Incongruities in Indian Constitution

 

Muhammad Ali Jinnah got what he wanted for Indian Musalmans though in time, their Quranic zeal turned Pakistan into a Rogue State. What of India, the product of an irony of a partition in that while some Musalmans walked away with one-fourth of its land, others stayed back to nurse their separatist dogma in its truncated bosom?

While the Hindu nationalists lamented about the loss of their ancient land, the Musalman intellectuals were alarmed at their reduced numbers vis-à-vis the Hindus. Even as the Golwalkars articulated the Hindu frustration in shrill tones, the Maulana Azads voiced the Muslim apprehensions in secular tunes. Whatever, as Pakistan became an Islamic State for the Musalmans, India remained a habitat of varied interest groups, the Musalmans included! While the Indian political classes were beset with a sense of loss that partition brought in in its wake, the Hindu intellectuals were upset by the age-old caste guilt that the reform movement occasioned in their collective consciousness.

It was in such a setting that India ventured to formulate a constitution for itself, of course, piloted by Babasaheb Ambedkar, the intellectual giant from the depressed classes. Yet the end product, touted as the bulkiest of the written constitutions in the comity of nations, turned out to be an exercise in selective amnesia.  

“WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, reads the preamble of the Constitution of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens:

JUSTICE, social, economic, and political;

LIBERTY of status, expression, belief, faith and worship;

EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;

And to promote among all

FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation;

IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.”

None can fault the lofty ideals of this august document but for the politicization of the testament itself, i.e. by the induction of socialism into it. Strange it may seem, won’t the socialistic slant negate the economic justice that it seeks to provide? After all, socialism, as per the COD, is a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution, and exchange. How could there be an economic justice for an individual enterprising Indian then?

However, mercifully in the end, PV Narasimha Rao, the Accidental Prime Minister, aided by Dr. Manmohan Singh, his hand-picked Finance Minister, managed to extricate India from the Nehruvian socialist grip to leave his lasting legacy as the ‘Architect  of Economic Reforms’. But that was not before socialism wrecked Indian industry, stunted its enterprise, and ruined its economy so much so that, for servicing its national debt, the country had to pledge its gold for some sterling pounds.

   But before that, as if the religious leeway provided by Ambedkar & Co. to the Musalmans and the Christians to upset the demography of India’s diminished geography, Indira Gandhi, during her infamous emergency, unconstitutionally amended the constitution to further stymie the Hindu majority though with the laudable ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons appended to the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Bill, 1976 (Bill No. 91 of 1976)’ that was enacted as The Constitution Forty-second Amendment Act, 1976, which avers that – 

 

“A Constitution to be living must be growing. If the impediments to the growth of the Constitution are not removed, the Constitution will suffer a virtual atrophy. The question of amending the Constitution for removing the difficulties which have arisen in achieving the objective of socio-economic revolution, which would end poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity, has been engaging the active attention of Government and the public for some years now.”

 

Be that as it may, without specifying “the difficulties which have arisen in achieving the objective of socio-economic revolution” in the said bill it was stated that –

“It is, therefore, proposed to amend the Constitution to spell out expressly the high ideals of socialism, secularism and the integrity of the nation, …” based on which the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1976 had sought to remodel India as "Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic.”

Whatever, as neither the said bill nor the specified act defined what constitutes a secular republic; we may turn to the COD that defines the hallowed but much abused word thus:

1.  concerned with the affairs of this world; not spiritual or sacred.

 2.  (of education etc.) not concerned with religion or religious belief

 3. a. not ecclesiastical or monastic.

     b. (of clergy) not bound by a religious rule.

Hence, with regard to the above – 

1. Is not the spirit of our secular republic against the State subsidy of the Haj (which the Supreme Court had to order to be given up in a phased manner) as that amounts to its showing concern with the spiritual matters of the Muslims? 

2. Is not the penchant of the Musalmans for the madrasa education for their children that stresses upon Islamic separatist dogma against the spirit of our secular republic? 

