Why India won’t accept Hindu Rashtra!

 

 

 

 

Why India won’t accept Hindu Rashtra!

On Gandhiji’s assassination Pandit Nehru, in a chocked voice, said:  “It was one of the votaries of this demand for Hindu Rashtra who killed the greatest living Hindu.”  Nehru’s commitment to fighting communalism was put to severe test in the days immediately following the independence. But his resolve was clear from the day one. The very next day, after the independence, on 16the August, India saw her first Prime Minister proudly unfurling the Tiranga on the ramparts of the Red Fort, initiating a ritual that symbolizes Independence Day. On that solemn occasion, he issued a stern warning: “the first charge of the Government will be to establish and maintain peace and tranquility in the land and to ruthlessly suppress communal strife…It is wrong to suggest that in this country there would be the rule of a particular religion or sect”  And on 19th August, in a broadcast to the nation, he pointed to the secular democratic foundation of the nation: “Our state is not a communal state but a democratic state in which every citizen has equal rights.”

Nehru had unwavering faith in the people. He converted the first general election in late 1951 and early 1952 into a campaign against communalism, and insisted on passing the Hindu Code Bill, which was stalled by the Parliament leading to the resignation of Law Minister B.R.Ambedkar in 1951.  He traveled length and breadth of the country, covering 40,000 kilometers, and addressing some 35 million people- one-tenth of India’s population. The result was   emphatic rejection by the people of the votaries of communal politics- the Hindu Mahasabha, the Jana Sangh and the Ram Rajya Parishad, which could manage to win between them only 10 Lok Sabha seats,   in a House of 489, securing less than six per cent of the votes polled.

Vinay Sitapati, who teaches at Ashoka University, wrote an interesting piece ‘Modi: The creation of a 100-year movement’ in Sunday Hindustan Times (29/11) suggesting “the movement that created Modi, Hindu nationalism, was itself created 100 years ago” by the fundamentalist  Hindu organisations- the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha.  Ironically, the universal adult franchise-one-person-one-vote-  and the first-past-post  system actually helped them to focus on creating a Hindu ‘vote-bank’ that could dominate elections. Today little more than one-third Hindus are able to propel the right wing party into power. This was exactly the fear Jinnah had expressed that in independent India, the majority Hindu community would dominate electoral politics, reducing the minority Muslim community to second class citizens. The calculation of Modi’s political opponents that social coalitions of Dalits(16%),Tribals(8%) ,Other Backward Classes(42%) and  Muslims(15%) would isolate the upper-castes (less than 20%) ,who they consider the hidden hand behind the BJP’s electoral surge, proved wrong, with a sizable section of Dalits and OBCs voting for the saffron party.  

It looks the Hindu extremist organisations have succeeded in persuading the Hindus to vote as one religious group, and creating a Hindu-Muslim divide. That the Modi government is attempting to establish a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, notwithstanding the secular constitution, is evident from the following actions:

• ·     Turning Hinduism into Hindutva  political ideology;
•        Polarizing Hindus against Muslims;
•        Communal rhetoric at election campaigns; 
•        Cow Vigilantism;
•        The Triple Talaq law;
•        Abolition of special status of J&K-& and its bifurcation into Union Territories;
•        The NRC & the CAA; 
•         Ram Temple at Ayodhya; and
•         Anti “love-jihad ‘legislations

Shashi Tharoor, author of the book ‘Why I am a Hindu’- an authentic work on Hinduism-says Hindutva is not Hinduism. To him, “Hindutuva as an ideology seeks to establish the hegemony of Hndus, Hindu values and the Hindu way of life in the political arrangements of India...by replacing hatred for the British with hatred for a minority...”  Pavan Varma, an authority on Hinduism, argues:”the way BJP and RSS, which claim to be pro-_Hindu, are allowing their agenda to be consistently hijacked by ignorant bigotry which is an affront to all right thinking Hindus…the problem with the ultra-Hindu right is that its aggression is in inverse proportion to its knowledge. These self-anointed guardians of Hinduism are trying to make it run on Talibani diktats.”

India had been a melting pot of cultures and civilizations from the time immemorial and the world looked to her for inspiration. Romain Rolland said:”If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.”

Max Muller in his book India: What Can it Teach Us paid a glowing tribute to India:

“If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow —in some parts a very paradise on earth — I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention of even those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only, again I should point to India.”

Though the votaries of Hindutva ideology are emboldened under the present political dispensation to pursue the divisive communal politics, the people of India would never accept ‘Hindu Rashtra’.  No proud Indian will do anything to erode the exalted image of India, built by his ancestors, and subscribe to jingo patriotism and perverted nationalism. It is unthinkable the people in as  diverse a country as India  which gave birth to four leading religions  and where all the religions are professed and  practiced, where more than 120 languages and 1600 dialects are spoken, and where more than 4000 castes and some 25,000 sub-castes divide the people, would accept  the diktat of “one nation, one language, one culture.”They know the ‘unity in diversity’ is the only option to keep India’s unity and integrity and safeguard its freedom and democracy.

What is to be so proud about being a bigot by distorting a great religion? The real issues- hunger, poverty, backwardness, lack of jobs, atrocities against women and marginalized sections, and absence of social cohesion- would force the Indians, who are misguided, to abandon the idea of ‘Hindu Rashtra’, finding it destructive.  As Barack Obama said during his visit to India in 2015:“India will succeed so long, as it is not split among the lines of religious faith.”Why should the Indians want to revisit the two-nation theory that divided India?   

And Amartya Sen says, “Hinduism is not simply the Hindutva of Ayodhya or Gujarat; it has left all Indians a religious, philosophical, spiritual and historical legacy that gives meaning to the civilisational content of secular Indian nationalism. In building an Indian nation that takes account of the country’s true Hindu heritage, we have to return to the pluralism of the national movement.”As Tharoor observes, “while we have no illusions about past attacks on temples by Muslims raiders, we did not bring up our children to use the past to justify bigotry in the present…the common enemy lies in the forces of sectarian division that would, if unchecked, tear the country apart- or transform it into something that most self-respecting Hindus would refuse to recognize.”

The idea of ‘Hindu Rashtra’ is alien to Hinduism. The attempt to convert a multi-religious secular democracy into a ‘Hindu State ‘of majoritarianism will not succeed. We can’t spread the venom of hatred   and yet pretend to live in peace and harmony.