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. 

  

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.