Naming the enemy

Secularism has become passe, it is no longer a part of being modern. How did this come about? MUKUL KESAVAN looks at the implications in this exclusive extract from his recent book Secular Commonsense.

WHEN did being secular become passe? Why did being secular stop being a necessary part of being modern? How did it become a dated holdover from an unsuccessful past? Why did Advani's inspired coinage, "pseudo-secular", persuade so many Indians that secularism was a hectoring, anti-Hindu project? Secularists are, as an American might say, in denial: we need to acknowledge that Advani has done to "secular" what Reagan did to "liberal" - he has made the term seem a straitjacket that has crippled the potential of a great nation by suppressing its basic impulses.

Secular people find it not just hard, but impossible to understand why so many Indians vote for the BJP. They look at Advani equivocating about his party's record on the Babri Masjid; they watch Murli Manohar Joshi being strident in an angavastram; they listen to the hate speech of its allies, the Shiv Sena, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal; they follow as best as they can the doings of dour ancients in Nagpur and wonder: why do people we know support these sullen, resentful, intolerant men?

People who support the BJP never think of it as communal. The historical triumph of the Congress is that every party must now lay claim to the virtue of being secular. The meaning of secularism can be contested (truly secular/pseudo-secular), but it is a value, like democracy, that no mainstream political party can publicly repudiate. The BJP is genuinely bewildered when it is called communal. It thinks of itself as nationalist, and it is not mistaken. The actor Victor Banerjee supports the BJP because he admires its nationalism. So do many others. And if we look at the history of nationalism, particularly the nationalisms of Europe, we will find that there is warrant for this claim. The BJP is the party of Hindu chauvinism.

The BJP's chauvinism, which magazines like the Economist call Hindu nationalism, is very different from the nationalism of the freedom struggle, the nationalism born of anti-imperialism. Since colonial nationalism had to prove to the Raj that the variety of India could be gathered under the umbrella of a single movement, there was a Noah's Ark quality to Congress nationalism, as it did its best to keep every species of Indian on board. The chauvinism of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in the mid- 1920s) had very little to do with anti-colonialism. The RSS was a professedly apolitical militia, dedicated to Hindu self- strengthening. Its nationalism was derived from European models, and it was an exclusionary nationalism that tried to create a uniform citizenry on tried and tested European nationalist principles: a shared language, an authorised history, a single religion and a common enemy. French, Greek, German and Italian nationalism differ from each other in important ways, but none of them has any interest in plurality.

The uniqueness of Congress's nationalism is its near-complete freedom from mystical and mystifying notions such as blood, soil or national essence which are the stock-in-trade of narrower patriotisms. The Congress, whether by design or default, replaced these with colonial exploitation and economic subjection. Because we don't fully appreciate the originality of the Congress's construction of nationalism, we tend to confuse it with this other, European kind. And so do many of our fellow-citizens.

Since the dominant sense of nationalism the world over is derived from the European experience, when a Hindu asks rhetorically, "Doesn't France have a common language?", the French example begins to seem a sound nationalist precedent for supporting Hindi. When he asks, "Don't the English acknowledge that their culture and morality are derived from Christian values?", this becomes a persuasive reason to support the demand that all Indians acknowledge that they are constituted by Hindutva. The proper secularist response to this is that the nationalism of Gandhi that won us our freedom as a nation state and shaped the pluralism of the Constitution has very little in common with this hectoring, homogenising patriotism. These derivative arguments don't apply. They're irrelevant because they aren't rooted in the experience of our freedom struggle; they don't emerge from our nationalist practice.

The reason it's important to acknowledge the BJP's claim to be the party of Hindu chauvinism is to understand (more clearly than we could if we saw it as simply communal) how it tries to fudge the difference between the two nationalisms to create a genealogy for itself. The BJP has huge difficulty in laying claim to the freedom struggle because the role of its ideological forbears (the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS), in the struggle was minimal. There is a certain awkwardness in its appropriation of swaraj and swadeshi because they are nationalists without a nationalist movement. The BJP's posturing about the tricolour is particularly ironic because for decades, Hindu chauvinism swore by its saffron standard, the bhagva dhvaj, since the republican tricolour so closely resembled the flag of Gandhi's Congress. When the BJP lays claim to anti-imperialist campaigns like those of Subhas Bose and Bhagat Singh, it is scavenging, feeding on an imperial carcase killed by hunting-animals. What would INA heroes like Major General Shah Nawaz Khan have had to do with Hindu zealots?

This BJP-brand of majoritarian nationalism isn't uniquely Indian: there are parallels with Serb and Sinhala nationalism. Hindu chuvanism is a lot like Serbian nationalism: a memory of defeat at the hands of the Turks, legends of gallantry in defeat, a memory of long Turkish dominance and atrocity. It was this mythology of grievance that Tito managed to contain for fifty years, in a secular, federal State. The similarities to North India are uncanny: the same language, in different scripts; the shared ethnicity, the different religions. Kosovo is the Serbian Kashmir. The Serb and Sinhala majorities succeeded in aligning their States with their faiths, the Orthodox Church and the Buddhist Sangha respectively. Despite the much-advertised absence of a Hindu clergy, the BJP has been doing quite handily with its bands of sadhus and vocal Shankaracharyas.

This alignment of the majority community and the nation state has done nothing to resolve internal conflict or civil war. It has made the divisions worse, and in some cases, hastened a partition. Indonesia has lost East Timor, Sri Lanka has effectively lost Jaffna, the rump State of Serbia has been deprived of Kosvo. It isn't hard to see the direction in which the BJP's belligerence towards Muslims in particular and minorities in general, could lead us in Kashmir. The precedent the Sangh Parivar favours in the business of minority management is China and Tibet, that old fantasy of Hindu immigration and demographic engineering. That's not going to happen, unless we want a UN-supervised partition tomorrow.

The BJP's identity is crucially dependent on the presence of the Muslims as the enemy Other. Christians are part of its demonology, but its historical grievance is centred on the Muslim conquest. Its nationalism is premised on Hinduism beleaguered by Islam. It is a sheepdog chauvinism where the BJP is the sheepdog, trying to keep a Hindu flock together, protecting the strays from Muslim and Christian wolves. If there were no wolves, there would be nothing for the BJP to do. It is a nationalism that like many of its type in Europe, slips easily into chauvinist intolerance and bigotry. It isn't a coincidence that Golwalkar in the 1930s wrote in admiration of Hilter's way with Jews and the lessons to be learnt from this by Hindus faced with intransigent minorities.

For secular Indians, the dreadful track record of intolerant nationalisms and their failure in containing secession or managing dissent, is a gift. Instead of reflexively denying the BJP's claim to nationalism, secularists should ratify this claim enthusiastically. They should then distinguish it from the nationalism of Gandhi and the freedom struggle, and encourage an undecided public to study the self-destruction that BJP-like chauvinisms wreaked on countries misguided enough to harbour them. The task of secular persuasion will be aided by the fact that the BJP is unattractive in the way majoritarian parties with minority complexes always are. Bharat Mata being forced into petticoats intended for smaller Western women is not a pretty sight. And a Hindu Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian minorities is a story easier told as fiction than as real life.

Secular Commonsense, Mukul Kesavan, Penguin India, flexiback, p.144, Rs. 150.

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