(Bharat-Bharati, 28 Sep. 2017)
For once, the secularists have it
right. The nationalism by which the Hindutva crowd swears, is a Western
invention. Feelings for your home country are universal, and natives of India
will need no prodding nor any foreign or native ideology to defend their
country when necessary. Nationalism is just there, as a gut feeling, not in
need of any promotion or defence. But as an ideology, it is the creation of the
modern West, hardened in the fires of World War 1. Of the secularists, we
already knew that they always ape the West (or what they assume to be Western),
but for champions of native civilization, it is worth noticing.
Long before I learned about India, I
already knew that national provenance is not very useful as an explanation of
anything in politics. I remember the TV news report ca. 1970 of a public speech
by Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. Suddenly he was interrupted by a bearded young
man loudly scolding him. Trudeau singled him out for an improvised reply: “You have
been swayed by those bogus progressistic ideas from the US, from Chicago and
Los Angeles. Get Canadian, man!” Similarly, the Flemish politician Eric Van
Rompuy (younger brother of the later EU President, Herman Van Rompuy)
criticized Leftist-inspired innovations as “counter to the Flemish national
soul”. As if there can be anything Canadian or non-Canadian, anything Flemish
or non-Flemish, about ideas.
Nationalism in a changing world
In the 1920s, because of the
Freedom Struggle, loyalty to some form of Indian nationalism was the obvious
choice for self-respecting people in India. And because of the British presence
and influence on the curriculum, European ideological influence was larger than
life. Just at that time, after World War 1, nationalism was at its peak. When
theorizing the national struggle, Hindu activists had little choice but to take
inspiration from European thinkers like Giuseppe Mazzini, mastermind of Italian
reunification and translated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
The construction of Hindu
concerns in terms of "Hindu nationalism" (effective meaning of "Hindutva",
a term launched by Savarkar) was understandable. So, it is not our aim
to berate freedom fighters like Hindutva
author Savarkar, Hindu Mahasabha co-founder Swami Shraddhananda or RSS
founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar.
However, they could have looked
to Hindu history to see that one of the central concerns of all nationalists
was completely lacking there: homogenization. India was the champion of
diversity. States were rarely linguistically homogenous and rulers didn’t care
to make them so. Loyalty was less to one’s state (which could easily change)
but to a more lasting and more intimate identity: one’s caste. As BR Ambedkar’s
grandson, Prakash Ambedkar, said: “Every caste a nation.” States had only
limited power and were hardly present in the lives of their citizens. By
contrast, modern nation-states sought to involve its citizens in the state
project, e.g. by conscription, and to insinuate itself in their lives, see e.g.
Otto von Bismarck’s creation of social security to cement Germany’s newfound
unity.
If the Hindutva stalwarts per se
wanted to look to “civilized” Europe, they could have taken inspiration from a
number of multinational empires there. In Savarkar’s student days in London,
the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires still flourished and were
characterized by a state religion (Orthodoxy c.q. Roman Catholicism), just as
Hindutva stalwarts had in mind, whereas ethnic nationalism favoured secularism,
e.g. German unification deliberately downplayed the Catholic/Lutheran
dichotomy. Another example of how nationalism and religiosity are naturally
antagonistic, was provided by Turkey: while Atatürk abolished the Ottoman
empire’s religious bias, his secular-nationalist republic created the
Turkish-Kurdish conflict. The old empires had a dominant language (Russian c.q.
German), but along with a certain unequal tolerance to minority religions, they
also left room for minority languages and made no attempt to impose a single
language. This could be contrasted with the then purest example of nationalism,
the French Third Republic (1871-1940) where the minority languages, still
spoken by half the French population in the 19th century, were being
destroyed and the state “religion” of secularism was aggressively promoted.
True, with World War 1, the
aforementioned empires disappeared, but another example even closer at hand
survived: the United Kingdom. Few people realize how the specific status of
each part of the UK differed: the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Wales etc.,
all had and still have a different relation with the British Crown. The Welsh
and Gaelic languages were not supported by the state, but there was no active
campaign to weed them out either. In spite of a rising level of tolerance,
there was a state religion and all traditional customs and institutions were
upheld. All while struggling for their sovereignty, perhaps Hindus could have
learned something from their colonizers? (For starters, they could have
realized that Britain was named after Brigid, the fire-clad goddess whose name
is related to Bhrgu, the Vedic Ur-seer who introduced the fire sacrifice.)
