India in a Centrifuge

INDIA IN A CENTRIFUGE

(The Secular Nation in Danger)

(Mukul Sinha)

INDIA perhaps is now going through the most severe socio-political crisis in the post Independence period.  Never before has the moral and intellectual content of the Nation dipped so low. Never before has the Nation been so deeply inflicted by corruption, communalism and terrorism, tearing apart the social fabric of the nation. Never before has the ruling class of the Nation so brazenly aligned with the imperialist powers of yester years under the banner of Globalization, pauperizing its own citizens. Never before have all the democratic Institutions, including the entire political establishment of the country faced such a crisis of faith. Never before has the Nation been sabotaged from inside by its own political establishments. INDIA is indeed facing a crisis that threatens its sovereignty, unity and integrity.

When the Indian nation state was born in the midnight of 15th August, 1947, was it baptized into any religious order? With Jawaharlal Nehru at the helm of affairs, it was unthinkable that the new born state would pick up a non-secular credential. Contrary to the common belief, the founding father of Pakistan did notalso push the new born Pakistan to become an Islamic state. In fact,in his inaugural speech as first governor general of Pakistan, Jinnah had said:

‘You will find that in the course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state."

Will the Indian “nation-state” survive the centrifugal forces of capitalist development and its associated politcis in the era of Globalization?? The multi-ethnicity and caste-class contradiction would only exacerbate with time and may generate enough pressure threatening the unitary structure of the country itself. But over and above all these contradictions in the infrastructure, the communal politics of the past two decades would perhaps prove to be the proverbial last straw on the camels back.

A little known Babri Masjid Ramjanmabhoomi dispute was ingeniously resurrected in 1984 by the formation of the “Sri Ram Janma Bhoomi Mukti Yagna Samiti” and a 130 kilometer march was organised by VHP from Ayodhya to Lucknow in October, 1984 to voice the demand for liberating the site on which the Babri Masjid stood. The Sangh Parivar’s ‘National Thinkers Conferences’ held across the country  in 1987 and the BJP’s Palampur Resolution on Ayodhya in June 1989 finally put Ram Janma Bhoomi on the political agenda of the Sangh Parivar.

The November,1989 general election thus saw the worst ever communal violence in which over 800 people died in the Hindi belt. V.P.Singh became the Prime Minister with the support of BJP which won 88 seats. To push its own agenda, BJP/ VHP combine first declared February 14th, 1990 as the date to begin the temple construction which was changed to 8th June and later to 30th October, 1990. As a last ditch effort to keep away the other back ward classes from uniting  with the upper caste BJP, V P Singh introduced the “Mandal Bill” in the loksabha on 7th August, 1990. That’s is when the LK Advani hit back with his Ram card, his Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya. The arrest of Advani in Bihar on 23rd October, 1990 and the collapse of the V P Singh Government on 9th November, 1990, forever altered the course of Indian politics. The demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6th December, 1992, the repeated instances of communal violence and the hate campaign unleashed by the Sangh Parivar gave them good dividend in terms of votes and seats in the Parliament and since 1998, the NDA Government functioned with almost two dozen local parties supporting the BJP to reap their own local benefits.

Despite making  astronomical gains within a very short period by playing the Hindu card, BJP’s political hold kept sliding down equally fast in the year 2001and  by the end of  which it had lost power in three states. The entire efforts of VHP to resurrect the Ram Janma Bhoomi issue had also stopped paying the dividends which it did in 1990s.  And that is when the Godhra incident happened.

Godhra incident gave rise to a new phenomenon called “Modi”. He actually ‘modi’fied all previous concepts of communalism and refined the hate campaign against the minorities by identifying and projecting the entire Muslim community with “Islamic terrorism” and posing to be the savior of the Hindu community even when no such terrorism existed in Gujarat!

the Chief Minister of Gujarat  rushed to the press in the evening of 27th February, 2002 to blame the entire Muslim community to be responsible for the fire that had burnt down the S6 coach and he described them as “terrorist”:

“The abominable event that has occurred in Godhra does not befit any civilized society, is not a communal event but is an one sided collective terrorist attack by one community… He further said that this incident is not a simple incident of violence or communal event but is a preplanned incident….” (This statement as reported in SANDESH on 28.2.2002)

In the next few days, thousands of innocent Muslims were killed and crores of their property was burnt down  systematically by the storm troopers of the Sangh Parivar. BJP led by Modi won the the 2002 state elections in Decembers riding the wave of hatred created by the sustained propaganda against the Muslims and dubbing “Congress” as a muslim party!

