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Introduction: Go over the Supreme Court's definition of Hindutva, Mr Nayar
By saying that Hindutva and secularism cannot go together, senior columnist and member of Parliament Kuldip Nayar (IE, March 26) has once again displayed that his understanding of Hindutva is very poor. Or, in an attempt to launch his pseudo-intellectual assault on the BJP, he has taken the risk of maligning the very basis of Indian secularism - Hindutva.
If he is willing to be honest with his readers who regard Nayar as a great intellectual, he should consult the Supreme Court observations that have defined Hindutva as a way of life. It is a way of life that evolved and prospered on the Indian subcontinent over the ages. It's not a way of worship or a religion in the true sense of the word and in the sense in which Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism and hundreds of other sects of Indian origin can claim to be religions.
As a philosophy of life that goes beyond ways of worship and views of God, Hindutva is the name of a spirit that unites all these together. Hindutva is a cultural term and its central theme is tolerance and the spirit of co-existence. And this very spirit is the source of Indian secularism.
One must not forget that we might have imported the concept of democracy from the Western world but true secularism is a purely indigenous concept that stems out of the common undercurrent that unites all the sects that were either born on this land or have grown here after dropping in from somewhere else. Had the people who worship different, say thousands of, Gods, deities or avtars been intolerant, India couldn't have remained secular even after its partition purely on communal lines.
So, we must understand that Indian secularism is born out of the mindset of Indian people that had developed over thousands of years. This very lifestyle is Hindutva and both secularism and Hindutva are, therefore, synonyms. Nayar's way of looking at the RSS, one of the leading torchbearers of Hindutva in post-Independence India, also suffers from many shortcomings.
He is undemocratic when he says that Vajpayee cannot remain both a swayamsevak and the prime minister of India at the same time. He should come forward and enlighten the nation about those constitutional and legal provisions that debar a RSS swayamsevak from holding this high office.
Nayar, by raising such pseudo-secular
slogans, has once again chosen to sing in tune with the Pakistani propaganda
machinery. This language only suits the communal Pakistani media which
is all out for a false campaign against us.
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