By: B.S.Mahal Dollard des Ormeaux. Quebec
At long last the Babri Masjid has been reduced to dust. The surprise lay not in its being pounded to the ground. The question was simply of how and when the dead will be done. What brought the crisis to a boil was the wait and see the wind blows stance of the Central government. The government had hoped to save its bacon by letting the Supreme Court to pass judgment over the ownership of the disputed land. But, the government had failed to read the storm clouds swirling over Ayodhya. The BJP *ker sewaks,” armed to the teeth with all sorts of tools, had worked themselves in to a frenzy, Antlike they labored, swinging their picks and axes at the mosque, until the centuries old edifice crumbled into the dust. Immediately, they raised in its place a makeshift, rickety temple to Ram. As any fool will have known, the Muslims of India were not about to take such a sacrilege sitting down. The inevitable, what was feared all along, came to pass: sectarian violence.
Ten months earlier, at a place named Hapur (UP), an empty, fetid field, sandwiched between a Muslim slum and a Hindu sium, were the raison deter for a bloody ethnic rioting. The title to the vacant land had recently passed from a Hindu businessman to a Muslim trader. The trader subdivided the land and sold the individual lots to other Muslims. Fearful of Muslim encroachment, the Hindus kicked up a row. One misty morning a picture of Lord Shiva appeared out of nowhere at the base of a fig tree. Henceforth, the field became for the Hindus a sacred plot. Soon after a cobra was seen cuddled up in the leafy branches, Hindus proclaimed the same as Shiva incarnate, heralding the site as hallowed ground, in no time there grew a chorus of voices to build at the site a temple to Shiva. The fuse was lit, turning the teeming market town into a war zone.
What’s next? Vamasai, the holiest of the Hindu cities, nestled on the left bend of the Ganges, is seething with another perceived historic grievance. The focus of Hindu wrath is the 17th century Aurangzeb Mosque, which sits imposingly in the midst of the Hindu quarter. The word in the street is that it usurped the site on which had stood a temple of antiquity to Shiva, The mosque, pro tempore, is under protective custody.
Such religious animus is nothing news. Its genesis lie in the birth of the nation, the newly born India, a twin, emerged from a crucible of unimaginable horror. The legacy has endured. For example, the postnatal period has experienced, longo intervellow, a war for religious ends. Until the mid70’s the internecine conflict was usually parochial and of limited intensity, this has all changed now. The ultranationalist organizations, which have mushroomed in the last decade or so, are bent upon to ferret out any and all beefs, historic or contemporary, which speak to the suffering of the Hindus. Their unmistakable agenda is to latch onto any episode, malleable enough to be turned into a cause celebre nationwide. Ayodhya was one such place wailing to win the battle for gods.
Each time a Hindu Muslim conflict breaks out, the Indian leaders and intelligentsia, speak of it as. An aberration, the battle for the triumph of one man’s faith over the faith of another is becoming progressively melancholic. Yet the Indian leaders emphatically point out to the ‘secularism’ drafted into the nation’s consultation to imply that all’s well and as if to say that the written word is an ample protective shield, They are far off the mark as borne out by the unending deadly communal strife. They know it but will not admit to the fact that ‘secularism’ is a myth; that, ‘secularism’ has never been a tradition in India, pre or post-independence. No wonder that the words of the constitution have lost their luster. Unless and until ‘secularism’ is practiced as a virtue by the multitudes, it will ring hollow and be a meaningless concept.
Another myth advanced by the Hindu fundamentalists, and which is rapidly gaining currency, is that of a monolithic nation called *Bharat,” the fictionalized land of the Aryans. Ironically, ‘Bharat’ is supposed to encompass the entire subcontinent of India, but the creation of Pakistan, and later of Bangladesh, has made mockery of that belief.
The theocratic concept of *Bharat’ however, collides fatally with that of ‘secularism.’ Whereas the Indian leaders and intelligentsia paid only lip service to ‘secularism,’ many of them are charmed by the legendary alias. Those who are coy over the use of the pseudonym “Bharat” are not afraid to speak of a Hindu “rashtra® (nation). Consequently, the politics are becoming increasingly communalized as evident in the nomenclature of the ultranationalist parties, viz. Bharatiya Janata Party, Vishwa Hindu Parisad, Ram Sewak Sangh (on being made illegal, RSS changed its first name from Rashtriya to Ram).
In his interview with Anita Pratap (Time “Kick Them Out”; Jan.25), Bal Thackeray, head of the Shiv Sena, admits to extorting money for his Shiv Sena; owns up to controlling the “mobs” whose cry “Jala do!” resulted in a mini ho locust of the Muslims; boasts of wanting to “teach Muslims a lesson” for not “behaving like good citizens”; and, repeatedly declared India to be the “Hindus’ motherland.” For years the likes of Thackeray, Joshi, and Advani et al have been spewing race hatred, all the time winning new soldiers. No one censures them, which makes them grow even bolder and nastier.
History has at no time recognized India as ‘Bharat.’ Otherwise, the name ‘Bharat’ or a variation thereof will have trickled down to the present day. Such is not the case. The name ‘India’ came into play following philological changes to the word ‘Indus’. Strangely enough, even the word ‘Hindu’ is not indigenous to India, being not of Aryan or Sanskrit origin, it is a derivative of a Persian word.
Foreign rule of India can be traced to the 8th century, with the advent of Islam. Though the Aryanas trekked to India around 1500 BC, the concept of political governance came much later. Accordingly, perhaps for almost half of its civilized life much of India was under foreign domination. History also bears evidence to the fact that India has never been ruled or governed by any one person or regime. The Mauryas, the Mughuls and the British came very close to doing so. Even so, they, too, knew that they governed a pluralistic society. And, in the midst of their kingdom they tolerated quasi-independent states or principalities, from which they exacted tribute, Thus, India was never a nation-state. A ‘nation’ is defined by the political dictionary as a “people who possess a sense of unity because of common race, language or religion.” India fails on all counts. India i$. A country made up of many communities viz. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists and so on, Therefore, the myth of India as “Bharat’ is inconceivable. If the call for “Khalistan’ is deemed to be antinationalistic, so should the call for ‘Bharat.’ But that is not the case, a case of double standard, the fact remains that the call of a ‘Hindu rashtra’ or Bharat’ is naked sophistry.
The roots of Hindu nationalism go way back to when Mrs.Gandhi let the communal genic out of the bottle to serve her own political ends. No one could have been fooled by the attendant consequences: ethnic divide. The air ought to have been filled with a cacophony of protest; but, nay, the courtiers, politicians, academicians, poets, writers even the students (who are less likely to be tainted by bigotry) just took shelter in their cowardice, naturally, the silence of the savants only emboldened the religious votary. Instead of being put to shame, he was made a hero.
India’s increasingly communalized politics has produced two opposing trends: the decay of ‘secularism’ and the rise in the rallying cry for “Bharat” rashtra. Nonetheless, commitment to ‘secularism’ is being marketed aggressively for Western consumption for fear of losing foreign aid and favorable trade concessions. At the same time, ‘secularism,” on the home front, is becoming a victim of hypocrisy, In the case of the “Hindu rashtra’ or *Bharat’ the politician and the intelligentsia remain muted for fear of being branded disloyal. The bringing into being of ‘Bharat’ will silence all of the alien faiths and their god(s) is they Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists. So will the death of ‘secularism’. Whichever way one looks at it, it is a case of double jeopardy. Only an iconoclast will seek to diminish or revile the god(s) of other peoples, to be told which god(s) to revere and which god(s) to forget is in itself desecration of faith, the ultimate sin.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 9, 1993