Back to reality. The Hindutva
pioneers opted for the then-prestigious model of the nation-state and tried to
cram Hindu political aspirations into it. Rightly or wrongly, this is what
happened, so let us start from there. The normal course for a political
doctrine is to take in feedback from evolving reality, and to improve with the
times. A speech by a Marxist leader today will sound very different from one by
his predecessor a century ago. But in the case of Hindutva, the reverse development
took place. It froze in its tracks.
This way, important international
developments passed without registering on the RSS radar. Nationalism lost its
lustre and even became a term of abuse. First there was the circumstance that
the German and Japanese imperialists of World War 2 had sworn by stalwart nationalism
(many of the Resistance fighters too, e.g. Charles de Gaulle, but that has been
forgotten), whereas their Soviet enemies called themselves internationalists.
This way, nationalism came to connote both evil and defeat. Secondly, the more
recent wave of globalization turned nationalism into a nostalgic past-oriented
attitude, something for village bumpkins who had missed the latest train of
progress.
Yet, the Sangh Parivar remained
blind to these developments and kept on swearing by interbellum nationalism. It
continued to take inspiration from its first leaders, Hedgewar and his
successor Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. If you don’t know their voices and you
listen to a tape-recorded speech by Hedgewar and one from his current successor
Mohan Bhagwat nine decades later, you wouldn’t know who is who: the thoughts
they express are interchangeable. That does not reflect on Hedgewar, who was a
child of his time and contributed the best he could to the Hindu cause. But it
reflects quite negatively on the course the Sangh Parivar has taken since then.
“Nationalism is Hinduism”
In one sense, the word
“nationalism” is defensible from a Hindu viewpoint. For the overseeable past, Hinduism
has been native to India, whereas Christianity and Islam are irrevocably of
foreign origin, with their founding histories and sacred places located outside
India. Other factors remaining the same, Hindus will always identify with India
in a way that Christians and Muslims cannot.
On this reality, VD Savarkar
based his definition of Hindu as “one who has India as both his Fatherland and
his Holyland”. Applying this insight, MS Golwalkar came up with his oft-quoted
suggestion that, if India was to be a Hindu state, Christians and Muslims could
only stay there as guests, not as citizens. This deduction followed logically
from the premise that India would be a state of the Hindus.
Golwalkar’s rhetoric was
notoriously clumsy, but the point to retain is that he made a distinction
between Hindus, howsoever broadly defined, and non-Hindus. Whether or not that
distinction should have any juridical consequences, fact is that Hindus and
non-Hindus were deemed different in respect of nationhood. That was a
non-secular vision. In a secular state, religion wouldn’t matter, but Golwalkar
opted for a state in which religion would determine citizenship.
A comparison with Israel comes to
mind, where any Jew worldwide can claim citizenship. Some non-Jews are citizens
because they already lived there before the creation of the Zionist state or
because they are spouses of Jewish immigrants, but as a class they cannot claim
citizenship. And indeed, both Savarkar and Golwalkar did invoke Zionism as an inspiring
example.
To sum up, nationalism can be
loaded differently from the religiously neutral meaning given to it by the
Nehruvians. For now we should make abstraction of the anti-Hindu
discriminations instituted by Jawaharlal Nehru and his partisans, and merely
take them at their word when they dishonestly pontificate that in India, secularism
means religious neutrality. That neutrality, at any rate, is not what Savarkar
and Golwalkar had in mind.
Partition
As the decades went by, the
Hindutva movement kept calling itself “nationalist”. In the 1940s, the emphasis
came to lie on the unity and territorial integrity of India, against the
Partition project designed by the MA Jinnah’s Muslim League. Advocates of the
Partition were also called nationalists: ”Muslim separatists”, in Congress
parlance, but they saw themselves as “Muslim nationalists”. One man’s
separatism is another man’s nationalism, and these men argued that the Indian Muslims
had every attribute of a nation. They gave in somewhat to the then-fashionable
trends of democracy (hence the importance of numbers, so that rule by 24%
Muslims would not be legitimate) and nationalism. In this case, modern
nationhood thinking could be made to continue seamlessly where Muslim theology
had spoken of umma and recent Muslim
(particularly Ottoman) history had thrown up millat, meaning “religious community”, as an equivalent of
“nation”.
