LK Advani has emerged as the spokesman of Hindu political India – just as Jawaharlal Nehru did in the twenties in a different sense. In a way, no two personalities can be more dissimilar in terms of their temperament. Advani’s quiet sobriety contrasts sharply with Nehru’s restlessness and impetuosity. But like Nehru, Advani is also not a rabble rouser; if Nehru argued his case, as if in a classroom, Advani argues his, as if in a law court with meticulous care, moderation and caution. He has not been guilty of a hot-headed, angry statement. It is plainly absurd to try and stick the hard-liner communalist label to him and distinguish him from Vajpayee on that account. By GIRILAL JAIN. Exclusive to The Daily.
One had to see it to believe it. Nothing like it has been witnessed in the capital ever before. The numbers were stunning in themselves; at a rough estimate three quarters of a million people came to attend it from outside the city and a similar number joined locally. But that was not the most impressive feature of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad rally last Thursday (April 4). It was the spirit of quiet discipline, indeed devotion, of the participants that distinguished it from other similar demonstrations of popular support for a cause.
The rally, as is well known, was planned long before Chandra Shekhar resigned as prime minister in early March and thus precipitated the forthcoming poll next month. Since there was no government worthy of being addressed in New Delhi, it came to be doubted whether the organisers would still regard it as worth their while to adhere to the programme and whether they would get the kind of response they had anticipated.
Several newspapers added to the confusion. They convinced themselves that the VHP’s influence was on the decline, and indeed that the BJP had begun to distance itself from the VHP because its leaders, especially Atal Bihari Vajpayee, supposedly felt that they had gone too far in their support for the proposed Rama temple.
Thus the surprise was all the greater for those of us who live in New Delhi when an endless stream of people began pouring into the vast lawns in front of the Central Secretariat in the morning and continued pouring in till the rally was about to conclude in the afternoon. The organisers too had been extremely discreet. They had not let anyone into the secret; or perhaps no one had asked them about the response.
The star attraction at the rally was without doubt LK Advani, though it was the show of the Shankaracharyas, Sants and Swamis who dominated the dais. He has emerged as the spokesman of Hindu political India just as Jawaharlal Nehru did in the twenties in a different sense. In a way, no two personalities can be more dissimilar in terms of their temperament; Advani’s quiet sobriety contrasts sharply with Nehru’s restlessness and impetuosity.
But, like Nehru, Advani is also not a rabble rouser; if Nehru argued his case, as if in a class-room, Advani argues his, as if in a law court with meticulous care, moderation and caution. He has not been guilty of a hot-headed, angry statement in memory. It is plainly absurd to try and stick the hard-liner communalist label to him and distinguish him from Vajpayee on that account.
The status he has acquired in the popular imagination should suffice to clinch the issue. No narrow-minded bigot can command the kind of respect and following he does for the simple reason that Hinduism does not admit of fanaticism. Bigotry and fanaticism are wholly alien to the spirit of Hinduism, though it is only natural that Hindus should seek to defend and reaffirm their heritage and themselves through the use of symbols such as Ram, Krishna and Shiva, once they have recovered sufficiently from their earlier decline and defeats.
Two inferences follow. First, no one who does not represent in essence and substance the undying and limitless catholicity of Hinduism, can be the leader of Hindus. Secondly, the kind of leader who commended himself to them in the first period of their recovery, beginning in the nineteenth century, can get their enthusiastic support in the new context of the steady progress of that recovery.
That would explain partly the difference between Advani and Nehru. Nehru, unlike Advani, was, of course, greatly influenced by dominant Western concepts such as secularism and socialism, on the one hand, and Mahatma Gandhi’s abhorrence of violence, on the other; this must inevitably produce a sharp difference in the approaches and responses of the two men.
But it must also be remembered that while Nehru grew up and arrived on the political scene when India lay prostrate, emaciated by almost universal poverty and dominated by hopelessness, despair and fatalism, Advani has shot into prominence in the wake of repeated demonstrations of our ability to cope with difficult challenges in various fields – the tripling and more of food production, banishment of starvation and famines, military victory over Pakistan in 1971, acquisition of an independent missile and nuclear weapons capability on our own and involvement of the poorest in the political process, for instance.
