Counter hate with historical multiculturalism

In India, the expectation of tomorrow is rooted in a very personally felt understanding of the past, which cannot be ignored. But what is needed is the history of the people – the ‘Ganga Jamuni Tehzeeb’.

By Sarim Naved

The proponents of the Hindutva project having failed abjectly at administration and economics have only one crutch left: of a misremembered and misrepresented history. It was not always so, with the BJP at one time being considered the party of new ideas as opposed to the Congress. These ‘new’ ideas amounted to little more than new infrastructure initiatives coupled with efficient delivery of welfare benefits, but the BJP did succeed in presenting itself as the party of modern infrastructure as opposed to the old welfare state ideals. No longer the young and fresh rebel party that it used to be, the BJP has now dropped all pretence to a political appeal based on economic and material growth in favour of emotional appeals, based on an imagined clash of civilisations.

The historical argument of the BJP – of an oppressed Hindu population and cruel foreign (and non-Hindu) rulers – is flawed, to say the least. Nuances of history, however, make for bad politics. India, as the trite adage goes, is an old country but a young nation. Every town, village and community in this country has a historical sense of itself. There is a sense of old achievement and insecurities. These cannot be ignored. The expectation of tomorrow is rooted in a very personally felt understanding of the past.

There was a time, not long ago, when the Ambedkarite and Lohiaite schools of thought used the argument to great political efficacy. Sometime over the last two decades, however, they lost this focus on historical injustice and sought to focus on infrastructural development at the cost of social justice. The Congress party forgot its own ‘historical argument’ of an India which counted Bodh Gaya, Goa, Vrindavan and Agra as equal measures of its civilisational brilliance, reducing the party’s perceived ideology to one word, ‘secularism’. Once secularism was skilfully discredited by the BJP, Congress started seeming bereft politically and ideologically.

Need for historical multiculturalism

This discrediting of secularism is, however, anything but irreversible. It is well remembered that in a pre-partition India that was more multicultural than today, Hindus prospered, the BJP’s attempts to say otherwise notwithstanding. The freedom struggle, admirable in its integrity, is also a fact that Hindutva groups can only seek to appropriate. They cannot challenge it.

It is the period of the Mughal rule that becomes the most contested scene of this battle. Mughal rule having been romanticised to an extent is the focus of this attack. The Delhi Sultanate, for instance, does not attract anywhere near as much opprobrium, although as a historical period it lasted much longer than the Mughal period. It simply does not have the readymade cultural cache to be attacked or lied about. Aurangzeb, Akbar and Babar with just a smidgeon of Shahjahan and Humayun is where Hindutva wants to restrict this debate.

The morality of the constitutional Republic of India is sought to be applied to these medieval rulers, a standard on which they cannot but be found to be wanting. Akbar was no democrat, but then he could not have been. Every medieval ruler is bloodthirsty by modern standards, but the Mughals were definitely better than most such rulers. What is also true is that the application of modern constitutional morality would equally condemn past Hindu and Buddhist rulers.

Where the Ambedkarite argument works against Hindutva is that it questions power not only in the last millennium but over the last couple of millennia to say that the current status of the country is the most desirable, historically speaking. It proudly defends modern constitutionalism as the most fair system this country has ever seen. The Lohiaite argument also works on the same appeal. Ambedkar and Lohia are till today shining examples of secularism that the Right dare not attack, or even appropriate. Periyarism is, of course, another example and perhaps a more successful one. None of this is to say that it is only these three schools of thought that can take on the Sangh.

What is needed is a confident proclamation of the India that ought to be, but rooted in the India that was. This includes owning up to historical injustices. The Muslim and Christian rulers of India, for instance, both failed India by letting the caste system continue. In fact, letting caste be was a decision stemming from political expediency, by keeping the people divided. They deserve to be condemned for that. What they do not deserve to be condemned for is individual acts of policy or war which were legitim