Gandhi to Modi - India’s Nationalistic Quest

In his Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, quoted Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s idea of nationalism in his own words thus:

”I call myself a nationalist but my nationalism is as wide as the universe; it embraces all nations. My nationalism includes the prosperity of all nations. I want a strong India able to transfuse its strength to other nations …. Let us look for something new; let us try the power of love and God which are the truth.”

Elsewhere, Gandhi had proclaimed that ‘loyalty to the country is always subordinate to loyalty to God’ and re-emphasized that his nationalism was ‘not exclusive’ but is of ‘intense internationalism’.

His averment that ‘nationalism is as wide as the universe’, indeed, is the upanishadic concept of vasudhaiva kutumbakam but as it does not sync with the absolutist precepts of the Semitic faiths, obviously it is of no avail to further the cause of Indian nationalism. Be that as it may, it enabled Gandhi to ascend the throne on international moral high ground that is while leaving the Indian nationalism bereft of, so to say, any space.

While his proposition, ‘my nationalism includes the prosperity of all nations’, ignored the wisdom of charity beginning at home, his reliance on ‘the power of love and God which are the truth’ failed to take into account the nature of the Abrahamaic Godhead in that while Jehovah in His Ten Commandments had ordained his believers thus:

“1. You may worship no other god than me.

      2. You shall not make yourselves any idols: no images of animals, birds, or fish.

      You must never bow or worship it in any way; for I, the Lord your God, am very

       possessive. I will not share your affection with any other God!”

And it is another matter that the self-same God, in his Quranic avatar as Allah, had turned His new favourites against not only his chosen people but also the followers of his own son, not to speak of others, thus:

“The Jews and Christians say: We are sons of Allah and His loved ones. Say: Why then doth he chastise you for your sins? Nay, ye are but mortals of His creating. He forgiveth whom He will, and chastiseth whom He will. Allah’s is the Sovereignty of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them, and unto Him is the journeying.”

“All they who disbelieve and deny our revelations, such are rightful owners of hell.”

That being the case, wonder on the ‘power of which love and which God’ was Gandhi banking upon to help his nationalism that includes the prosperity of all nations. While one can attribute this loftiness of thought, not grounded in the reality of the God, to Gandhi’s nobility of purpose, what one were to make out of his advocacy that ‘loyalty to the country is always subordinate to loyalty to God’!

It cannot be the case that Gandhi was unaware of the fact that the Muslim loyalty to Allah and the Christian affinity to Jesus, both alien to the ancient Indian ethos, is not the same thing as the Hindu loyalty to the native Rama, Krishna et al. Surely, Gandhi would have known too that the exclusivist Muslim umma and Christian fraternity alike subscribe to ‘intense internationalism’ of their creed through religious conversions in India and elsewhere, but yet, he didn’t care, at any rate seemingly so. And true to his conviction, he lent his nationalistic weight to the Khilafat movement, aka the Indian Muslim movement, post-World War I, to pressure Britain to preserve the authority of the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam, by which he had sowed the seeds, unwittingly though, of a separate homeland for the Muslims on the Indian soil.

Nevertheless, as he happened to be the philosopher-guide of Indian struggle for independence from the British colonial rule, his confusing presumptions shaped the nebulous nationalism that came to define independent India’s political axiom. While how all this turned out to be an enduring hurt to Indian national integration needs no retelling, we may examine how his wooly views came to prevail to India’s hurt.

True, India was first invaded by Muslims but yet resisted all through and then was colonized by the British but subdued only after the fall of Rani of Jhansi in 1858. So to say, this defeat in its first war of independence was more moral than mortal for India seemed to have lost its fighting spirit once and for all thereafter. Gandhi, having been born eleven years after the morale-ruining defeat, was but a product of that India’s hapless era, and understandably his call for satyagraha jelled with the nation’s psyche then. What is more, once he could galvanize the nation behind him, as his words became Vedas, so much so that his idiocies became the truths belying the nationalist concerns of Savarkar, Ambedkar and such. Amused by his idea of non-violent struggle that is alien to the spirit of their crusades, much of the West, going by the human nature, egged him to undertake that which they themselves would not do at any rate. 

