[Next][Index]
An Emerging India
From: Gopi Maliwal <GOPI@VTVM1.CC.VT.EDU>
_A_N _E_M_E_R_G_I_N_G _I_N_D_I_A
By Shri Jaswant Singh
__________________________________________________________________________
AYODHYA and 6 December: one a place, the other a date; but the place
is not a mere geographical entity; it is, in a very real sense, redolent
with the very essence of India... There is yet another factor- that which
I would call the suffusion of Ram in our very civilizational core... It is
this Ram that is believed to have been born in Ayodhya.
Some people have disputed this belief saying it is necessary to find
evidence for it. That evidence, about faith, is then to be judged against
the certainties of our current law. But the belief far predates this law.
You cannot, in that sense, put belief to the test of this law just as I
think it would be absurd to attempt to identify that very stable in Beth-
lehem where Jesus Christ was born. It is a matter of belief or faith which
has moved Christendom for twenty centuries. Or for that matter, in today's
world obsessed with scientific analysis, a denial of the possibility of
virgin birth as a biological impossibility is, I think, to engage in a
disputation that really diminishes humankind.
_S_Y_M_B_O_L_I_S_M _O_F _A_Y_O_D_H_Y_A
That is why when we try find an inter-relationship between Ayodhya
and 6 December, we are not really attempting a simple thing like estab-
lishing an event at a geographical place. We are, in a very real sense,
attempting to reduce the entirety of the mystery and mythology of Ayodhya,
the symbolism of it, the infinity of the concept of Ayodhya to a finite
date. That is also why at a certain philosophical level, there is a frac-
ture here, a conceptual fracture. There is unacceptable simplicism in the
general comments made on Ayodhya- 6 December: 'India has broken apart';
'India will disintegrate'; 'end of our secular order'-and all such other
outcries distress me greatly because they are so overstated: reacting to
the immediate in apocalyptic terms.
What happened at Ayodhya on 6 Dec. was of course unfortunate; it was
unprecedented and the sheer drama of that gripped the nation, To start
with, across the length and the breadth of the country, everyone felt
something wrong had taken place, that it was something that could have
been avoided. But as we moved onwards from 6 December (and here one has to
say in parenthesis that not unnaturally, when one looks at events and
occurrences, it is inevitable that one comments upon them depending on the
totality of one's thought process, our swabhav, born on one's sanskara,
from which evolves vichar), the whole scene and mood was transformed. That
is what we have to examine; did we judge the mood of the land correctly?
Are we doing so now? That is what will enable us to understand the cata-
lytic effect.
_P_O_L_I_T_I_C_A_L _R_E_S_P_O_N_S_I_B_I_L_I_T_Y
Examine, then, the incident at the level of political responsibility;
it is necessary to do so before we proceed further. The party to which I
belong gave a public commitment that the disputed structure would not be
touched and that commitment was given in various fora. But we were unable
to keep that commitment. For a political party to fail to keep its word
is, without any doubt, a great failing. Mindful of that, the then Chief
Minister of UP resigned. The leader of the opposition in Parliament
resigned. I am distressed that the first resignation was treated by the
government with scant respect and after it they dismissed the Kalyan Singh
government. I find that an act of very petty political vendetta.
Thereafter, to arrest the leader of the opposition, and to charge him on a
totally fabricated FIR, an FIR that is not only illegal but is also illi-
terate, is both an insult to the person concerned and to the intelligence
of the large mass of India.
These were acts of pure political vendetta, not statesmanship. The
occasion for meeting the challenge of the times was lost, and every subse-
quent reaction of the Government of India has been of very shallow poli-
tics, guided much more by factors like dissension within cabinet, discord
within the party, compulsions or pressures from outside, and the desire of
the present incumbent to somehow keep secure a particular office or chair.
This is distressing in the extreme because even a modicum of moral respon-
sibility for the events has not been accepted, not even by a single utter-
ance of the ruling party or the government.