3. Is not the assertion of the mullahs that they are bound by the sharia, the rule book of Islam, tantamount to the negation of the secular ethos of our remodeled republic?

 

Be that as it may, in spite of Indira’s unholy amendment, as Indian constitution remained a holy cow, Narasimha Rao had to let it go, besides, he happened to be a congressman and had to run a minority government at that.  

Nevertheless, the article of the ‘Original’ Indian Constitution with regard to “Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion” exhorts thus:

1. Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.

 

2. Nothing in this article shall affect the operation of any existing law or prevent the State from making any law-

 

(a) regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice;

 

(b) providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.” 

Agreed, the right of the citizen for the profession and practice of one’s religion is unexceptionable for it constitutes the birthright. But, why an ordinary Indian citizen should be concerned about the propagation of his faith for the constitution to grant it to him? Besides, where does the right of an Indian citizen for propagation of his faith leave his fellow citizen’s cultural need for preservation of his own order, sanãtana dharma in case of the Hindus? After all, the right of propagation is but the right to spread one’s religion, and one cannot do that without coming into direct conflict with another’s religious faith or dharma, as the case may be, can any?

It’s thus, as one citizen’s right to propagate his faith vitiates the right of another to profess and practice his religion, India’s Constitution by granting the right for propagation of one’s religion per se, willy-nilly takes away another’s implied right for the preservation of his own faith. Besides, to what avail is the right to propagate one’s religion for the citizen rather than to fuel the zeal of the religious zealots for converting?

And what about the ‘FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation’ that the constitution provides for! What of the individual dignity of those Hindus whom the evangelists try to lure into the Christian fold, for them to embrace the Son of an alien God! Thus, is not the creed of the Church to propagate its faith that causes the poor of the land to lose their dignity is at odds with our constitutional spirit itself? Besides, as the raison d’être of religious propagation is conversion, wouldn’t that individual right prove inimical to the unity and integrity of the Nation?

However, going by the hell raised by the missionaries, the mullahs, their political cohorts and the co-opted media, at any move by the State to disfavor fraudulent conversions, the popular belief is that the right for propagation is without any constitutional or moral strings attached to it! Only when the clamor for the future partitions of India on religious lines picks up, would a Western historian be able to spot the constitutional blind spots that gave rise to the development! Yes, it needs Western intellectuals even to see it all in the hindsight even, for India’s left-leaning political analysts and Islamapologist liberals are notoriously blind to the realities of the Indian life and times.

Whatever, what’s the rationale of religious propagation based on which the framers of the constitution granted that to its citizens? Though Hinduism and Judaism, the world’s oldest surviving religions, are content with their constituencies, it is the Christianity and Islam, the new brands in the religious marketplace that hanker for conversions, of course, having come into being through propagation. Indeed, their religious spread worldwide is owing to their creed as enshrined in their Scriptures per se. If not all, most Christian missionaries and every Musalman mullah entertain the dream of seeing the world turn all Christian or all Islamic as the case may be; after all, that’s what their scriptures ordain and their religious creed obliges them to do so, and in the Indian context one has to contend with the jihadi penchant to transform Hindustan into Ghazwa-e-Hind.

It thus defies logic as to how our constitution makers, who went about the exercise in the immediate wake of the country’s partition on religious lines, thought it fit to endorse the propagation of one’s faith, read the Christian and the Islamic, in the Hindu midst! Well, it’s the illusionism of Gandhi that became the idealism of the Congress which influenced the Constituent Assembly of the just-partitioned India. And that shows. How strange then, that the constitution exhibits a singular lack of application of mind of its framers to secure India’s integrity as a constituent country for all times to come. Sadly thus, the wise-heads of that time, not to speak of the foresight, lacked the hindsight even. God forbid, they seemed to have unwittingly laid the seeds of a future partition of the Hindustan, whose wings Jinnah had already truncated. But, would this religious ‘constitutional’ error ever be erased from our statute before history gets repeated! Doubtful though.  

