As so often in the past, an attempt is once again being made to conjure up the spectre of a Hindu revivalist backlash. The spectre has not materialised in the past and it is not likely to materialise now. But that does not matter. Hardly any leading intellectual or commentator is going to take a pause and ask why this has been so.
This is an extraordinary lapse which must have some deep psychological causes such as self-alienation and self-hate (most of those trying to raise the ghost have been and are Hindus). But we do not wish to go into the psychological aspect of the problem. We wish to concern ourselves with the fact of the absence of a powerful all-India Hindu revivalist movement and to explore its possible causes.
To begin with, let us note that like any living entity, communalism must have a ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ component and that this is not possible in the case of the Hindus. Both these points need to be heavily underscored; for they are important and they are seldom made in any discussion of the problem of communalism in the country.
Thus, while there can be Hindus who are communal in the sense that they are anti-Muslim, or anti-Christian, and currently anti-Sikh, or who, like the Zionists before the establishment of Israel, dream of a Hindu state, these are no Hindus who have a blueprint of a future India which can legitimately be said to be based on a Hindu view of life and society. And since one ‘current’ (negative) cannot be effective without the other (positive), Hindu ‘communalism’ fails to acquire life and vigour. It remains an anaemic and episodic affair.
In passing, it may be said that even the ‘negative’ Hindu communalism is a reaction against the activities of the others. Left to themselves, the Hindus would like to behave as if all differences are unreal or at best superficial. Indeed, they have been possessed by the passion for proclaiming universal brotherhood as if their own identity does not matter. We make these observations in the spirit of clinical neutrality. We are neither commending the Hindus for their universalism nor condemning them for it.
To return to the main issue, viable communalism has to be differently situated. Muslim communalism in the pre-independence period, for instance, possessed both the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ features. While the western-educated Muslims, who came to lead the Muslim League in the thirties and forties when it sought to become a mass movement, constituted the ‘negative’ charge on account of their fear and hatred of the Hindus, the ulema ‘provided the ‘positive’ current inasmuch as they possessed a blueprint of what they sincerely believed would be a truly Muslim society.
British Policy
Of course, other helpful factors helped the League achieve Pakistan – for instance, the overall British policy since 1880 of promoting non-Hindu communities and encouraging them to distance themselves from the Hindus, British compulsions arising out of World War II, especially in the context of the Congress opposition to the war effort, and the imprisonment of Congress leaders which left the field open to the League. But Muslim communalism would have been a powerful reality even if these and similar factors had not operated and led to partition precisely because it possessed both the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ charges.
Unlike the Muslims, the Hindus do not possess a vision of the future which is rooted in the past for a variety of reasons, one of them being that, unlike the Muslims, they have not been able to invent a golden age which can be located in any kind of history and that they cannot invent one. While, they would, if challenged, vaguely own up all Indian history up to the beginning of the Muslim invasions of north India in the 11th century, they do not identify themselves with any particular period. Indeed, they have little sense of history. So how can they have a golden age and how can a people without such a sense engage in revivalism? What can they seek to revive?
‘Hinduism’ is an arbitrary imposition on a highly variegated civilization which is truly oceanic in its range. Such a civilization cannot be enclosed in a narrow doctrine. It cannot have a central doctrine because in its majestic sweep it takes up all that comes its way and adapts it to its ever-widening purpose, rejecting finally what is wholly alien and cannot be accommodated at all. Attempts have been made to build embankments around this ocean-like reality to give it a shape and definition. But these have not succeeded. The spirit of India has refused to be contained. To put it differently, Hinduism has refused to be organised. By the same token, it has refused to be communalised.
We can only speculate on the likely course of Indian history if the country had not been subjected to a series of invasions by Muslim rulers from across the Khyber beginning with Mahmud Ghaznavi in the 11th century and if the collapse of the Moghul empire in the 18th century had not been accompanied by the rise of British rule. Such speculation would be irrelevant to our present discussion. For right now we are interested in making the point that the absence of independence in much of India from the 11th to the middle of the 20th century also meant the absence of a natural evolution which in turn has meant the absence of an institutional framework which the Hindus could fall back on at the time of independence in 1947.
The discussion so far would partly explain why in spite of the partition, the communal holocaust that preceded, accompanied and followed it and the migration of millions of people across the new borders, Nehru succeeded in his ideological battle against those in the Congress leadership who favoured a so-called Hindu-oriented political order. Nehru was doubtless helped by Gandhiji so long as the latter was alive and then by the fact of the Mahatma’s martyrdom in the cause of Hindu-Muslim amity. But Nehru was in a hopeless minority in the Congress and would certainly have been overthrown if the allegedly Hindu party comprising such stalwarts as Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad had possessed a vision of a Hindu order and had been determined to try and create such an order.
