Heroes of Hindu nationalism

 It looks as if Modi’s Hindu nationalists intend to do with the Indian Muslims, what the Christian rulers of Spain did with their Muslim subjects.

 History is being made in India. The sun of secularism has set. A new dawn is beginning, the dawn of Hindu nationalism. How different will India be under the ‘new nationalists’, whose guiding philosophy is Hindu religion? In less than seven decades, the Nehruvian principles of secularism and liberalism seem alien in his homeland. Such can be the ravages of time.

 Like the secular Indian nationalists that have been pushed away from the centre stage; the Hindu nationalists will also pass off in the nothingness of time, however, for the moment they are a stark reality and therefore merit a close study.

 It is perfectly normal for individuals to believe in and practice a religious ideal but only at the individual level. If the institution of state is used to promote and impose a particular brand of ideology then those who do not subscribe to it are relegated to the status of ‘second class citizens’ with no room to live as free citizens pursuing ideals according to their conscience.

 Almost every country of the world is a pluralistic society inhabited by large groups of people living side by side yet different in religion, language, ethnicity, culture, etc. If the state is secular, every citizen can associate with it in the hope of being treated equally and fairly, however, if the state adorns the mantle of a particular creed then those that do not adhere to it are victimised resulting in dissatisfaction, disgruntlement and discord all around.

 The enthronement of Modi and Co at the helm of the state is a sign of retrogression and not progression in India. It is retrogression in the sense that these ‘new nationalists’ will try to shape the future on the basis of Hinduism as it was defined and interpreted by its leading lights during the first half of the last century. Modi and Co are heroes of the present Hindu generation whereas they themselves are followers of another set of the past Hindu heroes. Now, let’s turn to those heroes of these new heroes of Hindu nationalism.

 Every Hindu nationalist worth his salt looks upon Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as his hero because it was he, who, for the first time formulated the concept of Hindu nation in his 1923 classical work “Hindutva / Who is a Hindu?” Even today, his book serves as the charter of Hinduism for the nationalist Hindus. Apart from serving as the president of Hindu Mahasabha for several years, he was a suspect in the murder of a British official and was identified as the consignor of those revolvers sent from Europe to India, one of which was used in the murder of a Bombay magistrate. No wonder he spent twenty-seven years in jail, in all. He was ever suspicious of millions of Indian Muslims whom he labelled as ‘fifth columnists’ because he thought that their allegiance was not to India but to Mecca ‘their religious capital’ and Istanbul ‘their political capital’- the city being the capital of the last Muslim caliph. What would have been the fate of the Indian Muslims, had his Hindu Mahasabha come into power is any body’s guess? Meanwhile, the present Hindu nationalists clearly revealed their intentions, when one of their leaders while addressing an election meeting a few days ago warned the Indian Muslims to pack up for Pakistan. It looks as if Modi’s Hindu nationalists intend to do with the Muslims of India, who have been residing there for over 13 centuries, what the Christian rulers of Spain did with their Muslim subjects, who had been living there for about eight centuries. The blunt decree of the Christian monarch read: “Muslims must become Christians or leave Spain.” Will Durant in his multi-volume masterpiece ‘The story of civilisation’ (Volume: Reformation) has captured that historic moment: “The Moors protested that when their forefathers had ruled Spain they had given religious liberty, with rare exceptions, to the Christians under their sway but the sovereigns were not moved. During the sixteenth century 3000,000 superficially converted Muslims left Spain. In February 1502 the Royal Edict asked Muslims of Castile and Leon to choose between Christianity and exile.”

The enthronement of Modi and Co at the helm of affairs is a sign of retrogression in the sense that these ‘new nationalists’ will try to shape the future of India on the basis of Hinduism as it was defined and interpreted by its leading lights during the first half of the last century.

