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OBVIOUSLY everyone has an ancestry; it is only a matter of rummaging deep enough into the past to discover who one’s forebears were.
The British aristocracy has made a fetish of it. Lineage matters to them, but occasionally even they can see through the affectation. In 1963, for example, the plebeian Labour leader Harold Wilson referred contemptuously to his Conservative titled counterpart Sir Alec Douglas-Home as “the Fourteenth Lord Home”, to which Sir Alec retorted with patrician common sense: “I suppose Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr Wilson.”
Since 1869, when DNA was discovered, scientists have made phenomenal strides in expanding their research into the composition of DNA and its applications, especially as a tool of evolutionary biology. What scientists have not been able to do so far is to convince fellow human beings of their commonality, of the Universality of Man.
Mankind remains riven by differences, dissension and discord. Through these fissures, noxious policies have begun to seep to the surface — and nowhere more so than on sectarian issues.
Ordinarily, the selection of a leader by an Indian political party that is out of power should be of no more than passing interest to non-Indians. Nonetheless, the election of Mr Narendra Modi (the 14th chief minister of Gujarat) as the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is too important an event to be ignored by Muslims within India and in the countries adjoining it.
Mr Modi has stepped into the paduka or wooden sandals of his mentors L.K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee but without their blessings. Vajpayee still regrets not removing Modi as chief minister of Gujarat following the Godhra massacres in 2002, and Advani puffed and pouted but could not prevent Modi from being voted in as his successor.
Vajpayee and Advani are both octogenarians; their future is behind them. Narendra Modi is 63 years old. His future will be the spearhead of the BJP and by association its ideological fount, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Modi began his career helping his brother run a tea stall in Gujarat, servicing attendees at the RSS political rallies. Within 40 years, he had risen, through his own assiduous efforts, to head the BJP.
The next general elections in India therefore will be a contest between Congress led by a fourth generation Nehru-Gandhi and the BJP by a fourth generation Modi — a tournament between doggedness and dynasty, and (more sinisterly for India’s Muslims and its Muslim neighbours) a clash between secularism and sectarianism.
Rahul Gandhi personifies secularism. He has Hindu, Sikh, Parsi and Catholic blood flowing through his veins. Modi is as saffron-blooded as they come.
Modi’s followers maintain that he will follow Vajpayee’s policy of politico-religious ‘apartheid’ or separate development: India at its own pace, neighbours at their own. As foreign minister and then prime minister, Vajpayee deliberately disabused the notion of an akhand Bharat or unified India and, despite pressure from the ultra-rightists, underplayed the demand for Hindutva.
Advani had no such reservations. He led the destructive yatra to Ayodhya in 1992. There have been many Babri Masjids since then. Today, 21 years later, the communalist genie Advani released has reached maturity. It has devoured him as its latest meal.
With the emergence of Modi on the national scene, the espousal of Hindutva has received fresh wind. There has never been any doubt amongst RSS diehards of their intention to see India become a state with Hinduism as its state religion — the Hindu-stan Nehru wanted to avoid.
In his memoirs My Country, My Life (2008), Advani acknowledged “the seminal influence” Swami Ranganathananda, the president of the Ramakrishna mission, had on his political thinking. He included an essay the Swami wrote in August 1947, coinciding with Jinnah’s speech and Nehru’s broadcast.
Ranganathananda proselytised that “the people [the Hindus and Muslims] are one whether under one sovereign state or two. And, as such, there will always be a large India looming behind the states of India and Pakistan. That India is bound to impinge itself on the social constitutions and on the political states of the two parts of divided India”.
Whether a “large India” will continue to loom large over the political states of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, only time and geopolitics will tell.
This month, for the first time in 2,500 years, the two opposing sects of the Jaina community in India — the Digambaras and the Svetambaras — reunited at Jaipur to undertake Paryushan or a period of atonement. For 18 days, the two sects performed penances for their sins and forgave each other’s transgressions. Perhaps there is a lesson in this for Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists — to meet, to forgive and to atone. Unlike the pacifist Jainas, these militants may not have 2,500 years to achieve such a reconciliation. n
The writer is an internationally recognised art historian and author.