Lined up against them within the
Muslim community were the so-called “nationalist Muslims”, meaning that
minority among Muslims who rejected Partition because they wanted to gobble up
the whole of India, not just a part of it. They were not impressed with the
nationalist idea that the world should be divided in sovereign territorial
units belonging to nations. At most these could be administrative units within
the really sovereign unit, the Caliphate, intended to comprise the whole world.
Nor were they impressed with the modern fad of democracy. As Pakistan’s
spiritual father Mohammed Iqbal said: “Democracy is a system in which heads are
counted but not weighed.” So, like in the Middle Ages, Muslims should just
emulate Mohammed and grab power any which way. Later, Muslim power could always
see to it that Muslims become the
majority. Since Gandhi and Nehru had always been called nationalists, Muslims
who sided with them against Partition in order to keep their option of
all-India conquest open, were also called nationalists, though what they really
hoped for, was a reunification of the Muslims in a new Caliphate where they
would lord it over the unbelievers.
Do keep in mind that both parties
had the same goal: Islamic world conquest. The wrongly called “nationalist
Muslims” went straight for it, largely because the modern world was unfamiliar
to them, while the separatists made temporary concessions to the new
circumstances and first wanted to consolidate Muslim power in Pakistan.
Initially they were even willing to settle for Dr. BR Ambedkar’s proposal to
exchange populations, so that no Muslim would stay behind in remainder-India.
They couldn’t believe their luck when on this score, India’s hands were tied by
Gandhi and Nehru, so that while the Paki Hindus had to flee, the Indian Muslims
could stay where they were, thus forming a fifth column for the next phase of
Islamic expansion.
Integral Hinduism
Forty years later, ca. 1965,
Deendayal Upadhyaya adopted the promising term "Integral Humanism",
in Hindi Ekatmata Manavavad or Ekatma Manavadarshan. This seemed to
transcend the division of mankind in box-type nations. Moreover, unlike
nationalism, it did not seem to have been borrowed from the West, in spite of
appearances. In the 1930s, the French Catholic political thinker Jacques
Maritain had launched the notion of “humanisme
intégral”, the ideological core of what was to become the dominant post-war
movement of Christian Democracy. But it is unlikely that that is where
Upadhyaya had the term from: at that time, there was still a large barrier
between the French and Indian public spheres, and the term had been used
cursorily by Indian writers as well, being a rather evident concept.
Let us nonetheless note the
parallel: in 1930s’ France, there was a militantly secular regime, the 3rd
Republic, and an advancing threat of Communism, exactly like in 1960s’ India.
Both were effectively atheist but called themselves “humanist”, which had the
effective meaning of “non-theist”. Against these two arms of atheism, the core
counter-insight from the religiously committed side was that “a humanism which
denies man’s religious dimension, is not an integral humanism”. Materialism
amputates the natural religious dimension from man, and this has to be
restored.
So, in name, “integral humanism”
had a touch of genius. It sounds so innocent and positive, something that
nobody can object to. That is why, in spite of being the official ideology of
RSS and BJP, in which every member is trained, it is never mentioned in
textbooks by “experts” on Hindutva. Out of an unscholarly political activism,
these “experts” prefer to push more negatively-sounding terms, of which “Hindu
nationalist” is still the kindest. It is unthinkable to read a textbook on the
Labour Party without coming across the word “socialism”, yet so noxious is the
intellectual climate in both India and India-watching, that it is entirely the
done thing to write expert introductions on the RSS-BJP without mentioning its
actual ideology.
Alas, once Upadhyaya went beyond
the basics, he relapsed into talk that can only be explained as nationalistic. The
central concept in his system is Chiti, the "national soul". This
notion had been dear to Johann Herder, the Romantic theorist of nationalism ca.
1780. Last winter in Pune and Mumbai, the heartland of Hindu nationalism,
during Upadhyaya's centenary, I noticed that this rather simplistic ideology went
through a revival, with some convivial symposiums but few new ideas. It was again
around this nationalist notion of Chiti that the main churning took place.
