Indian politics has clearly taken a historic turn. For the first time, the issue of an Indian nationalism rooted in Hindu civilisation has been firmly put at the centre of the country’s political agenda. That is the true significance of the salience that the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid controversy has acquired in the determination of the outcome of the struggle for power.
Obviously, neither the attempt to root Indian nationalism in Hindu civilisation, nor the Mandir-Masjid controversy is new. The first can be traced back to Bankim Chatterjee and Swami Vivekanand in the 19th century and, above all, to Sri Aurobindo,who fleshed out the concept in a remarkable series of articles in the early part of the century. And as for the Mandir-Masjid dispute, it goes back to the 16th century itself when the mosque is said to have been built. But the two have come together for the first time since 1986, with consequences which are still barely visible.
The story of how this combination has come about is highly complex and cannot possibly be discussed in this space. This is also not the occasion to engage in such an attempt. In the present context, it will suffice to note that though the Ram Janambhoomi issue figured prominently in the 1989 poll and accounted to no small extent for the defeat of the Congress in North India and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s remarkable performance, it was submerged in the overall anti-Rajiv Gandhi platform on the Bofors payoff issue. The proponents of the Ram temple – the BJP backed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS – fought the election not on their own but as part of a coalition which was led by V.P. Singh and not by L.K. Advani. Thus, this is the first time a major political party is contesting a general election, principally on the Janambhoomi platform.
I have little doubt that the BJP will do well in the forthcoming poll. But that is in the future. Right now, my central contention is that Indian politics is polarised, not on the issues of personality and ideology, as it has been since Independence, but on that of the temple and that the process cannot be reversed.
On the face of it, we are witnessing a triangular contest between the BJP, the Congress and the National Front-Left combine, the last posing a serious challenge not only to the first but also to the second on the strength of its commitment to the Mandal fabrication. Indeed, no one can deny the importance of Mandal in determining the outcome of the election. But Mandal does not represent a break with the past. Reservations on caste basis are a fact of life in South India and Maharashtra and no party is opposed to it in principle. Moreover, the Janata Dal is an offshoot of the Congress and belongs essentially to what is called the Congress culture.
It will not be quite correct to say that the conflict between the Congress and the Janata Dal continues to be the result of a clash of personalities which it was, to begin with in 1987. Larger issues now form this clash but mainly because Rajiv Gandhi is still not prepared to risk fragmentation of Hindu society to the same extent as V.P. Singh is. As such, the Congress and the Janata Dal can come together in some form if Rajiv Gandhi or V.P, Singh or both get discredited as the result of the outcome of the forthcoming election.
It also needs to be noted that though the Nehruvian consensus has become irrelevant with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and demonstrations of the disasters of centralised planning, the Janata Dal and its Leftist allies, backed by much of the westernised intelligentsia, are as keen to preserve it as the Congress. They too swear by the same slogans – socialism, secularism and non-alignment and woo the same segments of the electorate as the express. The Raja has, of course, felt no need to reinterpret the Nehru framework since he is not weighed down by considerations of national good and need for order. But he comes from the same political stable as Rajiv Gandhi.
The same is true of the CPM and CPI. Indeed, but for the ‘complication’ of the Congress being the CPM’s principal rival in its strongholds of West Bengal and Kerala, and for their distrust of Rajiv Gandhi, they could as well have been aligned with the Congress instead of the Janata Dal.
The BJP alone, among major national parties, is not an offshoot of the Congress. The RSS leadership founded the Jana Sangh to serve as its political platform. As such, it was anathema to Nehru, as no other party ever was, not even the Swatantra, for the obvious reason that while the Swatantra challenged only his economic and foreign policy approach, the Jana Sangh hit at the very core of his being and philosophy of life; for it espoused the primacy of Hindu civilisation and Hindus in India and disputed his syncretist view of Indian civilisation.
This is, of course, common knowledge. What is not equally well recognised is that at one stage the Jana Sangh too was willing to be accommodated within the Nehruvian consensus, though, of course, not under the auspices of the Congress, which auspices were, in any case, not available to it, as they were to other parties. Even the CPI had friends and allies in the Congress. But not the Jana Sangh.
The Jana Sangh leadership toyed with the concepts of ‘Gandhian’ socialism, whatever it might mean, and humanism, as if the conceptual armoury of Sanatan Dharma needed to be replenished by such borrowings from the West. It supported the JP movement, as if Jayaprakash Narayan too was not a product of the Nehruvian framework, unable to come out of it on the critical issue of the primacy of Hindu civilisation and Hindus in the refashioning of modem India. Finally, it agreed to merge into an amorphous Janata Party which was different from the Congress mainly in the sense that it did not possess a leadership capable of holding it together.
