People's Democracy

Need Of The Hour: Frontal Secular Offensive

Sitaram Yechury

THE BJP's phyrric  victory in Gujarat and the consequent Modification of India that it is seeking to undertake brings into sharp focus the ongoing battle between alternative visions that was sculpted  during the course of our freedom struggle. Intense debates took place on what should be the character of independent India. This ideological churning during the 1920s produced  three distinct visions.  What was later to become the main stream of the people's movement represented then by the Congress envisioned independent India to be a secular democratic republic. This included federalism, social justice and economic self-reliance  as highlights.  Distinct yet not antagonistic was the Left vision which suggested that independent India cannot stop with the attainment of the Congress vision but needed to proceed  further to convert the political independence of the country into a truly economic independence of our people, i e , establishment of socialism.

Distinct, antagonistic and  conflicting with this was the right-wing vision which envisaged independent India to be a country whose denomination and definition would be defined by the people's religious affiliations.  This vision found a twin expression - the RSS that advocated its fascist "Hindu Rashtra" and the Muslim League, which advocated a separate Islamic state. 

In fact, the RSS vision was articulated even before its formation by V D Savarkar in 1923 in the pamphlet, "Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?".  The RSS was  founded in 1925.  In his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha on December 30, 1937,  Savarkar said: "There are two nations in the main:  the Hindus and the Moslems in India".   Mohammad Ali Jinnah propounded his two nation theory in 1939. In this very year, the then RSS Chief Golwalkar chillingly articulated the fascistic  character of the "Hindu Rashtra" in his treatise,  "We, Or Our Nationhood Defined".

Having declared that all others except Hindus are foreign elements, Golwalkar proceeds to state: "there are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race…. There is, at least should be, no other course for them to adopt. We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign  races, who have chosen to live in our country."

And how should `old  nations' deal? "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

Jinnah's vision divided the country, harmed the community that he led and with the break up of Pakistan in 1971, it completely exposed the falsity of the two-nation theory.

Hindu communal fanaticism  claimed the life of Mahatma Gandhi when after partition, the Congress continued to adhere to  its vision of the Indian republic. All through these years, however,  these communal forces remained active waiting for an opportunity to advance their objective.  The recent events in the country  resoundingly vindicate this.

The Left vision was not  merely an extension of the Congress vision. It simultaneously  contained its critique.  The Congress objectives, laudable as they may be, were contained in a vision that was simply unsustainable  unless backed by a radical economic reforms sweeping away feudal vestiges.  This was not possible under the stewardship of the Congress, which for its political survival allied specifically with these very elements  that prevented such profound economic changes.  The Congress's political compulsions to remain the ruling party laid the seeds of negation of the very vision that it espoused.

The resultant popular discontent amongst the people led not only to protest against the policies of the Congress but more importantly developed a sense of disenchantment with the Congress vision itself.  It is this that engendered the rise of the communal agenda. 

The sharpening all-round crisis  reached a decisive stage in the mid-eighties.  The seeds of economic liberalism were laid in the later half of this decade which were to become all embracing in the nineties. The crisis also engendered sharp decline in political morality. In order to retain political power, the Congress adopted disastrous shortcuts. 

On the other hand, the consequent growing discontent and disenchantment continued to feed the RSS activities in the later half of the eighties when it started mounting a fresh offensive. In order to meet this offensive,  one of the disastrous shortcuts the Congress employed was an appeasement of communal forces.  The reopening of the locks at the Babri Masjid, the shilanyas undertaken by Rajiv Gandhi at Ayodhya, and the  appeasement of the Muslim community in the by now infamous Shabano case -- all projected  the Congress as a pale saffron outfit.  

The subsequent vacillation of the Narasimha Rao government at the time of the Babri Masjid demolition and the refusal to mount a secular confrontation of communalism in the recent Gujarat campaign have only  reinforced this direction.  Further, an autopsy of the election results in Gujarat shows that in as many as thirty six seats, the result would have been the opposite had only the Congress worked for a `one to one' contest. 

Thus, a secular confrontation of communalism which was the hallmark of the Congress during decisive phases of  the freedom struggle has now been replaced by a communal onslaught against secularism led by the RSS. It needs to be underlined that secularism for us, in India, is  no western concept borrowed in  modern times.  Way back in the third century B.C., Emperor Asoka commanded in his edicts, "Whosoever honours one's own sect and condemns other sects, out of devotion to one's own sect, intending to glorify it, in acting thus injures his own sect the more."

The RSS never tires of accusing all modern elements, particularly the Communists and the secularists, of having borrowed western concepts.   Never mind that they are today wielding control over State power in a  system of parliamentary democracy borrowed entirely from the west.  Further, if there is any ideology that in the 20th century was defeated by a people's upsurge, it was fascism.  It is precisely this ideology of fascism that the RSS has appropriated for itself in India.   Golwalkar's hero was Hitler while Moonje's hero was Mussolini.   The latter played an important role in the formation of the RSS in 1920s.  The former gave the RSS both its ideological construct and the organisational linkages to achieve their objective.

Humanity paid a heavy price to defeat this menace.  The decisive force in  liberating humanity from fascism has been that of the Soviet Red Army and the Communist underground resistance in many of these countries.  Similarly, in India, the people are already paying  the price for this march towards fascism.   However, as the experience of the 20th century shows, these forces are destined  to be defeated.  The tragedy, however, will be the immense loss of innocent life and destruction of property that this fascist monster will gurgle. 

Finally, it needs to be underlined that Savarkar coined the term "Hindutva" as a political slogan. He, in fact, states: "Here, it is enough to point out that Hindutva is not identical with what is vaguely indicated by the term Hinduism." 

In this context, it is necessary to remind ourselves once again that it was a majority of Indians, a majority of whom belong to the Hindu fold, that rejected the RSS vision of a "Hindu Rashtra" and embraced the secular democratic republican constitution.  They were then defeated by a frontal secular confrontation.  It is only such a confrontation that can now stop this communal juggernaut from seeking to metamorphose secular democratic India into  a fascistic "Hindu Rashtra".