The concept of a “national soul”
could make sense as a purely descriptive attempt at encapsulating the
statistical tendency of a "nation" towards a certain mentality. But
even as a statistical average, it is susceptible to serious evolution.
One example. The ancient Romans
were known for their organizing power, and this is what allowed them to defeat
the fearless but less organized Gauls and Germans. But then Arminius, a German
mercenary in the Roman army, learnt about these organizing skills, returned to
his country, organized a German army, and defeated the Romans. It was the first
time the Germans got associated with organizing skills, a great tradition of
theirs ever since. By contrast, after holding out as great organizers for
several more centuries, the Italians became proverbially chaotic, great artists
but lousy strategists or politicians. The "national soul" is an
entity subject to change. They know all about cuisine and amore, but you wouldn’t entrust any organizational task to them.
While not very precise as a
descriptive term, Chiti is even worse as a normative concept. The stereotype of
"the drunken Irish" may have a grain of truth in it, but for Irish
nationalists, it is hardly a value worth defending. I don't know what the
Hindu/Indian national soul is (the first European travellers in Asia, not
colonialists yet, had stereotypes of “the violent Muslims”, “the indolent
Buddhists”, “the perverse Chinese”, and yes, “the deceitful Hindus”), but I
imagine it may also have some less desirable traits, not really worth
upholding. In Upadhyaya's day, Communism was a major concern, but it was not
wrong because it failed to accord with the Indian Chiti -- it did not accord
with the Russian or Chinese Chiti either. Any serious critique of Communism or
other challenging ideologies can perfectly be made without reference to the
"National Soul".
Here again, Chiti serves as a
secular-sounding escape route from a religious category. That, after all, was
part of Upadhyaya’s agenda. Alright, his term “Integral Humanism” was bright,
and the best possible secular-sounding approximation to a perfect translation
of the Hindu term Dharma. What
Upadhyaya was really getting at, was that Indians have a mentality in common
that oozes out from Hinduism. The “idea of India” that secularists like Shashi
Tharoor or Ramachandra Guha like to preach about, is but a secular nod to the
unmentionable term Hinduism. However, rather than being proud of his Hinduism
as the source of integral-humanist values, Upadhyaya, like most Sanghi
ideologues ever since, was in the business of downplaying and hiding this Hinduism
behind secular terms. His “integral humanism” ended up as the equivalent of the
secularists’ “idea of India”. He pioneered what was to become “BJP secularism”.
Ayodhya
During the Ayodhya controversy
around 1990, the RSS-BJP professed loyalty to the “Indian hero” Rama and
indignation about the “foreign invader” Babar. In reality, his geographical
provenance had nothing to do with demolition of temples. The Greeks, Scythians,
Kushanas and Huns had been foreign too, as were the British, yet they had not
been in the business of temple-destruction. By contrast, Malik Kafur had been a
native but as much of a temple-destroyer as Babar, after he had converted to
Islam. So in reality, there had been a religious conflict between Hinduism and
Islam, the religions of the “Hindu hero” Rama and the “Muslim invader” Babar,
but Sangh Parivar escapists had tried to clothe it in nationalist language of
“Indian” vs. “foreign”.
When Mohammed and Ali entered the
Pagan pilgrimage site, the Ka’ba in Mecca, they were not foreign invaders. They
were of the same gene pool, skin colour, language, food habits, literary
tastes, and anything else that may define a nation, as the people from whom
they were about to rob the temple. And then they broke the idols, just as the
Muslim invaders did in Ayodhya and everywhere else in India,-- as well as in
West and Central Asia and in the Mediterranean.
Conceptualizing Islamic
iconoclasm in terms of “national” vs. “foreign” is completely mistaken. In the
case of the contemporary Sangh Parivar, it has moreover become a wilful
mistake, an act of escapism. It thinks it can escape the label of “religious
fanaticism” and earn the hoped-for pat on the shoulder from the secularists by
swearing it is not Hindu. It now claims to be wedded to secular “nationalism”,
not realizing that this term also invites contempt, at least in the West and
therefore also among the Westernized intelligentsia.
