Girilal Jain believed clinical analysis, not emotional indignation, can explain the shifts which led to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. This is something that eludes ‘secular’ analysts, argues Sandhya Jain
INDIAN ANALYSTS have been so intoxicated with the concept of secularism as tacit parity between Hindus and Muslims and a ‘composite’ culture embodying this, that they have been unable to come to grips with the obvious failure of these artificial constructs. They continue to adhere to a mechanical view of the State as an impartial arbiter between the two communities. They do not realize this is a vicarious justification of Jinnah’s theory that Hindus and Muslims are separate nations because they espouse different faiths. Moreover, they tend to discuss the epochal shifts in contemporary history in moral rather than historical categories.
Girilal Jain, the former editor of The Times of India, believed rigorous clinical analysis, not emotional indignation, could help explain the fundamental shifts affecting the Indian template. He averred that unlike European nations, India is not a fragment of a civilization claiming nationhood on the basis of historical accidents. Instead, Indians are a people by virtue of the continuity and coherence of the Hindu civilization. Jain had the prescience to see that the apocalyptic events transforming the political landscape and culminating in the demolition of Babri Masjid called for new paradigms of thought. He viewed Hindutva as Mother India asserting her civilisational dimension in which the Hindu ethos would enjoy its natural primacy.
Jain brought his celebrated intellect, deep spirituality (he was a disciple of Sri Aurobindo) and formidable reputation to the defence of the Ram Janambhoomi movement. But this cannot legitimately earn him the title of ‘an ardent saffronite’; to be clubbed with the uncouth Sadhvi Rithambara and accused of propagating civilizational conflict, as Amulya Ganguli has done (Politics of conflict, July 24).
Ganguli’s article is meant to be a defence of Track II diplomacy with Islamabad, but he is unable to tell us how this will translate into the political process of bringing about lasting peace between India and Pakistan. He has also maligned a great man now seven years dead.
Ganguli speaks of ‘a standard argument for Partition’, as though there was a Hindu demand for Partition. In this context, he selectively quotes (misquotes) Jain. He also argues that while there was a sharp contrast between India’s multicultural democratic polity and Pakistan’s theocratic dictatorial one, since large numbers of Muslims remained in India, the earlier Hindu-Muslim problem reassumed its original context.
Jain’s controversial thesis, formulated and calibrated boldly yet cautiously in the heady days of the rath yatra, was that the Indian people are till this day possessed by the idea of founding their polity on dharma. He observed that Aristotle had noted (Politics) that India was the only land where virtue had successfully been made the basis of political order. Jain asserted that Ram was no mere cultural hero for the Hindus, but the exemplar for ordering the community’s polity. Ram was therefore invoked by Gandhi in his search for the ideal concept for reordering India’s public life.
Jain’s principal thesis was that Hindu India was engaged in a civilisational contest with Islam for much of the second millennium. He also stated that Partition ended the stalemate in favour of the Hindus as without it they could not even have produced a workable Constitution, let alone a viable economic and democratic political order: Despite this, the shock of the motherland’s vivisection was so great that most Hindus could not appreciate this reality. The fact that Partition was the reason why Gandhi was murdered by fellow Hindus should lend credence to this view.
Jain believed that the alternative to Partition – in the shape of continued separate electorates, weightage and separate reservations – would have been disastrous. Hence, though Partition did not settle the civilisational question, it facilitated Hindus as they had a powerful pan-Indian state of their own. Jain shrewdly observed that this would be quoted to show that he endorsed Jinnah’s two-nation theory, but realized he could not avoid this risk.
He did, however, demolish the ‘second nation’ thesis with the view that “Muslims in undivided India could represent only a fragment of Islamic civilization and were, therefore, incapable of becoming a people”, that Jinnah “could not possibly overcome the obstinate fact that Islam, on the one hand, does not admit of nationalism and, on the other, does not help overcome local and even tribal loyalties”.
Hence, “while Jinnah could bring Muslims together on an anti-Hindu platform and force the country’s partition, he could not lay the foundations of a Pakistani nation. It is not surprising that Pakistan continues to ‘define’ itself in anti-India and anti-Hindu terms”.
Indian nationalism, Jain asserted, has to be pluralistic in its approach and centre on our civilisation which is universal in the deepest sense of the term. He claimed that it is precisely because Indian nationalism has been informed by a civilisation remarkable for its catholicity and broadmindedness that it has not become a narrow creed. That this is why it did not acquire an anti-Muslim bias either when the Muslim League unleashed widespread violence or when Pakistan actually came into being (The Hindu Phenomenon)
It is difficult to square such a profoundly Hindu ethos with vulgar accusations of civilisational conflict and two-nation theories. Yet there is no denying that Jain’s views caused deep unease among intellectuals for reasons not difficult to fathom. Jain did not view the Janmabhoomi movement in moral or legal terms; his was a civilisational perspective. He believed the Nehruvian order had exhausted its potentialities for good and that a new order was in the making. In this new order, Indian nationalism could no longer be civilisation-neutral.
Two things have happened since his demise. The Muslim leadership that resisted the reclamation of the Ram Janambhoomi by Hindus has lost its relevance in the community, and the ISI’s pervasive inroads have made an Indian consensus centred on the civilisational perspective imperative.
Hindustan Times, 1 August 2000