Vision Lacking
They did not possess such a vision. So there could be no question of their being determined to create it.
In reality, their view of the future was not significantly different from Nehru’s in that it too was based on the British model. Unlike his other senior colleagues, Nehru had acquired a broad international outlook tinged with a vague kind of socialism; his commitment to the well-being of the Muslim minority was also apparently stronger than theirs perhaps partly on account of his cultural background which emphasised the learning of Persian. But on the fundamental nature of the Indian state as finally defined in the Indian constitution, there was no worthwhile difference between the two sides. And the constitution, it would be readily agreed, is designed to serve a modern Indian state and not a Hindu order, however defined.
This brings out an interesting paradox in Hindu society. While hardly any other people can be said to be so tradition-bound, few non-western societies have shown the kind of resilience and adaptability the Hindus have shown. A deeper knowledge of Hindu society and history will, however, indicate that this resilience is natural to it.
For one thing, a non-dogmatic culture is by definition innovative in intellectual terms. This spirit of innovation and experimentation, characteristic of the Hindus in their exploration of inner space, did not become extinct even when they were thrown on the defensive during Muslim rule. The Bhakti movement is proof enough of their resilience. Contact with western liberalism and science further helped revive this spirit, though it must be admitted that the western-educated Hindus, who constitute their elite, remain unduly imitative. For another, the lack of opportunity or ability or both to evolve their own institutions in the entire modem period beginning with the Renaissance in Europe in the 15th century has made it obligatory for them to borrow on a big scale.
It is not an accident that while almost all ‘creative’ Hindus, including Gandhiji, have come from among the western-educated group, they have not been able to break through the western framework to create one of their own. Gandhiji tried hard and long to produce such a framework – self-reliant and self-governing village ‘republics’ to serve as the basis of the new political and economic order, a system of education related to the day-to-day life of the ordinary Indian and a model economy based on the dignity of labour. But the rulers of independent India did not even look at this model; in fact, it was confined to the dustbin of history long before independence; the rising western educated intelligentsia paid no attention to it. The new rulers picked up some parts of the Mahatma’s programme for subsidy – Khadi and other cottage industries. But the model they followed for building new India was essentially, indeed wholly, western. Secularism is part of that model.
Secularism is doubtless an expression of Hindu tolerance of other faiths. This tolerance survived the partition and all the bloodshed that followed it. That was one reason why Nehru could win on this issue without much of a fight with his supposed opponents in the Congress.
Secular Pakistan
Jinnah’s speech of August 14, 1947, in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly is often quoted to make the point that he too wanted to build a secular Pakistan in which there was to be no discrimination against anyone on the basis of religion. Perhaps he genuinely meant what he said, though one could never be sure. But that apart it is in conceivable that he could have succeeded. A secular order would have negated the very raison d’etre of Pakistan and even a Jinnah could not have won against the ulema forever. They defeated even the great emperor Akbar, if only after his death. In India’s case, the logic is the very reverse.
Tolerance flows from a largeness of vision and spirit. Gandhiji and Nehru certainly possessed such largeness of mind and heart. But tolerance is also an expression of lack of coherence which characterises Hindu society. In that sense, our secularism is a reflection of the Hindu incapacity to produce and implement a socio-economic political blueprint which is characteristically Hindu.
This brings us face to face with what is perhaps the gravest obstacle in our path of nation-building. For those who cannot constitute a community cannot serve as the national mainstream. And if the Hindus cannot constitute the mainstream, who else can?
By and large we have evaded this issue. We have assumed the existence of a mainstream which we have been expecting all Indians to join. But where is that mainstream? Who constitutes it?
The Hindu concept of nationalism has been territorial. It could not be otherwise in the absence of a living and coherent cultural tradition determined to assert itself, as in the case of the Israelis. Partition made nonsense of this concept. India after August 15, 1947, was no more the India of Bankim Chandra’s or Tagore’s description. Even otherwise, a territory-based nationalism also needs to be underwritten by a living culture, an awareness of it and a commitment to it on the part of the nationals. Secularism, as we have defined it and practised it, has taken us in the reverse direction, with the result that the Indian elite shows increasing signs of becoming rootless.
This is not to suggest that the problem could have been resolved if, on attainment of independence, India had proclaimed itself to be a Hindu state. No such easy route to nationhood was available then or is available now. Indeed, since independence most of the divisive struggles, political, economic and social, have been fought within Hindu society.
So to sum up, the spectre that is haunting India is not Hindu revivalism but Hindu incoherence and incapacity to command a vision of the future. In such an India, it is not surprising that minorities tend to go their own separate ways. That is the main source of strength for various communalisms as we have witnessed their growth in modern times, especially since 1947, and it does not look as if it will dry up in the foreseeable future.
The Times of India, 10 September 1986