With the rare exception of some individuals, there does not exist the slightest awareness that Muslims need the triumph of Hindutva even more desperately than Hindus. Indeed, such is the grip of the misrepresentation of Hindutva in anti-Muslim terms that its proponents, including some leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, speak of it defensively.
History knows of any number of instances when a community has needed to be protected, or liberated, from its own ‘leaders’. Germans under Hitler, Russians under Stalin, Chinese under Mao Zedong, and, more recently, Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, for example. Hitler and Hussein first let loose a reign of terror at home and broke the spirit of their own peoples before they went to war with other countries. Indeed, the war at home is central to all dictators. Stalin got an opportunity to extend his tyrannical rule to Eastern Europe only towards the end of World War II. Earlier he, like Mao later, was content with mass massacres at home, and he was about to return to that ‘sport’ at the time of his death in 1953.
To extend the argument further, while the West has doubtless celebrated the collapse of communist tyrannies in Eastern Europe, the principal beneficiaries have been the peoples of those unhappy lands. In fact, while in the West the sense of relief has already given way to the anxiety that it would have to bear much of the enormous cost of repairing the havoc communism has wrought in those countries, East Europeans have got an opportunity to reclaim their dignity both as individuals and peoples, their history and civilization, even if economic recovery is going to be a painful and prolonged affair.
On a superficial view, which some pseudo-Marxists might find convenient to espouse, communism has collapsed wholly as a result of internal decay, precipitated by the inability of a rigid bureaucratic system to cope with rapid developments in technology and the information revolution. In reality, this is at best only partially true. Communism has also collapsed because the West kept up the pressure by way of setting an example, in respect of human dignity, freedom and prosperity and competition in the military field.
In any event, it cannot be anybody’s case that communism has shown the capacity for self-reform in any country. It has had to be pushed by external factors and compulsions. Similarly, it also cannot be anybody’s case that the people under communist, or any other form of tyranny, have been in a position to overthrow hated and hateful rulers in the absence of external assistance and encouragement.
By now, the thrust of my case should be obvious. If it is not, let me state it explicitly without any equivocation. After years of reflection I am convinced that Indian Muslims – I am concerned principally with them and not Muslims elsewhere – need self-renewal, that they are incapable of engaging in this exercise unless they find themselves in a milieu which obliges them to try and overcome the inertia, produced by a frozen tradition, and resistance to change on the part of the ulema, and that the triumph of Hindutva resulting in the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra alone can create such a favourable milieu for them.
Before I proceed further, I must confess that, like other self-proclaimed ‘secular nationalists’, I too have tended to think in terms of leaving Muslims to their ghetto mentality, free to continue to stagnate in it, if they so chose, and to oppose the demand, by BJP leaders among others, for a uniform civil code. My argument has been that so large and obstinate a community cannot be pushed against its will, that any attempt to do so would aggravate existing tensions, and that such a risk should best be avoided. I have also had no reason either to believe that ‘modernizers’ in the community are anything but an utterly marginal phenomenon, or to dispute that ulema continue to represent the broad consensus in the community and be in a position to silence any voice of dissent within it. That incidentally was also why I was not strongly opposed to the scandalous piece of legislation in 1986 which denied even utterly destitute Muslim widows in danger of becoming vagrants the right to alimony from their former husbands.
Since it has taken me so long to realize that there was a way out of this dilemma, and that Hindutva offered that way out without imposing a common civil code on Muslims, I do not feel entitled to blame others for being indifferent to the consequences of stagnation for millions of fellow citizens. But I cannot help noting that our secularism has become an euphemism for callous indifference to the fate of Muslims. Rajiv Gandhi and VP Singh may woo them in their search for power. But they cannot offer them a way out of the ghetto mentality. LK Advani offers them such a way, though he too does not know the glorious implications for Muslims of his Hindutva platform and repeats the old demand for a common civil code.
A common civil code can be, indeed is, part of a nationalist platform which, on the one hand, demands that all citizens live under the same laws, and, on the other, entitles Parliament, or any other legally constituted body, to enact such laws for all citizens. But it cannot figure prominently in the Hindutva platform which, by its very nature, determined as it must be by the unlimited catholicity and broadmindedness of the civilization it espouses, seeks to influence by way of example rather than convert and impose in the manner of mere creeds and religions.
The Hindutva platform apart, however, the proponents of ‘secular nationalism’ cannot in all conscience any longer sidetrack certain questions. Since they too cannot possibly deny that Muslims, on the whole, have remained frozen in their attitudes, as illustrated by their passionate adherence to the Muslim Personal Law based on the shariat, they owe to themselves, if not to the rest of us, to explain why this remains the case after more than four decades of life under a secular political order, and what they propose to do to end this stagnation. They should not beat about the bush and indulge in tirades against Hindu ‘communalism’, or fascism, or whatever new term of abuse they can borrow from the West; for they also cannot be so ridiculous as to argue that it in any way accounts for the prevalence of ghetto mentality among Muslims.