But as Gandhi’s non-violent movement against British went haywire in Noakhali on the Muslim aggressive front and as he remained clueless to the Islamic ways, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was on course to gain a homeland for Indian Muslims in Pakistan. It was another matter that way back in 1937; Savarkar had stated that Congress is betraying the nation by indulging in Muslim appeasement at the cost of Hindu rights and it is better to stand in the last row of patriots than in the first row of betrayers. However, Gandhi’s brainwash of India’s Hindu majority towards his Muslim-leaning ways (he was even crazy enough to advise Hindus to smilingly die if Muslims were to kill them) can be gauged from the fact that they accepted the loss of their ancestral land to the later-day converts without a demur and bore the brunt of the post-partition riots to a fault.

Post-independence, sensing the minority Muslim votes as ready pickings for his congress party at the polling booths, Nehru had contrived to keep the Gandhian non-nationalist legacy alive as a ploy to keep the nationalist forces at bay. That Godse, a Hindu nationalist, felled Gandhi only came in handy for Nehru to malign nationalism per se to thwart the unification of the caste-ridden Hindu polity that’s the avowed aim of Indian nationalism. While Nehru and his progeny thrived politically to lord over India for better part of its independent existence, the national emotional vacuum came to be slowly but steadily came to be filled by communalism, regionalism, casteism, nepotism, favouritism and above all corruption to India’s hurt. However, things came to a nadir during the ten year proxy rule of the Italian born Sonia, when graft became the byword of political power.

When India was thinking enough was enough, came an upright Narendra Modi onto the national political stage to the cheers of the desperate electorate. And as India’s premier he too lost no time to ascend the ramparts of the Red Fort, wearing a Maharaja turban, signaling the return of the native. What with his invocation of the nation’s ancient culture at every turn and showcasing its civilizational glitter on the world stage, India began to experience a sense of itself for the first time in its living memory. Also, his robust military response to Pakistan’s nefarious terror design in the form of a surgical strike on the ground and an air attack on Balakot had bestowed upon the nation a martial sense of achievement. 

Thus, besides cleaning the corrupt public stables, as he gave it nationalism to boot, India, all again, rooted for him to march ahead on the nationalistic path. And promptly he did abrogate the vexatious Art 370 ‘n 35A of the Indian constitution to politically integrate the intransigent State of Jammu & Kashmir and that gave a fillip to the Indian nationalist sentiment as never before. Finally, as of now, he owned up Veer Savarkar and proclaimed that he was the fountainhead of Indian nationalism thereby fast tracking Indian nationalism. Surely, in India’s post-independence history, Narendra Damodardas Modi’s name would be etched in golden letters as the spearhead of Indian nationalism, and certainly he would have earned that for himself. 

  

Warts in Mahatma's Atma

 “Won’t it remind one of Gandhi’s experiments with truth?”

“I have no quarrel with Gandhi the man but I have problem with the Mahatma of his,” he said and as if to remonstrate his apathy for the Gandhian values, he had an extended sip of that Laphroaic.

“I’m no Gandhian and I don’t intend to be one,” he continued from where he had left. “But as is being done, I see it’s a disservice to his legacy to deify him; it’s when I approach him as man that I value him as a human being, but in his picture of mahatma, I see many a wart in his atma. Credit him for cleaning up the public toilets but why not condemn him for having forced his spouse to do the same; why laud him for his quixotic abstinence unmindful of his wife’s conjugal plight; was he not an inveterate autocrat in the democratic garb; what about his falling afoul of Prakasam, and how he played favorites with Nehru. Why bother about him as he’d been reduced for long as a political mascot of the slavish-minded of the self-serving Nehru family that hijacked his name to grind its dynastic axe! What an irony it is that his party that sundered the British yoke should have rendered the political reins into Italian hands? Bemoan the congress party.”

The above is excerpted from the author’s Glaring Shadow – A stream of consciousness novel and the following quote is from his prayer meeting on April 6, 1947, New Delhi, cited in the Collective Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 94, Sl. 243, pages 248/249. 

 “We should dispassionately think where we are drifting. Hindus should not harbour anger in their hearts against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them. Even if the Muslims want to kill us all we should face death bravely. If they established their rule after killing Hindus we would be ushering in a new world by sacrificing our lives. None should fear death. Birth and death are inevitable for every human being. Why should we then rejoice or grieve? If we die with a smile we shall enter into a new life, we shall be ushering in a new India. The Concluding verses of the second chapter of the Gita describe how a godfearing man should live. I would exhort you to read and understand those verses and ponder over their meaning. You will then realize what our ideal is and how far short of it we are today. Our independence is at our threshold and it is our duty to ask ourselves whether we are fit to have it and sustain it.”

