vocabulary relevant only to ‘tweets’ have monopolised the debate, no attempt has been made to put the current secularism versus communalism debate in a historical context.
This writer believes that India’s civilisation is in crisis as the result of our doctored past, and our inability to abolish the menace of casteism through religious reform. By leaving caste to politicians, we have compounded our problems with caste, and society is rotting at the core.
We should start with the history of the difficult relationships between Hindus and Muslims. Riots between Hindus and Muslims have had a long history even before independence. The riots in Jabalpur city of Madhya Pradesh in 1961 were particularly savage. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was a true liberal and was distressed by the events. He was wedded to building an India that would give freedom to all and discriminate against none on the basis of caste, creed or gender. When these riots took place he himself went into the causes and the reasons for hatred between Hindus and Muslims in India. He came to a conclusion that it was the history of constant invasions and past atrocities committed by Muslims, and the memory of it reinforced by school text books, that was at the root of it all.
However, in this writer’s view, Nehru’s understanding of his own country’s history (and even geography) was deficient. He arrogated credit for Indian ‘pluralism’ to himself and the Constitution he drafted. He ignored the fact that the concept of pluralism and individual freedom was in-built in Indian civilisation. It was one of its fundamental beliefs. He never paused to consider as to how and why a Hindu majority country did not have any takers for a narrow concept of a Hindu state. Instead of giving credit where it was due, he went about systematically destroying the very philosophy that made India adopt a liberal constitution and remain a functioning democracy, while elsewhere in the third world it failed.
Nehru then gave a directive to the education department to ‘revise’ history to play down the sordid past. The Communists and Leftists enthusiastically supported him. He then handed over the entire apparatus of education to Left-leaning individuals. The Left had its own agenda and believed that it must first ‘deconstruct’ India before it could build its Marxist Utopia. The whole government apparatus went systematically on a sustained campaign to deny, distort, and ridicule India’s cultural, philosophical and scientific heritage. Thousands of years of history were dismissed in a few paragraphs while the authors went on to glorify the British and the Nehru family.
Located amidst states of South Asia like Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which are at various stages of being ‘failed states’, India is thought to be the only stabilising factor. Yet unknown to most is the fact that the Indian state and its society are rapidly rotting at the core.
Our political structure was borrowed from Britain with its two-party system. It failed to work in the Indian setting, with the sub-continent’s diversity and multiplicity of parties. In most Indian elections, voting has not exceeded 60 percent and the winning candidate often secures less than 40 percent of the polled votes. Winning parties often have vote shares of a bare 24 percent of the total electorate, voting and non-voting. This, combined with the apathy of the middle class and the majority Hindus, means that well organised minorities have begun to wield disproportionate influence on the state.
While India, in the last decades of the 20th century and in the early 21st century, was making great strides in economic development, the core of its society was being slowly eaten away by the cancer of corruption – not just material (which was rampant), but moral too. The soul of India was being systematically destroyed.
India’s fundamental belief system stresses the individual and his free choice in matters of faith. This resulted in an ‘atomised’ society, which had no corporate existence. Social cohesion was destroyed by the caste system based on birth. The only field of activity that had a unifying force was politics, as Gandhi showed with his extraordinary mobilisation of the masses for the freedom movement. But post-independence, politics revolved around dividing society in ever-increasing caste groups; all vying for concessions and job quotas. Towards the end of the last century India has begun to resemble African nations like Rwanda and Burundi, with a resurrected tribalism.
One must realise that Indians in the 21st century are still prisoners of a doctored past, a past that was shaped to serve the ends of the ruling clique. Our politicians have gone about dividing society in a manner that put even the British imperialists to shame.
As George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “But where did that knowledge of past exist. And if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past” ran the party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”.
One of the dominant philosophical world-views in India is that objects and thoughts or ideas in the universe can be divided into three Gunas, or attributes; Sat (moral and righteous), Raj (material) and Tam (literally meaning darkness, but pointing to the undesirable attributes of aggression, violence and other animal instincts). These are not water-tight categories – every individual and all living beings are said to have these three attributes in varying degrees. Thus the reality of the world is never black or white but complex. This is at the base of celebrated Indian tolerance.
