India’s survival lies in her diversity

Well might the Bombay high court’s Nagpur bench ask — as it did last week — “whether India is for Hindus only” The judges were criticising the Nagpur Municipal Corporation for using its “AIDS awareness programme” to promote a religious agenda. “Is it only Hindus who contract AIDS ” the judges asked.

Our country is suffering from an acute crisis of identity. I wake up every morning to the azaan broadcast from a nearby mosque. I drive past a large gurdwara and a towering cathedral every day. Yet, many Indians cannot accept that their beliefs and customs are not the universal norm. Other countries resolve similar dilemmas in a spirit of civilised give and take. Here, one often feels there isn’t even any awareness of other beliefs.

The United States is regarded as a Christian nation but I recall seeing near Pearl Harbour, when we lived in Honolulu, an 80-ft flagpole from which fluttered a massive Stars and Stripes. It had replaced a 65-ft cross that was dismantled when a federal court ruled on a complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Jewish War Veterans, that the cross violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

There was a similar controversy over a 37-ft white steel cross erected in 1962 at taxpayers’ expense at Schofield Barrack’s which, said the Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church, was a “blatant and obvious violation” of the First Amendment. When the Army promised to dismantle the cross, the attorney for Hawaii Citizens declared, “the action sends a strong message that the wall between state and church stands tall and forbids government from endorsing Christianity in particular over other religions”.

Those two rulings justify Jawaharlal Nehru’s dismay when Rajendra Prasad as President of India insisted on inaugurating the rebuilt Somnath Temple which Mahmud of Ghazni raided and plundered in 1024. Discussing the controversy the other day, a retired Indian diplomat attributed Nehru’s objections to rivalry with Vallabhbhai Patel who had initiated the Somnath project. That explanation only highlighted Indian inability to see matters of state except in personal and political terms to the exclusion of principle. For Nehru, reconstruction of the temple was a symbol of Hindu revivalism with which the government of secular India could not be associated.

The distinction is lost on functionaries like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh general secretary, Bhaiyyaji Joshi, and the organisation’s spokesperson, Manmohan Vaidya. They recently drew a distinction between rajya (state) and rashtra (nation) to argue that while Vande Mataram is the real national anthem because it belongs to the nation, the “constitutionally-mandated” officially recognised anthem, Jana Gana Mana belongs to the state.

Reading between the lines of that claim, one discerns the RSS’ answer to the question the Bombay high court’s Nagpur bench asked. The nation (rashtra) being Hindu, the rites and rituals of the state (rajya) must pay obeisance only to the Hindu faith. No wonder Syed Shahabuddin, the diplomat turned Muslim activist, objected to lamps being lit and coconuts smashed at inaugurals.

What appalls me about the RSS demand is the smugness with which it is advanced. A Calcutta stockbroker once told me quite seriously that Hinduism’s all-embracing benevolence catered to all other religions as well. Identifying characters and episodes from various Hindu texts that he thought referred to other faiths, he couldn’t understand objections to a Hindu rashtra or rajya.

This was the negative aspect of the unity Muhammad Ali Jinnah famously extolled on August 11, 1947, when he said that if Pakistanis worked together in a constructive and egalitarian spirit “in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community... will vanish”. He identified these differences as “the biggest hindrance” but for which “we would have been free people long long ago”. Jinnah added, “No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time, but for this. Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this.”

What happened to that dream is another matter for in promoting sectarian dominance Pakistan has been ahead of India. But just as our Research & Analysis Wing is not a mirror image of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, there is no reason for a government in New Delhi to follow Islamabad’s precedent in establishing a majoritarian theocracy. It’s worth considering in this year of the 60th anniversary of the world’s first Islamic republic that things might have been different in Pakistan had Jinnah lived. Without his vision, there was no question of ever realising a Pakistan where “in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state”.

Pakistan’s failure is all the more reason for India to ensure it succeeds. Given its demographic variety, India has much more at stake. Moreover, India’s size, population, economic achievements and potential, geopolitical location and strategic reach hold the promise of an Asia-Pacific role. Whether or not that promise is squandered depends largely on a Prime Minister whose rhetoric inspires hope but who has been slow on delivery.

As President Pranab Mukherjee said in his Arjun Singh memorial lecture last Saturday, “Pluralism and tolerance have been the hallmark of our civilisation. This is a core philosophy that must continue undeterred. For, India’s strength lies in her diversity”.

That last sentence needs revising. It’s not only India’s strength, but India’s survival that lies in her diversity.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author