  If all this were Ambedkar’s idea of a religious safety valve for the disenchanted dalits, the then harijans, yet it would be a betrayal of India’s cause. However, the true dalit emancipation lies in bringing about the Hindu reformation from within and not in their opting out of the faith, and surely that wouldn’t have been beyond Ambedkar’s robust intellectual grasp. More significant is his own understanding of the Islamic credo that he articulated thus:

“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.”

Thus, he would not have been oblivious to the inimical consequences of affording a free religious leash to the moulvis to lead the Musalmans on a separatist course in the partitioned Hindu majority India, but yet that’s what precisely he did! Surely, one can understand Babasaheb’s hurt that made him vow not to die a Hindu, and, indeed, he did keep his word by embracing Buddhism before his death, but whether he wished the comeuppance of the Hindus at the hands of the Musalmans, one might never know.       

Now, over to the “Freedom as to attendance at religious instruction or religious worship in certain educational institutions” that the constitution stipulates.

(1) No religious instruction shall be provided in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State funds.

(2) Nothing in clause (1) shall apply to an educational institution which is administered by the State but has been established under any endowment or trust which requires that religious instruction shall be imparted in such institution.

(3) No person attending any educational institution recognized by the State or receiving aid out of State funds shall be required to take part in any religious instruction that may be imparted in such institution or to attend any religious worship that may be conducted in such institution or in any premises attached thereto unless such person or, if such person is a minor, his guardian has given his consent thereto.”

The sum and substance of the freedom of religious instruction is that the State, in true secular spirit, is expected to keep itself away from it (religious instruction) in the physical sense, and no more. However, the catch here is that the religious education is fine so long as the government does not fund it for that allows the State to retain its secular pretence by keeping itself overtly out of religion. Even otherwise, one would expect the constitutional makers to address the content of the religious education to serve the needs of the communities concerned, without compromising the general public order and good, but they failed ‘India that is Bharat’ in that respect as well.

Well, every community needs some amongst them to undergo religious education to meet its spiritual and social needs in accordance with the tenets of its faith and feelings. That should at once be the scope as well as the limitation of the religious education, isn’t it? So as to cater to these legitimate needs of a given religious group, the required religious education with or without the government funding forms a fundamental communal right of the members of that group. Right, but what if in the name of freedom of religious instruction, the dogmas of such faiths, given to deride the religious beliefs of fellow citizens, are sought to be inculcated in an unwieldy number of members of that community? Won’t such a move hamper the secular character of the country besides inculcating religious bigotry in the mind-set of any given community?

Obviously, the framers of the constitution, but for Ambedkar, arguably Islamic naive, couldn’t delve deep enough into the vexatious subject of religious intolerance of the practicing faiths in the country. What is worse, this supposed constitutional religious goodness came in handy for the ugly politician to turn it into an exploitative mask for the minorities’ votes in the election seasons. It is one thing to espouse the cause of the minorities and another to abet the bigotry of the Musalmans and the prejudices of the Christians. Sadly, for the minorities, moreso for the Musalmans our politicians tend to be on the right side of their wrong issues to the benefit of none, save themselves.

    Yet, it has become fashionable in the Indian politico-social discourse to juxtapose secularism and communalism that is with a matching ignorance about the latter for communalism is “a principle of political organization based on federated communes.”  No wonder that even seventy-one years after its independence, as India is still groping for its political direction in an ideological darkness, thanks to the Semitic promiscuity that Indian constitution grants, for the human rights activists, the Musalmans and the Xians holding on to their scriptural dogmas is kosher, but the right of the Hindus to articulate their religious sentiments or cultural concerns, and / or both is sheer religious intolerance, and that’s perplexing.

 In the light of the above may be seen the hollowness of the fundamental duties Indira’s infamous amendment imposes upon the citizens that are rarely, if ever, fulfilled by the rulers themselves.

1. While it is incumbent upon the citizenry “to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities; to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women” -

- the political ethos has been to cynically reap electoral dividends by exacerbating social dissensions based on region, religion, caste et al. 