One may reflect the above sillyness in Ambedkar's intellectual light underneath: 

“Hinduism is said to divide people and in contrast, Islam is said to bind people together. This is only a half truth. For Islam divides as inexorably as it binds. Islam is a close corporation and the distinction that it makes between Muslims and non-Muslims is a very real, very positive and very alienating distinction. The brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. For those who are outside the corporation, there is nothing but contempt and enmity. The second defect of Islam is that it is a system of social self-government and is incompatible with local self-government because the allegiance of a Muslim does not rest on his domicile in the country which is his but on the faith to which he belongs. To the Muslim ibi bene ibi patria is unthinkable. Wherever there is the rule of Islam, there is his own country. In other words, Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as his motherland and regard a Hindu as his kith and kin. That is probably the reason why Maulana Mahomed Ali, a great Indian but a true Muslim, preferred to be buried in Jerusalem rather than in India.”

May also read "Gagging Godse - A Ploy" in Sep 2019 folder https://bulususmurthy.blogspot.com/2019/09/gagging-godse-ploy_3.html?zx=98cb880795c2b011

Gagging Godse - A Ploy

Adolf Hitler had on his hands the blood of six million gas-chambered Jews besides fifty million soldiers, in the flower of their youth, and thirty million civilians of all ages, who perished in the World War II that he started, but yet he is among the most debated about worldwide. Moreover, Mein Kampf, his autobiography with an anti-Semitic slant is not ostracized either by the book world, but in a stark contrast, uttering the very name of Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, a frail seventy-eight-year old man, and paid the price for his crime on the gallows, just running forty, remains a taboo in his own country for whose good he believed he did what he did, seemingly into eternity! So, sadly for him, the reality his legacy faces belies his hope, expressed in his ‘Why I killed Gandhi’ testimony; “I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof some day in future.”

It is one of the ironies of human history that Hitler, who restored to Germany the pride the Treaty of Versailles robbed if off, and Gandhi, who inspired India to free itself from the British yoke, should’ve become the bane of their countries in the  long run. Though Germany could recover its Hitler trauma in time, it couldn’t repair its demographic dent the war had left to its hurt, but trapped in a Gandhi matrix mired by Godse conundrum, India is stymied, seemingly forever, from inculcating a nationalistic pride and purpose to achieve its true potential. 

Godse, in his own words, was “Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone,” and that should have earned him a place of honour in the pantheon of India’s social reformers. Thus, but for a quirk of fate, maybe, Godse would have rubbed ‘reformist’ shoulders with Gandhi whom he had assassinated for altruistic reasons.

What had put him in the dock that led him to the gallows, again in his words, “I took courage in both my hands and I did fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds of Birla House. I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this reason I fired those fatal shots. I bear no ill will towards anyone individually but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy which was unfairly favourable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi.”

Being himself a Hindu that Gandhi tended to be ‘unfairly favourable towards the Muslims’ at every turn to the hurt and humiliation of his co-religionists is a matter of common knowledge but the motivating factors of this unnatural tendency would’ve stemmed from his vanity to sustain the false aura of a ‘Mahatma’ that the vulgar minds had built around his fallible persona, lo, when he was in his mid-forties! Having seen Gandhi’s ‘image-need’ to bend over backwards to be ‘unfairly favourable to Muslims’ in the socio-religious as well as political spheres, Jinnah had exploited his ‘mahatman’ fallibility to the hilt and walked away with Pakistan to the hurt and humiliation of the Hindu majority of Hindustan. That Gandhi could not shed his inappropriate partiality towards those Muslims, who opted to stay put in the remainder of the sundered Hindustan, notwithstanding their unremitting aggression against his co-religionists therein, illustrates the power of vanity to blind one to the realities of life and times, which, so to say, proved to be the proverbial ‘last straw on the camel’s back’ for Godse.

On his crossing the rubicon, Godse had said, “Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces”. But alas, Godse had failed to reckon the Hindu-indifferent propensities of Nehru to whom Gandhi had handed over the political reins by then that is against the consensus of congressmen, who had instead pitched in for Patel and that much for Mahatma’s democratic convictions.

