Hindutva and radical Islam: Where the twain do meet

Arun Shourie: Friday, December 28, 2007

Every set of scriptures has in it enough to justify extreme, even violent reaction. The tectonic shift in the Hindu mind, that has been going on for 200 years, is being underestimated

Your Hindutva is no different from Islamic fundamentalism’ — a fashionable statement these days, one that immediately establishes the person’s secular credentials. It is, of course, false, as we shall see in a moment. But there is a grain of potential truth in it — something that does not put Hinduism at par with Islam, but one that should, instead, serve as a warning to all who keep pushing Hindus around. That grain is the fact that every tradition has in it, every set of scriptures has in it enough to justify extreme, even violent reaction. From the very same Gita from which Gandhiji derived non-violence and satyagraha, Lokmanya Tilak constructed the case for ferocious response, not excluding violence. From the very same Gita from which Gandhiji derived his ‘true law’, shatham pratyapi satyam, ‘Truth even to the wicked’, the Lokmanya derived his famous maxim, shatham prati shaathyam, ‘Wickedness to the wicked.’

In the great work, Gita Rahasya, that he wrote in the Mandalay prison, the Lokmanya invokes Sri Samartha, ‘Meet boldness with boldness; impertinence by impertinence must be met; villainy by villainy must be met.’ Large-heartedness towards those who are grasping? Forgiveness towards those who are cruel? ‘Even Prahlada, that highest of devotees of the Blessed Lord,’ the Lokmanya recalls, has said, ‘Therefore, my friend, wise men have everywhere mentioned exceptions to the principle of forgiveness.’ True, the ordinary rule is that one must not cause harm to others by doing such actions as, if done to oneself, would be harmful. But, the Mahabharata, Tilak says, ‘has made it clear that this rule should not be followed in a society, where there do not exist persons who follow the other religious principle, namely, others should not cause harm to us, which is the corollary from this first principle.’ The counsel of ‘equability’ of the Gita, he says, is bound up with two individuals; that is, it implies reciprocity. ‘Therefore, just as the principle of non-violence is not violated by killing an evil-doer, so also the principle of self-identification [of seeing the same, Eternal Self in all] or of non-enmity, which is observed by saints, is in no way affected by giving condign punishment to evil-doers.’ Does the Supreme Being not Himself declare that He takes incarnations from time to time to protect dharma and destroy evil-doers? Indeed, the one who hesitates to take the retaliatory action that is necessary assists the evil to do their work. ‘And the summary of the entire teaching of the Gita is that: even the most horrible warfare which may be carried on in these circumstances, with an equable frame of mind, is righteous and meritorious.’

Tilak invokes the advice of Bhisma, and then of Yudhisthira, ‘Religion and morality consist in behaving towards others in the same way as they behave towards us; one must behave deceitfully towards deceitful persons, and in a saintly way towards saintly persons.’ Of course, act in a saintly way in the first instance, the Lokmanya counsels. Try to dissuade the evil-doer through persuasion. ‘But if the evilness of the evil-doers is not circumvented by such saintly actions, or, if the counsel of peacefulness and propriety is not acceptable to such evil-doers, then according to the principle kantakenaiva kantakam (that is, “take out a thorn by a thorn”), it becomes necessary to take out by a needle, that is by an iron thorn, if not by an ordinary thorn, that thorn which will not come out with poultices, because under any circumstances, punishing evil-doers in the interests of general welfare, as was done by the Blessed Lord, is the first duty of saints from the point of view of Ethics.’ And the responsibility for the suffering that is caused thereby does not lie with the person who puts the evil out; it lies with the evil-doers. The Lord Himself says, Tilak recalls, ‘I give to them reward in the same manner and to the same extent that they worship Me.’ ‘In the same way,’ he says, ‘no one calls the Judge, who directs the execution of a criminal, the enemy of the criminal...’