Interestingly, the same day , i.e. 27th February, but in the year 1933, the German Parliament (the Reichstag) had been burnt down, though later it was established that Hitler’s own storm troopers had burnt down the Reichstag to instigate the Germans against the communists. When informed about the arrest of the  arsonist, Van der Lubbe, whom he immediately dubbed as a “communist”,  Hitler had declared, "The German people have been soft too long. Every Communist official must be shot. All Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. All friends of the Communists must be locked up.”

3000 members of the German Communist party were killed within a few weeks of this date!

The comparision does not stop here. The Gujarat experiments’ obvious goal is to create a political system which will do away with the “soft democratic belly” of the Indian capitalist system and replace it with an aggressive jingoistic political machine which will match with the dream of the Indian Capitalism to be the fountain head of globalization., call it “hindu rashtra” or anything you like.In building a new autocratic  state the frame work developed by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the RSS ideologue and the necessities of the monopoly capital in the era of Globalization is synthesized. This is what he said in "We or Our Nationhood Defined”:

Hindutva: Hindutva is what is now commonly known as Hinduism. The basic reason for insisting on its being called as Hindutva rather than Hinduism is that any -ism suggests a relatively narrow, limited ideology or set of beliefs, which follows set rules, guidelines and definitions.

As for what exactly Hindutva is, it is the Dharma. The reason for saying “the” Dharma, as opposed to “a” Dharma, which many people would say, is because there can only be one Dharma, since Dharma has implicit within it, all the aspects which make up life. The main reason for this misconception is that Dharma is often translated (wrongly) as “religion”. Whilst religion makes up a part of Dharma it is only a part and not the whole of it. Dharma takes a holistic view, and covers the whole spectrum of human experience.

“Sapta Sindhu” was actually pronounced as “Hapta Hindhu”. The Persians adopted the same name for the country, but with time dropped the “Hapta”, and were left with Hindhu, from which is derived Hindu.  Hence, the people of the country were called Hindus, and the country itself Hind, or Hindustan (Hindu Stan meaning Place of the Hindus). Thus, the way of life followed by the people of that country came to be known as Hinduism…or Hindutva...

Nation of Hindutva: Having now defined the two individual words, it now becomes immediately completely obvious as to exactly what is meant by the phrase “Nation of Hindutva”. This is not, as it may at first seem, a vague, general concept, but an absolute, defined entity, which refers to the Nation – i.e. all those people throughout the world, regardless of official “Nationality” (i.e. what appears on the passport, etc.) – of people belonging to the cultural, philosophical, and ancestral background and heritage that is Hindutva.

Commenting on the German experience, Golwalkar wrote:

“… 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... From this stand point, sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations, the foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights…

Minorities: The most obvious deviation from the ideal of ‘one nation, one state’, is the presence of minorities, especially ethnic minorities, which are clearly not members of the majority nation. The nationalist definition of a nation is always exclusive: no nation has open membership. In most cases, there is a clear idea that surrounding nations are different, and that includes members of those nations who live on the ‘wrong side’ of the border.

The founder fathers of the Indian nation state had ofcourse firmly rejected the concept of  a state based on any religion and had chosen to adopt a modern, secular, socialist and democratic state structure. The idea was associated with the rise of the modern system of states — often called the "Westphalian system" in reference to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The "Westphalian" doctrine of states under which legitimate states were assumed to correspond to nations—groups of people united by language and culture.

They wrote down a constitution that still remains a path breaking document.

