So riots have materialised on a massive scale, as if to reinforce the case of those who argue that the central issue in the current elections is the fight against “communalism”. Meanwhile, all kinds of rumours have been circulating in connection with the riots. A great deal is being made in certain quarters of the fact that the riots have taken place in recent weeks and months only in Congress-ruled states. But I do not regard the so-called circumstantial evidence as proof “beyond reasonable doubt”, and, therefore, do not intend to take note of the rumours.
The talk of fighting communalism is no more than a euphemism for eliminating the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indeed, the Congress and the two Communist parties do not even resort to this euphemism; they proclaim themselves to be champions of “secular democracy” and “secular nationalism” and condemn the BJP as a veritable embodiment of the “communal” threat to the country’s integrity. The two Communist parties have been even louder in their protestations, perhaps because they cannot, in terms of their ideology, claim to be either nationalists or democrats. After all, throughout their existence, they have sworn by “proletarian internationalism”; and the stronger of the two, the CPI-M, has not even accepted Gorbachev’s reformist programme since, by and large, its leaders remain frozen in the Stalinist mould.
For the sake of form, the opponents of the BJP make an occasional reference to “Muslim communalism” so that they can rebut the charge of being “anti-Hindu”. The undivided Communist Party of India (CPI), it is hardly necessary to recall, went so far as to favour the Muslim League’s demand for partition in the name of “right of self-determination” as formulated by Stalin. Neither the memory of this record nor the explosion of revelations regarding the destruction of non-Russian peoples and cultures in the Soviet Union and the consequent threats to its very survival has persuaded communist leaders to be modest in their self-praise and condemnation of others.
In Nehru’s own case, his background doubtless influenced this approach to the Hindu-Muslim problem not only before partition but also after partition. As it happened, this approach fitted neatly into both his vision of modern India and his realpolitik. The two again dovetailed neatly into each other.
In plain terms, Nehru wanted to build modern, that is Westernised, India on the Kemal Ataturk model, though he was no Ataturk (ruthless and despotic) and the Hindus were no Turks who needed to be dragged into modernity by the scruff of their neck. On the contrary, the process of “modernisation”, beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy in the 1830s, had progressed among them to a point where even Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest Indian of our times, had for all practical purposes little choice but to fall in line with it.
Yet it was useful for Nehru to have the advantage of assured Muslim support in this enterprise to be able to checkmate any possible challenge to him and his programme from among the Hindus even after the death of Sardar Patel in December 1950. He was eminently successful in winning this support by assuring Muslims security and thereby eliminating the possibility of serious challenge to his leadership of India and his vision of future India.
That was the logic of electoral politics in the given situation in India. The Muslims and the Harijans between them have provided the Congress almost 50 per cent of its total vote in election after election with the exception of 1977 when the party suffered a humiliating defeat precisely on account of the withdrawal of Muslim support.
In the context of the trauma of partition and the slaughter that preceded it and accompanied it, it was not particularly surprising that millions of Muslims transferred their loyalties to the arch opponent of the two-nation theory which they had so enthusiastically embraced up to August 14, 1947. Even so, it is notable that a community so fiercely attached to its religion- based way of life, became an effective instrument for the advancement of “secular nationalism” and has remained so ever since.
There was an inevitable corollary to it – continued adherence to the theory of Hindu communalism as a long-term proposition. Here again Nehru was remarkably successful in keeping alive this bogey. The demonology still works especially among the “brown sahibs” who have otherwise nothing but contempt for Nehru’s foreign and economic policies.
A whole army of “engineers of the human soul” (Stalin’s infamous phrase) has been engaged in the enterprise of defaming tradition (Hindu more than Muslim perhaps because the Muslims are quick to take offence) and of first creating and then demolishing a new Ravana in the shape of “Hindu communalism”. This army is still active. But it is a little demoralised. A real monster the shape of an immoral state apparatus has arisen and the engineers of the soul realise, even if still rather vaguely, that this multi-headed rakshasa has to be contained if it is not to devour the country and them with it. But this is a separate object which I shall deal with in coming weeks. Today I shall limit myself to the Hindu-Muslim problem.
Millions of words have been written on the subject and it would seem presumptuous on my part to claim to bring new light to bear on it. But I must confess that the more I have examined this problem over the years the more I have become convinced that the discussion has invariably been dominated by the twin concepts of race and nationality (based on ethnic and linguistic unity) which are fundamentally alien, and indeed antagonistic, to both the Hindu and the Muslim way of thinking, and that this has confused the issue so thoroughly that it is virtually impossible to put it in its proper perspective.
The issue, as I see it, is basically not religious and therefore not communal. There is nothing in Islam, including its iconoclasm and the concept of Jihad, which cannot be generally validated in terms of some ancient Indian tradition. Hinduism cannot similarly be accommodated within the narrow confines of Islam but that cannot be a big enough source of a sustained conflict.
