By M D Nalapat
Handover of Hindu shrines will ensure that fringe moves get treated with derision.
Contrary to the
views expressed by opposition parties, the Narendra Modi government is
the effect, and not the cause, of changes in societal attitudes that
need to be addressed. What is taking place at Sabarimala in Kerala is
just a mild foretaste of what can happen across the country, were past
(and still largely present) societal policies to be continued. Several
times when the UPA was in office, this columnist warned friends in the
Congress Party about the risks of backfire of their policy of treating
what in India is quaintly known as the “majority community” the way
minorities get treated in some countries. For decades, the way in which
successive governments discriminated against large sections of the Hindu
community in their policies remained unchanged. It was the overreach of
this policy by the Sonia Gandhi-led UPA that caused the blowback which
resulted in the installation as Prime Minister of Narendra Modi, who
refused to wax apologetic about Hindus being the majority community.
Since taking office, however, Modi has moved with extreme caution on the
necessity of ensuring that the scales of administration be level as
between members of one community or the other, refusing to take steps to
equalise sacrifice in the Right to Education Act or to free Hindu
temples from state control. Indeed, even the recent decision of the
Kerala government to remove the proviso that those administering (Hindu)
temples should be Hindu, was met with silence from the Union Ministry
of Home Affairs. Whether it be in choosing those in the BJP who had (and
have) cosy relationships with the Lutyens Zone, or in selecting for
important assignments those officials who were the favourites of Sonia
Gandhi and her key ministers (such as Sushil Shinde and P. Chidambaram),
the Narendra Modi government has followed a hyper-cautious policy
towards the past that has done little to lower the sense of insecurity
and injustice prevalent in the Hindu psyche as a consequence of decades
of “Nehruvian secularism”. This, by definition, posits that only Hindus
are “communal” and every other community “secular”, no matter how
extreme their views. An abortive UPA-era legislation sought to anchor
this tenet even more firmly than before, explicitly implying that only
Hindus would be found guilty in communal incidents.
It is essential for double digit growth
that the social stability necessary for rapid growth (the other
requirement being sound policy) be nurtured. This should not be expected
from government, as the colonial baggage carried by the administrative
apparatus (and its compliant political overseers) makes the structure
both unwilling as well as unable to remedy the festering fault line that
has been created as a consequence of discriminatory policies over the
centuries, added on to, rather than reduced, by the dawn of Independence
in 1947. Fortunately, the innate moderation of the Indian spirit is
sufficient to ensure that steps get taken within civil society itself to
heal rifts in perception and to ensure that a sense of shared destiny
permeates the 1.27 billion people of the Republic. After all, both the
RSS as well as the Jamaat-e-Islami-Hind were opposed to the 1947
partition of India that was agreed upon between M.A. Jinnah together
with Nehru and Patel. As for Gandhiji, he must have been heartbroken,
for it had been his life’s mission to bring together Hindus and Muslims
in a way that would make partition impossible, a goal which impelled him
even to support in 1919 the Wahhabi project of the Ali brothers to
bring back to life the Turkish caliphate, a decision that had the
opposite effect of promoting religious extremism and separatist
impulses. Whether it be his decision to be neutral during World War II
(thereby ceding public opinion in the UK to Jinnah, who backed the
Allies against the Axis), or to make the Congress ministries in the
provinces quit and thereby boost the power of both the Viceroy as well
as the Muslim League, there were several decisions taken by Mahatma
Gandhi that will need to await fuller examination in an era when even
mildly critical comments on the Mahatma are not seen as immoral or
indeed illegal.
98% of Hindus and Muslims are moderate,
and to ensure that this percentage does not dip in future, a gesture of
divine benevolence on the part of the Muslim community needs to be taken
to ensure that the Ram Janmabhumi, the Krishna Janmabhumi and the
ancient Kashi Viswanath temple in Varanasi be restored to the condition
they were in before the Mughals. The three sites are to the Hindus what
Mecca, Medina and Al Aqsa mean to Muslims, or Bethlehem to the
Christians (and the Vatican to the Catholics among them). Except to
Wahhabi and Khomeinist zealots, this should be obvious. There may be
intemperate minds within the Hindu community who say that not just this
all-important trio, but some other places of worship as well should be
similarly restored. The atmosphere of love and trust that will get
created between Hindus and Muslims after the handover of these three
shrines will ensure that such fringe moves get treated with derision.
Any attempt by elements of the Hindu fringe to take over any other place
of worship (once the three mentioned above have been restored) should
be met and thwarted with armed force by the state. It is not for nothing
that the ISI has for long ensured that more than a few Hindus form part
of its stable of agents. Indeed, those Hindus who kill in the name of
cow protection play a role welcomed by the ISI, which is to commit acts
that portray India as a country similar to a Pakistan that has been
relentlessly Wahhabised since the 1970s. The Congress and the Left need
to stop efforts at preventing a resolution even of the Ram Mandir issue.
There are those who claim that the Rahul Gandhi Congress is simply the
Sonia Gandhi Congress in a tracksuit. This is being unfair to the new
Congress president, although the anti-Hindu remarks of some of its
(Sonia-era but continued into the new period) senior leaders do seem to
indicate that nothing has changed. Such a perception would be to the
benefit of the BJP, a party that has a less than stellar record in
economic and social policy during its nearly five years of rule. In
India’s Muslim community rests the power to carry out an act of supreme
beneficence that would be entirely in keeping with the words repeated
multiple times in the Holy Quran, words that stress the divine qualities
of mercy, compassion and beneficence.
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