_S_E_C_U_L_A_R_I_S_M _A_N_D _F_U_N_D_A_M_E_N_T_A_L_I_S_M
I have heard that some of these things- 'death of secularism', "end
of Constitution', etcetera- are said because apparently there was a call
that 'Ayodhya is only the beginning' and that "there is still Kashi and
Mathura'. It is also argued that "secular' India has been destroyed; that
all this gives a go by to our Constitution, and so on. In order to deal
with such arguments, I will have to spend a little time on stating what is
meant by 'secular'. What is secularism, what is fundamentalism, what is
this Indian nation all about.
The concept of 'Secularism' has been analyzed endlessly. But follow-
ing upon the incidents of 6 December, there is need to examine it afresh,
and at great length and in detail. It is no good simply a brush, dipping
it in tar and tainting the BJP with it. Here I want to dwell a little on
this journey that we started upon, really in 1976, but effectively when we
adopted our Constitution. It is not sufficiently well known that neither
in the original draft nor in the Constitution, as adopted by the Consti-
tuent Assembly in 1950, was there any word like 'secular'. It was only in
1976, during that fraudulent emergency, when the Parliament was captive,
when things were being done without debate or discussion, that the 42nd
Amendment to the Constitution was moved and in that amendment, the 'Repub-
lic of India' suddenly became both 'socialist' and 'secular'. This is a
historical fact.
Now if the original constitution-makers did not choose the word secu-
lar, are we to believe that they were deficient in some manner? Was it a
deliberate omission? Was it amnesia? It was none of these. Because the
concept of secularism is a Christian concept. It is a derivative concept,
it is inapplicable to India. I think that this is a fact upon which all
the 'super- secularists' ought to reflect deeply...
Secondly, in practice, the word 'secularism' as we have used it has
acquired two characteristics. One, it has been used as a device to gen-
erate fear amongst the minorities, and thereafter this fear is employed to
garner the minority votes; a purely partisan and political consideration,
hardly secular. Inevitably, therefore, after constant misuse and mis-
application, the very word has got perverted, politically. Today, if you
are a minority you can, for example, run your own educational institution
without any governmental interference. Ramkrishna Mission, named after one
of the greatest saints India has produced, goes to the Calcutta High Court
and says: 'We are a minority. We wish to run schools, give us the same
benefit as you give, for example, to Christian convent schools, or to
Muslim madrassas. We are not, therefore, to be categorized as Hindu.' But
this is only a small example.
The real damage, I hold, to the very fabric of India was caused in
the decade of the 1980s. I cannot imagine a more profligate decade-
socially, economically and politically. It is only twelve years since
1981; yet, reflect upon how much has happened since then.
In 1980, Indira Gandhi was returned to power. In 1981 started the
troubles in Assam. They kept on deepening, and in 1983 took place that
horrendous election in Assam. It is shocking that the deaths and killings
in Assam at that time numbered about 5,000. Or that the average vote in
Assam in the 1983 elections was barely 2%. Yet I don't remember the
English press or anyone else at that time pointing out, in similar terms,
the dangers of what was happening. Only the BJP was concerned that some-
thing terrible was happening, had happened; that it would profoundly
affect India. What was the issue? Illegal immigration: the identity of a
people.
In 1983 Punjab was already on the boil. If one recollects, in the
early talks, and I was involved in the tripartite talks in both Assam and
Punjab, demands were separated into two: 'religious demands' and 'politi-
cal demands'. I won't go into an analysis of the handling of the entire
situation except to point out a rather incontrovertible fact.
When a decision was taken to 'create' Bhindranwale -what happened
then to the Constitution, the law, the courts? Bhindranwale was convicted
for murder. He was wanted for murder. He travelled all the way from Har-
yana to Mehta Chowk. After Mehta Chowk, he travelled to Delhi with an
accompanying truck full of the young Sikhs armed to the teeth with
automatic weapons. And he went back to Mehta Chowk, from where he 'nego-
tiated' the terms and conditions of his arrest!
All this was sending out various kinds of signals to the collectivity
of that which is called 'this country of ours'. The army, despite my
protestations in writing, was finally employed at the Darbar Sahib. I was
here, in Delhi, from October 30, 1984 to November 7. Over 3,000 Sikhs were
killed in a week, most of them in Delhi. Almost a decade after that
tragedy not one person has been found guilty, let alone punished. Who was
the Home Minister then? P.V. Narasimha Rao. And the successor PM announced
that 'jab koyi bara ped girta hai to dharti hilti hai'!
