Some leftists and secularists have reacted adversely to my article “The Hindu Backlash: Ghost That Fails To Rise”. To begin with, I was taken by surprise by this reaction for I had not advocated a backlash; on the contrary I had argued that the Hindus lacked the necessary coherence to be able to function as a religious community in the sense this term is generally understood. Then I realised that the leftists and the secularists in question were angry with me precisely because I did not treat the Hindus just as another community.
I do not wish to try and apportion blame for communal violence which erupts from time to time in different places. I do not believe it is desirable or even possible to do so on an objective basis. A riot in Ahmedabad is different from the one in western UP and the causes need to be separately investigated in each case. Apart from the old Hindu-Muslim antagonism, a number of other factors go into the creation of a situation which lends itself to repeated incidents of violence as Ahmedabad and Baroda in recent years, the decline of the textile industry, for instance.
Blaming Others
It follows that the earlier article could not be inspired by the desire to exonerate the Hindus and blame the others, especially the Muslims, for communal violence. The purpose was quite different. It was to show that most of the commentators had got stuck with a wrong formulation and to try and persuade them to move away from it. I believe that once the truth of the proposition that the Hindus are not and cannot become a community in the sense the minorities are communities begins to be recognised, our approach to the communal problem can acquire greater clarity.
On the basis of the kind of reasoning I advanced in that article a leading commentator has gone so far as to argue that India consists of many nations, that the nations are rooted in the major languages of India (incidentally, with the exception of Urdu, all of them are creations of the Hindus) and that instead of trying to become nation-state (in the European sense), the Indian state should be a “state of many nations”. This represents the other extreme which is as invalid. If the Hindus are not a religious community in the normal sense of the term, they are also not divided into many nations on the basis of language. If they were, they could not have produced one freedom movement and stayed together as one country under one Central state with a constitution which is as much unitary as it is federal. The Hindus are a complex people and they cannot be described in such simplistic terms.
India can truly be said to be launched on a greater venture precisely because the Hindus are what they are. No one can predict what shape this venture will take. But the venture is a fact. The venture will also reshape the Hindus. Science and technology are great agents of change. We cannot live in the computer age the way we lived in the bullock-cart age. But that is not what is under discussion. The reference is to the social and political arrangements that will emerge as a result of the turbulence we are going through.
As suggested earlier, this turbulence in the country is also largely responsible for what we call upsurge of communalism in the country. We are giving an old name to a new phenomenon, though the old prejudices and memories are also at work.
To be candid, when we talk of communalism, we have by and large the old Hindu-Muslim conflict in mind. But in a fundamental sense this issue has been resolved. We are dealing with the residue which, however troublesome, is nothing more than a residue of what was truly gigantic conflict before 1947. So if I were asked for my response to the efforts some Hindu organisations are making to cope with the supposed threat from the Muslims, I would say that these are misplaced. And I would say this not just as a secularist but also as a self-conscious Hindu who is deeply interested in the survival and growth of the Hindu civilization.
The causes of the Hindu-Muslim conflict are complex and cannot be discussed in a newspaper article. In any case, the question has been so thoroughly discussed that it is not possible for me to add anything to it. I would only underscore one point. Which is that the conflict assumed menacing proportions because the British established and maintained a parity between the two. Incidentally that was partly why they introduced separate electorates. The nationalist movement accepted the separate electorates because it had no choice and it also accepted a parity between the two in cultural-civilisational terms. That is what the talk of India’s composite culture implied.
We do not know what course India’s development would have taken if independence had not been accompanied by partition. But while that is now a matter of only academic interest, it cannot be seriously denied that partition ended the parity between the Hindus and the Muslims in both political and in cultural-civilisational terms. After August 15, 1947, there could be no doubt that India of the future will be shaped, for good or ill, essentially by the Hindus. And it has been.
Diverse Civilisations
It is immaterial for the purpose of this discussion whether one regards the Hindu civilization or the incoming Arab-Muslim civilization as superior. As I see things, civilizations are different; they are not superior or inferior; and two under discussion here were without doubt very different. There can also be no doubt that the Arab-Muslim civilization prevailed during the Muslim rule and that it reshaped the personality of the urban Hindu elite. But while its dominance declined with the decline of the Moghul empire in the 18th century, the Hindu civilization could not reassert itself; apparently it did not possess the necessary resources to be able to take over power from the Moghuls in decline.
The contact with the British produced among the Hindus a reform movement which served as the basis of Indian nationalism. They were also quick to take advantage of western education; this gave them entry into the administration and the professions in large numbers. These two developments together with the fact of their significant majority could have placed the Hindus in a dominant position under the Raj if, on the one hand, the Muslims too had not taken to western education and, on the other, the British had not decided to end the discrimination against them and indeed to favour them. The policy produced a stalemate. While this stalemate led to partition, the partition ended the stalemate. The Hindus came into their own in what remained of India on August 15, 1947. This was turning point for them, perhaps the most important in all their history.
There is a great deal of confusion s regarding the nature of developments in this regard in post-independent India. Much of this confusion is the result of our continued use of the pre-independence vocabulary which in turn is the result of our refusal to take due note of so dramatic a development as the country’s partition on the basis of religion and the consequent decline in the Muslim population in India. This changed the power realities and thus made the old formulations and stances at least partly invalid. If abolition of separate electorates for the minorities was a reflection of the new reality, so is the rise of Hindi in north India.
The political leadership in independent India has had the sagacity to ensure that the minorities, especially the Muslims who constitute 11-12 per cent of the total population, enjoy all the rights of citizenship so that they do not feel driven into a corner, leaving them no choice but to fight back for their survival. The widespread acceptance of an Indian variant of the concept of secularism has facilitated this task of the ruling party and leadership. But this has not ill-served the cause of the Hindus. On the contrary, the emphasis on secularism, however defined, has helped the Hindus in two ways. It has prevented the growth of bitterness among the Muslims and it has promoted the cause of modernisation among the Hindus. This approach has had one apparent weakness; it has failed to attend to the question of Indian identity. But that is an expression of lack of coherence among the Hindus; the minorities cannot be blamed for it.
I for one neither bemoan this lack of coherence nor welcome it. For if it poses a problem in respect of national identity, it facilitates our march into modernity. If the Hindu identity was well defined, it could have made the pull of the past irresistible. And in the very act of moving into the modem world, the Hindus may acquire a unity they have never possessed before. Moreover, power in our era grows out of the drive of a computer.
Towards Modernity
It is widely believed that it would have been wonderful if a large section of the Muslims were not to resist joining the march into modernity. This belief is based on the assumption that such a development among the Muslims would have facilitated the growth of secular nationalism. The assumption is not self-proven. In any event, it is neither possible nor desirable to try and force the pace of change among them. Also their social conservatism cannot be said to create any special problems for the Hindus and does not, therefore, call for special remedial measures on the part of the latter.
In India we have mastered the art of evasion. We discuss both domestic and international issues as if power in its various manifestations does not decisively shape events. The result cannot but be confusion on an enormous scale. This is what has happened on the Hindu-Muslim question. It is truly extraordinary that the Hindus should feel threatened in independent India which they cannot but dominate. Some Muslims may have behaved provocatively on occasions. This has apparently set into motion a chain of events which has strengthened the prejudice against them among the Hindus. But that cannot negate the whole range of developments since 1947.
The Times of India, 8 October 1986