Could the variance between two interpretations be greater than is the case between the Lokmanya’s Gita Rahasya and Gandhiji’s Anashakti Yoga? Yet both constructions are by great and devout Hindus. Are ordinary Hindus nailed to Gandhiji’s rendering? After all, at the end of the Gita, Arjuna does not go off to sit at one of our non-violent dharnas. He goes into blood-soaked battle.

The comforting mistake

The mistake is to assume that the sterner stance is something that has been fomented by this individual or that —in the case of Hindutva, by, say, Veer Savarkar — or by one organisation, say the RSS or the VHP. That is just a comforting mistake — the inference is that once that individual is calumnised, once that organisation is neutralised, ‘the problem’ will be over. Large numbers do not gravitate to this interpretation rather than that merely because an individual or an organisation has advanced it — after all, the interpretations that are available on the shelf far outnumber even the scriptures. They gravitate to the harsher rendering because events convince them that it alone will save them.

It is this tectonic shift in the Hindu mind, a shift that has been going on for 200 years, which is being underestimated. The thousand years of domination and savage oppression by rulers of other religions; domination and oppression which were exercised in the name of and for the glory of and for establishing the sway of those religions, evinced a variety of responses from the Hindus. Armed resistance for centuries... When at last such resistance became totally impossible, the revival of bhakti by the great poets... When public performance even of bhakti became perilous, sullen withdrawal, preserving the tradition by oneself, almost in secrecy: I remember being told in South Goa how families sustained their devotion by painting images of our gods and goddesses inside the tin trunks in which sheets and clothing were kept. The example of individuals: recall how the utter simplicity and manifest aura of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa negated the efforts of the missionaries, how his devotion to the image of the Goddess at Dakshineshwar restored respectability to the idolatry that the missionaries and others were traducing... The magnetism of Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi... Gandhiji’s incontestable greatness and the fact that it was so evidently rooted in his devotion to our religion...

Each of these stemmed much. But over the last 200 years the feeling has also swelled that, invaluable as these responses have been, they have not been enough. They did not prevent the country from being taken over. They did not shield the people from the cruelty of alien rulers. They did not prevent the conversion of millions. They did not prevent the tradition from being calumnised and being thrown on the defensive. They did not in the end save the country from being partitioned — from being partitioned in the name of religion...

There is a real vice here. The three great religions that originated in Palestine and Saudi Arabia — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — have been exclusivist — each has insisted that it alone is true — and aggressive. The Indic religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism — have been inclusive, they have been indulgent of the claims of others. But how may the latter sort survive when it is confronted by one that aims at power, acquires it, and then uses it to enlarge its dominion? How is the Indic sort to survive when the other uses the sword as well as other resources — organised missionaries, money, the state — to proselytise and to convert? Nor is this question facing just the Hindus in India today. It is facing the adherents of Indic traditions wherever they are: look at the Hindus in Indonesia and Malaysia; look at the Buddhists in Tibet, now in Thailand too. It is because of this vice, and the realisation born from what had already come to pass that Swami Vivekananda, for instance, while asking the Hindus to retain their Hindu soul, exhorted them to acquire an ‘Islamic body’.

Instigating factors

We can be certain that his counsel will prevail, our secularists notwithstanding,

• The more aggressively the other religions proselytise — look at the fervour with which today the Tablighi Jamaat goes about conversion; look at the organised way in which the missionaries ‘harvest’ our souls;

• The more they use money to increase the harvest — whether it is Saudi money or that of Rome and the American churches;

• The more any of them uses violence to enlarge its sway;

• The more any of them allies itself with and uses the state — whether that of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan — for aggrandisement.

Nor is what others do from outside the only determinant. From within India, three factors in particular will make the acquiring of that Islamic body all the more certain:

• The more biased ‘secularist’ discourse is;

• The more political parties use non-Hindus — Muslims, for instance — as vote banks and the more that non-Hindu group comes to act as one — ‘strategic voting’ and all;

• The more the state of India bends to these exclusivist, aggressive traditions.