2. While it is the fundamental right of the citizen “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” – 

a) The State had failed its Hindus to rein in the caste panchayats that tend to lynch the inter-caste couples and

b) The politicians, who treat the Musalmans as a vote-bank had neither encouraged them to inculcate the spirit of inquiry nor provided them an environment conducive for reform.

Whatever, owing to the vacuity of verbiage in the over the 100k word-long Indian Constitution, a rabid Islamic obscurantist and a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu nationalist have been able to pin their juxtaposing positions, with equal aplomb, and that’s ironical. However, while the Hindu secular habit of left-lib brainwash would like to equivocate the Jai Sriram chants with the Musalman rant of Allah Hu Akbar, one needs to understand the latter in the context of azan, the muezzins’ five-time a day call to the faithful for Islamic prayers, which reads thus:

“Allah is the Greatest,

I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, 

I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah,

Come to Prayer,

Come to success.

Allah is the Greatest

There is none worthy of worship except Allah.” 

It is thus, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs et al of India, and of the world, have to endure the azan, blaring from the loudspeakers of their neighborhood mosques five times day, which, besides offending their own belief-system is bound to hurt their religious sentiments. But no one is seemingly caring, not even the evolved Christian West. 

That is not all, wonder how the inimical quranic tirades of the Musalmans against kafirs in mosques, madrasas and mohallas reconcile with their FUNDAMENTAL DUTIES as Indian citizens that are stipulated in the Indian Constitution, as under, is anybody’s guess. 

“PART IVA , 51A. It shall be the duty of every citizen of India 

(e) to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities; to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women.” 

Also, the Christian proselytizers as Indian citizenry fare no better in their constitutional compliance for besides branding Hindus as heathens, they label their deities as false. 

Needless to say, the copy (from other constitutions) and paste (in the Indian Constitution) work of the so-called framers of our constitution, comprising of the Semitic-naïve caste Hindus and a well-informed, though embittered dalit, as argued above, needs a pragmatic overhaul, for which the level of Hindu awareness about the Abrahamic outrage against their sanātana dharma has to raise to self-respecting heights of Himalayan proportions, hopefully. 

So, it is time for WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, over seventy years after our fathers, or be it grandfathers, had adopted the constitution, to factor the new realities into a more equitable document? After all, isn’t the level playing field the theme song of the modern world order? And the Hindu emotional grievance is that they are denied just that in the religious plane in the country that their forbears made their own before all others.

[This is part of the author’s Puppets of Faith: Theory of Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic Faith, Indian Polity ‘n More) that’s in the public domain as a free ebook]

 

Decoding the Cynical Method in Mamata’s Political Madness

 

Ernst Röhm, the boss of Brown Shirts, whose rough shoulders carried Adolf Hitler into the German Chancellery, was keen to induct them into the Wehrmacht that was set to replace Reichswehr. However, the Fuehrer, whose vision was to develop a world-beating armed force, saw no role for Röhm’s riff-raff in its professional setup. But as the rebuffed deputy could unleash his Storm Troopers on his regime itself, the real politic constrained the Nazi numero uno to usher in the Night of the Long Knives but for which, the rights and wrongs apart, the Third Reich wouldn’t have had such a formidable army with the Panzers at its helm.    

That was in the early thirties of the last century and now in the nascent twenties of the current one, India’s West Bengal faced a Röhm moment as Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool supremo, led her party to a resounding victory in the assembly polls, however, fouled by her personal loss at the hustings. Thus, while Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, and Amit Shah, the Home Minister, who together led a no-holds-barred poll campaign to uproot the unruly Trinamool, have been licking their political wounds and counting their electoral losses, one would have expected Mamata Didi, who had the last laugh by remaining in the saddle to prove the Bengal electorate right that is courtesy the country’s constitution, which enabled her to take another shot in a by-election, to be conciliatory to her opponents. But then, she has to contend with her formidable support base of the aggressive Muslim constituency that she cultivated for electoral aggregation that came to perceive the Trinamool victory as a license to pursue their extremist Islamist agendas, and so began to run amuck amongst the Hindus, who sought to spoil their party by voting for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). That was the Röhm moment for Mamata, which put her in a catch- 22 situation of her own making.