 The policy of zero-tolerance adopted by the Christian rulers of Spain towards their Muslim subjects was also adopted as an article of faith by the Hindu nationalist leaders towards the Indian Muslims in the first half of the twentieth century. One such leader was Dr Balkrishna Moonje, who remained opposed to any agreement with the Muslim community and felt no inhibition in publicly preaching that “as England is the land of the English, Germany that of Germans, similarly, Hindustan is the land of the Hindus.” Such statements were in clear contravention of the modern concept of nationality in which the right of citizenship is guaranteed by birth and not determined by any religious denomination or the religious identity of the majority. When the leaders encourage such prejudiced exclusivism, one can’t blame their followers much. Although the Hindu majority had not acquired political power before partition in 1947, space for survival had begun to shrink for non-Hindus even in cosmopolitan cities like Delhi and Bombay. This can be corroborated by a 1946 book published from Bombay entitled, ‘Caste and outcaste’ by a Hindu named J E Sanjana. The writer admits that “In New Delhi, as in many other places, no Hindu will let his house on rent to a Muslim…. In Bombay, generally supposed to be a cosmopolitan city, there are many numbers of houses and even whole localities where non-Hindu, especially Muslims cannot find a single room to live in.”

 Even the Indian Christians were not spared of such social boycott by the Hindus. Sanjana has narrated the woes of an Indian Christian in search of a room in Bombay, who was repeatedly turned away by the Hindu landlords just because he was not a Hindu. While narrating the fate of another Indian Christian in search of accommodation in Bombay, the writer adds that there were many flats and rooms for hiring but the reply of the Hindu landlords was always the same: “No, not for Christians and Muhammadans.” Fast forward to the present day: the Indian celebrity Shabana Azmi made news headlines when she revealed that she couldn’t buy a house in Mumbai because she was a Muslim. She is on the record to have said, “I wanted to buy a flat in Bombay and it wasn’t given to me because I was a Muslim and I read the same about Saif (Ali Khan). Now, I mean, if Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi cannot get a flat in Bombay because they are Muslims, then what are we talking about?” If this could be the fate of an Indian Muslim celebrity during the rule of the secular Congress, one can imagine the degree of ghettoisation that awaits the Indian Muslims under the Hindu zealots led by Modi and Co.

 Another hero of the Hindu nationalists, Lala Lajpat Rai suffered from the phobia of Muslim domination thinking that the Indian Muslims would join hands with the Muslims of Arabia and Central Asia to dominate the Hindus. Being a Punjabi Hindu, he was worried about the Muslim majority in Punjab and worked unsuccessfully for the division of this province. Lala ji probably believed in that Hindu nationalist narrative that looked upon the Muslim invasions from time to time as a systematic pan-Islamic conspiracy to subjugate Hindus. The problem with this narrative is that it is too simplistic because the past Muslim rulers were as divided on racial, linguistic, cultural and sectarian lines as the present ones are.

 Yet another leader idolised by the Hindu nationalists was Pandat Madan Mohan Malaviya, who, as a rule, did not accept food from people other than his own ‘jati’ (race). Moreover, he remained at the centre of the major Hindu-Muslim tensions such as the anti-cow slaughter movement and the Urdu-Hindi controversy. In addition, he vigorously struggled for the reconversion of the Muslims to Hinduism because he felt that most of the Indian Muslims had been originally Hindus and were forcibly converted to Islam during the Muslim rule in the subcontinent.

 There is nothing wrong with any set of leaders working for the uplift of their community. The aforementioned Hindu nationalist leaders struggled for the betterment of their community. There would have been nothing wrong had they devoted their efforts for the rejuvenation of the Hindus but the problem arose because their words and deeds encouraged hatred and high-handedness towards the non-Hindu communities, particularly the Muslims. Modi and Co adore these leaders and wish to shape the future of India on their lines. Such an approach caused chaos in the past and if this line of action is pursued by the present Hindu nationalist leadership, the level of violence will be humongous because in the past the tools of violence were just lathis, knives and revolvers; today, there are missiles and nukes. Sanity did not prevail then; would it prevail, now?