With Gandhi gone, Nehru, whose background and brought up made him feel, “I am English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by an accident of birth” became the Caesar and that was a double jeopardy for the Hindus for whose sake Godse lost his honour and earned infamy. While his English education precluded the inculcation of Hindu values and dharmic ethos in his mindset, his cultural affinity for Muslims made him averse to the idea of nationalism, an anathema to Islam, in the post-partitioned Hindustan, home to ninety percent Hindus! By crudely exhibiting the Godse red herring and by cleverly equating Hinduism with Brahmanism, for Godse was a Brahmin, and emphasizing the danger it posed for the Hindu masses, Nehru cynically exploited Gandhi’s assassination to malign the Hindu nationalistic impulses per se. Having thus nipped the Hindu nationalism in the bud, Nehru encouraged the separatist-minded Muslim ghettoism, and together, they debilitated the Indian polity for the nationalist void was filled by an accentuated communalism, casteism, regionalism, nepotism and above all an unbridled corruption in every walk of life.

Just a digression, why is this worldwide prevalence of Islamapologia among the left-lib elite notwithstanding the debilitating effect of the debasing ideology of Al-Qaeda, ISIs etc.? One can surmise that these ‘enlightened’ non-Muslims in a way pity the ghettoized ummah that’s afflicted with bigotry and backwardness in equal measure and thus condescend to descend to the Muslims without troubling themselves to address the root cause of the state of the base Muslimness, which is owing to the inimical ethos of Islam.

Back on the track, by acclaiming Gandhi as ‘Father of the Nation’, it was as if he had occasioned the birth of the sub-continental part of the planet, and overemphasizing his role in India’s freedom movement that is either by under-playing or altogether ignoring other eminences’ contributions therein, Nehru managed to create the ‘Brand Gandhi’ for his congress party to market in the poll arena of the then illiterate India for its electoral gain. Not just that, Nehru was pretty shrewd to realize that it was only half a job done for Godse’s testimonies, if allowed to gain ground, would bring Gandhi’s Muslim fault lines to the fore on the Hindu sentimental plane, which could dullen his haloed image to the detriment of the congress party. So, using the state machinery that was at his beck and call, not only did Nehru succeed in deifying Gandhi and demonizing Godse but also created an enduring ecosystem to forever ensure public revulsion for the errant ‘patriot’ as unforgivable ‘traitor’, and that worked wonderfully well for his congress party that is electorally.

After Nehru’s long Caesar-like reign over India, during which, though he always tended to bend backwards for the approval of a white man or ‘the white woman’ and / or both (god only knows how many times he could’ve sprained his spine), his daughter Indira, who in the meantime hand appropriated the haloed name of Gandhi for a surname in place of the phonetically matching Ghandy, her estranged husband’s surname, had assumed the reins of power after a short Shastri interlude that is. Be that as it may, the significance of Indira’s phonetic slieght could be gauged from the fact that even Sonia Maino, the Italian entry into her dynasty, could eventually walk her way through the Indian political arena like a colossus with the nom de guerre of Sonia Gandhi! Whatever, keeping the Godse bogey alive, the dynasty Indira had established in Gandhi’s name was able to retain its political hegemony by electorally exploiting the societal fault lines that Nehru had cemented.   

What is most perturbing that is invariably lost on short-sighted sophists devoid of hindsight to boot, is that the ‘nine percent’ Muslim canal that Nehru brought about on the post-colonial Indian soil has, in six decades, swelled into an ‘eighteen percent’ Islamist stream, which if left to its own course, is bound to facilitate Article 370 Muslim Districts, if not States, all over the land, with Art 35A ‘No Hindu Entry’ boards that is by the turn of the 21^st Century. Given the resurgent upsurge in the ummah to paint the universe green, it goes without saying that there is this urgent need to nudge the recalcitrant Muslim Indians into the national mainstream to preserve the sovereign integrity of India without subjecting it to a second vivisection.

That being the case, when Sadhvi Pragnya Thakur, a new entrant into the political arena, invited the wrath of the left-lib congress crowd for her ‘Godse is deshbhakt’ assertion, the failure of the ‘resurgent’ nationalist forces to back her stance amply illustrates the ‘traitor’ sway Gandhi’s ghost has over Godse’s legacy. It should not be lost on any that while the vast majority of Hindus remained silent, the Muslim Indians, who have no love lost for Gandhi, hand lent their subtle voices to her vociferous denouncers, but why? It is not generally realized that Muslims, groomed by hadith and armed with well-defined strategies to survive as a minority in non-Muslim countries that is as a precursor to mid-term expansion leading to eventual domination therein, make the cleverest political creatures in the world. 