I for one have argued again and again that the Hindus are not a community in the accepted sense of the term and cannot therefore be guilty of communalism occasional explosions of anger on their part notwithstanding. I have not extended this approach to the Muslims, partly because I have accepted their own claim that their acknowledgement of the final prophethood of Muhammad and adherence to the Quran and the Shariat make them a unique community and partly because they do demonstrate a much greater capacity for united action than the Hindus. But the proven incapacity of the Muslims in West Asia to unite in the face of a mortal danger and the experience of Pakistan should persuade us to re-examine the problem. The Islamic republic is plagued by worse ethnic problems than India.
The issue of Hindu-Muslim relations is civilisational, and it is precisely because the Hindus have not been seen as a civilisation that attempts to define them have failed. I would wish to underscore this point heavily because, in my view, it offers the clue to the understanding of the Hindus as well as the Hindu-Muslim problem. The Hindus constitute a variegated, rich and complex civilisation and not what are called a religion and a way of life. Both these are Western or West-inspired definitions of the of Hindus.
For the present I cannot do justice to the subject, and have, therefore, no choice but to request the reader to assume with me that a great and universal civilisation existed a long time ago; that geological changes of a cataclysmic nature overwhelmed it in large parts of the Eurasian-African continent; that this civilisation, it would appear, was centred on what is now north India and Central Asia; that there is evidence of its revival as the last ice-age retreated between the eleventh and the ninth millennium BC; that outside of India, only fragments of the primordial civilisation have survived; that this civilisation, once it revived in India in the shape of Jainism, Vedism, Brahmanism, and Buddhism, sought to resume its universal character; that it extended to Korea and Japan in the far east and the Mediterranean in the West; and that this spread was finally checked and reversed by the rise and expansion of Islam in the 11th century on land and in the sixteenth in the Indian Ocean. That civilisation has since been confined to India and it has been on the defensive, especially in the last 200 years of Western dominance.
The impact on Islam and the consequent shape of Islam in India, had it finally triumphed, can only be a matter of speculation, for the fact is that it did not triumph. It could only disrupt the unity of the Hindu fabric, particularly in north India; it could not supplant it. Indeed one has only to read Mujeeb’s The Indian Muslims, Asim Roy’s The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal and Rafiuddin Ahmed’s The Bengal Muslims (1871-1906) to recognise the possibility that, but for the arrival of the British, Islam could have become an integral constituent of the larger Indian civilisation. The British rule also closed the possibility of a truly Indian renaissance. What passes for the Bengal or Indian renaissance under British auspices was a form of surrender, the consequences of which are still with us.
Broadly speaking, two laws operate in relation to civilisational contacts and conflicts. First, no civilisation, however “rudimentary” and “primitive” according to the modern way of thinking, ever disappears; it can at worst only be submerged; and what is submerged must resurface, though in a distorted form. The history of Christianity in the last 2000 years bears witness to this fact. Second, one of the contesting civilisations must prevail, though, of course, not fully without absorbing elements from the vanquished rival.
But the two laws can be frustrated by the intervention of a third civilisation which then seeks to impose itself on both. This is exactly what has happened in India. The Hindu-Muslim relationship is one of stalemate and both are victims of the Western onslaught which, if anything, has gathered momentum since independence in 1947. The stalemate has survived partition and that is one reason both feel insecure and occasionally turn on each other in distrust, frustration and anger without much provocation.
In civilisational terms, the top Congress leadership and the Communists have represented the West-derived blueprint; indeed, all their anti-western rhetoric and radicalism notwithstanding, the Communists, in ideological terms, have been the cutting edge of the Western civilisational thrust. It is not an accident that they are far more relentless in their anti-BJP hate campaign than the Congress. This in itself is a recommendation for the BJP, whatever its weaknesses. I for one cannot imagine how a communist can face himself after the rash of exposures of the Soviet leaderships’ criminal record, much less read lectures to others in humanism and liberalism.
The BJP does not possess a blueprint for an Indian India. But no one else has produced such a blueprint either. In any event, what we need above all else and what is all that is within our grasp is a new orientation rooted in our culture. A revolution can start if only we begin to discuss Indian problems in terms of Indian traditions, values and behaviour patterns. The Mahatma tried to develop such an approach but his priorities had of necessity to be different – the abolition of untouchability and political freedom, for instance. The circumstances now may be a little more propitious and hopefully the BJP may one day be able to offer the possibility of such a value orientation.
The moral and ideological bankruptcy of Communism is patent. The non-Communist West retains its glamour; and its resources, particularly intellectual resources, remain phenomenal; indeed, they continue to expand. But there is an emptiness at the heart of it all which, after four decades of supreme and unprecedented self-confidence, is beginning once again to cause concern to sensitive westerners. They can be our allies if we become conscious of our own inheritance.
India’s cultural autonomy, through poorly formulated, has been the central issue of Indian politics since the early seventies and it is the central issue in the current elections.
Sunday Mail, 5 November 1989