Back to the forties

The Bharatiya Janata Party has thrown down the gauntlet. It has said openly and unashamedly that it wants to establish Hindu raj in the country. There is no ambiguity in its stance and intent. Gujarat was its laboratory for the recently instigated and well-planned communal riots to polarise the state. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has shown that it can be done. He has assured the BJP high command that they can sweep the polls if they are held quickly. One does not know yet how and where the Sangh Parivar seeks to duplicate the Gujarat pattern so as to divide the country on communal lines.

Modi has, however, set the ball rolling by scheming to dissolve the assembly and paving the ground for elections. He expects to cash in on the pandering to Hindu chauvinism or, more aptly, to the killers and looters of the minority community. Depending on the results of the polls in Gujarat, the party will decide when to go for general elections on the Hindutva plank. Somehow the party has come to believe that by refurbishing its Hindu identity it can win back voters who have turned their backs on it, as in Punjab, UP, Uttaranchal and Delhi.

It has never occurred to the party that its misgovernance was the main cause for electoral defeat. In the absence of such realisation, the BJP will go on spewing the same old venom against the Muslims, a process that the RSS initiated soon after Partition. But it came to grief at that time. Mahatma Gandhi was then living and his words that “Hindus and Muslims are my two eyes” were far more effective than the Hindu rashtra slogans of the Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS. Gandhiji’s assassination in 1948 by a Hindu fanatic was such a shock that the communalists knew they would be beaten up if they uttered even a word against Hindu-Muslim unity. India enjoyed an uninterrupted secular atmosphere for three decades. The Hindutva forces came to the fore only during the Emergency (1975-77). They covered their communalism by donning the dress of democracy. Meanwhile, the secular forces went on fighting among themselves. If they were to unite even today, the Vajpayee government and the Hindutva movement would come tumbling down.

In the early years after Independence, the secular ethos of national struggle against the British had also not worn out. Having gone through the traumatic experience of Partition, people reacted adversely to parochial appeals and rejected such arguments as would tell them to hate Muslims. The national struggle had toughened them against communal thinking. Hating Muslims also meant hating Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Abdul Ghaffar Khan and many others who were in the forefront of the national struggle and who had remained unruffled despite pressure and abuse from their own community.

Accounting for 82 per cent of India’s population, in the early decades the Hindus could have established Hindu raj. After all, Pakistan had become an Islamic republic. Why they did not do so was because the ethos of the national struggle was secular. The entire approach and thinking, moulded by Gandhiji, was to not mix religion with politics or the state. He said: “Religion is a personal matter which should have no place in politics.” When he said that politics would be based on religion, he meant that it should have a moral foundation in dharma, not religion in the sense we generally use the term. Pluralism was woven into the warp and woof of Indian society. We have a composite culture which has evolved over the centuries.

Those who participated in the movement for Independence — something foreign to the RSS although it was established in 1929 — had a dream: “When India attains her destiny, she will forget the present chapter of communal suspicion and conflict and face the problems of modern life from a modern point of view. Differences will no doubt persist, but they will be economic, not communal. Opposition among political parties will continue, but they will be based not on religion but on economic and political issues. Class and not community will be the basis of future alignments and policies will be shaped accordingly.”

This dream is sought to be destroyed. If the gauntlet thrown down by the BJP is not picked up, it would do irreparable damage to the polity which is founded on the principle of equality between Hindus and Muslims who have lived side by side in villages and towns for centuries. It is horrifying to watch the vacillation of some constituents of the National Democratic Alliance. They once fought the BJP to defend pluralism in the country. Now they are too much in love with power to go back to their old secular credentials. The only exception is the Telugu Desam which does not feel comfortable with the new mood in the BJP. Even if all the non-BJP parties in the NDA fail to assert themselves and the Vajpayee government continues in office, it need not mean the destruction of India’s secular ethos.

What Vajpayee and the Sangh Parivar do not realise is that an overwhelming majority in the country believes in the concept of pluralism. Hindu religion itself is pluralistic in character. The ethos of India’s national struggle is secular and this is what has been enshrined in the Constitution, the best treatise on democracy and pluralism.

It looks as if the BJP has taken a leaf out of the Muslim League’s book — the Muslim League before Partition. In its own vicious way, the Sangh Parivar expects to rekindle the hatred that was ignited in the forties. As Azad said in his book, India Wins Freedom, “An atmosphere of emotional frenzy was created at that time. It made reasonable appraisement impossible and swept away especially the younger and more impressionable among the Muslims.” The Sangh Parivar is following the same path and using the same arguments to plant in the minds of the youth the idea of separateness — as it has done in Gujarat to create a permanent wedge between Hindus and Muslims.

It is not going to be that easy. The nation is wedded to the pluralistic way of life and thinking. There is so much togetherness that religious divisions over any happening do not endure for long. Whatever attempts are made by communal elements, they cannot shake the nation’s belief in unity through diversity. Why doesn’t the BJP see what is so clear? Gandhi and Godse cannot live together. In a multi-religious country, the only beneficial way has to be based on co-existence.

Vajpayee has shed the mask of liberalism he had been wearing for the last four decades. He has turned out to be nothing but a foot soldier of the Sangh Parivar, which is out to destroy the country’s ethos of pluralism. No one takes exception to his attack on militants among the Muslims. The objection is to the way he has come out in favour of Hindutva, the anti-thesis of secularism.

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