It is thus, the Muslim antipathy towards Godse stems from the self-same strategy that is to stall the possibility of his narrative awakening the lazy Hindu intelligentsia to the virtues of Indian nationalism that runs counter to their Dar-al-Islam destination. Moreover, one cannot eulogize Gandhianism and yet vouch for nationalism in the same vein with any conviction for they are oxymoron, and the failure to differentiate Godse the deshbhakt from Godse the assassin, willy-nilly endorses the Nehruvian vulgarity of Gandhi is India, a la later day Barua’s Indira is India.

Wonder how anyone, rooted in the Hindu cultural ethos, can fail to realize that Lord Rama, who killed Ravana for his villainy had yet acknowledged his vidvat by asking Lakshmana to seek his advice. Besides, Ravana is not blue-penciled in Ramayana nor are Duryodhana ‘n Dussasana blocked out in Mahabharata for they are as much a part of it as Yudhishthira ‘n Arjua are. Moreover, the asuras galore of Hiranyakasipa, Narakasura et al, who committed unspeakable atrocities against humanity, are an integral part of our puranic literature for whatever they were. That is owing to the Hindu approach to life and times based on the concept of dharma and adharma, both of which were open to debate and deliberation, like say the school of thought that after all Ravana as the king was duty bound to avenge the wronged Surphanaka by abducting Seetha and that Duryodhana was not wrong in coveting Hasthinapura’s throne for he was the first born of the first born. When it came to appraising the puranic heroes, even the rights and wrongs of the way Lord Rama slew King Vali by slyly hiding behind a tree are debated.

But then, how is it that any public debate on the pros and cons of the Godse ‘act’ is frowned upon and the answer is not far to seek for it is the fear of the nationalist inimical forces, the overseers of Nehruvian ecosystem, that the ‘murderer’ Godse’s sense of Indian nationalism would bring to the fore the hollowness of the ‘martyred’ Gandhi’s propensity to be ‘unfairly favourable towards the Muslims’.

Given that the nuances of sanatana dharma came to be perceived as prejudices of backwardness in Nehruvian wisdom, so to say, Indians have ceased to base their distinctive discourse based on dharma and adharma, but instead have come to develop a tendency to bury the ‘fallibilities of the favoured’ in the graves of martyrdom, and apart from Gandhi, as all are aware, there are more political martyrs to name.

Thus, it is high time that Indians begin to reflect upon the compelling reasons that Godse said had goaded him to eliminate Gandhi in the spirit of ‘what is said is more important than who said it’. It is for another day though, whether Godse, who willingly disgraced himself for the sake of his country or Gandhi, who, chased the mirage of personal glory by turning a blind eye to national interests, is a deshbhakt, is better left to individual perception. But all may beware that if Godse’s words are not heeded to in time, then the very circumstances that made him an assassin could produce his clone in times to come. So, it’s time the gag on Godse is removed, more so as Gandhi got his justice but Godse is in wait of the same.  

[More on Gandhi in “A Lingering Longing” in Glaring Shadow – A stream of consciousness novel  https://g.co/kgs/9gAzSM

  

More on Gandhi in “A Lingering Longing” of "Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel"  https://www.boloji.com/articles/14945/a-lingering-longing

India’s Chase of the Secular Mirage

The secular cliché of ‘unity in diversity’ is the political myth that at long last has been done in the postcolonial India. But in reality, India is a habitat of disparate groups with varied agendas, often at conflict with the rest; here are the Hindus, the original inhabitants of the ancient Aryavarta, who form the generic majority in its partitioned portion of modern India, who are a fragmented lot on regional grounds, stratified by iron-cast caste system, though united in denying even the basic human rights to the dalits amongst them. Besides, its predominant Muslim minority, positions India in the Islamic universe as Dar Al-‘Ahd, an infidel territory with an unwritten treaty of non-aggression or peace with the faithful, its indomitable Christian evangelists are ever eager to convert the marginalized sections of the majority community to their religious dispensation, for ostensible salvation.

