Author: Balbir K. Punj
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: December 9, 2002
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=14420
Both critics (Mani Shankar Aiyar
in The Indian Express, November 26) of and commentators on Deputy Prime
Minister L K Advani's recent speech in Parliament on Gujarat are missing
the point when they assume that there's something new in his statement.
Advani is credited with having said that India will never be a ''Hindu
Rashtra'' when the text of his speech shows that he didn't use those words
anywhere.
And as for his statement on the
making of the Constitution, especially in the context of Partition, Advani
said: ''Nobody said declare Hindustan a Hindu state. India accepted a constitution
which does not have the secular word in it but the secular concept is there-respect
for all religions, equal rights, status for Hindus, Muslims, Christians
and Parsis.''
He then stressed that if ''this
concept which can be called secular was accepted, unanimously at that,
because Hindustan's ethos, Hindustan's culture never accepted the concept
of a religious state: Our concept of Hindutva, our concept of Hinduism
is the concept of Swami Vivekanandji.'' Advani also quoted the former Supreme
Court Chief Justice J S Verma in a judgement: ''The words Hinduism or Hindutva
are not confined only to the strict Hindu religious practices unrelated
to the culture and ethos of the people of India depicting the way of life
of the Indian people... We in the Government accept that meaning of Hindutva.''
Critics are fond of quoting Guru
Golwalkar to pillory the RSS. They usually pick up a quotation from We
Or Our Nationhood Defined as allegedly authored by Guruji in 1939 and project
it as the authentic dissertation on RSS ideology. In fact, the book wasn't
Golwalkar's original work but an English rendering of a Marathi book Rashtra
Mimansa (Discourse on Nation) by G D Savarkar. Golwalkar later distanced
himself from this radical work, a product of his formative days in the
RSS and out of print since 1947.
Let me quote what exactly Golwalkar
had to say on this issue. In Bunch of Thoughts, he went over the terms
'Hindu Rashtra' and 'secularism'. It may surprise my friend Mani Shankar
Aiyar that Golwalkar supported a secular Indian state. He said: ''Indeed,
our concept of 'state' has always been 'secular' and emphasising the secular
nature of the state by the adjective 'secular' is redundant in our country.''
Secularism is a ''positive approach,'' he says, in that ''the king became
the symbol of support and protection to all faiths and creeds and never
negation of religion.'' The ''king'' in our case represents the ''state''
or its sovereign function. Golwalkar emphasises that ''the wide and all
comprehensive view of life ingrained in the Hindu ruler made him to respect
and even encourage every single religious thought... to grow according
to its own genius''.
That is what Advani also said in
Parliament: ''It is because of such language that you must again understand
that Hindustan or Hindustan's people will never condone communal violence
whether it is done by Hindus or Muslims. Mass communal violence will never
be condoned.'' He repeated that he was ashamed of what happened in Gujarat,
something he has said before.
This confusion arises because some
people cannot distinguish between the 'state' and the 'nation'. The 'state'
is a part of the nation-the 'state' may change, rulers may be replaced
by others, the state may be taken over by an army and so on but the 'nation'
lives on. The 'nation' has a much larger meaning, in that it encompasses
the entire ethos of the people. Because of our history and culture, we
are a Hindu nation with the majority following the Hindu way of life. That
way of life has influenced and will continue to influence several other
things -our literature, fine arts, music, sculpture, heritage, our values.
Hindutva is a thread that runs though all these, uniting them and the people
of different ways.
Golwalkar said: ''The wide and all-comprehensive
view of life ingrained in the Hindu ruler made him to respect and even
encourage every single religion and thought.'' Advani also says that people
of all religions should feel safe under BJP rule. And because in Gujarat
during the three months of rioting they did not feel so, he admitted a
failure on the part of his government.
But it is the 'secularists' who
are a problem. Aiyar finds an alibi for Pakistan pointing out that it is
''theocratic only in the sense that it calls itself 'Islamic', not in the
sense that it is ruled by clerics.'' He even goes on to recall that until
recently, extremist parties didn' t get more than 5 % of the votes. According
to which political theory does a theocratic state need to be ruled by clerics?
The character of the theocratic state is not that it is ruled by clerics,
but that the state puts one religion above all others and considers its
duty to propagate that religion in all state functions, even at the cost
of other faiths.
Our self-styled secularists also
fail to find out whether anyone other than Hindus is prepared to vouch
by a secular state if the country's demographic character changed. Islam
historically divides the world into two: dual Islam and dar-ul- harab.
Aiyar must ask his ''secular'' friends what that difference means and whether
conquering the non-Islamic world forms part of the Islamic mindset or not.
Also whether it is not a fact that most Islamic nations are theocracies.
Aiyar must find out whether the
concept of the Caliphate combining the political crown and theocratic ascendancy
is not peculiarly Islamic, and whether much of the current global alliance
against Islamic terrorism is because the mindset is widespread in the Islamic
belt that it is the ''duty of every Muslim'' to work for destroying dar-ul-harab,
the 'enemy' country. That is the great obstacle to true secularism.
(The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP
and convenor of the BJP Think Tank)
