SECULARISM

The Somnath Temple and the Congress as the Voice of Hindu Cultural Nationalism

Bhagwan Josh in the Indian Express, 24 December, 1995

On December 1, amidst the chanting of Vedic mantras, President Shankar Dayal Sharma performed the Kalash Parishthan of the Somnath Temple's Nritya Mandap and dedicated the temple to the nation. Thus, the reconstruction process which began in 1948 has been completed. In 1948, the process of reconstruction of this temple precipitated a serious crisis in the Cabinet as the move was sharply opposed by Jawaharlal Nehru  who had understood this move in terms of the rise of Hindu communalism.

Surprisingly, this time the event has passed almost unnoticed. No secular political party or a group, despite their articulation of Nehruvian discourse, thought it fit to criticize the President (and by implication the Prime Minister) for presiding over the ceremony. The 'event' was considered so ordinary that no leading newspaper from Delhi carried the news of this ceremony on its front page. Very clearly, a significant shift has occurred in the perception of the nation as a whole. But does this convey any important message? In other words, how should one decode the symbolism embedded in this silence of national consensus? Does it tell us anything about the cultural complexion of the Indian nation today?

For a section of the national movement the cultural impulse for temple renovation was umbilically linked with the political project of India's Independence. On November 12, 1947, Sardar Patel accompanied by Jam Saheb and Kaka Saheb Gadgil, went to Junagarh. It was, precisely, then that the idea of temple reconstruction was mooted. According to K.M. Munshi, though the Government sponsored the scheme, Patel decided that it should not make any contribution in the form of money for the temple reconstruction. In 1949, Patel appealed for public contributions to rebuild the temple of Somnath.

Sardar Patel, K.M. Munshi and their other friends were fully aware of the meanings of the motion associated with the temple reconstruction. On 25 December 1947, the State Ministry decided to request the Junagarh authorities to lease a sufficiently large area around the temple. On 23 January 1949, a conference was held at Jamnagar which was attended by Patel, Gadgil, Jam Saheb, Dhebar, Chief Minister of Saurashtra and Samaldas Gandhi, administrator of Junagarh. The trust, which was to supervise the overall planning and construction was to consist of two representatives of the Government of India and two representatives of the Government of Saurashtra. The restoration of the temple was interpreted by Munshi, a Minister in Nehru's government, as a 'national urge'. He ascribes to Patel an 'uncanny insight' in being able to see that "we would never genuinely feel that freedom had come, nor develop faith in our future unless Somnath was restored".

 Nehru was unhappy with the way the function to inaugurate the temple was being given a politic- religious color'. Nehru tried, in vain, to dissuade the President, Rajendra Prasad, from associating himself. Writing to chief ministers in 1951 about the impending ceremonies at Somnath, Nehru observed that some of his colleagues were associated with it "in their individual capacities", and the Government of India as such had "nothing to do with it". He told them that he recognized a certain measure of public support to this 'venture'. But then observed: "we have to remember that we must not do anything which comes in the way of our state being secular".

 During this critical period, Nehru wrote to his friends that communalism was invading the minds and hearts of the Congressmen. Was the Congress turning into a communal organization as asserted by Nehru? Perhaps what was happening was that large number of Congressmen were finding it difficult to maintain the strict division between 'culture' and 'politics' as required by the discourse of secularism. Because, in their heart of hearts, many were equally convinced that the Congress now could and should legitimately reflect the cultural pride of the Hindus without having pangs of guilt. In their eyes, having a legitimate pride in one's own cultural traditions was very much a part of nationalism, i.e. "cultural nationalism", and "political rationalism" went hand-in-hand. But once the cultural aspirations were driven underground in the name of "communalism" the Congress could not possibly be an adequate vehicle for the expression of Hindu cultural hegemony. Before the partition many of these Congressmen could understand the rationale of keeping the discourse of "culture" underground as the pragmatic need of the Congress policy of uniting with the Muslims demanded this. But after the partition they could not but have perceived such attitudes as self-imposed censorship.

 Under Nehru, Congress as an organization ceased to become a significant vehicle of Hindu cultural identity. People like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the erstwhile president of the Hindu Mahasabha, realized that for people like him there was no place in the Congress. This was the background which gave birth to an organization such as the Jana Sangh. But the problem was that it could not evolve a more radical social programme of national development as compared to the Congress. Beyond a particular point, as we know, the cultural issues of identity begin to be intertwined with caste and class issues and power relations. Therefore, the birth of Jana Sangh, purely on a programme of cultural identity, further deepened, though unwittingly, the par division in the spectrum of Hindi cultural nationalism. The moderate complex of Hindu identity continued to stay underground within the Congress while the strong voices came to be articulated through the Jana Sangh. The very logic of the formation of a new political party dictated that if it was to acquire a position of power then it must claim to be the 'sole spokesman' of Hindu identity.

Today, the Congress is faced with a serious dilemma: should it openly articulate itself as a vehicle of a relatively moderate Hindu identity or not? But the Congress is a kind of party which allows practice to speak louder than words. If the ceremony at Somnath is any indication, the Congress is certainly moving slowly but steadily, towards the resolution of this historic dilemma.