It was Gandhi’s Congress, which helped India earn its freedom from the British yoke that shaped the secular theme of the nebulous Indian democracy, which under Nehru’s progeny degenerated into a cynical strategy to politically divide the Hindus on their caste-fault lines, cunningly unite the Muslims in the Islamic separatist fold and covertly support the Christian mission to convert the gullible, all for its electoral gain. This self-serving idea to divide the majority votes and rally with the minority ballots in the electoral arena, which the post-Mandal political outfits in the Cow-belt borrowed, had inculcated the debilitating non-nationalism in India’s collective consciousness, which, being  is in the realms of our every day experience, needs no detailing.

And now, at long last, the majority community, which, by far, has the highest stake in India’s unity and integrity, seems to have seen through this pseudo-secular game to bust the nationalist forces at the hustings. But stunned by the new-found nationalism, which is surging into the country’s polling booths, resulting in their ouster from the pinnacles of power, the political false elements have started crying wolf about the majoritarianism threat in the making to the so-called secular idea of India. However, it is another matter that notwithstanding its inimical caste system that needs more vigorous redressal, it is Hindu sanatana dharma that swears by sarva dharma sama bhav, all faiths have same the same footing, and vasudhaika kutumbakam, the world is but one family. But by casting aspersions on the Hindu nationalism, willy-nilly, the so-called secularists fuel the fundamentalist urges of those Muslims and the Christians, who vouch for the insular togetherness of the faithful based on the divisive diktats of their religions. Thus, notwithstanding the Hindu ethos of togetherness, given the intellectual sophism that aids and abets the Semitic system of separateness, India has come to chase the secular mirage in its own heartland.

But thankfully there are oases in the cantonments of our ‘majoritarian’ defense forces, in which Masjids, Churches, and Gurudwaras abound with Mandirs, bound by the common faith - to live to serve the Indian nation and die for preserving its sovereignty. Well, the Sikhs have been doing just that for centuries now, and there is no denying that Islam exhorts the believers to go after infidels’ throats, but nevertheless, Muslims-in-arms fight, arm in arm, with the Hindu soldiers to slay the intruders from across the borders, who happen to be their co-religionists. True, but for the naïve Hindus, the pastors could cry hoarse from the pulpits of the Churches that there is no scope for salvation for the heathen Hindus, yet the Christian soldiers vie with the Hindus of their regiment to attain martyrdom at India’s borders. Mind you, the members of the Indian Armed Forces are no mean in number. 

All this, besides proving the bogusness of the secular bogy of Hindu majoritarianism, only brings to the fore the fact that these seculars, along with their liberal cohorts, have been barking up the wrong ‘Hindutva’ tree to exhibit their exaggerated anxiety over India’s religious tolerance allegedly under threat. Maybe owing to ignorance they fail to realize that the Islamic preaching and the Christian teachings, of course based on their scriptures, are unflattering to the Hindu culture and beliefs and that is to say the least. And on that count, there is no faulting the Muslims and the Christians, but at the same time there is no denying that their belief system bleeds India, inhabited by over a billion Hindus. However, Dr. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian Professor, in his ‘Islam in Modern History’ (1977) was hopeful that the Indian Muslims would reform and transform Islam thus:

“The question of political power and social organization, so central to Islam, has in the past always been considered in yes or no terms. Muslims have either had political power or they have not. Never before have they shared it with others. Close to the heart of Islam has been the conviction that its purpose includes the structuring of a social community, the organization of the Muslim group into a closed body obedient to the law. It is this conception that seems finally to be proving itself inept in India. The Muslims in India, in fact, face what is a radically new and profound problem: namely how to live with others as equals. Yet it is a question on which the past expression of Islam offers no immediate guidance. Imperative is the willingness to admit that there are problems waiting to be solved.

This awareness has been rare in recent Islam, which has tended to believe that problems have been solved already. That the answers have somehow, somewhere been given and do not have to be worked out afresh with creative intelligence - this idea had deeply gripped, almost imprisoned the minds and souls of many Muslims. The Quran has been regarded as presenting a perfected pattern to be applied rather than as an imperative to seek perfection. Islamic law and Islamic history have been felt to be a storehouse of solutions to today’s difficulties to be ransacked for binding precedent rather than a record of brave dealing with yesterday’s difficulties, to be emulated as liberating challenge. Religion has seemed to confine behavior rather than inspire it. The fundamental fallacy of Muslims has been to interpret Islam as a closed system. And that system has been closed not only from outside truth but also from outside people.