Well, she could only rein in the rampaging Muslim miscreants, euphemistically called Trinamool goons by the compromised Islamapologic media, at the cost of imperiling her solid vote-bank of roughly one third of the State’s electorate. Besides, with her extreme-Muslim-appeasement governance model, she had already burnt most of her electoral bridges with the majority of the Bengali Hindus, save the supercilious Bhadralok, who seem to take pride in swimming away from the pan-Indian political mainstream. This aspect of the Bengal’s political reality was underscored by her electoral loss at Nandigram, albeit by a narrow margin, to Suvendu Adhikari, her confidante turned contestant, who meaningfully dubbed her as Begum in his election rallies.  

Thus, with her political survival inexorably linked to the formidable Muslim constituency, unceasingly buttressed by the successive pseudo-secular administrations of varied hues and cries that turned a blind eye to the hordes of Muslim intruders from the neighboring Bangladesh, she was caught in a demographic quagmire. That in her Muslim-engineered electoral triumph, the minimal contribution of the overwhelming, though fragmented, Hindu majority is a cause for her future political worries cannot be over stated. That being the case, getting tough with the Muslim miscreants out at the Hindu throats could tantamount to her denting the minority vote-bank, which would be nothing short of a political suicide in the democratic arena.  Even otherwise, there is a strange compatibility between Mamata's roguish behaviour and Muslims' aggressive mentality that make them made for each other, which fact she seems to have recognized only after coming to power in 2011 by storming into the Left citadel over the industrial ruins of Singur. Why, in 2006, she made a ruckus in the Lok Sabha over the Speaker's rejection of her adjournment motion on illegal infiltration of Bangladeshis into West Bengal!

Though she retained power in 2016, despite her lackadaisical governance, the spectacular performance of the BJP in the 2019 parliamentary polls made her rush to the poorer women with all sorts of sops to shore up her scam-ridden Trinamool in the ensuing 2021 assembly polls. Nevertheless, BJP's high pitch campaign in them made her nervous to the core, so much so that she opted to migrate from her shaky Bhowanipore constituency to the safe Muslim-profuse Nandigram, in part driven by her egotistic urge to crush Suvendu Adhikari to his political death, well, to come a cropper. However, during the month-long election regimen, what with the vexed Hindu wind seemingly turning against her and her party men, she turned to the Muslim voters with folded hands not to split their votes in favour of the other secular pretenders and that earned her a reprimand from India’s Election Commission.

However, if only she had a grasp of the Islamic psyche, there was no need for her to go to such desperate communal lengths as Muslims anyway would strive to ensure BJP's defeat, not because its rule materially hurts them as in deed their kin in Modi’s Gujarat became a prosperous lot. What is not adequately appreciated is that the Muslims, who perceive themselves as the erstwhile rulers of Hindustan, feel emotionally slighted to be ruled by it that unabashedly espouses the Hindu causes.  It was thus, aided by the Muslim hatred towards her rival and her sops for the poor, her Trinamool once again steamrolled into the corridors of Nabanna, the seat of the State power.    

Though the agenda-driven media, so as not to give any leg up to the hated Narendra Modi, downplayed her Nandigram debacle, she was so rankled by it as to make William Congreve's words ring true - heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turn'd, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn's. Thanks to the electronic voting machines, as it was apparent that her humiliation was owing to the hostility of the Hindu voters, anyway the post-poll targets of her Islamist supporters, how does the question of their rescue arise? Her personal pique apart, there is real politik at play as well for what if the momentum of the adverse consolidation of Hindu voters that began in seventy-seven constituencies in 2021 picks up in the rest of them in the future; more in Bhowanipore from where she is all set to contest to retain her chief ministerial chair, and in 2024 parliamentary polls in which she hopes to pitch herself as the opposition’s prime ministerial candidate. So, as offense is the best form of time-tested defense, go after the Hindus, who dared to vote for the BJP, to make an example of them so that none ever dares to repeat the mistake in their living memory, seems to be the cynical method in Mamata’s political madness.  

