Unlike most analysts, I do not believe that RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan’s contentious recipe for inculcating patriotism among the minorities is at all aimed at the Muslims or Christians. Like other controversies in India, this one too is essentially an intra-Hindu affair, with the minorities being used as a smokescreen. While the prickly reaction of minority spokesmen is somewhat understandable, they would do well to keep out of the current debate in their own interests, as one writer has already suggested.
The RSS chief’s principal target was the Hindu community, particularly in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, which is to go to the polls next year and is widely expected to yield disastrous dividends for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Neither the RSS nor the BJP have cared to provide good governance in states ruled by them, and their much-touted organizational discipline is a pathetic sham. In state after state, RSS and party leaders were indifferent to complaints against headstrong chief ministers, such as Bhairon Singh Shekhawat in Rajasthan and Kalyan Singh in UP, and helpless to contain them when matters went out of hand.
In Rajasthan, Mr. Shekhawat could not be persuaded to quit the scene even after the party’s ignominious defeat. In UP, the opportunity provided by Kalyan Singh’s ouster was squandered with the elevation of the uninspiring Ram Prakash Gupta, and this non-entity is able to defy the leadership and perpetuate his non-rule. Since neither the Prime Minister nor the RSS chief seems able to tell him to just fax his resignation and begone, they have to device a strategy that brings in the vote, notwithstanding the performance.
I have previously argued that the RSS is intensely concerned with the political prospects of the BJP. This was glaringly apparent last month when senior RSS leaders stoutly defended Mr. Bangaru Laxman’s unconditional overtures to the Muslim community, including the ‘carrots’ of reservations and proportional representation, and the virtual purification of the history of a millennium. Most interesting was the reaction of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad – it pretended that only the BJP had made the overtures, and upped the ante on the Ram Temple.
Clearly, the Sangh Parivar was acting in tandem. The BJP-RSS tested the waters to see if Muslims would bring their vote to the party in return for a virtual promise to abandon the Ram Temple (since they cannot possibly both build the Temple and secure Muslim vote); while the VHP protected their flanks in case matters went awry. When the move flopped badly, the RSS moved swiftly to clear the horizon of the Islamic votebank that once loomed so large in its wishful thinking, and bring back the old Hindu votebank. It surmounted the problem of its endorsement of the Nagpur line by showing the broom to the minorities and raising enough dust to make people forget its role in the aborted brotherhood with Islam.
Indians, particularly Hindus who comprise the majority, should not fall for this pseudo-communalism; it can only take us through a trajectory as painful as the pseudo-secularism this nation is still battling to overcome. I have faith that the generations that have grown up after independence have the confidence and ability to face the country’s myriad and complex problems squarely, without recourse to subterfuge. Public debate in India is now candid, and we mercifully no longer speak in terms of the minority community (read Muslims) and a minority community (read Sikhs in the post-1984 period). My reservations with Parivar politics concern the fundamentals of Indian nationalism and nationhood; these cannot be reduced to political bargaining chips.
As I have argued previously, India is the land of the ‘Sannatan Dharma’ (Eternal Tradition), which is simultaneously a religion and a living civilization or way of life. The sannatan dharma is all-encompassing: it is righteousness, justice, duty, and the eternal law that is not fixed (in time or space) but eternally renews itself in response to the changing times. This catholic comprehension of our sages has permeated the whole culture and given it the multi-dimensional, multi-layered character that is the hallmark of all great civilizations. Throughout its long history, India has been comfortable with the idea of co-existence with different ethnic, racial, and religious groups, and has not viewed them as intrinsically alien, hostile, or unacceptable. In modern times, it has granted political space to the minorities while allowing them to maintain their distinct identities.
Yet modern India has some problems with its minority citizens, which need to be discussed maturely, not aggravated through jingoistic rhetoric or swept under the carpet in shady backroom deals. The principal issues threatening the social fabric today are terrorism and an adamant insistence upon conversions as the only evidence of religious freedom, and these will defy a political solution until concerned citizens grapple with them in the arena of their hearts and minds.
It is a sad truth that ‘liberal Islam’ does not confront the fanatical, hate-driven Islam of the mullahs and the Taliban, either in India or anywhere else in the world. The mysterious world of mystics and dervishes has never found space in mainstream Islam; yet it is promptly invoked to disarm agitated Hindus when the violence and mayhem against the country and the people reach intolerable levels, and repercussions are to be averted. In the prolonged crisis involving the hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane at Kandahar, Muslim religious and liberal leaders spoke out only when there were strong rumours of a communal backlash (which may or may not have actually happened).
Liberal Muslims are adept only in voicing the community’s imagined grievances, and are singularly unappreciative of the wealth of opportunity available to the community in independent India. They will not admit that many of the community’s problems come the reckless abuse of the political arena. They would be well-advised to ponder the extent to which the perceived privileging of Muslims in politics is responsible for the sustained fall in Muslim representation in Parliament and state assemblies across the country. The solution is not to demand reservation, but to build bridges with the majority community.
Currently, Muslim intellectuals have condensed all community issues into an insistence that the Ayodhya Temple be built away from the cherished site, and resisting state attempts to regulate the mushroom growth of madrasas that serve as sanctuaries for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, not only in Kashmir, but across the country. They have also maintained a stony silence on the involvement of the Islamic sect, Deendar Anjuman, in the attacks on Christian churches and clergy at the instance of the ISI. This was particularly important in view of the political decision by Christian organizations to continue to lambast the Hindu community for the attacks, despite overwhelming police evidence from states not ruled by the BJP.
The BJP-RSS naiveté in trying to do business with Muslim vote-controllers without addressing these issues, and their willingness to make the Temple a bargaining chip in the transaction, has led Hindus across the country to give them the thumbs-down sign. The RSS chief has sought to recover lost ground by setting up yardsticks for the minorities to ‘prove’ their loyalty to the motherland. But Hindus have broken through the shackles and insecurities of the Nehruvian era to re-establish themselves in their civilizational moorings. This precludes the search for ‘the Other’ as scapegoat for one’s problems or failings. Hinduism is about righteousness, not self-righteousness.
The Pioneer, 24 October 2000