When a poor and aged divorcee from Indore, denied her maintenance,
finally reached the Supreme Court and that Court ruled that whatever
faith, you are entitled to due upkeep, there was an uproar. It was con-
sidered an interference with personal law... government of the day bent
over backwards all over again and went through all kinds of contortions,
finally coming out with an Act of Parliament annulling the judgement of
the highest court of the land. What was the message that was sent out?
That court judgements could be annulled if they proved inconvenient
So far as the Babri 'masjid' and Ramjanmabhoomi dispute is concerned,
a court case was initiated in 1949 and was finally ruled upon in 1955. It
then went to the division bench which ruled in 1956 that the idols should
stay in the structure, worship continue, although on grounds of law and
order, visitors could be prohibited from coming to the site. So a lock was
placed on the 'masjid' and there it remained until 1986. In that year
(1986) the Magistrate was persuaded by the government of the day to have
the lock removed. Regular darshan now became routine.
In the meantime what had taken place in Kashmir? Almost 200,000 Kash-
miri pandits were driven away from their homes. I don't recollect any
delegation of concerned Indians going to Jammu saying that what has hap-
pened is wrong, or protesting against the indignity that had been
inflicted on Indians by converting them into refugees within their own
country.
All this also sent out a message. On a political there are two
aspects to this message: One, that this whole misemployment of the term
'secularism' or 'secular' is coming home to roost. If you misemploy some-
thing, then you have to pay the price. And two: that as a nation we still
have to confront the real questions. The sum total of it being that
'secularism' is but a handy device; it is a pliable political convenience;
a 'force multiplier' of votes.
When we examine what happened on 6 December, we have to do so in the
context of all that took place before it, including the efforts to arrive
at a negotiated settlement. No doubt, on 6 December, our leadership lost
control. Without doubt, a wrong took place. But in this act of destruc-
tion, I do not see the kind of cataclysm that people are pointing out, or
wish to draw attention to. What I do see is that those verities, or what
we treated as verities, certain fixed points of our political comportment
that we were working with for the past 50 years or so, and to which we
continued to subscribe (despite the fact that they had lost their
relevance), finally collapsed. I think in a very real sense, and this
might hurt many, a political era ended on 6 December. It is a matter of
great sorrow to me that this transition from the old order towards an
emerging India- you can question whether the emerging India is the 'right'
India or it ought to be moving differently- had to occur accompanied by
violence. But it is without doubt a transition from the old to the new.
That is why when cries of 'end of secularism', 'Gandhi was murdered
on January 30, 1948, but his soul is being buried now', or 'mixing reli-
gion with politics is unacceptable', are raised, people forget that the
person who first did this was Gandhi. And he used religion with great
finesse and dexterity. He talked of Ram rajya. It was he who said that cow
protection to me is so important that I will give up the freedom of India
for the protection of the cow. And, therefore, cow protection became a
constitutional obligation. We forget all these things because we are
obsessed by, and, understandably perhaps, overawed by the horror of the
present.
So, what 6 December and Ayodhya do is to bring the two strands of
secularism and nationalism to the forefront. Ayodhya and 6 December really
mean that finally, even as we are putting that past behind us, it is still
only a search, rather it is the beginning of a search, a search that was
inarticulate all this time but which is now going to be much more articu-
late, much more focused in political terms. Whatever else you might think
or say, this is certainly not the demise of India. It is also not the
beginning of any theocratic state.
Have no doubt that this land of ours shall survive. We have not over-
come many centuries of foreign occupations and other varieties of disas-
ters both natural and man-made; we have not survived drought, hunger and
great destitution only to now be pulled under because we wail like widows.
It is really up to us to mould this event and the consequent opportunity,
to see it for what it actually it is: a milestone, a catalyst of the
transformation of our great land, in its march for its inevitable date
with a glorious destiny.
==========================================================================
(Courtesy: Seminar)
--
"Hinduism is a relentless pursuit after truth and if today it has become mori-
bund, inactive, irresponsive to growth, it is because we are fatigued. As soon
as the fatigue is over, Hinduism will burst forth upon the world with a bril-
liance perhaps never known before."-Mahatma Gandhi in "Young India", 24-4-1924