Thus, in such a setting, as the election commission dutifully conducts future elections in West Bengal, the vulnerable Hindu voters, who are averse to Trinamool, would keep away from the polling booths thereby facilitating Mamata and / or her successor to lord over it till such a time when the Muslim minority becomes its electoral majority to be able to eventually ensconce its members in the seats of power. Why doubt that as the short-sighted Mamata is sure to open the long Bangladeshi borders to further augment her vote-bank to counter the Hindu apathy towards her, and hasn’t one of her Islamist worthies recently proclaim that once Muslims reach the thirty percent threshold in India there would be four more Pakistans? That is apart from the avowed goal of every sub-continental Musalman to turn Hindustan into Ghazwa-e-Hind. 

So, even as the colonial British dismembered India, its regional satraps such as Mamata, if not reined in, in time, could cause its further fragmentation with impunity. No denying that the Modi-sarkar can deservedly pat itself for having reined in the separatist forces in the Kashmir valley but what about the out-of-control West Bengal and the Christian surge in Andhra Pradesh, estimated to have already covered over a quarter of its population, making it a fertile ground for the Mamata model of politicking, if need be.  The tragedy of India hitherto is that all political dispensations across the board, barring the honorable exception of the BJP, have been aiming for a share in the minority vote-bank and thus were not averse to the inimical demographic alterations, be it the form of Bangladeshi Muslim infiltration into West Bengal and Assam or the local Christian conversion sprees in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu etc. Well, it may be tempting to fault the late YS Rajasekhar Reddy and his son YS Jaganmohan Reddy, chief ministers both, for systematically Christianizing the Hindu hinterland in Andhra Pradesh but Chandra Babu Naidu, who was in a political position to checkmate their evangelical moves is to be equally blamed for having turned a blind eye, eying some electoral crumbs from the High Christian table, and sadly, BJP that could have stalled the religious disorder has had no political ground there whatsoever. 

 What of now to avert further demographic distortion of Bharat that is India? To start with, BJP must begin a public awareness drive within and without West Bengal about the perils posed by the Trinamool politics to the unity and integrity of the country. It also needs to build public opinion to force the Indian media to put an end to the pseudo-secular political correctness that somehow came to rule the nation’s public discourse. It should strive to develop an intellectual climate conducive to reviewing the fact-checked demographic changes and the socio-political implications thereof. Besides, Modi-sarkar should devise methods to bring India’s substantial religious minorities into the national emotional fold resulting in the diffusion of their separatist identities, which, in turn, would dent their religious zeal to bring others onto their sectarian paths.

However, in the short-run, the onus is on the Me Lords of the Supreme Court, who have come to fancy themselves as the sole-protectors of the Indian democratic order, to nip Mamata’s political disorder by banishing her from Bengal’s electoral arena to make an example of her to dissuade others from embarking upon the dangerous course set by her, and the Indian Constitution does grant them that extraordinary power.

 

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

The Electoral Psychology in the Indian Democracy

In 2014, it was on the plank of ‘high hope’ that Narendra Modi, with self-belief, sense of purpose and Herculean effort, had navigated his party to power through the stagnant Indian electoral waters. This extraordinary achievement, so to say, was unbelievable in the Indian electoral context that’s traditionally devoid of any semblance of nationalistic fervor for the callous politicians having nursed the majority community on divisive caste lines and groomed the minorities on unifying religious grounds for narrow electoral gains, any sense of nationalism failed to take roots in India’s pre-partitioned social soil. What’s worse the vote-bank politics of post-independent India fomented an Islamist mind-set amongst the formidable Muslim minority that turned it against Modi’s nationalist party for long. However, with his personal charisma and forceful oratory, he could alter the electoral psychology of the Hindu majority to get on to the Delhi gaddi to usher in systemic changes not only to address India’s social plight but also to uplift the Hindu self-worth, at a low for over thousand years.  