It has almost become routine to slight Hindu sentiments — our smart-set do not even notice the slights they administer. Recall the jibe of decades: ‘the Hindu rate of growth’. When, because of those very socialist policies that their kind had swallowed and imposed on the country, our growth was held down to 3-4 per cent, it was dubbed — with much glee — as ‘the Hindu rate of growth’. Today, we are growing at 9 per cent. And, if you are to believe the nonsense in Sachar’s report, the minorities are not growing at all. So, who is responsible for this higher rate of growth? The Hindus! How come no one calls this higher rate of growth ‘the Hindu rate of growth’? Simple: dubbing the low rate as the Hindu one established you to be secular; not acknowledging the higher one as the Hindu rate establishes you to be secular!

Or M.F. Husain. He is a kindly man, and a prodigiously productive artist. There is no warrant at all for disrupting all his exhibitions. I am on the point of sensibilities. His depictions of Hindu goddesses have been in the news: he has painted them in less than skimpy attire. I particularly remember one in which Sita is riding Hanuman’s stiffened tail — of course, she is scarcely clad, but that is the least of it: you need no imagination at all to see what she is rubbing up against that stiffened tail. Well, in the case of an artist, that is just inspiration, say the secularists. OK. The question that arises then is: How come in the seventy-five years Husain has been painting, he has not once felt inspired, not once, to paint the face of the Prophet? It doesn’t have to be in the style in which he has painted the Hindu goddesses. Why not the most beautiful, the most radiant and luminous face that he can imagine? How come he has never felt inspired to paint women revered in Islam, or in his own family, in the same style as the one that propelled his inspiration in regard to Hindu goddesses?

‘In painting the goddesses, he was just honouring them,’ a secular intellectual remarked at a discussion the other day. ‘It was his way of honouring them.’ Fine. It is indeed the case that one of the best ways we can honour someone is to put the one skill we have at the service of the person or deity. But how come that Husain never but never thought of honouring the Prophet by using the same priceless skill, that one ‘talent which is death to hide’?

‘Has Mr Shourie ever visited Khajuraho?,’ a member of the audience asked, the implication being that, as Hindu sculptors had depicted personages naked, what was wrong with Husain depicting the goddesses in the same style. Fine again. But surely, it is no one’s case that the ‘Khajuraho style’ must be confined to Hindu icons. Why has the artist, so skilled in deploying the Khajuraho motifs, never used them for icons of Islam? The reason why an artist desists from depicting the Prophet’s face is none of these convoluted disquisitions on style.

The reason is simplicity itself: he knows he will be thrashed, and his hands smashed.

Exactly the same holds for politics. How come no one objects when for years a Muslim politician keeps publishing maps of constituencies in which Muslims as Muslims can determine the outcome, and exhorting them to do so? When, not just an individual politician but entire political parties — from the Congress to the Left parties — stir Muslims up as a vote bank. When Muslims start behaving like a vote bank, you can be certain that someone will get the idea that Hindus too should be welded into a vote bank, and eventually they will get welded into one. Why is stoking Muslims ‘secular’ and stoking Hindus ‘communal’?

And yet perverted discourse, even the stratagems of political parties, are but preparation: they prepare the ground for capitulation by the state to groups that are aggressive. And in this the real lunacy is about to be launched, and, with that, the real reaction.

Not Just Macaulay's Offspring

Arun Shourie
"We must at present do our best to form a class," Macaulay wrote in his famous Minute of 1835, "who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."

Now, many of the strictures in his Minute were entirely to the point: the texts which were in use at that time in Arabic and Sanskrit schools were out-dated, they were teaching notions about geography, astronomy and the rest which had been superseded by recent researches. And in this sense, modernising the syllabus and imparting education through English, opening our eyes to the world was indeed to raise Indians.

But there was another aspect to the Minute: utter scorn for all that had been written or developed here. And more than the knowledge they imbibed of the world, it is this disdain for everything Indian that the products of the new education system internalised.