The secular, democratic structure of the constitution is non-negotiable as it reflects the basic principles on which the constitution of the nation state was drawn up at the dawn of its creation. Starting from the KeshavanandaBharati’scase, the Supreme Court has thus carved out the basic structure of the constitution that includes the “fundamental rights” which cannot be altered even under the amending powers conferred on the parliament to amend the constitution under Article 368 of the Constitution. A few paragraphs from a later judgment reiterate those principles:

(This extract is taken from I.R. Coelho v. State of T.N.(2007)2 SCC 1, at page 97)

110. The history of the emergence of modern democracy has also been the history of securing basic rights for the people of other nations also. In the United States the Constitution was finally ratified only upon an understanding that a Bill of Rights would be immediately added guaranteeing certain basic freedoms to its citizens. At about the same time when the Bill of Rights was being ratified in America, the French Revolution declared the Rights of Man to Europe. When the death of colonialism and the end of World War II birthed new nations across the globe, these States embraced rights as foundations to their new Constitutions. Similarly, the rapid increase in the creation of Constitutions that coincided with the end of the Cold War has planted rights at the base of these documents.

125. The question can be looked at from yet another angle also. Can Parliament increase the amending power by amendment of Article 368 to confer on itself the unlimited power of amendment and destroy and damage the fundamentals of the Constitution? The answer is obvious. Article 368 does not vest such a power in Parliament. It cannot lift all restrictions placed on the amending power or free the amending power from all its restrictions. This is the effect of the decision in Kesavananda Bharati case1 as a result of which secularism, separation of power, equality, etc., to cite a few examples, would fall beyond the constituent power in the sense that the constituent power cannot abrogate these fundamentals of the Constitution. Without equality the rule of law, secularism, etc. would fail. That is why Khanna, J. held that some of the fundamental rights like Article 15 form part of the basic structure.

Despite all such pronouncements of the Highest Court of the land and the pious desires of the founder fathers of this nation, the culture and temperament of secularism has systematically eroded with time from all spheres of life. As we have said earlier, the growth of the Sangh Parivar and all its variants like Shiv Sena etc have openly challenged the very concept of a nation state that could be secular.

In this article, while I do not propose to deal with the rising communal-terrorism in the country, it would be impossible to overlook the phenomenon altogether, specially after the Mumbai incident of 26 July, 2008. We ofcourse should not lose sight of the fact that the terrorist activities in India have three distinct currents:  (1) The violence perpetrated by persons belonging to the organized Hindu rightist groups- through communal riots and/or by using IEDs, like in Malegaon (2) incidents of bomb blast specially after the post Godhra violence by organized Muslim groups primary as revenge attacks like in the serial blasts of 1993 and 2006 in Mumbai and (3) the well trained mercenary type of attacks that are linked to conflicts in the international sphere between the American-Zionist on one hand and the Taliban-al-Qaeda on the other hand but spilling into the Indian soil because of growing American-Indian axis, like the terrible event in Mumbai on 26/11/2008. The first two are obviously indigenous and intertwined and historically nothing to do with the third current save and except the fact that the Muslims are the common target.

The modified Hindu Rashtra of Narendra Modi is perhaps the ideal model of the nation state that Modi wishes to present to the monopoly capitalist which totally safe guards their The manner in which more than a 1000 acre of land was transferred to Tatas for the Nano project just in one day proved what Modi can do for the rich!

The secular state therefore is in serious danger. It needless to point out that secularism, equality and democracy are completely intertwined and dependent on each other and the destruction of one ensures the destruction of the others. To save democracy therefore we have to save secularism. No amount of social engineering can however guarantee the safety of the secular state except a determined and resolute struggle against communalism and communal politics which is already having all the trappings of fascism. The need of the day is therefore a widest coalition of the secular democratic forces which is conscious of the danger faced from the rightist forces and the global monopolist. Let us expose them and defeat them and save our constitution.

Let us campaign for the following demands

1. A law that totally bans all organizations including political parties that directly or indirectly invokes religion in any process of the State or election at any level.
2. A non-aligned foreign policy and a policy of neutrality in the so – called “War on Terror” led by the Americans.
3. A fullest investigation by NIA in all “terrorist” incidents since 2002.
4. Punish the culprits who demolished Babri Masjid.
5. Say “NO” to any war-mongering with Pakistan.