SECULARISM
Weak Secularism: No Antidote to Hindutva
C.P. Bhambhri on Cultural Nationalism
India is witnessing a fundamental struggle between two concepts of nationalism, and the future of society and politics will depend on the solution of this question. Indian struggle for independence witnessed contest between secular, cosmopolitan, pluralist and democratic nationalism, on the one hand, and, on the other sectarian nationalism of the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh political organizations. The history is repeating itself because the BJP in the name of cultural nationalism has emerged as the vanguard of Hindu religion based national identity and the Congress is campaigning in defense of plural and secular nationalism as the foundation of unity of a diverse multi-cultural country.
It is essential to look into the slow and gradual development of multi-cultural nationalism of the Congress in the twentieth century when it started expanding its social base and social agenda. Multi- cultural claim of the Congress was contested by the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha which were established in 1906 and 1907. Not only this. Ramaswamy Naickar of the Madras Congress and many important Dalit leaders of the Bombay Congress revolted against the Brahmanical orientation of the Congress leadership. Bal Gangadhar Tilak was a great national leader but his identification with Ganesh Puja and other Hindu symbols for political mobilization did not impress the Dalit leadership who kept away from the Congress platform. Similarly, Ramaswamy Naickar walked out of the Congress by revolting against the Brahmin-led Madras Congress and he established a separate Dravida Kazhagam to mobilize the oppressed castes of his socio- cultural region. The 1940s witnessed a great intensification of the struggle for Independence. Mohammad Ali Jinnah characterized the Congress as a Hindu organization and he championed the Two-Nation Theory in describing the Indian social reality. Similarly Veer Savarka and the Hindu Mahasabha opposed the Congress for its policy of appeasement of Muslims and ignoring the interests of the Hindu Nation i.e. India.
The Congress concept of multi-cultural nationalism was contested by the League and the Sabha. The Congress philosophy of democratic and pluralist secularism was contested by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in the 1930s and 1940s. The Ramsay MacDonald Award of according separate identity to the Muslims and the Scheduled Castes brought the issue of religion and caste in the centre stage of Indian politics. How did the Congress tackle this challenge? it projected itself as an all-India national and non-sectarian movement by evolving many strategies.
Gandhi launched successful struggles to accommodate the political interests of the Scheduled Castes. In Gandhi's agenda of secular nationalism, the Harijans occupied a very special position and he really and genuinely worked for their social uplift. The result of Gandhi's efforts was that B.R. Ambedkar could not emerge as the 'sole' leader of the Harijan, and the Congress platform was made really hospitable for the oppressed castes.
Similarly, in the broad platform created by Gandhi, many important leaders of the Congress were always identified with Hinduism. Pt. Madan Mohan Malviya was Rai was a Congress leader and his Servants of the People a great national leader but a practicing Hindu. Lala Lajpat Society was in reality a Hindu reform movement. (But) conservative Hindu leaders co-existed with great secularists like Pt. Nehru.
The Congress till the end contested Jinnah's claim to be the sole representative of the Muslims, and many important Muslim leaders preferred Congress secularism and rejected Jinnah's sectarianism. The tallest of such leaders were Azad and (Abdul Ghaffar Khan).
Since the Congress leadership accommodated multiple social tendencies of the country, it practiced accommodative secular nationalism irrespective of the fact that many of its leaders were openly identified as Hindus. This weak secular nationalism of the Congress based nationalism of the Hindu Mahasabha and the was a kind of reply to aggressive and militant religion- Muslim League.
The Congress party is the inheritor and the practitioner of weak secular nationalism where public policies are always evaluated on the basis of secularism, and the practicing Hindu or Muslim leaders do not find any difficulty in the Congress party organization. After Independence, Nehra, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and others practiced this inherited legacy of the Congress. it is balancing in actual governance. Nehru differed with a difficult legacy because it requires a lot of social Rajendra Prasad and Purshottam Das Tandon because Nehru on the one hand, and... Tandon, on the other, had derived different meanings from the Congress legacy of the State should associate himself with the ceremonies of weak secularism. Nehru did not accept that the Head of Hindu Somnath Temple. Similarly, Rajiv Gandhi was castigated by Muslim modernists because it was perceived that on the Shah Bano Case, the Congress Government was compromising with the Muslim fundamentalists. Since the Congress practiced its secular nationalism by maintaining social equilibrium and also by respecting the religious sentiments of every community, it always raised controversies and the bubble was burst on Ayodhya Temple-Babari Mosque dispute. P.V. Narasimha Rao were accused by the large sections The Congress party governments of Rajiv Gandhi and of Muslim community for betrayal on the issue of Babari Masjid. The BJP which was a minor factor in Indian politics in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, emerged in a big way in the 1980s on the basis of an alternative concept of cultural nationalism i.e. Hindutva. If weak secular nationalism of the Congress was suspected by the minorities, the BJP attacked the Congress as a "pseudo- secular" party which in reality practices appeasement of the Muslim minority. The religion-based so-called Cultural Nationalism targeted 120 million Muslims and other minorities as a privileged social group because of the Congress type of secularism.
