EXPLORING THE BEAST WITHIN

By Sunil Khilnani

Hindu nationalism is the child of India’s modern history and democratic politics, not of its intrinsic nature.

The two nation-states founded in 1947 on the debris of the British Indian empire had, from their very inception, radically different stories to tell about themselves. One, Pakistan, adopted explicitly religious principles: it portrayed itself as the state of a homogenous people, the first Islamic nation in the world. The other, India, proclaimed a pluralistic nationalism that welcomed religious and cultural diversity, and it opted for an Indian variant of secularism, one that gave official privileges to no religion, nor made the state the vehicle for any particular religious group.

For most of the past 50 years, the two nations have trod very different paths. Pakistan has stumbled through a series of military dictatorships that have edged closer to Islamic precepts. Although overwhelmingly homogenous in religious terms, it has often been riven by ethnic and cultural divisions—most notably in 1971, a conflict that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. India, meanwhile, has maintained itself as a working democracy, and although much more heterodox, it has managed to maintain a precarious unity. Until recently religion has played only a weak role in national politics (until 1989, right-wing Hindu-chauvinist parties invariably polled less than 10 percent of the national vote).

Today the two countries seem united by an apparent symmetry: both are in the throes of a rising tide of religious extremism. The mushrooming of madrasas and theological indoctrination camps in Pakistan has been matched in India during the 1990s by the spread of mass popular piety, growing intolerance toward religious minorities and a militaristic nationalism. Religious leaders and organizations, mullahs and swamis, have insinuated themselves into the political system.

It would be easy to conclude that this seeming convergence signals, in the case of India, a return of the repressed— that it marks, a la Samuel Huntington, the surfacing of an inherent civilizational logic. The assertion of India’s authentic Hindu identity, it is claimed, has finally destroyed the facade of secularism and democracy that Nehru and his colleagues had tried to build. Such a view suits politicians, bureaucrats and military men on both sides of the border—or, as they would prefer to see it, on either side of a “civilizational fault line.” But this view is both false as an explanation and poor as a guide to India’s politics.

It is false because India is not—and has never been—a country of a single religion. It has the world’s second largest population of Muslims (more than 120 million), as well as significant numbers of Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and followers of animist traditions. The depth and extent of its religious diversity are unparalleled by any other nation-state. This differentiation among India’s religions extends also to the myriad types of Hindu belief and practice that exist in the country.

Today’s Hindu chauvinism is, in fact, the product of India’s modern history and politics, and not the assertion of an ageless culture’s genetic codes. The BJP’s political Hinduism, with its centralizing and codifying inclinations and its desire to align religious belief with state power, is in fact deeply untraditional. For many years, the claim that India is a Hindu nation was successfully contained by the political skills of men like Gandhi and Nehru. This strategy of containment—rather than any specific theoretical doctrine that sought to eliminate religion from Indian society—was the real substance of Nehru’s idea of secularism: it was a principled stance that kept a distance between the state and the religious passions of society.

Over the past two decades, such principled commitment and choice on the part of India’s politicians has weakened. The intensifying competition of democratic elections has multiplied India’s already numerous divisions, and has encouraged politicians to exploit religious differences in order to garner support. These appeals have found ready listeners among a rising, selectively modernized middle class, conservative and pious in its sentiments.

But, at the same time, the BJP has had to submit to the logic of India’s complex and culturally various federal democracy. Hindu chauvinists have been forced to learn—despite themselves—the skills of coalition building across regions and social classes. This learning may now have reached its limits. For all its efforts, popular support for the BJP is less than overwhelming. The party has never been able to gain more than a quarter of the national vote, and it currently rules in only two of India’s 29 states. The growing regionalization of India’s economy and politics, and—linked to this—the rise of parties representing India’s lower castes and Dalits, may well make it more difficult to push through its ideological ambitions. The BJP is very much a creation of India’s democratic politics, and the future workings of this politics may yet remove it from the political scene.

Khilnani is professor-elect of politics, Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of “The Idea of India.”