Eminent Journalist Prem Shankar Jha

At the centre of the struggle was an issue that could decide whether India remains a single, united nation or disintegrates into smaller sub-units in the coming years.

That issue is the safeguarding of Indian pluralism. Among all the countries, India is unique in that it is a federation of scores of different ethnic groups - linguistic, tribal and religious. The only way all these groups can stay together voluntarily is if they are convinced that their core identity is secure while they construct the larger, modern identity that is the Indian nation-state. The core identity is, in a real sense, primeval for it is what we come into the world with ..

The modern identity is constructed. It is what we subscribe to because we see, in this identity, opportunities of self-fulfillment. The opportunities may be social, cultural and educational, but they are above all economic. As these are availed of they add new layers to one's identity. The interaction between the core and constructed identities creates new amalgams that are shared more and more widely within the nation. The end product is the modern nation-state ...

... The achievements of Indian democracy ... can be traced to a carefully calculated succession of decisions that firmly entrenched India's pluralism and diversity into Constitution and into political practice. The struggle over the membership of the RSS that one witnessed in the Lok Sabha is a struggle to ensure that this carefully consiructed pluralism is not endangered.

... For the RSS has been the fountainhead of an alternative view of India, as a culturally Hindu state. Allowing employees of the State to join it is therefore a signal that the State is prepared to align itself behind this alternative vision of India.

No one can, or indeed wants, to deny that India is predominantly Hindu, and that its culture, although composite, springs mainly from Hindu roots. But there is a world of difference between a historical fact and a (state) ideology ... The latter immediately forces various minorities to reassess their relationship to the State. In short, to ask themselves the simple questions: "Do we belong here, can we continue to belong here, and if so, on what terms"?

Fortunately, the logic of Indian pluralism has begun to assert itself in the face of this threat. The BJP has come under pressure not only from the Congress and other Opposition parties, but also from its own allies in the NDA. This has forced it to start backtracking on its earlier promises ....

But overt action to change a particular law or rewrite the Constitution is not the only form that this threat is taking ...

Every such action makes it more difficult for Indians to answer a Naga or a Kashmiri when he asks what such a State offers to him ... The BJP" Hindu chauvinism can easily legitimise a burst of ethnic chauvinism in other groups.

The BJP's Maharashtra Secondary School Board's textbooks on Indian history already emphasise the importance of Shivaji to the exclusion of practically everything else in Indian history. Other states have only to detach themselves from the two all-India secondary school examination system - the CBSE and the ICSE - and the start rewriting their own histories, for future generations of Indian children to lose all sense of a common nationhood.

The BJP remains trapped in the dilemma of whether to serve its committed supporters or the nation as a whole. It is trying to resolve it by yielding to its partners on major issues, while appeasing its diehards on issues like appointing them to key posts in the fields of education and culture, changing syllabi and rewriting textbooks, which fall below the radar screens of their partners in the NDA.

Unfortunately, it is precisely these #ctions that give the greatest jolt to the core identities of the various ethnonations that make up the Indian Union.

Vajpayeė, Advani and others will soon have to decide which master they wish to serve - the India whose unity they have sworn to uphold, or the mythical Hindu nation that commands no more than one-fifths of the national vote.  (Source: The Hindustan Times, 10 March, 2000)