However, its continued loyalty to
“nationalism” could be dismissed as only a publicity mistake. It seems to me
that its ever more pronounced shame about its historical sobriquet “Hindu” is
more serious. Though once calling themselves “Hindu nationalists”, and still
called that by all media, they are now only nationalists, and they repeat this
over and over again to secularist interviewers, thinking this will earn them
their approval. "Nationalism" has gotten absolutized at the expense
of Dharma, and now serves the Sangh and esp. the BJP as a conduit towards
secular nationalism, dropping any Hindu concerns altogether.
BJP
secularism
We are currently witnessing the incumbency
of “BJP secularism”. This non-ideology was already taking shape with the Nehru
imitator AB Vajpayee’s increasing dominance in the later Jana Sangh and early
BJP. It became evident in the Ayodhya events, which the BJP leadership eagerly
distanced itself from after reaping the rewards in the 1991 elections. When
Hindu activists defied the BJP leadership to demolish the disputed structure on
6 December 1992, BJP leader LK Advani called it “the blackest day in my life”,
though in the larger scheme of things, this act greatly expedited a solution to
the controversy, thus saving thousands of lives.
The Vajpayee government of 1998-2004 did
strictly nothing about the list of Hindu priorities, not even the version laid
down in the 40-point Hindu Agenda of another Sangh branch, the VHP. The late
Pramod Mahajan realized (possibly purely as matter of electoral calculus) the
untenability of the contrast between BJP programme and BJP performance: he
wanted the BJP to raise certain of these demands. It they were to be vetoed by
the allies, or defeated in the Lok Sabha, then they would form excellent stakes
in the election debates; and if they were to pass, the BJP could take them as
trophies to the campaign. But Vajpayee was adamant about going to the voters
with a purely economic programme, and though India’s growth figures were then
at its peak, he got soundly defeated.
The current BJP government is repeating
this performance. The Supreme Court judgment against triple talaaq (divorce
through instant repudiation of a wife) was used as a fig-leaf somehow proving
that the BJP was slowly inching towards the abolition of the separate Islamic
family law system and towards a Common Civil Code, an old election promise. In
reality, the case had been brought by a few Muslim women. That the BJP happened
to be in power was merely a coincidence. The private bill proposing to abolish
anti-Hindu discrimination in education is just that: private, emanating only
from BJP MP Maheish Girri, not from party or government. Like Jawaharlal Nehru,
like erstwhile RSS theorist Nana Deshmukh, like all the NGOs meddling in Indian
affairs, like every capitalist or socialist materialist, the BJP swears exclusively
by “development” (vikaas).
Not that it will ever receive the much
hoped-for pat on the shoulder from the secularists. In their circles, the done
thing is still to throw texts from the 1960s or 1920s full of Hindu rhetoric at
the supposedly Hindu party, as if these could tell you what the party is about
today. So long as this pat on the shoulder is an unreachable goal beckoning in
the distance, the RSS-BJP will sacrifice anything including its professed
ideology to get it. For in its universe, the secularists still lay down the
norms that it tries to live up to.
Misconstruction
Time and again I get to see how the
nationalist paradigm distorts issues. Thus, the missionary challenge is no
longer a matter of Western intrusion into India. Most missionaries are now
Indian, and even the Evangelical sects teleguided from America will make sure
to send a native to any inter-faith meeting or TV debate. Missionaries are not
CIA agents plotting against India, they have their own agenda since centuries
before the CIA or the colonial entreprise even existed, and their target is not
some nation or state, it is all Pagan religions, in India principally Hinduism.
Two examples from my own experience. A
Hindu who used to like me, turned his back on me after I uttered my scepticism
of a certain guru called Gurunath who claimed that the enigmatic character
Babaji (a normal form of address for any ascetic), described by Lahiri Mahasaya
and Swami Yogananda as a Himalaya-based yogi of indeterminate age, is the same
character as Gorakhnath who lived a thousand years ago. He found that I was
unimpressed by his assurance that this Gurunath is “enlightened”. I happen to
have met a big handful of people deemed “enlightened”, and I have concluded
that their yogic power and knowledge, in itself superior to our humdrum lives,
does not magically confer on them a superior knowledge of worldly matters. At
that mundane level, their knowledge and opinions are no different from those of
any other man from the same background and circumstances. Therefore, if he
wants to make eccentric claims such as of a man living for millennia, then he
has the same burden of proof on him as any ordinary man. After that, my Hindu
friend cut off the debate and decided that I was insufferably attached to a
“Western” prejudice. As if numerous Hindus don’t have a similar healthy
scepticism of paranormal claims; and as if conversely, there aren’t equally
gullible Westerners in great number.
