Hindu Nationalism Clouds the Face of India

Abstract

classic novels of India, The Jewel in the Crown, when an old Rajput princess soon after independence says: I have a feeling that when it was written into our constitution that we should be a secular state we finally put the lid on our Indian-ness, and admitted the legality of our long years of living in sin with the English. That was in the time of Jawaharlal Nehru, the aristocratic Cambridge man whose secularism was never in doubt. Although an ardent nationalist and Mahatma Gandhi's chosen heir, Nehru never had any trouble admitting the legitimacy of British democratic institutions as the model for India. The Hindu extremists, one of whom assassinated Gandhi for being too considerate of Muslims, were an embarrassment to Nehru, and he brought the ruling Congress Party along with him. But there have always been Indians who looked upon the colonial period as living in sin. There have always been Hindus and Muslims too who consider secularism on the subcontinent a foreign body to be expelled. In Pakistan, blowing back from the mujahedin of Afghanistan, Islamic fundamentalism grows ever more threatening to what is left of Pakistani democracy. In India, it is Hindu extremism that is challenging the secular order of things and the rule of law. As with other fundamentalist movements, the battle has much to do with the modern versus the traditional in a war of values. Secularists realize that a united India was a product of the British Empire. Before the British, Indians owed their allegiances to family, clan, religion, or princely state. It was the British who established a centralized administration, a common educational system, and countrywide transportation that gave the subcontinent a sense of belonging to one country. Hindu nationalists, however, believe that for a thousand years India has been a single cultural unit that absorbed all its invaders, and that Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Buddhists are all converts from, or offshoots of, a basic Hindu entity. They believe that differences in geography, religion, ethnicity, and language never really detracted from this basic cultural whole and sense of nationhood.