Will xenophobic and religion laced nationalism ever give way to secularism

(The Times of India
28 Sep 2007)

Let's Move On

by Meghnad Desai

What a strange country India has become. Even after 60 years of independence, it still lacks self-confidence to feel comfortable in its own skin. It is happy about the welcome 'incredible India' receives in the Big Apple. Yet when a few British descendants of those who served and died in India during 1857 come to pay homage to their dead relatives, people behave as if the East India Company were back again. Will some Indians never become truly free of the foreign yoke, never be able to treat a foreigner as an equal? Do we have to be either victims or bullies?

India's eagerness to be liked by the British is strong. I have been frequently asked in the last two months: What does Gordon Brown think of India? And yet not a single Delhi politician has raised a voice against this appalling behaviour with the British tourists while Brown went out of his way to apologise for the remarks made against Shilpa Shetty.

Even at home the country is uncomfortable with itself. The Ram Setu incident is much more significant than anyone has realised. It is a fundamental disagreement about the idea of India. The story of India as a nation was constructed by Nehru from the ruins of the partition. India, the story ran, was a nation which had uniquely won independence using non-violent methods under

Mahatma Gandhi's leadership. At the final step Jinnah broke the country. The entire independence struggle was exclusively a Congress story. Independent India was the creation of a secular/syncretic culture built by Hindus and Muslims together. Minority versions were ruthlessly marginalised. The Congress myth was supreme; it was history.

All non-Congress strands of political movements were ignored. One is the Hindu Mahasabha/Jan Sangh strand which got its own back in 1992 and came to power with its own alternative story of India. The other was the Dravidian movement led by E V Ramaswamy 'Periyar' Naicker who led the radical anti- Brahmin movement of Dravidian pride. Periyar, like Ambedkar, was anti-Gandhi since he did not trust Congress to challenge upper caste hegemony. For him, only the rejection of the entire paraphernalia of ancient India — Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayana — as a partial elitist story could make Dravidians to feel at home.

The academic ideologues of Congress come mainly from Left-leaning centres. This was Indira Gandhi's bargain with the Left in 1970 for their support. The Left happily suppressed its atheism and embraced a middle of the road syncretic/secular India story where the tolerant kings were prized though there were only two of them: Ashoka and Akbar. When the Babri masjid was destroyed, the champions of secularism ran scurrying to their acceptable Hindu saint — Vivekananda. No root and branch defence of the secularist ideal was made.

Having abandoned secularism (except as a gesture to bash the BJP), the slogan became sarvadharma sambhava. But that was too extreme since fanatics of every view had a vote bank to offer. So now we have dwidharma-samatolan — the balancing of two religions. Each religion can have its own madness but if it controls votes that is alright. This is why Congress rushed quickly to repair the damage done by the offending para in the Archaeological Survey of India submission and the law minister of a 'secular socialist republic' rushed to pronounce his belief in Rama in as many ways as he could.

For BJP, Christmas (Diwali?) come early after two years in the dumps. It is now relieved of all serious thinking before the next election. But little did Congress realise that south of the Vindhyas there is a large country as well. India is not Uttar Pradesh nor is the Rig Veda brand of Indian history accepted everywhere. BJP may be wedded to the Ramanand Sagar story of India. But DMK takes its atheism seriously; it defines its identity on the rejection of the Ramayana ever since Periyar wrote a pamphlet 70-odd years ago. This is the most serious north-south rupture since the anti-Hindi agitation of the 1960s. The battle is not between Hindus and Muslims but between Hindus and Hindus, north and south.

Politics has lost its capacity for uniting the country. It no longer offers a story of India that can bind together. It has also lost touch with young, modern India. It offers no role models for the millions of young. A new, young India is thinking confidently and wants to get on with jobs, gadgets, travel, sex and, of course, winning. This is why sports unite people while politics divides them. First we have the amazing success of a film like Chak De! India, which played on Indianness of the women hockey players coming from all over India plus their Muslim coach. Then there has been the Twenty20 success. Everyone could understand the confident, hard-working, hard- celebrating Indian side. This is young India and indeed non-metropolitan India. No one in politics is talking with it.

It is not clear who will do this. The Indian psyche did not begin to change till the 1980s when India at last had world-class cricketers and could begin to talk with foreigners on equal terms without the rigmarole of imperialism. That generation briefly came to power with Rajiv Gandhi only to go into exile for the next two decades. Now there is another desperate hope. Can the new inductions in the Congress get ready to throw out the old guard? A Kamaraj Plan for the 21st century, anyone?