Imagining identity in Hindu India

Nationalists with myopic vision are a threat to secular India

After winning independence in 1947, one of the biggest challenges faced by the nascent Indian state was to conceive a political system that could ensure social harmony among its diverse population. After due consideration and deliberations, its founding fathers decided to adopt secularism as the ‘official’ national ideology.

Why did they adopt this ideology when an absolute majority of Indians were Hindus; there was an atmosphere of heightened communal passions let loose by partition; and in next door Pakistan efforts were being made to make it a religious state. Almost all the founding fathers were Hindus from the Congress Party and had they wanted to make India a purely Hindu state, nobody could have stopped them. It was a test of political statesmanship: having secured independence from the colonial masters was one thing but to make the liberated land to function as a viable modern state offering equal citizenship and due space for sustenance to every individual was an equally herculean challenge. How the founding fathers envisioned the Indian polity is what India was made to look like and function as a state in the decades after independence.

To one of the founding fathers, Jawaharlal Nehru, India was the embodiment of a culture and a civilization which had the ability to absorb foreign influences and reach a kind of synthesis in which not only all types of beliefs and customs could co-exist but were also acknowledged and encouraged. Such a vision of India could be best sustained by adopting the secular path, by making secularism the guiding principle of the state’s constitution that looked upon all of its citizens speaking different languages and practising diverse faiths as a ‘national family’ without allowing any particular group to dominate the state at the expense of others. In other words, citizenship was determined by birth or naturalization and not on the basis of religion; in fact, the state was to act as a ‘neutral umpire’ among adherents of different faiths. Under Nehru’s ideal of secular India, one did not necessarily have to be a Hindu to be an Indian and that is why his list of heroes of Indian civilization included several non- Hindu figures such as the Buddhist Ashoka, the Sikh Guru Nanak and Kabir, Amir Khusro and Emperor Akbar, who were all Muslims.

The sense of religiosity of another founding father, Mohandas Gandhi, who was also a Hindu, was based on the appreciation and respect of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Jainism. Contrary to the centrality of Hinduism in the scheme of Hindu nationalists, Gandhi said, “If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in a dreamland. The Hindus, the Muslims, the Parsis and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen… Do people become enemies because they change their religion? Moreover, there are deadly proverbs between the followers of Shiva and those of Vishnu, yet nobody suggests that these two do not belong to the same nation.” Gandhi’s belief in unity in diversity, tolerance of and coexistence with non-Hindus, particularly the Muslims was so much hated by the Hindu nationalists that one of them actually gunned down the father of the nation in cold blood in the aftermath of partition.

Today, the Hindu nationalists are ruling India and it is time we try to understand as to how do they construct the identity of the land and people of India. To them, India is not ‘India’ but ‘Hindustan’, inhabited by people, a big majority of which are followers of the Hindu religion. They claim that all the land between River Indus and the Himalayas along with the adjacent waters is ‘Hindustan’ since the time of Mahabharata about 2500 years ago. They hold this geography sacred because it contains their holy rivers such as the Ganga, the Jumna and the Cauveri as well as almost all the sacred places such as Benaras, Hardiwar, Badrinath, Ayodhya, etc. They also insist that ‘Hindustan’ is the only land in the world which the Hindus can call their own because it is also the birthplace of Hindu religion notwithstanding the fact that India is also the birthplace of some other religions as well such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism while the Hindu identity constructed by the Hindu nationalists today is only two to three centuries old because before that there were different Hindu sects but no unified Hindu identity. While the Hindu identity is just a few centuries old; followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam had made India as their permanent abode for well over a millennium.

So what is the status of the non-Hindus in the eyes of the Hindu nationalists? The Hindu nationalists argue that only those who fit into the definition of ‘Hindu’ as enunciated by V D Savarkar, the father of Hindu nationalism in his classic text ‘Hindutva’ can be called Hindus and those who don’t, do not belong to ‘Hindustan.’ To Savarkar “A Hindu means a person who regards this land [Hindustan]… from the Indus to the Seas as his fatherland (pitribhumi) as well as his Holyland (punyabhumi).” The Hindu nationalists aver that of all the non-Hindu communities, only the Sikhs, the Jains and the Buddhists can be considered Indian because their religions were born in India but under no circumstances can the Christians, Jews, Parsis and Muslims be considered Indian because the origins of their respective religions were outside India in the foreign lands of Arabia and Palestine. Thus, even if the adherents of these “foreign faiths” have been born in India or have adopted India as their permanent home for many centuries, Hindustan can never become their “Holyland” as their mythology, ideas and heroes are not the offspring of the Indian soil. This is the standpoint of the Hindu hardliners whereas the relatively moderate Hindu nationalists state that they can consider the Muslims a part of the Indian nation only if the Muslims agree to fully assimilate in the society by giving up their distinct identity. This means that not only the Muslims must accept the key Hindu religious and historic figures such as Ram as their heroes but must also repent the actions such as the destruction of temples by the Muslim rulers of India in the past. In the heat of hatred towards the Muslims, the Hindu nationalists want to change even the Muslim names of some of the Indian cities. For example, they intend to rename Aligarh as Harigarh, Lucknow as Lakshmanpur, etc. So much bigoted are the Hindu nationalists that they are not willing to include even the tolerant Muslim Mughal Emperor Akbar in their assorted list of Indian heroes.

Such a myopic vision of life of the Hindu nationalists is a grave threat to the idea of a peaceful and prosperous secular India as envisioned by its founding fathers. When a Hindu nationalist assassinated Gandhi, the Indians rejected this brand of mad politics for decades, however, over time, history has come full circle in India today, as the Hindu nationalists are ruling the roost under Narendra Modi. Where is India heading to?