It is not my case that we are over the hump. On the contrary, right now we confront grim problems such as the enormous trade deficit, growing indebtedness to, and dependence, on foreign agencies, terrorist violence in Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir and Assam, sharp decline in the standard of public morality and political instability. But Hindus do not feel overwhelmed by the odds as they were before independence and they are not looking for a saviour as they have done in the past. Advani is a leader and not a would-be redeemer.
It would have stretched imagination to the breaking point if someone had called Nehru either the last British viceroy, or the last Moghul emperor, of a combination of the two, in 1946-47. But in course of time after independence he came to be so seen and not without some justice. This was as much a testimony to India’s strange capacity for continuity amidst violent upheavals as to Nehru’s ancestry and personality.
Similarly, I would run the risk of being laughed out of court if I were to say that Advani not VP Singh or Chandra Shekhar is Nehru’s only possible successor in the new context. But the proposition will not look as ridiculous as it would on a surface view if we probe a little deeper. I shall make only a couple of points in the piece.
First, in view of the collapse of communism not only as a political and economic system but also as a new secular faith, whatever that widely used formulation might mean, it cannot be seriously disputed that the Nehruvian framework, inspired as it was by the concepts of secularism, socialism and non-alignment, has exhausted its beneficial potentialities. It cannot possibly serve as the basis of a new national consensus and progress.
Secondly, just as a rival order grew up under the shadow of the Raj in decline, partly in cooperation with it partly in conflict with it, under the auspices of the Indian National Congress, a new dispensation is ready to replace the Congress-supervised one under the auspices of the BJP. The British could not possibly be succeeded by their lackeys; the Congress cannot be succeeded by its offshoots. Those who swear by secularism and socialism are disqualified today as were the Brown Sahibs in 1947. Change was accompanied by continuity then; that story is being repeated right before us if only we have the eyes to see.
Thirdly, India’s dominant and desperate need in 1947 was bread, social justice and, of course, political freedom. Nehru summed up these aspirations. India’s urgent search now is for self-renewal and self-affirmation, in the civilisational sense. Only the BJP recognises the practical implication of this yearning and Advani has articulated it better than anyone else, though, as in Nehru’s case, the groundwork has been done by many others – the VHP and RSS leaders and cadres in this case.
When a historic change of this magnitude takes place, intellectual confusion is generally unavoidable. The human mind, as a rule, trails behind events; it is not capable of anticipating them. But it should be possible to cut through the mass of confusion and get to the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter is that if India’s vast spiritual (psychic in modern parlance) energies, largely dormant for centuries, had to be tapped, Hindus had to be aroused, they could be aroused only by the use of a powerful symbol, that symbol could only be Rama, as was evident in the twenties when the Mahatma moved millions by his talk of Ramrajya; once the symbol takes hold of the popular mind, as Rama did in the twenties and as it has done now, opposition to it generally adds to its appeal.
An element of a subjectivity and voluntarism, typical of a modern Westernised mind, has got introduced in the above paragraph because that is the way I also think. In reality, time spirit (Mahakala) unfolds itself under its own auspices at its own momentum, as it were; we can either cooperate with it, or resist it at our peril. Saddam Hussein, and with him the people of Iraq, are the latest victims of the kind of resistance to the ineluctable power and logic of Mahakala.
Historians can continue to debate whether a temple in fact existed at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, whether it was in fact a Rama temple, whether it was destroyed, or whether it had collapsed on its own. Similarly, moralists and ‘secularists’ can go on arguing that it is not right to replace one place of worship by another, especially so long as the above issues have not been resolved. But that is not how history moves and civilisational issues are settled.
Pertinent is the fact that for no other site have Hindus fought so bitterly for so long with such steadfastness as over Ramjanambhoomi in Ayodhya. There is no rational explanation for it and it is futile to look for one. All that is open to us is to grasp the fact and power of this mystery.
The rally in Delhi on April 4 was part of the unfolding of that mystery, especially since 1986 when the gate of the building was opened under judicial orders. Since the Ramlalla idol was already installed there – it has been there and under worship since 1949 – the building ceased to be a mosque in 1986, even if it can be argued that it had not so ceased in 1936 when namaz was offered there for the last time. But it did not become a temple because the structure did not conform to the sacred geometry of a Hindu temple. This abnormality can only spell trouble for India. More than that I would not wish to say at the moment.
The Daily, 7 April 1991