It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Nehru’s role in the rise of modern and, therefore, secular India. Measured by any yardstick, it has been critical. Nehru was supremely qualified to play this role. He was a truly modern man, almost European in his outlook. He genuinely believed that a modern state could not but be secular in its approach He was convinced that science and technology held the key to India’s social and economic progress. Even before he joined the freedom movement and fell under Gandhiji’s influence, he was committed to the cause of Hindu Muslim unity. For one thing, his own religious baggage was rather small; indeed, as a successor to the reformers beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy, he did no have much respect for Hindu rituals and practices, many of which he dismissed as so much superstition. His family background of service in the Moghul court and Persian learning predisposed him in favour of Muslin culture, though not towards Islam as a religion. As an agnostic, he did not care for any religion, though he was in later life attracted to Buddhism, perhaps because of it’s emphasis on ethical norms.
His experience of the Muslim League under Jinnah in the ‘thirties and forties when it swept a large section of the Muslim community on to the separatist path could have embittered him. But it did not. Unlike Gandhi, he accepted partition as being the least of the evils the Congress and the country had to choose from. But in his adherence to the cause of fair treatment for the Muslims who stayed behind in India, he remained as firm as Gandhiji. No one can say what course India would have taken if Gandhiji was not there to absorb the shock of partition and the holocaust that followed and Nehru to give a secular orientation to the country’s political system.
The Hindu’s tolerance (in both the positive and the passive sense) is proverbial and cannot be denied even by those who raise the spectre of Hindu chauvinism. This has invariably been explained in terms of the fact that Hindus do not have the (one) holy book, the (one) ethical code, the (one) God and so on. This is an important distinction between Hindus on the one hand and Christians and Muslims on the other. It promotes tolerance of other faiths and discourages proselytisation. Not surprisingly, only those sects among them which have patterned themselves on Christianity and Islam have sought to win converts; the Arya Samaj, for instance.
Hindus Distinct Class
But behind the above distinction lies another extremely important fact. Hindus are not a religious community except in a negative sense. They are Hindus inasmuch as they are not Muslims, Christians or Zoroastrians. The followers of other faiths, too, are not, it is true, the monolithic communities they are often made out to be. Even Islam has not obliterated the other identities of those who belong to it. In Pakistan, for example, the Sindhis and Baluch have not ceased to be Sindhis and Baluch under the influence of Islam. But Hindus are a class by themselves.
It is often said that Hinduism is a way of life and not a religion. Since Dr. Radhakrishnan put forward this formulation more than half a century ago, it has become a cliché with the result that it has come to be used rather thoughtlessly. Except in a very broad sense, the formulation is a contradiction in terms. A way of life must have a religion as its core. One cannot exist without the other. No, Hinduism is not even a way of life. For it incorporates within it several ways of life, just as it provides for any number of gods and goddesses and paths to salvation.
Nehru summed it up in his well-known phrase: unity amidst diversity. His emphasis was on unity. This was understandable in view of his anxiety to fashion a nation on the European model, the only model he or anyone else knew or knows. In terms of factual accuracy, however, the emphasis should have been on diversity. The over-arch is there in the shape of certain beliefs such as theories of Karma, transmigration of the soul and moksha (final liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth) and certain ceremonies. But it is a pretty thin crust.
There is a Hindu personality but it can be defined mostly in negative terms, that is in terms of being different from those of the followers of the other faiths. Such a people – it would be wrong to call them a community – could not possibly be organised on the basis of religion, however grave the peril facing them. History fully validates this proposition. Even in modern times, that is when they had absorbed the impact of Islam and Christianity and in theory recognised the need for solidarity, they came together under the banner of the Indian National Congress with its platform of nationalism and not under that of the Hindu Mahasabha with its emphasis on religion. Even when they faced the challenge of the Muslim League on the warpath, they did not abandon the Congress and move over to the Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS. Once again we hear talk of Hindu chauvinism. In fact Hindu chauvinism is a contradiction in terms and so it will remain so long as Hindus remain Hindus.