The fundamental hopefulness about Indian Muslims, and therefore Indian Islam, is that this community may break through this. It may be forced to have the courage and humility to seek new insights. It may find the humanity to strive for brotherhood with those of other forms of faith. In the past, civilizations have lived in isolation, juxtaposition or conflict. Today we must learn to live in collaboration. Islam, like the others, must prove creative at this point and perhaps it will learn this in India.”

But Nehru’s secular failure to prod the Indian Muslims into evolving an Indian Islam enabled the Mullah-Maulvi nexus to insensibly push them into the separatist Salahi clutches, the effects of which India Today pictured, by way of its survey published in its August 26, 2002 issue, thus: 

“In the past six months communalism and Pakistan-sponsored terrorism have grabbed the national headlines. On these issues there is a definite Hindu-Muslim rift. Take the on-again-off-again Ayodhya dispute. On this issue, there seems to be a hardening of stand in favour of building a Ram temple immediately - 43 per cent were in favour six months ago, today it is 47 per cent. Even among Congress voters, 43 per cent want the temple now. Predictably, this is not a solution favoured by Muslims. Equally, support for the temple isn’t as enthusiastic in the South and East as in the North and West.

Likewise, while 70 per cent of Hindus regard Pakistan as an enemy - a rare expression of national unity - only 37 per cent of Muslims do so. Indeed, 49 per cent of Muslims have a rather charitable view of Pakistan as an estranged brother, a friend and a future ally. What complicates matters is that among Muslims who are aware, Mohammed Ali Jinnah is regarded as a hero, along with Mahmud of Ghazni and Aurangzeb. The weight of Hindu opinion treats these historical figures as villains.

These are worrying signs and pointers to the emotional gulf between the majority community and the most significant minority. Nor is this rift a persisting relic. The poll indicates that it is the youth (18 to 24-year-olds) that is more aware and belligerent than their elders. This raw, untapped energy is yet to find focus. A positive outlet may take India to new heights; in the wrong hands, it could plunge the country in civil strife. A divided India can swing either way.”

That was in 2002, and fifteen years hence, while the Indian Muslims in general have become more faithful in their inward beliefs and outward exhibitions of Islamic tenets, the youth in particular are enamoured of the annihilative adventurism of radical Islam, with some of them even laying their lives for the cause of Baghdadi’s Caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Arguably, the gradual upsurge of radical Islamism in postcolonial India owes in no small measure to the legacy of Nehru’s intellectual backing to the Islamic religious rigidity, augmented, in recent times, by Saudi Arabia’s political urge to bring about a Wahabi Umma.

Maybe, history beckons Narendra Modi to help bring about the Indian Islam into the realms of Wilfred’s dream, and paradoxically, the opportunity could as well lie in Ayodhya’s vexed Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. Let us face the fact that while the Islamic precepts and practices make Muslims the religious square pegs in India’s Hindu cultural round holes, its religious callings such as haj and its cultural moorings in Arabic moulds ensure their emotional distance from the very land in which their ancestors lived as Hindus. Thus, for the Indian Islam to evolve, it is imperative that the Muslims should have their unique Islamic icon on the Indian soil to rival Kabaa, the pilgrimage to which is within the reach of every believer in this land that is unlike the haj to Mecca that is the privilege of a faithful few. And what can be a better place to host that than the banks of Sarayu across Ayodhya, the janma bhoomi of Rama, the ethical mascot of India? What is more, if the pilgrims of Ayodhya and the hajis across the river are encouraged to visit each other’s place of worship, won’t that become an enabling tradition to break the Hindu-Muslim religious barriers in the long run? Possible, but the Mullah-driven Arabic-centered Muslim mindset would be averse to that, and yet, the State and the society alike should push and prod the recalcitrant towards that goal, which, when achieved, is bound to usher in Indian Islam.

That way, as and when Indian Islam takes roots in India, then Indian Muslims would regard Abdul Hamid the soldier, who sacrificed his life for India in its war against Pakistan, as a hero and not Mahmud of Ghazni the pillager of Somnath. Likewise, APJ Abdul Kalam the Bhagvad-Gita-reading Muslim, and not Aurangzeb the bigoted Musalman, who would inspire  the Indian Muslims to come out of their Semitic scriptural shell to venture into the arena of Hindu philosophy. As for the Christian evangelism, it should be made loud and clear that belittling the Hindu dieties and deriding the native customs is not the way to voice the gospel and proselytizing by means fair or foul for harvesting the poor Hindu souls should cease forthwith for India’s demographic good. That is when; living in the all-encompassing oasis of Hindutva, India would stop its futile chase of the secular mirage.