When Modi would seek reelection, circa 2019, what could be the electoral psychology of the Indian democracy then?

No denying, a majority of the Hindus gloat over the fact that, at long last, their ‘ruler’ does not shy away from exhibiting his Hindu religious inclinations in public that is besides wearing his patriotic nationalism on his sleeves. But it’s no guarantor that his re-election plank would sail through the polling booths as the Hindu nationalistic currents, besides being weak, are notoriously transient for they are afflicted by undercurrents of caste affiliations. It takes a while for Modi to forge the disparate castes in a unitary Hindu mould but that’s in the realms of the future, but what about the year after?

Well, he has to contend with the religious apathy of the majority of the Muslim and the Christian voters nurse towards him for the very reason that made him endearing to the majority of the Hindus. That an ‘overtly’ Hindu should lord over the land, lorded by their forefathers, fails to jell with their sense of history, and to avert repetition, they could be queuing up at the polling booths to see Modi’s back. And if you add up the closet Christians too to the overbearing Musalmans, maybe sans some of their womenfolk, thanks to his triple talaq stance, at some quarter of the electorate, they would be in no mean numbers.

Augmenting the minorities’ ant-Modi votes would be the loose, but large, regional forces, the die-hard, though shrunk, Congress loyalists, the ‘secular’ ant-sangh parivar gang and the congenital Modi-maniacs, roughly accounting for another quarter of the electorate. But the saving grace for Modi would be there are too many in the electoral arena to share the spoils of his inimical half of India’s voters that is notwithstanding the tactical voting by the minorities to keep him out.   

However, those taking up cudgels on Modi’s behalf in his electoral battle would include the nation’s teeming youth, enthused like never before by any leader, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty haters and the rare breed of Hindu nationalists, all in all, adding up to, maybe, half of all Hindu voters. And that’s just one fourth of India’s total voters!    
   

It is thus, the electoral psychology of the other half of the Hindu voters that will decide Modi’s political fate in 2019 and determine India’s future course as a nation state thereafter. No denying, with his empathy for the poor and the foresight to improve their lot, he made friends and influenced people from these hapless folds. Enjoying the ease of living, for the first time that is, courtesy the gas cylinders and other goodies, the grateful lot backed him at the hustings in state after state, but as human gratitude is a fickle phenomenon, come 2019, the good will may as well evaporate. What is worse, having been spoiled by the largesse, they may even feel dissatisfied for what they are deprived off, thereby taking to the inimical though habitual caste routes.

And this is just one of the many psychological potholes that Modi has to contend with in the 2019 electoral path.

In 2014, Modi, so to say, had the entire Indian middleclass under his spell for they were enthused by his vows to bring the corrupt to book. Who won’t love to see the high and mighty of the dark alleys languishing in the dark cells? But instead of affording them a vicarious pleasure of seeing their corrupt netas in the country’s jails, Modi has left those suffocating in air of despondency as the dirty mighty are having it easy that too even as the ‘corrupt’ common men and women are made to suffer, first on account of demonetization and then owing to the GST, to their eternal hurt. What a let-down to be handed over the rough end of the anti-corruption stick. It is anybody’s guess that these would love the return of the UPA’s corrupt times for their self aggrandizement. Even some of the ‘clean’ middleclass-wallahs, swallowing media’s Goebbelsian lie on demonetization, have turned into inveterate Modi-critics, and who knows, the media, with concocted popularity ratings,  may be leading Modi on the garden path.

Come 2019, if the much publicized corrupt deeds of Sonia, Rahul, Vadra, Chidambaram et al won’t make it to the court rooms at the least, and instead gather dust in the investigating offices, Modi may as well kiss goodbye to the bulk of the middleclass voters for they are bound to feel cheated by his duplicity in the fight against ‘real’ corruption. After all, five years is a long period to surmount the odds even in our snail paced judicial process that is if Modi were true to his word, so goes the grapevine. Yet, they won’t vote for the corrupt Congress etc., in a volte face, but would surely stay away from the polling booths, leaving Modi to fend for himself. And the shortfall in the vote share, if it won’t cause his ouster, would certainly diminish his prime ministerial stature, setting the opposition in motion.  