Scheduled Castes
An intelligentsia arising out of such a people could have no difficulty in accepting the Western idea of a modern state based on the recognition of the individual as the basic political unit. Without this foundation the Indian Constitution could not have survived.
The Constitution provides for one departure from the overall “individualistic” approach – in respect of the scheduled castes. This is the result of the guilt feeling which generations of reformers beginning with the Bhakti movement have managed to give the caste Hindus towards the scheduled castes. And as we know, Gandhiji had made removal of untouchability his life’s mission.
Gandhiji had the foresight to oppose separate electorate for the scheduled castes and Dr. Ambedkar the courage to abandon the demand for a separate electorate. This provided the framework for the constitutional provision in question. So while providing for a fixed representation for them in the legislatures, the Constitution provides for a joint electorate even in those select constituencies which are given double representation on the ground that the Harijans there constitute a significant minority. This arrangement has ensured that the scheduled castes do not emerge as an independent political force because under only scheduled caste candidates acceptable to the larger community can get elected. In other words, the special provision does not vitiate the basic model of nationalism based on the individual.
It has often been argued that this scheme has not worked the way the founding fathers expected it to work. Of late especially there has been a lot of discussion on the importance of the caste factor in politics. But if developments since 1967 (when the Congress party’s near monopoly of power came to be challenged) have proved anything, it is that no caste or a possible combination of “allied” castes has been in a position to dominate any state legislature. Equally important is the fact that no caste has functioned as a monolith even when it has shared a community of interest and enjoyed the advantage of having a leader of stature as the Jats in Punjab, Haryana and Western UP have had in Chaudhuri Charan Singh.
This is not to suggest that Indian voters act as individuals and are not influenced by caste, communal and regional considerations. They are so influenced as are voters in any multi-ethnic democracy. In the United States, for instance, broadly speaking, the Jews, the blacks and the working class formed an alliance which kept the Democrats in power for two decades at a stretch – from 1932 to 1952. But alliances shift in India as in the United States, and in India, as in the United States, the recognised political unit could only be the individual, and not groups. Not to speak of democracy, neither country could have survived on the second basis. That is why no sane Indian interested in the survival of the country in one piece and of the State as a viable entity can ever accept proportional representation. Indeed, it speaks for the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the BJP (former Jana Sangh) leadership that in its anti-Congress obsession it should have advocated this extremely dangerous concept.
Old Norms Eroded
The recognition of the individual as the basic political unit has been accompanied by other developments – the spread of modern education, the growth of commerce and industry and with them of more and more and bigger and bigger urban centres, for example – which have reinforced the trend towards individualism. This has inevitably led to social instability and the erosion of the hold of old norms. But both are unavoidable in any society which moves out of economic stagnation. Social disruption is an inescapable price for social mobility and progress. The new entity known as nation cannot also be built on any other basis. Existing solidarities must weaken so that a now larger one can arise.
Hindus are more at home in this slowly emerging modern milieu than Muslims. The general assumption, especially among the Muslim intelligentsia, is that this is essentially the result of the numerical superiority of Hindus. But this superiority, as I have tried to show, is a myth. Hindus have never functioned as a coherent community and cannot so function, however hard the RSS or any other organisation may try.
By the same token, Muslims feel uncomfortable in it, not because they are a minority but because their sense of group consciousness is strong and as a community they remain reluctant to come to terms with the modern world. Witness the determination with which they oppose the reform of family laws to bring them in accord with the spirit of the modern times.
Group consciousness must of necessity possess both “positive” and “negative” features. On the “positive” side, it involves pride in a select past (the golden age) and a desire to return to it. On the “negative” side, it involves an exaggerated sense of grievance and a cultivation, deliberate or otherwise, of that feeling. In the world of Islam, the first has given birth to what we call fundamentalism and the second to xenophobia which, given the power balance, is accompanied by a feeling of helplessness!
The Indian Muslims have managed to avoid being swept into the fundamentalist vortex. But they have yet to overcome the persecution complex and come to terms with the forces of modernisation sweeping India as never before. It is the iron law of history that those who do not change with the times are left behind.
The Times of India, 29 December 1982