Tolerance has a wider connotation. Every living being, in the Hindu view, has a soul that is divine; God is not something external, but a part of us all. We have 330 million Gods, was an old saying, when Indians (who had a great head for numbers) thought that number to be the figure of living species. To a Hindu, all life, not just human life, is divine. Since divinity is all-pervading and universal, Indian philosophers have always accepted that there can be several paths to the realisation of God or the ultimate truth. Thus diversity in religious belief is accepted by Hindus as normal and natural, and not merely tolerated. From this basic acceptance of diversity springs the ‘tolerance’ that Indians seem to have in such abundance.
Indians accept that the main function of the state is to uphold Dharma, which in this context is defined not as religion, but one’s duty in life. This is in direct contrast with the Western view that sees the state as a necessity to control and regulate the competition between men. In the Indian view, contentment is the ultimate goal that leads to happiness. In the materialist concept of the West, constant progress is the goal. There is no room for self-satisfaction and constant striving for bigger, better, and deadlier is rational. It is possibly this factor of rationality that saw the West emerge dominant in the world from the 16th century onwards. In philosophical terms the Western goal is conquest of nature. Human existence is thus a constant struggle either with nature or with other human beings. In contrast to this, the Eastern ideal is coexistence with nature. Once the conflict model is adopted, then violence either against nature or another of the species is inevitable.
The ‘old’ world civilisations of India and China face a dilemma. While the people have given up the old concept of Dharma, or the goal of contentment, society is still suffering from a hangover of the past. If Indians desire the fruits of ‘progress’, then the next logical step is to accept the Western view of rationality and also structures of state. A society then has to be ready to deal with conflict and violence. This basic issue has ramifications for both internal as well and external relations. It is an Indian’s inability to see this clearly that is at the root of current intellectual confusion that makes Indian leaders and society unprepared to face the challenges to unity.
Hindus of India face a cruel dilemma: how to counter intolerance without being intolerant? A dilemma being faced by the West today is similar when it counters militant—and sometimes violent—Islam. It is not that Indians lacked a model. In the 17th century, Shivaji the Great in Maharashtra successfully fought intolerance and the political domination of Islam while scrupulously respecting religious Islam. His army had several Muslims at very responsible positions (The Admiral of his fleet, for instance, was Daulat Khan), who remained loyal to him in this fight. But Shivaji, the Great, was an embarrassment and any mention of his struggle is politically incorrect today. This has something to do with the fact that the bulk of the Indian population in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal (the very areas where the Islamic revolution was stronger) had no tradition of resistance to oppression and felt uneasy at the thought of their own past. Shivaji was inconvenient and was to be ignored as an aberration.
It is easy to blame the British or Islam for all our ills, but ‘casteism’ is the greatest curse of Hinduism. Unfortunately, all the efforts at eradicating this evil from Hindu society have been the work of ‘modernists’ or reformers. The religious hierarchy has remained aloof from it. Mere laws or social reforms could not change the status of the lower caste people. What was needed was a religious revolution, which never happened. The problem was that in a ‘unorganised’ faith like Hinduism, there is no way one can issue a Papal Bull to end retrograde practices. Such a society is vulnerable when faced with an organised enemy who knew its goals.
India and its civilisation are endangered not by any external force but by Indians themselves. Towards the end of the 20th century, India resembled a candle that was burning at both ends. The single biggest factor in this dilemma is the self- hatred of Hindu intellectuals, who percolated this to the masses. No one feels that they have any stake in the survival of the faith, society or the nation. Hinduism is secular to the core, in the sense that it has no single prophet, unified dogma or concept of being a chosen race. Its basic tenets accept all prophets and all faiths and stress on the ultimate unity.
What this gave Hindus was a fundamental right to choose their own paths of life, salvation and duty. This led to cultural relativism and a multilingual society. But as Dharma degenerated, the relativism was carried to the moral/ethical field, giving rise to the all-pervasive ‘chalta hai’ (anything goes) philosophy of life. In a fundamental sense, the death of India is inevitable once this virus of amorality caught on and the country becomes a vast ethical slum, wallowing in moral squalor. The corruption, treachery, betrayal and cowardice that took place in the past were all by-products of this basic malady. Militant ideologies will merely kick a door that was already rotten to the core.
