Daily Times

This article is not one of the usual jeremiad prognostications about the demise of a nation lest the message is misunderstood. It is in fact a bare knuckles admission of a stark reality that like a mirror should be shown to all India lovers and sympathizers. For if ever there was a time the empyrean abode of Mahatama Gandhi’s ideals was in mortal danger of being sunk in the pits of rabid Hindu puritanism, it is now. The eclectic and syncretic social contract begotten out of centuries of peaceful co-existence between several faiths, creeds, and races is being rent apart by the votaries of Hindutva like Modi and his intolerant gang, that have declared an open season not only on Muslims but all racial and religious minorities. 200 million Muslims and Dalits each, 100 million scheduled castes, 28 million Christians,24 million Sikhs and 8.4 million Buddhists are at the receiving end of Hindutva exclusivism.

The message to the harried neighbours and the terrified inmates of India is clear and unambiguous. It is a Hindu India for the Hindus only and all others who wish to remain in its fold should either enter the Hindutva defined social order or risk excommunication from the social fabric of the nation. Savarker and Golwalkar are the new ideologues of the militant Hinduism who had spawned monstrosities like Rashtriya Swaymamsevak Sangh that devoured the children of the pacific Hindu revolution against the colonial tyranny in 1947. The murder of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, an active member of extremist RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, was a watershed event that laid the foundations of a hate campaign that culminated in the ascension of an avatar of Hindu exclusivism in the shape of Prime Minister Modi. Godse’s message was clear i.e hence forth there was no right to life for anyone thinking of interfaith harmony.

Though Nathuram’s death sentence was commuted by Gandhi’s two sons but clemency was rejected by Nehru and his Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel. The term Hindutva was first coined by Chandranath Bassu, a Bengali journalist. The message of hate and misanthropy however was first disseminated in the shape of a pamphlet writtenin 1923 by Savarkar, titled Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? He wrote in the pamphlet that the Hindu nation comprised all those who lived in the geographical confines of the Indian subcontinent as Hindus having an ancestry belonging to the region. Following quote illustrates his ideological thrust; “We Hindus are bound together not only by the tie of the love we bear to a common fatherland and by the common blood that courses through our veins and keeps our hearts throbbing and our affections warm, but also by the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilization”.

The subliminal message in above quote was that of xenophobia and rejection of all faiths and ethnicities that claimed a foreign descent like Parsees, Christians, and Muslims hailing form Persia and Arabian Peninsula. Only Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists were deemed fit for the fold of Hindutva due to their descent from subcontinent’s Hindu culture. It is another thing that very few people realized that the seeds of Hindu-Muslim divide were sown by the British as a part of their carefully contrived policy of “Divide and Rule” after 1857. In fact it was in 1872 that the Hindus and Muslims were categorized as two different communities on the basis of religion. Prior to that the Hindus and Muslims alongwith all other Indian faiths or ethnicities were known by the generic name “Hindi”. The Hindu Rashtra or the Hindu nation as per Savarkar included only those who embraced Hindu faith and culture.

Something real sinister lay hidden in Savarkar’s apparently patriotic pitch for Hindu nationalism. In Hindutva ideology only those had a right to be part of Hindu Rashtra or nation who renounced all other cultural or religious identities to be subsumed into the fold of Hindu culture. Since culture and religion in 18th century India had almost merged hence it was difficult to separate the religious and cultural practices altogether. The Muslims being the largest of the excluded groups were the natural targets for varying reasons, the chief amongst those being a minority that had ruled over India and was not ready to roll over and make way for the Hindu socio-political hegemony. The Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and even the closet bigotry of Congress forced Muslims to seek a separate homeland for protection of their political and economic rights in a post British India dominated by Hindu nationalism.

Francis Fukuyama had predicted in his famous End of History thesis claiming that the liberal democracy and capitalism had ushered in an end of history

The remarkable prescience and farsightedness of our founding father Quaid e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah stands in stark contrast against the naïve optimism of some Congress aligned Muslim political leaders who opposed partition. The present Hindutva inspired Modi led government that is trying its best to alter the secular character of the Indian constitution through slow nibbling attacks of extremist narrative is forcing Muslims to embrace Hindu culture or else face diurnal persecution and denial of fundamental rights. The revocation of Article 370 and integration of Kashmir into Indian union was also a dream of Savarkar’s disciples that has fructified under Modi’s watch. The injustice in Kashmir and Hindutva are therefore two interlinked phenomena. The slow poison of communal hatred that had lain dormant after the cataclysmic partition of India in 1947 is now rising to frightening levels under the BJP’s espousal of Hindu supremacism.

Muslims and other minorities in India are being subjected to ethnic pogroms and cultural violence. According to Johan Galtung, cultural violence is “any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural forms.” It is a kind of insidious violence that furnishes a justification for injustices and inequities against a persecuted community by changing the moral colour of a hideous act. The Nazi concept of racial purity and selection inspired by eugenics theory was a kind of cultural violence that furnished a pseudo- scientific pretext for atrocities against the Jews in Europe and Germany. Cultural violence acts as a substratum of ideology for an iniquitous socio-political or socio-economic structure that inevitably leads towards acts of violence against the beliefs, property and lives of the dominated community. The top dogs in a structure of violence deify their own culture while desacralizing that of the underdogs. The disaggregation of culture in religion, ideology, and art helps understand the anatomy of cultural violence. In case of Hindu cultural violence against Muslims it is the religion that is being used as a tool to direct the Hindu misanthropy and cultural xenophobia against Muslims. Hindu revivalist organizations like RSS and their political front i.e BJP rely on the caste system to demonize Muslims as objects unworthy of equal treatment and therefore liable to be discriminated against in all spheres.

What Modi and his megalomaniac accomplices do not realize is that by repudiating the inclusive secular ethos of the Indian constitution they are sounding the death knell of the Indian union. What held a polyglot union of diverse ethnicities and nationalities together was the Indian secularism bequeathed by her founding fathers like Gandhi and Nehru. Now while the Maoist-Naxalite insurgency ridden Red Corridor in the Eastern, Central, and Southern parts of India is already on the boil the declaration of an open war against the cultural inclusivism of the Indian government is akin to a social hara-kiri. What is most galling is that in that endeavor it is being egged on by one of the most brainwashed medias of the world. Together with a rabidly extremist Hindutva loving ruling BJP party they are hollowing out the basis of Indian union.

Francis Fukuyama had predicted in his famous End of History thesis claiming that the liberal democracy and capitalism had ushered in an end of history. Indians under Modi are embarking on a similar voyage aboard Hindutva ship little realizing that they are nearing End of India as conceived by their founding fathers.

(The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST; e mail rwjanj@hotmail.com)