But what if, Sonia and her sinister ilk are made to sweat in the court halls or cool their heels in jail cells, won’t that alter the electoral psychology of the country, electrifying the political atmosphere for Modi’s thumping victory in the Indian electoral arena.

Let’s wait and see what’s in store for Modi’s New India.

[This piece was written before Narendra Modi’s triumphant electoral victory in 2019]

          

Political Hurdle to Indian Nationalism

The raise of Narendra Modi in the Indian political firmament has brought to the fore the debate on nationalism and anti-nationalism, like never before, and that too with a rare patriotic fervor. With the unfolding events in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, it’s as if the ‘secular’ left and the ‘Hindu’ right have drawn battle lines for what could be a decisive ideological war on the Indian patriotic front. 

While the hitherto ideologically muzzled majority is shrill over the campus ranting of ‘bharat ki barbaadi’ as an anti-national activity, the religiously-rooted minorities, backed by high-decibel left-liberals, have come to articulate that ‘Afzal teri katil zindahai’ sloganeering is just an instance of ‘free speech’, that too enshrined in the constitution. Contrast this with the universal taboo on Nazi symbolisms that ironically include the Hindu Swastika, imaginatively ‘tilted’ by Adolf Hitler for artistic effect. And all this is so long after our British colonial masters had granted us the right to breathe our own ‘fresh’ air.

If Gandhi’s Congress, in the main, conceived a social structure for free India, mainly it’s Nehru, who had designed and built our political edifice. And if a dwelling turns out to be unwieldy for living in it, blame the intellect of architect for it, but if it develops cracks, shouldn’t the builder be brought to book? And it’s a double jeopardy for India that not only the premise of the design was unrealistic but the material of construction was unsound. Before going into the genesis of our patriotic paradox, it is imperative to understand what nationalism is all about and who is an anti-national for that matter. The dictionary defines nationalism as the spirit or aspirations common to the whole of a nation and an anti national as the one who is opposed to national interests or nationalism.

Name it Bharat that is India or Ila Varta or Arya Varta, this ancient land had all along been a nation of nations as parts of it were kingdoms with distinctive political boundaries though culturally unified. That was before foreign forces came to set up their sultanates. Though the entry of the Afghans and the Turks did not sunder the land, the Islamic surge they occasioned had culturally divided the people, eventually resulting in the country’s partition for the Muslim accommodation. Add to it the British mischief that left it to the rajahs and sultans to take their fiefdoms whichever way they wanted, so to say, nipped the evolution of Indian nationalism in its bud. While an ailing Sardar’s patriotic energies were consumed in creating an Indian political entity, he died before he could infuse a national unity into it. But sadly for India, Nehru messed up Patel’s unfinished job.

What with the Muslim classes having left for Pakistan, leaving behind the Islamic masses, the supercilious Nehru took it upon himself to play the role of an unsolicited Mullah. Be that as it may, had he energized himself to improve their economic plight and rationalize their fundamentalist mindset, as he tried in case of the Hindu majority, he would have served India well. But instead, he took the easy route (the lazy man) to humour them by catering to their religious instincts and separatist psyche, thereby keeping them away from the Indian nationalist mainstream. And beginning with his daughter, Indira, as the unscrupulous politicians in the cow belt saw the electoral dividends catering to the Muslim religious sentiments fetched, never mind its inimical impact on the community at large, more so its women folks, vote bank politics took deep roots to ruin the nation that, any way, was never in the making.

The sum and substance of this political zero sum game is that it not only hinders the entry of the Musalman into the national mainstream but also stymies his personal well-being through ghettoized thinking. That Muslims should fall prey to this Machiavellian deception packaged as secularism for electoral consumption is the bane of the Indian democracy. It’s thus; the cynical secularism of the self-serving politicians that won’t allow us to inculcate the spirit and aspirations common to us as the citizens of the whole of India is the hurdle to our nationalism.

      

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.