In recalling all this, I am not insensitive to the fact that it is not easy for a political outfit to defy the atmosphere in which it operates, that Jana Sangh leaders have not been alone in believing that Gandhiji offers an alternative to Nehru and that many others saw a promise in the anti-Congressism Indira Gandhi’s personality and the emergency had provoked. My intention is to draw attention to the possibility that if it were not for Madhu Limaye and Raj Narain who broke up the Janata Party and thus obliged the Jana Sangh to revive itself, an independent Hindu platform could have been lost.
The bitter experience of 1977-79 ensured that the BJP would never again be willing to lose its identity and merge into another anti-Congress alliance. As it happened, the merger issue did not figure in the attempt to forge an anti-Rajiv platform in 1989. But the notable point is that, once again, the BJP leadership did all it could to ensure the survival of the non-Congress government. Once again, one of its allies, this time V.P. Singh, forced it to strike out on its own.
The Raja’s decision to Mandalise India, without any reference to it, put the BJP leadership in an embarrassing position. Even so, if hundreds of thousands of students all over North India had not reacted violently and a number of boys and girls had not committed, or tried to commit, self-immolation, the BJP leadership would in all probability have sought to preserve the alliance. Only the turn of events left L.K. Advani no choice but to embark on his rath yatra over the Mandir issue and thereby to precipitate the fall of the V.P. Singh government.
To appreciate the significance of the sequence of events as they have unfolded, a few additional points may be made. The VHP had fixed October 30 last as the date for starting the construction of the temple; the BJP leaders would have found it extremely difficult to secure its postponement as they had managed previously in February. V.P. Singh could not have got round the obstacles, put in the path of any agreement by Mulayam Singh Yadav, even if he had been interested. He might not have gone in for Mandal if he had anticipated the reaction of the students. He could possibly have retrieved the situation if he was not the callous and obstinate man he is, and had sought genuinely to assuage the students’ bitter anger and frustration. Mulayam Singh Yadav was also not a free agent as he was in competition with the Raja for the Maulana title. He over-reached himself in his hostility to the proposed Mandir. But he is that kind of man.
This brief resume of events should suffice to establish that there is a pattern and the pattern is pointing towards an objective. The Congress had to be defeated in 1989 if the BJP was to emerge as a reckonable factor in Indian politics. The BJP had to be forced to break the arrangement with the Janata Dal on the Mandir issue if its independence of other denizens of the old dying world was to be meaningful.
The V.P. Singh government should have fallen on the Mandal issue. Instead, it fell on the Mandir issue. V.P. Singh desperately looked for a way to avoid the break with the BJP and went so far as to issue an ordinance which Advani and Vajpayee could welcome. But his nerve failed and he allowed Muslim fundamentalists to overrule him. Advani did not wish to break the alliance with V.P. Singh but was left with no option by the turn of events. If there is one actor in this drama who can legitimately claim, or be said, to have been a free agent, I would like to know his name.
This is not fatalism; it is willingness to recognise that we are being pushed in a particular direction by forces beyond our control. One can welcome it, as I do, or one can bemoan it, as many of my peers do. The reality cannot be denied.
Only on a superficial view resulting from a lack of appreciation of the history of modern India, beginning with Raja Rammohun Roy in the early 19th century, can the rise of the Janambhoomi issue to its present prominence be said to be the result of a series of ‘accidents’, the sudden appearance of the Ramlalla idol in the structure in 1949 and the opening of its gate under the Faizabad magistrate’s orders in 1986 being the most important. As in all such cases, these developments have helped bring out and reinforce something that was already growing – the 200-year-old movement for self-renewal and self-affirmation by Hindus. If this was not so, ‘accidents’ in question would have petered out.
Similarly, while it cannot be denied that the RSS, VHP and BJP have played a major role in mobilising support for the cause of the temple, it should also be noted that they could not have achieved the success they have, if the general atmosphere was not propitious and the time not ripe. Indeed, not to speak of Gandhiji who aroused and mobilised Hindus as no one had before him, fought the Christian missionary assault, and successfully resisted the British imperialist designs to divide Harijans from Hindu society, it would be unfair to deny Nehru’s and Indira Gandhi’s contributions as well to the Hindu resurgence we witness today. A civilisational revival, it may be pointed out, is a gradual, complex and many-sided affair.
Again, only on a superficial view is it possible to see developments in India in isolation from developments in the larger world. Nehru’s worldview, for instance, was deeply influenced by the socialist theories sweeping Europe in the wake of World War I and the Soviet revolution in 1917; by the same token this worldview, which has dominated our thinking for well over six decades, could not but become irrelevant in view of the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the disarray in the Soviet Union itself. This cannot be seriously disputed even on rational grounds. But if it is a mere coincidence that the Janambhoomi issue has gathered support precisely in this period of the disintegration of Soviet power abroad and decline of the Nehruvian consensus at home, it is an interesting one. And now we have witnessed the humiliating defeat of Saddam Hussein, the best armed exponent ever of Arab ‘nationalism’, which obviously is not unconnected with the plight of the Soviet Union.
Sunday Mail, 24 March 1991