ON INDIAN COMMUNALISM





Some wounds were never intended to heal. The division of the subcontinent in 1947 was one of them.


What remains raw and suppurating even after 60 years is not the effect of the displacement of millions of people from their homes, the bisection of its human, material and natural assets, or the mutilation of a common history. It is the tacit admission that every religion in India other than Hinduism is an immigrant, a tenant rather than a son of the soil.


One does not need the third eye of Shiva to see the destruction that is being wrought in too many parts of India by right-wing Hindu extremists, intent on reversing history by re-converting the converted. There can be no friend of Hinduism within India and outside it, who is not disturbed by accounts of the recent forcible conversion of Christians back to Hinduism. Communal India today would seem to be no better than 16th century Tudor England. Then, Mary Tudor, a Catholic, ordered the persecution of converts to Protestantism and a reversion to the religion of Rome; today, a country led by a Catholic-born convert to Indian nationality is mute witness to sectarian barbarity in which the religions imported from Rome and from Mecca are targets for re-conversion.


Sixty years ago, the segregation of Muslims concentrated in the northern and eastern extremities of India was thought to be the solution to sectarian hostility. Pakistan and later Bangladesh became the new nation-state ghettoes for sub-continental Muslims. For years since then, they offered residual Indian Muslims the same choice that Israel did for Jewry unwelcome in Europe and the East. Muslims who remained in India were left to create their own ghettoes, as Jews were in Russia.


What will be the face of India 60 years from now? Will the Indian flag be predominantly saffron encroaching upon a diminishing band of Muslim green? Will re-conversion to Hinduism, even if it were to occur on a large enough scale, be enough to protect previous Muslims and Christians from further discrimination?


Unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Hinduism never had an Abraham, a single progenitor whose descendants populate every corner of the globe. These religions have over the centuries become spiritual transnationals, while Hinduism has remained concentrated within the geography of India itself. Ironically, Pakistan and Bangladesh have less to fear from Indian communalism than ever before. They are being legitimised already as outcasts, living like butchers do in rural India, on the periphery. The million mutinies, to borrow Naipaul’s memorable phrase, that will take place over the next 60 years will be not from without but from within India.


Now that India is on an irreversible trajectory to becoming a regional superpower, it will need to be prepared to suffer the same finger-wagging the Chinese have had to endure from Western liberals after the Tiananmen incident in 1999. India should expect similar sermons from its friends.


For the first time in their recorded history, both India and China have expanded their political identities to occupy their geographical boundaries. For the Chinese, religion will never be an issue. Over a thousand years have passed since the Great Anti-Buddhist persecution in 845 AD. In the next thousand years, unless there is another Tang dynasty, no single religion is likely to emerge pre-eminent, head and halo above the others as Buddhism did.


For India, religion will always be an issue. That pluralism exists in India is a fact. That India is secular is a matter of interpretation of the term “secular”. Does it mean the separation of religion and the state, or does it mean the referee-ship of the state over all competing religions? It could take Hinduism another thousand years to mature, before it feels no longer threatened by ideologies more structured than its own, or by religious observances that go beyond tactile symbolism.


Millennia ago, the Ocean of Milk was churned by the devas. It produced first a pot of poison Halahala that Shiva swallowed, and afterwards the precious pot of Amrita. The churning of India’s communal ocean is yielding Halahala. How long will it take for the Amrita of communal harmony to emerge?





[COVERT magazine, 1-15 Nov 2008 issue.]