Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: September 24, 2002
The English language media's inability
to come to terms with the possibility that Narendra Modi may win even the
delayed elections in Gujarat has inspired vituperative outbursts against
the former RSS pracharak. Yet the declamations are notable for the fact
that, for the first time in several years, they avoid demonizing the Hindu
community en masse and focus their ire exclusively on the Chief Minister's
political grammar.
It would be dishonest to deny the
sharp polarization in Gujarat in the aftermath of Godhra. Nor is it easy
to dispel the impression that in the first few days following that massacre,
Mr. Modi appeared panic-stricken and out of his depth. This is understandable
as he was a greenhorn sent to Gandhinagar to keep the seat warm till the
elections and deflect the anger of earthquake victims against Keshubhai
Patel's inept administration.
However, much water has flown under
the bridge since then, and Modi is today variously applauded or lambasted
as the icon or alchemist of Hindu nationalism (sic). His colourful rhetoric,
front-paged in the media, reinforces the image. Nonetheless, only a callow
commentator could believe that a man who has become the symbol of a deeper
churning in society as a whole, is not himself the product of waters that
run deep.
Gujarat has witnessed the return
of the Kshatriya element in the personality of urban educated Hindus, a
fact unpalatable to many. And Narendra Modi has been landed with the unenviable
task of dignifying this transition, as few within Gujarat are now prepared
to countenance the colonial propaganda that Hindus are mandated by their
faith to be bovine spectators in the face of unacceptable provocation.
In the circumstances, Modi cannot possibly swim against the current of
a powerful movement of self-assertion.
Indeed, the groundswell has been
so powerful that even the opposition Congress has had to affirm its 'Hindu'
credentials with a public rally at the temple of a famous crusader against
cow slaughter. The BJP cannily gave this rally precedence over its own
proposed yatra, as it committed Congress to a course of non-combat with
Hindu sentiment and subtly changed the ground rules of political discourse
in the state. Sankarsinh Vaghela has since liberally spiced his meetings
with Hindu ingredients, and I feel it is only a matter of time before other
political parties and states realize that Hindu-baiting is no longer politically
remunerative.
This will inevitably complicate
matters for political parties that regard Hindus as mere aggregates of
castes linked together for electoral convenience, and treat minorities
as clients who are duty-bound to provide the votes mandated by the poll
arithmetic. It is already clear that Muslims are no longer satisfied to
serve as clients of the major parties, and are demanding a larger political
role, which Mr. Vaghela realizes is not feasible in present-day Gujarat.
Understandably, Congress is in a bind; however, its new-found sensitivity
to the Hindu question has checked media hostility to the majority community.
But all this still begs the question
- what exactly is going on in Gujarat, and where do we go from here? To
my mind, Gujarat has rejected the civilizational deadlock imposed by Jawaharlal
Nehru at independence, and launched the Hindu community on an irreversible
journey of self-assertion and self-affirmation. This has been possible
for several reasons.
The first is that the wholly Western-inspired
Nehruvian consensus is dead, and even its most die-hard adherents are finding
it difficult to maintain the façade of its legitimacy. The second
and more important reason is that the once-dominant West is in intellectual
disarray and moral retreat. This may seem surprising in view of the awesome
military and economic power still exercised by the West, but one has only
to look at the dissensions in the Western alliance over the proposed American
action against Iraq to realize that the West no longer speaks in one voice
on issues of critical strategic importance.
The West's loss of self-esteem and
self-confidence is not the subject of this article, however, I would like
to emphasize that unless the West quickly revises its notions of civilization
to include genuine respect for non-monotheistic traditions, it may find
itself overwhelmed by Islamic fundamentalism. I may add that I have never
been a votary of Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis, for
the simple reason that the two entities he perceives as heading for confrontation
do not satisfy my understanding of the term 'civilization.'
To return to Gujarat, most analysts
have been confounded by the enthusiasm displayed during the riots by the
Adivasis, Dalits, and the educated middle class. A leading newsmagazine
estimated that about two million people come onto the streets, making the
post-Godhra events a mass movement in purely numerical, value-neutral terms.
The media has been unable to understand why one of the richest, educated
and industrious communities in the country should abandon the secular quest
for material prosperity and pursue a blatantly 'communal' agenda.
The answer, of course, is that man
does not live by bread alone, and that India's foundational ethos was bound
to assert itself once the artificial Nehruvian consensus and its ideological
underpinnings had been gravely undermined. That Gujarat should be the arena
of this resurgence is understandable once it is realized that the Hindu
community in the state has thoroughly secured the secular realm over the
past several decades. This means that unlike communities that are at odds
with the modern world, Hindus have whole-heartedly embraced modernization
and have internalized it completely in education, industry, trade, information
technology and other state-of-the-art fields of endeavour. The foundations
of artha (economic prosperity) being firmly laid, they are enjoined by
dharma (law, duty) to participate in the eternal quest for dharma (righteousness,
way of life).
The Nehruvian paradigm essentially
rested on three pillars, all of which have now come crumbling down. One
was non-alignment, which became totally redundant with the end of the Cold
War and the demise of the Soviet Union. The second was socialism, which
has completely lost its legitimacy as a viable economic system, and remains
discredited notwithstanding current Indian concerns over the manner of
disinvestment in the public sector. The third, of course, was secularism,
which in India never implied a separation between religion and state power.
Rather, state arbitration ensured disproportionate power and privileges
to the elite of minority communities, at the expense of the majority community,
in return for assured votes at election time.
This third pillar was the first
to loose legitimacy in the eyes of the majority community - because minority
support was perceived as keeping the Congress party in power on a minority
of the total votes polled - but the peculiar interplay of forces somehow
kept this leg of the Nehruvian tripod propped up, long after the other
two had fallen. But it was intrinsically unstable, and fell in the face
of concerted opposition to an unbearable provocation.
The challenge before us now is to
fashion a new national consensus and articulate a theory of secularism
that is consistent the demands of our civilizational ethos and natural
justice. Serious-minded citizens must begin by asking themselves to what
extent the privileging of monotheistic traditions at the expense of the
truly catholic sanatan dharma has bequeathed us a grim legacy of intolerance
and violence.
