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MORE than 80 years after he published An Autobiography, Jawaharlal Nehru’s querulous attitude towards “Muslim culture” sounds refreshingly naive.
“I have tried hard to understand what this ‘Muslim culture’ is, but I confess that I have not succeeded,” he complains. He notes that the influence of “Persian language and traditions” extends to “a tiny handful of middle-class Muslims as well as Hindus in north India.”
More broadly, “the most obvious symbols ... seem to be a particular type of pyjamas, not too long and not too short, a particular way of shaving or clipping the moustache but allowing the beard to grow, and a lota .…”
Nehru was vehemently opposed to both Muslim and Hindu communalism, and his pronouncements on the latter were often a great deal harsher, but a dozen or so years before Partition, such a separation seemed inconceivable to him.
In recent weeks many Pakistanis have cited the latest developments in India as evidence that the division of the subcontinent in 1947 was both justified and necessary. But would it ever have come to this without an inevitably incomplete communal redrawing of boundaries? Would even the most vicious Hindu parishad have been so eager to defenestrate the Muslim minority in the absence of Pakistan and Bangladesh?
The revolt against Modi’s action is a sign of hope.
Who knows. It’s worth recalling, though, that the two-nation theory was embraced by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar before Muslim communalists adopted it. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the one-time “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”, sought to neutralise the communalist poison by declaring that his nation, too, would be a secular state. But by then it was arguably too late. The deed had been done. For many decades hence, Pakistan’s tendency towards religious bigotry broadly contrasted with India’s avowed secularism. But that changed in the 1990s. Lal Krishna Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra and the eventual demolition of a historic mosque in Ayodhya transformed the narrative, and Narendra Modi did his bit in 2002 by facilitating the Muslim massacres in Gujarat.
His suspected role in the atrocities made him persona non grata across much of the West, but the curbs were swiftly lifted once he became prime minister, even before comparable prototypes emerged as the dominant political force across the West.
Modi and his associates, notably his home minister Amit Shah (who served in the same position in Gujarat), appear to have assumed that they could get away with anything after the reconquest of Kashmir back in August. But with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the threatened National Register of Citizens (NRC), there is a broad impression that he’s gone much too far. In combination, they raise the prospect of India as an apartheid state.
The justifications of the Bharatiya Janata Party for its legislation cannot detract from the long-standing desires of its key component, the overtly fascistic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and associates such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, among others. It’s a bit like imagining what Pakistan would be like were it controlled by the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal.
Modi wasn’t expecting the resistance that the CAA has stirred, and has predictably resorted to dog-whistling by citing the sartorial preferences of some of the protesters. To his discomfiture, the rebellion isn’t sectarian. Even many of those who appreciate his campaign against open-air defecation don’t particularly appreciate the idea of his regime defecating on the Indian constitution.
It was inevitable that the advent of Modi as the chief honcho would lead to something like this. All the delusional acolytes who were insisting that he would be a judicious ruler and minorities would have nothing to fear ought to look themselves in the mirror and recognise that they were grievously mistaken.
I fear too many of them will do no such thing, and will continue to latch on to their ridiculous illusions, amended every other day to match the dystopian reality. But the popular revolt against Modi’s overreach is an invigorating sign of hope. It suggests that the more intelligent Indians, of all religions and ethnicities, will not bow to this blatant bigotry.
It’s a shame that the opposition is both weak and scattered. Nehru’s heirs in the Congress have all too often tended to emulate the Hindutva movement rather than oppose it. Whether the remaining scraps of the party that led India to independence can play a role in guiding it towards a less divided future remains unclear. The communist parties have reduced themselves to nothingness in their erstwhile strongholds. The regional parties succeed in staving off the BJP juggernaut in nooks and crannies, but cannot aspire to national leadership.
Only time will tell whether the BJP, notwithstanding its routine excesses, is here to stay as an electoral force. The current uprising may throw up viable alternatives. But, as things stand, 21st-century India threatens to be as through a disaster as its Western neighbour.
Published in Dawn, December 25th, 2019