"...the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that until they are enriched from some other quarter it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them," Macaulay wrote. "I have never found one among them (the proponents of continuing to stress oriental learn- ing)", he wrote, "who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." "It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say," he wrote, "that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books which have been written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England...."

With the British gaining supremacy several things happened. The scorn, falsifications and caricatures of our culture by the missionaries had a free field. They were buttressed by the sway the British acquired in the political sphere - even apart from the assistance this gave to missionary propaganda, political tutelage bred inferiority among us, a feeling that our culture was inferior as it had led us to enslavement. Such acquaintance that educated Indians came to have with our tradition was what they learnt from western books and missionaries. How pervasive the effects of the system were and how they have endured to our very day will be evident from a single consideration: although each is among the simplest of the hundreds upon hundreds that can be set out, every single example cited above - descriptions of our land in the Vedas, Puranas and epics, Shankara's journeys, the Granth Sahib, the linkages between temples and pilgrimages -- will be a surprise to most of us, educated Indians today.

The scorn was deepened in part because of the truimph of western science and technology, but even more because of the fact that educated Indians acquired just a smattering of anacquaintance with even this new learning -- they concluded that the 'scientific temper' and 'reason' were all; they knew next to nothing about our culture... The scorn was made repudation by the spread of Marxist ideas: for these ideas every feature of our culture was an expression of, indeed an instrument of a system of exploitation. Crude and vehement examples of this attitude can be had by the ton from the writings of communists and fellow-travellers right upto the 1980s as also from those of editorialists and pontificators right upto today's newspapers. But the effects did not spare the outlook -- and therefore the writings and, when they attained office, the policies -- of the very best.

Pandit Nehru is the most vivid example of the type. He was the truest of nationalists. His sacrifices for our independence compare with those of anyone else. But he had little acquaintance with our tradition -- his description of it, even when they seek to laud it, do not go deeper than the superficial cliche: one has only to read his account of even a relatively straightforward text such as the Gita alongside that of Sri Aurobindo or Gandhiji or Vinoba to see the chasm. There was in fact more than a mere absence of acquaintance. Deep down Panditji felt that whatever worthwhile there might have been in tradition had long since expired, that it had now to be replaced by the "scientific temper" and "reason". It was not just that the Bhakra-Nangals should be "our new temples," but that the old temples were nothing but spreaders of superstition and devices of inequity and exploitation...

Lack of acquaintance with our tradition was one factor. But this new class was -- and remains to our day -- equally ignorant of, and distant from the life of our common people. In addition therefore to not seeing that which was common in our past, it did not, it does not today, as we noted earlier, see the commonalities in the life, in the beliefs and practices of ordinary people across the country.

Giants such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Gandhiji did all they could to awaken us to the essential elements of our tradition. They saw the essence behind the forms, their eye took in the whole, it did not get stuck at the parts. Others -- from Ramakrishna Paramhamsa to Ramana Maharishi to the Paramacharya at Kanchi -- lived that essence. But after independence offices of State and even more so public discourse came to be filled by the other sort -- the best among them only Macaulay's children.

The result is before us: for seven hundred years to talk of the essence of our tradition was blasphemy; for a hundred years it was stupid; for the last forty years to do so has been "revanchist", "chauvinist", and, the latest, "communal".

Politics

The argument thus far has been as follows: the core of our tradition was the spiritual quest; the core of this spiritual quest was Hindu; the way in which this core manifested itself in the life of our people was the religious. To the western educated Indian the spiritual was just mumbo-jumbo, religion was just opium to entrap the masses, and Hinduism just a particularly pernicious form of that opium. That which was the very essence of our nationhood was thereby denounced. The character our politics too compounded the evil.

When examined closely enough every aggregate disaggregates -- even the atom disaggregates, as do the components into which it disaggregates. A society, a country is an aggregate too: it consists of groups that have both -- features that are common to them and features which differentiate them one from the other...