The BJP polarized India on the issue of nationalism. The BJP and its other organizations like the RSS, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal etc. appeal to the past and humiliation of the Hindu by the Muslim conquerors. Only Hindu State can defend the interests of the Indians i.e. the Hindus and only such a state can set the historical record straight by constructing Ram Temple at Ayodhya. The agenda of historical humiliations does not end with Ayodhya, Mathura and Varanasi are standing monuments to be demolished. Hindu self-respect can be assured by a Hindu state only. This was the demand of Veer Savarkar, Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS. Golwalkar and the inheritors of this legacy are Advani, Vajpayee and others.
India is at the cross-roads because the inheritors of the secular legacy are weak, vacillating and compromising and the successors of Hindu nationalism are aggressive and militant. While the Congress party leadership of the 1980s and 1990s should be castigated for making some opportunist compromises with the forces of Hindutva, the other weak secular political formations have made full contribution in encouraging the ongoing polarization in India. In 1977, and in 1989, the Jan Sangh/BJP was brought into the national political mainstream by Jayaprakash Narayan, VP. Singh and others. (They) cannot turn around and disclaim role in legitimizing the BJP at the national level.
Compromising politics of the weak secular parties including the Congress has provided new space to the forces of aggressive Hinduism. In a formal manner, the Congress party has never shared power or common political platform with the Hindu party. In reality it has been perceived as becoming 'soft' on Hindutva. If this perception about the Congress becomes real, Narasimha Rao's claim that the Congress has fundamental differences with the BJP will not carry political weight. The Congress cannot defend secular nationalism... without politically confronting the practitioners of cultural nationalism who will divide the country. A multi-lingual, multi-national, multi-cultural and multi- religious country will get balkanized in the absence of democratic secular nationalism. Cultural homoge- sisters and political hegemonizes are involved in constructing Indian nationalism in their own image which is based on distortion of rich Indian historical traditions and heritage. Politics of secular nationalism has to grapple with the misrepresentation of Indian history because the founders of Hindutva are playing politics with history (Source: The Hindustan Times, 2 July, 1996)
Javed Anand on the Secular Leadership
The fact that a growing section of the electorate sees nothing wrong with the BJP should be cause enough for anxiety. Far more worrisome is the casual-at-best and hypocritical-at-worst commitment of the major political! players to the very credo by which they swear...How does one explain the fact that while communalism was one question which pitted almost the entire political spectrum against the BJP, well over half the respondents to (a recent) poll believe the BJP is not a community party?
To leave such a discrepancy between the pronouncement of the secular leaders and the led unaddressed is to ask for trouble. The parties which swear by secularism must either revise their own views about the BJP or think seriously about a mass education programme to help the ordinary voter understand what Hindutva is all about and how support to the BJP will only add to the nation's misery.
The major parties which stood firm in their resolve not to allow the BJP to preside over the nation's destiny include the Congress, the JD and the Samajwadi Party. Which of these parties are capable of going beyond the empty "Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai" rhetoric?
The secular credentials of the party of Gandhi and Nehru had been so badly compromised by India Gandhi (in her last phase), Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao that it cannot be expected to be taken seriously by any community unless it does honest introspection and makes a public admission of the way it has pandered both to majority and minority communalism.
To be fair to the JD (and its splinter, the SP), its secular conscience is not as smeared with all the bloodshed during riots under successive Congress govts. at the Centre and in the states. But even VP Singh cannot disown the role his party played, may be unwittingly, in accelerating the process of communal polarization in recent years. His repeated prostrating before a bigot like Imam Bukhari, giving pride of place in his party to communalists like Maulana Obaidullah Azmi and Syed Shahabuddin (sic Editor) his tokenism in declaring Prophet Mohammed's birthday did not help India's impoverished and insecure Muslims one bit. They did, however, provide sustenance to Hindutva's charge of the "appeasement of minorities".
Hopefully, today, Singh realizes his folly. But there is not much to be hoped from yesterday's champions of secularism, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Yadav. In a hard-hitting article last month, Seema Mustafa, a JD member, looked out at the two Yadavs, calling them both cynical politicians interested in nothing more than feeding on Muslim insecurity to ensure Yadav dominance in UP and Bihar. She wondered what brand of secularism will follow when cartelists and criminals lead the campaign against communalism. With the future of Indian secularism in such safe custody, Hindutva should really have very little to worry about.
(Source: The Pioneer, 1 July, 1996)
