The Congress Working Com-mittee has been crassly opportunistic in adopting the new line it did in its resolution of 16 January 1999: "Hinduism is the most effective guarantor of secularism in India," a formulation which the Sangh Parivar has been making all along. It is no use saying that its notion of Hinduism is Hindutva while the Congress' notion is of the great faith as it has been known for centuries. We are not in the realm of academic discourse but political polemics. It is a different matter when the CWC characterises attacks on the minorities as "a serious affront to basic Hindu beliefs and values". That is an apt riposte to a party which, as L K Advani proudly told the BBC, is "a Hindu party", The new Congress line was laid down by Sonia Gandhi four days earlier, on 12 January, in her speech on the anniversary of Swami Vivekananda: "India is secular primarily because Hinduism, both as a philosophy and as a way of life, has been based on what ancients said "truth is one, the wise pursue it variously'."
This shift from emphasis on India's secular heritage to Hindu teachings ... The CWC simply endorsed.
Its claim that Gandhi and Nehru expressed this view "on various occasions" is false. The entire exercise was a planned one. In the face of the Sangh Parivar's calumny on her credentials as an Indian citizen, Sonia Gandhi sadly compromised. At a moment when its communal campaign is at its worst, the Congress has hit on a ploy which is as dangerous as it is cynical. This attempt to beat the Parivar at its own game was tried by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi with disastrous consequences.
Vajpayee's Thesis
It has been a constant refrain of the Sangh Parivar that India is secular because Hinduism is secular and so is the majority community which subscribes to the faith. The RSS supremo M S Golwalkar and the Jan Sangh-BJP ideologue L K Advani rank as the most strident propagators of this thesis. Atal Behari Vajpayee went one better at Mumbai on 9 November 1995 ... (and) declared "national integration is a matter of upbringing, not a subject of awards". When he said that the reason for India's unity is to be found in its roots of Hinduism, he left none in doubt as to what he meant by upbringing. "Secularism was never mentioned in the Indian Constitution until 1976. It was understood that India was secular." Hindutva was synonymous with Hinduism and nationalism. That was his thesis.
... The secularism which the framers of the Constitution envisaged and took for granted was challenged then only by the RSS and its offshoot, the Jan Sangh in 1951. The Indianness that came to the fore during the freedom movement was threatened by use of religious symbolisms for political ends. Some of the ends were noble; but this tactic of mass mobilisation was short-sighted and proved ruinous in the end.
Reportedly, the initiative for endorsing Sonia's speech came from Arjun Singh ... Pranab Mukherjee and V N Gadgil who has for quite some time espoused this line and, in the BJP manner, opposed "minority appeasement". Gadgil said "My information is that the RSS is shaken by the defeat of the BJP in the three states and has decided that unless it revives Hindutva nothing can happen. This must be stopped" - by stealing its saffron attire while it is wallowing in the muddy waters of electoral defeat. On 25 April 1998, he told presspersons: "Rethinking needs to be done on the concept of secularism. We go on talking about the minorities going away from us. The real question Congress should be asking is why the majority has gone away from us." The minorities are 15 per cent of the population. "We have received only 25 per cent of the total vote" so, woo the 85 per ,cent, the majority community ...
The stark truth is that the secular ideal was ever under attack within the Congress. The West Bengal Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, disclosed to the state Assembly on 20 March 1998: "Six months ago, the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister had told me "there are more communal-minded people in my party than perhaps the BJP'." His advice to the Congress was sound: "The party can survive only if it truly upholds secularism. There can be no progress at the cost of certain sections of society."
At the CPI-M's 16th Party Congress at Calcutta on 5 October 1998, he said that the Congress had "surrendered" to communal forces. The General Secretary, Harkishen Singh Surjeet, revealed "even its leaders today confess that some Congressmen collaborated with RSS karsevaks before and during the Babari Masjid demolition".
It was Rajiv Gandhi who had, on Arun Nehru's advice, revived a dormant problem by ordering the gates of the Babari Masjid to be opened on 1 February 1986. They had been locked 36 years earlier. He had struck a deal with the VHP for this, with 8 March 1986 as the deadline, as this paper reported (20 April 1986). The Muslim Women's Bill followed this. Rajiv's sordid moves on the masjid before the 1989 elections haye been documented ... Like the Bourbons, the Congress learns nothing, forgets nothing. Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi fouled up the party and its ideology. But the virus of communalism was not altogether absent earlier. "Many a Congressman, was a communalist under a national cloak." Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in his Autobiography (1936).
After independence, he complained publicly of Congressmen talking in a communal voice. (6 September 1951). A few years later, on 11 May 1958, he told the AICC that the "communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the minority" ... He explained later (5 January 1961), "when the minority communities are communal, you can see that and understand it. But the communalism of a majority community is apt to be taken for nationalism." This is what the Sangh Parivar has been upto.
Nehru foresaw it all, as a former Foreign Secretary, Y D Gundevia, recorded in his memoirs. Outside the Archives. At a meeting with the officers ... a little before the AICC met at Bhubaneshwar in December 1963. Nehru (said) slowly and very deliberately "The danger to India, mark you is not communism. It is Hindu Rightwing Communalism". How very right he was.
This danger cannot be met by aping the Parivar's tactics but by carrying the battle headlong into its constituency and demonstrating that its credo is not Hinduism, as it falsely asserts, but Hindutva (a term) coined by V D Savarkar in his pamphlet of the same name in 1923.
V D Savarkar ... wrote "Hindutva is not identical with Hindu dharma; nor is Hindu dharma identical with Hinduism".
Hinduism is an ancient faith, noble and profound. ... Hindutva is modern hate, ignoble and vulgar. Its leaders are coarse and uneducated, lisp pop history and sing hymns of hate. Hinduism is ennobling; Hindutva debases. The Hindu drinks at the fount of the Gita and the Upanishads, among the greatest works known to man. The Parivar is intoxicated with Savarkar's Hindutva and speaks the barbaric lingo of Golwalkar and co.
In a brilliant article entitled "Modern Hate", Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I Rudolph .... wonder how the BJP "was able to hijack Hinduism, replacing its diversity, multivocality and generativity with a monotheistic Ram cult?" It invokes imagined "ancient wrongs" to spread modern hate. Instead of exposing this to millions of our countrymen who subscribe to the great faith, the Congress seeks to woo them on the agenda set by the votaries of Hindutva. Since the Parivar can up the ante, the Congress can only lose the contest. But it will inflict a lasting damage on the country's whole ethos. (Source: The Statesman, 29 January, 1999)