Genesis of Skullcap Secularism

Contrary to the current crop of skullcaps even on the tender heads of the Muslim kids, till the recent past, this religious symbolism was seldom on the public view save on some ageing heads of the faithful. So also, while politicians of the day, notwithstanding their ideological divisions, unite to hold iftar parties for the Muslim elite, in the bygone days, when the Congress party used to straddle the political arena like a colossus, there never was such secular farce on show. While it is obvious that the urge of the ‘nose on the ground’ politicians is to cater to the craving of the Muslim minority for a ‘distinctive identity’ in the midst of the majority Hindu milieu, we need to examine the phenomenal upsurge for ‘religious distinctiveness’ among the Indian Musalmans.

If only the tilak sporting fad amongst the Hindus matches with the Muslim penchant for the skullcaps, the newfound minority obsession with their ‘religious identity’ could be attributed to the travesty of the Indian polity. Since it is not the case, we have to look beyond the theories such as the perceived victimhood of the Muslim brotherhood, and look inward to zero in on the source of this social feature that not only stymies the nation’s emotional integration but also corrupts its political environment besides diminishing its once lauded mind. Note this, Narendra Damodardas Modi and Shivarj Singh Chouhan are the birds of the same saffron feather but for the ‘intellectuals’, the former is a ‘divisive’ character for his refusal to don a skullcap and the latter is a personification of ‘inclusiveness’ for no more than wearing the same.

What went wrong that the ‘skullcap secularism’ has become the ‘idea of India’ to our intelligentsia?

Besides being a land of a million mutinies as VS Naipaul had it, India is seemingly a nation of thousand ironies as well! What else it was but an irony that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, its first Prime Minister, was a Kashmiri, whose ancestral land is perennially divided at the dawn of freedom and is destined to be a perpetually disputed territory between the two antagonistic neighbors. What else it is but an irony that after fifty years of its independence, the foreign origin Sonia came to dictate its political course and discourse, and continues to do so to this day, with intent to pass on the ruling baton to her equally ill-suited and ill-equipped son Rahul. But as we may see in hindsight, it is no irony that the first irony had facilitated the second irony.

In the wake of India’s partition, the Muslims who opted to stay put in their ancestral dwellings were economically disadvantaged owing to the fact that they were traditionally uneducated that is as far as the modern secular education takes one. But on the flip side, what with the bulk of the hardcore separatists and the religious obscurantist’s having had migrated to Pakistan, there was an opportunity for the Indian polity to help the minority community to mould itself into a modern national mold. The stagnancy of Nehru’s socialistic pattern of society did not lend scope for the Muslim masses to prosper economically. After all, the State-generated job opportunities were under the control of the Hindu dominant government machinery and given the human propensity to favor their own ilk, the Muslim minority just got the crumbs of the meager development cake. While the Nehru’s economic policy kept the Muslims fiscally poor, his idea of a pan-Indian Hindu Muslim harmony based on the ideals of Kashmiriyat amounted to placing a square peg in a round hole; it is another matter that in the later years, Kashmir’s Muslim separatists had resorted to the ethnic cleansing of the fabled valley by driving out the Hindu Pandits from their midst.

One must not lose sight of the fact that amongst the world’s religious groups, arguably, the Muslims have the profoundest emotional attachment to their religious ways, and that the feeling of neglect and deprivation only accentuates one’s withdrawal into his or her religious shell. While Nehru’s statecraft willy-nilly pushed the Muslims into their socio-religious ghettos, his daughter Indira and the political dynasty that she had founded, instead of redressing their economic wrong on the development plank, sought to woo them as voters by catering to their base religious sentiments. It is another matter that the Lalus and the Mulayams did one better in courting the Muslims to beat the dynasty at its own game in the Hindi heartland of Bihar and the Uttar Pradesh. In all this, the face of the exploiters has changed from time to time (Mayawatis and Nitish Kumars to name a few) but the façade of the exploited Musalmans remained decadent. 

However, the open economic model initiated by Narasimha Rao and perfected by Narendra Modi in Gujarat should give hope to the aspiring Muslim masses, and hopefully, they might realize, sooner than later, that their nirvana could only lie in Narendra Modi’s development mantra.