The rule of the BJP ideology of Hindutva in India and the violent attempts to implement its idea of a nation needs a closer look in order to be able to understand and react to it. The term ‘Hindutva’ was coined in 1923 by Vinayak Somodar Savarkar in his book ‘Essentials of Hindutva’ that was later republished under the title ‘Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?’ In his book Savarkar explained that Hinduism was an ethnic, cultural and political identity of people born and living in India. He clearly dismissed the religious aspect. He gave it secondary importance only and he clearly excluded religions the origin of which was not in India: He included all Indian religions in the term “Hinduism” and outlined his vision of a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu Nation) as “Akhand Bharat” (Undivided India), stretching across the entire Indian subcontinent.
By doing so Savarkar and other Hindu nationalists responded to the idea of a nation that had been introduced by the British in the 19th century. Starting from Bengal and Calcutta where the capital of the British colonial administration was located and where most of the educational institutions influenced by British and European ideas were situated the idea of a nation appealed to educated Bengalis and later Indians who resented colonial domination but decided that one had to learn from the culturally advanced British. It was the higher castes, the so-called ‘Bhadra Log’ of Bengal who were traditionally affine to education that responded first to the idea. Starting from Rammohan Roy and his Brahmo Samaj founded in 1928 aimed at modernizing Indian society by reforming social customs of caste Hindus. The Samajis based their reform ideas on the European ideas of renaissance that included secularism and humanism.
Secularism meaning the rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations arose in Europe that based its Greek philosophical heritage that preferred a materialistic and rational interpretation of the world which greatly contributed to the critique of religion as spiritual and thus irrational. Early Indian reformers accepted secularism as a critique of Hindu religious customs such as Satti (widow burning), polygamy, child marriage and the way the caste system was practised. In European philosophical tradition even the term ‘religion’ was used to design only the sacred and devotional part of Christianity and disregarded and even negated the socio-economic and ethical part of it. This came handy when centuries later capitalism developed in Europe with the help of the church that promoted greed, lust, ruthlessness and materialism all of which are posed against original Christian ethics. Thus Christianity became removed from the public sphere into the private which finally resulted in the growth of agnosticism (religious scepticism) and atheism.
Such a view about their beliefs was of course alien and unacceptable to educated Indians who were mostly Hindus and well entrenched in the caste system that implied a strong hierarchical structure of society with no chance for improvement of your situation in this life. Therefore, the idea of equality of men was alien to them and its application would put Indian society that had existed for thousands of years upside down. A Brahmin could not accept the idea that his superiority that was based on his caste being created from the mouth of the first principle Purusha, the place from where the words originate, was undermined. Until today though caste is shunned in the Indian Constitution the process of breaking the caste hierarchy up is still in its infancy. That was the reason why the European ideology of nationalism that would have included secularism could be accepted only in an applied form in the subcontinent, namely as religious nationalism.
In the second half of the 19th century there was growing the uneasiness among educated Bengalis and Indians about British cultural arrogance included in their theory of imperialism and their contempt for Indian culture which they regarded as inferior. The led them to the idea of nation and nationalism for themselves to reassert their worth and prove it to the British. First (1875) Bengali nationalism and after that (1885) Indian nationalism in the shape of the Indian National Congress (INC) that included all of the South Asian subcontinent was adopted as a means to wrench respect and later political power from the British. While there was a real attempt to shun religion in the Congress in its early years, the moment the leaders realized that in order to make an impact on the British they needed popular support the fate of secular nationalism was sealed. Thus the early leader of the so-called radical wing of the Congress who wanted to make an impact used Hindu gods and other images for the purpose. B.G. Tilak from Maharashtra re-activated 1893 an already fading Ganesha-festival to connect the nationalist idea with the Hindu god. He wrote two books both of which dealt with the Vedas trying to show that the people who brought the Vedas were destined to rule the world. Another Congress leader the Punjabi Lala Lajpat Rai was at the same time a leading member of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement that had been founded in 1875. In an article in 1923 in the Indian newspaper The Tribune he demanded “a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and Hindu State India”. Yet another prominent member of the INC Madan Mohan Malaviya founded the Shuddhi Movement in India that was supposed to clean up the Muslim-ness from Muslim converts and return them into the fold of Hinduism. It was largely common for members of Hindu reform movements to be at the same time member of the Congress despite the formally secular intention of the organization.
These examples that could be even extended. This clearly shows that it was impossible to run an anticolonial political movement in India without reference to religion that defined the self-understanding and the lives of the Indian masses from the cradle to the grave. In order to motivate the common man or even to explain to him what nation meant even Gandhi had to refer to religion by calling his aim for India was to attain ‘Ram Raj’. How many Muslims or other minorities would have felt sympathetic to this? As a matter of fact it was Hindu nationalism that preceded Muslim nationalism and the demand for Pakistan by over sixty years that led straight to the formation of communalism the idea that identity in India is defined by the belonging to the respective (religious) community only. Let’s see what Savarkar had to say about it: “But, while it is religion-free, the word “Hindutva” does not include a Mohammedan. The majority of the Indian Mohammedans may, if free from the prejudices born of ignorance, come to love our land as their fatherland, as the patriotic and noble minded amongst them have always been doing. The story of their conversions, forcible in millions of cases is too recent to make them forget that they inherit Hindu blood in their veins. But can we see them as Hindus? No. Because we not only have ties of blood and fatherland, but also the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilization our Hindu culture,” unquote.
From this it becomes quite clear that Muslims are a problem per se because they are alien or even when born from indigenous Indians they pledge allegiance to Mecca and to the Muslim ummah that is outside India. With such a definition of nation naturally Muslims have no chance to ever be recognized as Indians and that is the underlying problem about what is going on in Kashmir and Assam. The fiction of secularism that India has been trying to uphold has finally been defeated. And that opens anew the question about how do Muslims fit into a Hindu rashtra as much as how do Hindus fit into an Islamic republic.
Contributed by:
Dr. Bettina Robotka
Dr. Bettina Robotka, formerly of Department of South Asian Studies Humboldt University, Berlin)
