Author: Ashok Mitra
Publication: Communalism Combat
Date: September 2002
URL: http://www.sabrang.com/cc/sep02/mitra.html
The crisis the country is facing
today has a most respectable genesis; it is intricately linked to the history
of the movement for Independence
To be less than blunt will be altogether
pointless. The crisis the country is facing has a most respectable genesis;
it is intricately linked to the history of the movement for independence.
Mahatma Gandhi, whom we love to describe as the Father of the Nation, was
the indisputable leader of that movement in the early decades of the last
century. He was in search of a paradigm which could capture the imagination
of the innocent, illiterate, ill-fed, ill-clad masses and inspire them
to be active participants in the great endeavour to liberate the nation
from foreign subjection. Religiosity, he concluded, held the answer.
His ceaseless pontification has
a single message: freedom would bring back the Ram Rajya of Puranic times;
in Ram Rajya, justice and fairplay prevailed in all seasons, nobody exploited
anybody else and people lived happily together under the benign rule of
Lord Rama. Whether Lord Rama's treatment of his consort, Sita was impeccably
correct was an issue that was conveniently brushed aside. Rama was the
embodiment of all virtues, and once the country was rid of foreign rule,
equity and manna would begin to drop from heaven.
The dream of Ram Rajya, the just
kingdom, was the incitement Gandhiji provided his people. The paradigm,
however, was sectarian to begin with. It was a Hindu paradigm; to the innocent
masses, who overwhelmingly belonged to the Hindu community, the liberated
land would be another Ram Rajya all right, but one the denominational identity
of which could hardly remain vague. The Ram Rajya was a Hindu concept,
post-liberation India would ipso facto be a Hindu domain.
The other communities were excluded.
The problem lay with the Gandhian model. A subterranean attitude of the
mind was simultaneously pervasive after all: we have made a gift of Pakistan
to the Muslims; the rest of the great Indian subcontinent naturally belongs
to us, the Hindus. It did not matter what the sophisticated thin stratum
at the top thought or felt; for the nation's multitude, the imagery of
India was that of a basically Hindu land. That imagery has not weakened
in the course of the past half a century and more.
The sojourn from Gandhiji's Ram
Rajya to the Ram Rajya of the Ram Rajya Parishad and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
was therefore not particularly arduous. The Parishad could claim to be
the sincerest followers of the Gandhian path. And it should not be much
of a surprise that the medieval savagery the country has witnessed this
year had Gandhiji's very own Gujarat as its venue. The current thought
of a considerable number of Gujarati Hindus bears traces of Gandhiji's
ideological baggage. What is true for Gujarat is equally true for the rest
of the country. It is not for nothing that the offspring of such eminent
Congress leaders as Pandit Govind Vallabh Pant and Lal Bahadur Shastri
are distinguished members of the top hierarchy of Bhartiya Janata Party
leadership.
The poison tree that has impeccable
roots has made nonsense of the Indian Constitution's secular pretensions.
Jawaharlal Nehru, free India's first prime minister, was unable to conceal
his emotions in those heady days: no fooling, he was going to preside over
a secular India. Nehru had a noble mind. Unfortunately, it was also a flawed
mind. A secular republic, Nehru thought, is one whose government tends
to be equally sympathetic to all religions and communities. He would accordingly
hop from temple to temple and satisfy his secular conscience by visiting
mosques, gurdwaras, churches and synagogues with equal gusto. Since the
number of Hindu temples in the country far exceeded the number of religious
sites identifiable with other faiths, it was his visits to the Hindu institutions
which caught the attention of the media and therefore of the general public.
The malady spread, and with rapidity,
following Nehru's departure from the scene. India Gandhi's persona was
an enigma: she was a modern woman par excellence; however, she had a religious
streak in her, laced with strong superstitious beliefs. Sadhus and fakes
of the Hindu denomination were constantly visible in her neighbourhood.
Her elder son, who too became prime minister, was born of a Parsi father
and wedded to a Catholic wife.
Democracy is a mug's game though,
and one must flaunt one's denominational credentials if the prime object
is the garnering of votes. Photographs exist of the young prime minister
of India bowing down, bare bodied, before Hindu priests while visiting
holy Hindu temples and seeking benediction. These pictures were regularly
flashed across newspaper pages. The subconscious Hindu mind, nestling in
the bodies of millions of honest, innocent Indians, could not but take
the hint.
Soon the electronic media was drawn
in. The great Puranic epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were serialised
for years on end under government auspices on the Doordarshan screen. The
Hindu epics were government-sponsored epics; by inference, the government
had to be Hindu. For a few weeks, as a balancing stratagem, those in authority
with some leftover conscience tried to run a serial on Tipu Sultan. That
proved to be extremely disappointing and was abandoned pronto.
The Republic of India continued
to be nominally secular, but it was Hindu secular. Hindu secularism defined
itself as one which does not mind the powers that be to patronise occasionally
other denominations as well. There is a catch though: others are tolerated,
Hindus are the dominant entity.
The rest of the grisly story is
easily summed up. The practice of Vast Pug persists in all construction
activities in the public sector. A boat, built in a government workshop
and owned by a government company, cannot be floated into the waters without
the crushing of a coconut. Hindu totems choke public offices. You should
not be surprised to find incense burning before the picture of a Hindu
deity when you step into the lift in a government building or take a ride
in a government car.
Secularism has lost its way. It
has come to be defined as a state of existence where the government is
equally chummy, at least on paper, with all religions; in reality, it is
much more chummy with Hindu ascriptions. The awareness that genuine secularism
is something else - a condition of being where the State is equi-distant
from all religions, is indifferent to all of them and keeps all of them
at arm's length - has in the present circumstances, ceased to exist.
Competitive democracy, besides,
has its own rules and an infectious disease is an infectious disease. For
his sins, the present writer was once a minister in a state government
which was immensely proud of its Left radical credentials. One of his most
shameful memories of that tenure concerns a cabinet decision to declare
a public holiday on the occasion of a solar eclipse; some eminent astrologers
had predicted the end of the world on that day and the state government
did not want to go against the general sentiments of the people: is it
not a reasonable proposition that, on the last day of human existence,
one should be in the midst of one's near and dear ones and not be attending
office?
It is going to be a long, long haul
before the parameters of this society could be totally overhauled. And
that will remain a very dim possibility as long as the present political
establishment, infested by crooks and hypocrites and devoid of all scruples
and moral compunctions, monopolises the proceedings.
(The writer, a columnist was formerly
minister in the Left Front government in West Bengal).