It is common knowledge that, if anything, the revivalist sentiment among Muslims has become stronger in the past one decade or so when hundreds of millions of petro-dollars have poured in from Saudi Arabia, Libya and so on, and that the terrorist menace we now face in Kashmir is one offshoot of this revivalist-fundamentalist upsurge. For, it cannot be disputed that the Jamaat-i-Islami has whipped up an anti-India hysteria in the valley and that hundreds of madrasahs under its control, generously financed by its patrons abroad, have provided the recruiting ground for Pakistan-backed terrorists and secessionists. But I do not wish to press this argument in the present context. Right now, I am more interested in finding out if secularists, or secular nationalists, or any other variant of self-alienated Hindus can tell us how they propose to end the stagnation of Indian Muslims which the psychological and material well-being of Muslims themselves demands.
I understand from Muslim reformist activists, a rare species, that the position of poor Muslim women has deteriorated as a result of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, which Rajiv Gandhi pushed through Parliament in 1986 under pressure from ulema because it has taken away from them what little protection Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code had given them earlier. If this indeed is the case, Rajiv Gandhi (and VP Singh) needs to be asked whether he would repeal it if he was to get back to power. In fact, Advani should also define his position on this issue.
Meanwhile, a report that appeared in The Hindu, New Delhi, on March 27 deserves attention. It says that Hizb-i-Islamia, an underground outfit in Jammu and Kashmir, has warned Muslim women that stringent action would be taken against them if they do not strictly observe purdah in public after the deadline of March 31 and that bus operators have been ordered not to carry women without the burqa. The outfit attacked women who refused to comply in 1989 and would no doubt do so again. Shades of Saudi Arabia and Iran in secular and modem India! No secularist Hindu is likely to lose his sleep on such an insignificant development. But they cannot deny that this constitutes a violation of the spirit of rights conferred by the Constitution as much on Muslim women as on anyone else.
It is sheer escapism and worse (dishonesty) to talk of bride-burning or maltreatment of women among Hindus. All that is reprehensible. But laws exist and more stringent ones can be enacted to deal with such problems among Hindus. Muslim women cannot be given similar protection under the existing ‘secular’ dispensation. Moreover, no one can possibly suggest that Hindus have insulated themselves from the winds of change. On the contrary, Hindu society is being, as it were, reconstituted and there is no organised resistance to it. The BJP and the RSS are agents of change, and conscious agents at that.
Their support for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s campaign to build a Rama temple at the site tradition has hallowed as Janambhoomi (place of birth) cannot detract from this assessment. Regardless of whether they are aware of it or not, the campaign for construction of the temple is part of the movement into the future and not of a relapse into the past.
To the best of my knowledge, neither Advani nor any other BJP-VHP-RSS leader has, unlike Mahatma Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi, spoken of Ramrajya. They should not in the future either. To quote Patrizia Norelli-Bachellet, one of the most perceptive writers on Hindu civilisation and much more, “Time moves on. Ram was the 7th Avatar. His mission was fulfilled many hundred years ago – nay thousands, in the 7th Manifestation. Therefore, to speak of or fight for a ‘Ram Rajya’ is a contradiction in terms. It can never come to pass… But the Time Spirit may use the symbol to awaken sleeping energies. This has indeed transpired…”
To modify her statement a little without doing violence to it, the Ayodhya issue is a rallying point; it has served to awaken energies dormant for the past 2000 years; it has helped focus attention on the most vital feature of Hinduism: the line of Ten Avatars; it has served to vitalize the Hindu spirit and soul weighed down by the thick layers cast upon it by invading ideologies far removed from its own truth-core; this has instilled the courage needed to cast these crusts aside definitively. “But it cannot be the finality, the goal. It is merely a tool…’
She uses ‘may’ and ‘may be’ and is therefore more tentative than I have been. I cannot say that my more definitive assessment is justified. Only events can settle that question. But there can be no doubt that the temple is a symbol of what Hindu psyche is yearning for.
Hinduism provides for self-renewal, even if Hindus as such have not been able to make effective use of the built-in mechanism for change for centuries. The Siddha tradition is as old as Hinduism; Goraknath to whom we attribute the Tantric tradition was himself the 84th and last in the line of master Siddhas. All in the line engaged in the same search for experience of Reality and Truth but everyone sought to communicate it in the spirit of the time in which he lived. The same is true of the 24 Jain Tirthankaras and 24 Buddhas. In our times we have the case of the Sikh gurus – the nine following Guru Nanak embodying the same spirit and engaging in the same search and yet communicating it in different forms.
Hinduism provides for the ultimate Truth but not for a final and last statement of that Truth. So we cannot have either the son of God, or the last messenger of God, or the final revelation. Indeed, in our civilisation, when we project a Nayak, we also project a priti-Nayak, the Nayak’s opposite. Such a civilisation just cannot admit of revivalism.
Sunday Mail, 31 March 1991