A Gandhi focusses on that which is common to them, where he sees distances between groups he builds bridges to span them. On the other hand a Jinnah insists that because there are differences, the groups just cannot live together, and he bases his politics on this premise or calculation. A Nehru tries to turn all the groups to values and pursuits -- "our temples, the Bhakra Nangals" -- which vault over those differences. On the other hand, a Ramaswami Naicker, a Lohia, a VP Singh, a Mulayam Singh, a Shahabuddin sees an opportunity in those differences: he focusses on them, he exaggerates them, he enflames in the group he sets out to bamboozle into following him the feeling of having been wronged, of being in peril unless it "preserves its identity" vis-a-vis the engulfing ocean.

In one type of politics the whole is the focus, in the other the parts are -- to the point that the "reality", the very existence of the whole is denied, the very notion that it exists is denounced as a device which has been fabricated to crush the parts one by one. Our politics since Jinnah's time, and even more so since the passing of Panditji has been of the latter kind.

In a word, that which was the essence of our nationhood had come to be denied and denounced already. since then the refrain has been that the parts -- of castes, of religious and liguistic groups, of this class and that -- alone are "real"....

For eighty years, for instance, the Marxists talked in terms of a lofty "internationalism": classes are the only valid category, they said, and these cut across national or state-boundaries. But the moment the War broke out, workers everywhere reacted entirely along reactionary "nationalist" lines -- the German proletariate most of all. "the Only Fatherland" -- the Soviet Union -- too relied wholly on stoking natinalist passions to save itself. Mao's fight against the Japanese, that of the Vietnamase against the Americans, and later against brother-communists, the Chinese -- all these were nationalist strugglers. The name they chose for them were told the tale: they were Wars of National Liberation. The theory was "internationalist", the practice was nationalist. At home here the chasm was even greater: while the resolutions were lofitly "internationalist", in practice the politics of the Marxists was dependent on fanning the sectional demands of "sub-national" groups and caste-groups. Their espousal of the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan was typical: their calculation was that this would endear them to Muslim youth, but they dressed it up in "theses" of Stalin! The Muslims are a separate nation they concluded -- on the basis of an article written by Stalin in 1912! -- and so they must have their separate country. But on Stalin's authority, "A nation is a historically evolved stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture." The Bengali Muslims and Punjabi Muslims, to take just two groups which were to be yoked to form Pakistan, had not even one of the four factors in common -- neither language, nor territory, nor economic life, nor "psychological make-up". What they had in common -- and that too, as was to be soon evident, only in a notional sense -- was religion. But that the Guru, Stalin, had not included among his criteria. Yet the demand for Pakistan was espoused and everyone opposing it was denounced as reactionary communalist wanting to establish Hindu-hegemony. The same hypocrisy continues to this day -- their "internationalism", for instance, keeps these progressives from taking up the cause of the one people who qualify as a nation by their oracle's definition, the people of Tibet; while their calculations goad them to fan the demands of "sub-national" and caste groups in India. As this hypocrisy continues, so does the vehemence.

The case of the liberals is no different. They denounce Hinduism in public but consult astrologers in private and get paaths and havans done in closets. They glorify the "masses" but denounce the sentiment of the masses for Rama. They denounce our tradition, donning modernism, but hail every politician with a casteist plank. They proclaim, "India is not one nation," and give as proof the Muslim's different perceptions of our past. And simultaneously proclaim, "Muslims are an integral part of India, they are as loyal to India as anyone else," and give as proof the performance of Muslim soldiers in wars against Pakistan. Every effort to remind us of our commonalities, they denounce as a design to swallow up the minorities. And then the absence of a fervour for those common elements they proclaim as the proof of our not being one nation!

Thus, out-doing what they said the last time round, and in many cases, factors of a much more personal kind account for their proclaiming the perverse And hypocrisy and the apprehension that if they allow the discussion to proceed they will be caught out are what account for their vehemence.

From 'A Secular Agenda'