by Jawed Naqvi
(Dawn, 10 Sep, 2009)
COMMUNALISM and nationalism often coalesce into a single purpose or idea. In India and Pakistan there are still people around who believe Hindus and Muslims make separate nationalities.
One of the leading proponents of this thought was Savarkar, a Maharashtrian Brahmin. He was later named in Gandhi’s assassination and his portrait was recently installed in India’s secular parliament alongside Gandhi, Nehru et al. Such are the times we live in. Jinnah accepted the separatist principle later.
So what do you do with an upsurge in nationalism that happens to be synonymous with communal violence? In Pakistan’s case the journey from the anti-Ahmadiya violence of the 1950s to the recent massacre of minority Christians in Gojra has been suffused with a religiously driven idea of nationhood.
The Indian state on its part more or less gave up its secularist pretensions by 1984 if not earlier. Yet it could not technically look the other way particularly when its own constitution would be put in the shredder machine every other day. Recourse to legal loopholes to prevaricate on secular commitment has been doing the trick for now.
It is of course a fallacy that there is an equal and intense tussle under way in India between secularism and communalism in the form of the Congress representing the secular corner and the Bharatiya Janata Party, standing up for the communalists. Since the waning of the Nehruvian era the two main parties have hunted in pairs. The Congress overtly promotes Muslim communalism, but it has a stake also in keeping Hindu revivalism simmering. Why forget that the Congress had set up the Shiv Sena to liquidate the communist trade unions in Mumbai before it turned on its other quarries.
Opening the locks of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya to give a handy advantage to Hindu extremists was a Congress ploy to placate the majority community. It needed the fine balance with them after it allowed the Muslim clergy the right to decide the fate of divorced Muslim women, an issue the Supreme Court had otherwise sought to bring under its secular purview.
The BJP is more overtly bigoted than the Congress though I can’t see how an obscurantist gesture like asking Sonia Gandhi, whose religious preference should be her private matter, to have a holy dip in freezing Ganga to appease Hindus is any different. Likewise, those in Pakistan who saw the leftist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto wooing the reactionary Muslim clergy in a Faustian deal, whether on the Ahmediya issue or by imposing prohibition, would be familiar with the atavistic South Asian trait common to those we mistake for liberal.
If nationalism and religious revivalism are coterminous, in practice if not in theory yet, then why is there a paucity of men and women wearing it on their shirtsleeves? When Hindu revivalists tore down the Ayodhya mosque in 1992 they proclaimed it the day of national liberation.
Two former presidents of the BJP – Lal Kishan Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi – were present at the site when the 16th-century structure was razed. They both flaunted the event as a high point of Indian nationhood. Logically, they should both have owned up to their role in stirring up the great surge of nationalism that was to fetch them political power, something unthinkable before it happened.
On the other hand, wearing the badge of religious nationalism would require its followers to serve prison terms under the Indian constitution. Moreover, it would put the rival Congress party in a quandary, since making martyrs out of vandals would not be good for its own dwindling credibility with secular voters. There are a few of those voters still around and they do make a difference in a crunch race. Therefore, a new brand of nationalism is on the political anvil. Let’s call it surreptitious nationalism.
In Shakespeare’s words its practitioners are like the ‘cat in the adage, letting I dare not wait upon I would’. Narendra Modi and Bal Thackeray are among those who use Hindu revivalism in tandem with their National Socialism-like quest. Yet they will not own up to it. Thackeray had supported the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya. He had sent his men to do the job. But has he ever offered to go to prison for that?
Modi knew only too well that without the carnage he was going to lose the 2002 polls in Gujarat to the Congress. Many have described the pogroms in an action-reaction paradigm – i.e. had there been no burning of the train in Godhra that killed a coach full of Hindus there would be no massacre of Muslims. Apparently enlightened journalists have used the description ‘post-Godhra’ carnage for the bloodbath, implicitly justifying the macabre and stage-managed killings. Imagine using the epithet of post-First World War Nazism to explain the holocaust.
This week’s reports about the carnage have thrown more light on a certain brand of cowardice that masquerades as nationalist fervour. According to the report of an inquiry into the killing of a Muslim girl and three fellow Muslim men by Gujarat police it was cold-blooded murder, a faked encounter killing. Modi has claimed the four were terrorists out to kill him. News report on Wednesday said his government was now flaunting an affidavit by the federal government, which supported his argument that the murdered four were indeed terrorists. Sample this less reported outrage: one of the prominent people murdered in 2002 was the former communist poet and later Congress MP Ahsan Jaffri.
He was cut into pieces before the mob burnt his remains in front of 100 witnesses. Jaffri had made frantic telephone calls before his lynching to everyone he knew, both in the Congress party hierarchy and within the BJP establishment in Modi’s government. The phone records were vital to investigate those who could not or would not save him. Now, according to human rights activists, the prosecution says that the records have just disappeared.
In this era of surreptitious nationalism – for that is what Hindutva as practised by its militant votaries really is – we can be forgiven for finding a grudging respect for Nathuram Godse. He too killed Mahatma Gandhi because of his fanatical worldview. But he surrendered himself and went to the gallows without for a moment seeking to disown his crime.
In some ways even Hitler had his integrity. He didn’t crawl out of his bunker to plead with his would-be captors that he wasn’t somehow personally responsible for the mindless hatred he preached in the cause of national socialism. It is not easy to begin to have respect for Godse. Put it down to the times we live in that such a thought has occurred.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
|
