A fatuous faux is happening in South Asia, which is going to jolt the Modi’s “Hindu-India.” Something that is thousands of years old is being failingly converted into something else. It is secularism that is being metamorphosed into Hindutva.
India will tumble down, should it mutate into Hindutva. Modi’s dreams would turn India into a quagmire of dark nightmares as resolute secularism would be altered into a chauvinist Hindutva. This has never been a historical reality, even when Hindus’ political profusion was much larger and stronger. This would cause state fragmentation with serious regional fallouts. Modi is on a suicidal re-invention of embellishing India.
India has never been home to any specific religion or culture and was never disciplined on the lines of religion or religious socio-cultures. India did not become secular in 1947 so that it could be easily alterable by Modi in 2019 (as he did with currency)! India’s secularism is a tale of thousands of years. If it was not being that, India would have never witnessed the rise of multi-religion entities and so many sub-belief systems. Also, the long and short history of the sub-continent constitutes the fact that while religion was used for the accumulation of political power, it never solely assisted in the perpetuation of the distinct political might.
Modi’s attempt to convert the secular state of India into a Hindu dominated Hindutva has serious ramifications, not only for the Muslims or Hindus, but also, and most definitely, for the very structure of India. Modi’s reengineering of converting anything and everything into being Hindu is a fine idea, only recognised by the RSS stalwarts. The RSS is, however, not the whole of India. The state is not a religious but a scientific entity and Hindutva is anything but scientific.
Savarkar’s doctrine of Hindutva has been a rejected treatise by both history and histology. It is only an embodiment of failed attempts to justify creating something through mutilation of historical facts; distortion of recorded history and a collection of whimsical desires, aspiring to structure a fairytale with bewitching contours.
Modi’s war narrative is bankrupted and vehemently flouted by the popular Junta
His work is based on a mythical reproduction of history and an abrasive attempt to re-write history; doing away with the universal principle that history is not written, but made.
Another problem would be the cleansing of the roots of the secular nature of India. Secularism is not nascent to India but a characteristic developed over thousands of years. Being so staunchly secular within, the Hindutva would be an external boorish cloak if Modi brings it forth, even if only to further galvanise his political ploys. The state engineering would be off-track as the two ideas would end in shards let alone the people’s grand psychology shift, which would make them face a serious identity crisis and a nationalistic ambivalence. The state of India would fall to the perilous social, economic, cultural and political hypothermia.
Modi is a dupe believing that the majority he won for the second term was the result of his verbosity for Hindutva, which completely undermined his performance through the application of well-planned economic policies, disciplined development, a check on corruption and easing out the common problems of a common man and the successful liberal international diplomacy.
This hallucination of Hindutva and Modi’s permanent stay over India as its godfather would hit him a serious blow. The Indians would never subscribe to anything so religiously decorated without looking into it through some critique. There are already voices rising within India of the significance of removing Article 370 without any material results. Modi’s war narrative is bankrupted and vehemently flouted by the popular Junta.
The political power does not take long to wither if it starts disbranching from the people. Indians would want an India that would be peaceful and free of insularity. They have already started picking up on the antipathy created within the country. The intractable division of people based on religion has already picked up the pace. This would be the beginning of an end of the state equanimity, and colossal India might behold a colossal fall.
The writer is a civil servant based in Quetta