In another discussion, Hindus were arguing
that Partition was the doing not of the poor hapless Muslims, but of the
British, who had it in for the Hindus, so much so that they even committed
“genocide” on them. Well, “genocide” implies murderous intention, and Hindus
only flatter themselves if they attribute this to the British, who merely
wanted to make money and thus instituted economic policies with an enormous collateral
damage, but didn’t care one way or the other whether the natives lived or
starved. When the Muslim League launched the Partition project, the Brits
initially rejected it and only came around when Muslim violence had made it
seem inevitable and the beginning Cold War made them see its benefits.
Moreover, while no Hindu says it openly, it is so obvious to any observer that
they only want to play hero against the long-departed Brits because they have
interiorized the fear that they might offend the Muslims, with whom they still
have to deal. What SR Goel called “the business of blaming the British” is a
trick of misdirection, popular among stage magicians, which only a buffoon
would believe.
Anyway, during the discussion, I used the
Indian word “tamasic” rather than the English equivalent “deluded” or “slothful”. Immediately, one of them flared up and warned all the Indians
present that I was equating “Indian” with “tamasic”. And then all through a
number of altercations, he went on with this line of deluded discourse.
Political delusions are as common among Westerners as among Indians, and
appeasement of Islam has become just as big in Europe as in India when the
Muslim percentage became similar. Conversely, people who are skeptical of the
faux-heroic attitude against long-dead colonialism as a cover for cowardly
Muslim appeasement exist as much in India, starting with the late SR Goel, an
impeccable patriot.
Falling back on the nationalist paradigm
makes Hindus misunderstand issues. It is of course far easier to separate
people by skin colour than by ideology, very appealing to the lazy, tamasic
mind. But it is sure to make you mistake enemies for friends, and friends for
enemies. If you think you can afford that on a battlefield, suit yourselves.
Conclusion
When you are on a battlefield, not because
you choose to but because your enemies impose this confrontation on you, it is
a matter of life and death to be supremely realistic. You simply cannot afford
to misconstrue the reasons and stakes for the battle, nor the nature and
motives of your enemies. It is but rare that the ideological stakes coincide
with national ones, as they did in the Indo-Pak confrontation during the
Bangladesh war.
A Hindu yoga master whom I know once made
the effort of disabusing some European yoga aspirants from their fascination
with India: “India is not that important, India will disappear one day.” India
is not absolute, not Sanâtana, “eternal”. India is relatively important as the
cradle of yoga, and secondarily as the cradle of many other cultural riches.
But what is important is its culture, Sanâtana Dharma. If a party of Hindu
travellers get stuck on an uninhabitated island without the means to escape
from there, they can still set up their Ram Rajya in this new territory. Maybe
they won’t have coconuts and marigolds there to reproduce their rituals, but to
those circumstances too they can adapt their Sanâtana Dharma.
Finally, let me state that nationalism, not
as a pompous ideology but as an intimate feeling, as what a better word calls
patriotism, is just natural. Certain ideologies try to estrange you from it,
but Hindu Dharma accepts and nurtures it. Every penny spent on RSS propaganda
for nationalism is a penny wasted. Every effort to rewrite textbooks in a
nationalist sense, is an effort misdirected. A feeling for your motherland is
simply normal and doesn’t need any propaganda. For the Vedic seers, the
Motherland was only the Saraswati basin in Haryana, king Bharat never heard of
the subcontinent named after him, but for today’s Indians, that subcontinent is
a lived reality. It is that expanse to which they are attached, and that we
should uphold.
In the modern age, when the state is far
more important than in the past, the Indian republic is a necessity to defend
Hindu civilization. In that sense, it is only right to be an Indian patriot.
But that national feeling goes without saying.