Mr Dileep Padgaonkar, editor of The Times of India, is not alone in wanting to use the Republic Day for “collective atonement for crimes we have committed, especially against people whose only fault, if it can be called that, is to practise a faith which does not fit into a particular definition of culture and nationalism” (Sunday Times of India, January 17). He is in excellent and large company. Many other Hindu intellectuals if they permit the use of the adjective, feel similarly ashamed over what has happened on December 6 last when the Babri structure was demolished in Ayodhya and since.
Many of them are convinced that the Republic is in danger of being overwhelmed. The BJP, the RSS, the VHP and the Shiv Sena are, of course, identifiable as threats to the Republic. But behind them, or beyond them, looms an even more ominous force. A headline in the Sunday section of a New Delhi daily tells us: “The lumpens have arrived.”
My knowledge of Marxist-Communist vocabulary is rather limited. The Oxford concise dictionary does not help either. It does not even list “lumpen” as a separate word. So I can only go by the use to which the word has been put since it came into vogue during the Emergency, along with other similar expressions like “inner party democracy” from the same source. Then Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s followers alone were called goons and lumpens. Now the list is longer.
My main concern is, however, different. It is the wide gap between the Hindu elite’s perception and the Hindu reality. The perception is that Hindus are peaceful, if not non-violent in the Gandhian sense. The reality is that while they may be slow to be provoked, once provoked, Hindus can be as violent as anyone else. To call them communal or lumpen is to evade the issue. And it is precisely because so many of us have engaged in this kind of escapism that we are shocked every time Hindus take to violence. I was as innocent of the gap between perception and reality as fellow members of the fraternity up to 1947 when I saw ordinary Hindus belonging to what is called the middle class engage in killing and looting. They had been provoked by Partition and much else beginning with the “great killings” in Calcutta.
This is not to deny that Hindus tend to think and act defensively. They react rather than act. Why this is so is a complex matter. To tell you how complex, I quote two examples. In an attempt to find a Freudian explanation, Philip Spratt has written that Hindus are masochistic while many other people are sadistic. More recently an American scholar, Ronald Inden, has written that western orientalism has “produced in India the very orient it constructed in its discourse. I doubt very much, for example, if Gandhi’s concept of non-violence would have played the central role it did in Indian nationalism had it not been singled out long ago as the defining trait of the Hindu character.” Of course, quite wrongly in his view.
Others have misjudged Hindus perhaps because they take the utterances of some leading Hindus seriously. Mr Jinnah was one such individual. Mr Kissinger told us on the occasion of the police action in Goa that liberal Americans were shocked at the use of force by Gandhi’s India. Islamabad almost certainly did not take Indira Gandhi at her word in 1971. Many other instances can be quoted.
Hindus are great practitioners of the theory of division of labour. That is in fact what the varnashrama and the caste system have been about. So, some preach, some fight, some trade, raise crops and cattle and others make all that possible through service. They have also not been known to be unduly burdened with “conscience” and guilt complex, as Christian missionaries discovered long ago. Gandhiji can be said to have been the only known Hindu to have wrestled with himself in the tradition of Judaism and Christianity.
The current use of the age-old theory of division of labour is, of course, not a deliberate attempt at deception. But it can be highly deceptive. Indeed, it has been so even currently. May I add this is analysis and not advocacy.
Economic Times, 22 January 1992