Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 07 May 2018 | Page 38

HI ND UTVA
OPI NI ON
WHY FEAR A HI
C.K. SAJI
NARAYANAN
India wouldn’t have been secular or democratic had we not been
M
ORE than once, RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat
has categorically made it clear that India is a Hindu
rashtra, its identity Hindutva and that anyone living
in the country is a Hindu, irrespective of one’s reli-
gion. Indeed, Hindutva is this nation’s lifeline—if
history is anything to go by.
In fact, Bhagwat’s predecessor Balasaheb Deoras had attrib-
uted India’s Hindu-majority status to why democracy and sec-
ularism exist in the country. The coexistence of these two
features eludes our neighbours who separated from India for
historical reasons, he had said, citing Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Tibet, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and even parts of
China, where minorities are being selectively annihilated.
“Hence it is necessary to keep India a Hindu nation for the
sustenance of various religious groups,” according to Deoras.
Many educated Indians got trapped intellectually when the
British scholars, who, as part of their divide-and-rule policy,
propagated that ‘Hindu’ denotes a religion. But eminent think-
ers like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr S. Radhakrishnan have repeat-
edly made it clear that the word does not denote a religion, but
is the name of an eternal culture. Gandhiji’s ideal of ‘Rama
Rajya’ is not different from Hindu nation. There is no Hindu
‘religion’, but there can be Hindu ‘religions’. Religions are part
of Hindutva, but not all of Hindutva. The concept of ‘ism’ is in-
compatible with a flexible Hindu spirit. So the term ‘Hinduism’
is self-contradictory and ‘Hindutva’ is the appropriate term.
But some of our modern intellectuals skillfully cover up these
facts and raise unsustainable accusation against Hindutva.
India has many enlightened Muslim-Christian leaders who
proudly proclaimed that they are culturally and traditionally
Hindus. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Justice Muhammad Karim
Chagla and Justice K.T. Thomas are examples. A 1950 book,
Five thousand years of Pakistan, which was approved by the
government in Islamabad, also recognises its pre-Islamic
Hindu cultural tradition. Yet, leaders of the Congress and
Communist parties in India keep rejecting Hindutva—only to
appease the religious minorities. Their formula: opposing the
RSS means rejecting everything Hindu. Its end result was the
failure of the politics by the Congress as well as the Left. After
all, no people in any national society can for long keep rejecting
one’s own identity and culture.
One major reason why Narendra Modi came to power was the
extreme minority appeasement pursued by most non-BJP
parties. While post-Independence India has a history of com-
munal riots, they stopped in Gujarat after 2002, with Modi, who
was known as a symbol of extreme Hindutva, in power. But such
38 OUTLOOK 7 May 2018
SOLEMN OATH Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief
Mohan Bhagwat (centre) at a recent event
disturbances keep erupting in a state like, say, Uttar Pradesh.
Why? It’s ruled by the so-called ‘secular’ parties, who make the
state a laboratory of minority appeasement. It is these ‘secular-
ists’ who are up in arms against Hindu rashtra.
Faraway, Europe has begun seeing religious activities of
Muslims with distrust and is regulating them. Switzerland
doesn’t permit new mosques; France has banned purdah. When
Islamic leaders questioned these, one president asked them
how they could claim the kind of freedom that Muslim-majority
countries do not give to other religions. In India, some ‘intellec-
tuals’ belonging to the Congress, Communist and other ‘secular’
parties propose the theory of ‘mixed culture’ or a ‘hybrid com-
posite culture’—mainly to oppose the Hindu culture pro-
pounded by the RSS. Those who join hands with them don’t
learn lessons from the tragic experience of the natives of
America, people of Gaza or the Yazidis of Iraq. How can such a
Semitic culture be mixed with ours that gives equal respect to
all religions? The West continues with such acts that the mod-
ern civilised era finds difficult to cope up with.
Jawaharlal Nehru said “I am a Hindu by accident of birth”,
while Marxist ideologue E.M.S. Namboodiripad once retorted
to a journalist thus: “Who said I am a Hindu?” These are some
of the proponents of the ‘mixed culture’. They are being corre­
cted in ‘soft Hindutva’, followed due to political compulsions by
later-generation politicians such as Rahul Gandhi (who has of
late started visiting temples) and Shashi Tharoor who recently
wrote the book, Why I am a Hindu. Tharoor begins his book by
answering his own question following the Nehruvian intellec-
tual legacy. He says: “Why I am a Hindu? The obvious answer to
this question is, of course, that it’s because I was born one!”