Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The partition of India in 1947 was a
traumatic experience for everyone in the Indian subcontinent – today’s states
of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Two major Indian provinces, Punjab in the
west and Bengal in the east, were sliced in two, amidst wide bloodshed.
Bengalis, in particular, had a vibrant culture that transcended religion.
The secularists in the Congress Party, the
independence movement which became the ruling party of India, had wanted a country
that would incorporate its various faith communities.
For Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime
minister, the partition was considered a victory for religiously-based
communalism: a new state, based on Islam, would now flank the rest of India in
both its west and east. (Pakistan included Muslim-majority east Bengal, after
1971 the sovereign Bangladesh.)
That’s why the new rulers of India were so
adamant in retaining control over the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir,
despite its Muslim-majority population. It would be “proof” that India was not
merely “Hindustan.”
For Pakistan, of course, Kashmir was seen
as territory that should have been included in its Islamic republic.
In recent decades, though, a new concept of
Indian nationhood has gained currency, one which sees India as a “Hindu”
nation, and Muslims as interlopers and imperialists who have historically oppressed
the people of India ever since their arrival more than a millennium ago – and who,
unlike the British, settled in the land permanently.
This ideology, known as “Hindutva,” was
initially propagated by ideologues such as V.D. Savarkar, who in 1923 wrote
that all people on the subcontinent who regarded Bharat, the Sanskrit name for
India, as their “sacred space” and “holy land” were true Indians – a definition
that included non-Hindu Sikhs and Jains, but not Muslims.
Savarkar’s geographical definition encompassed
the entire Indian subcontinent, including today’s Pakistan, Bangladesh, and
even the Himalayan states of Bhutan and Nepal.
Two years later, a nationalist organization
known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded to spread these
ideas. It was led by M.S. Golwalkar from 1940 to 1973.
While the organization remained on the
extremist fringes of Indian politics, and was in fact temporarily banned in
1948 after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, its doctrines would eventually
come to the fore with the formation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in
1980, under its first leader and future prime minister (in 1996 and from 1998
to 2004), A.B. Vajpayee.
Vajpayee attacked Congress Party secularism
as “appeasement” of those Muslims who remained within India, at the expense of
the majority Hindus. This hindered the Indian nation from discovering its true
Hindu identity and freeing itself from the shackles of imperialism, he asserted.
The BJP would employ the discourse of
majoritarian “Hindu democracy” in its construction of Indian identity, with
less regard for minorities. Its program even included the full incorporation of
Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian Union (it has special status in the country’s
constitution).
The BJP won India’s general election last
year, making Narendra Modi prime minister. (He wrote a biography of Golwalkar
in 2008.)
It is too soon to tell how this will affect
relations with Pakistan, and with India’s own very large Muslim community.
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