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Religion and nationalism inIndia Ram the God of thehindu nationBharat WariavwallaPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Bharat Wariavwalla (2000) Religion and nationalismin India Ram the God of the hindu nation, The Round Table: TheCommonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 89:357, 593-605, DOI:10.1080/003585300225223
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Hindu nationalism emerged as a major political force on the Indian politicalscene in the mid-1980s. It is their vigorous espousal of the cause of building aRam Temple at the site of the Babri masque in Ayodhya, Ram’s birthplace thatcatapulted the Hindu nationalists to the centre stage of Indian politics. Yet a pan-Hindu nationalism built on or garbed in Hindu religious and cultural symbolsdoes not appeal to all Hindus. The enormous diversity of the Hindu religion andthe larger diversity of the Indian civilization militate against the rise of an allembracing Hindu nationalism. The convincing creation of a modern Indiannation eludes its ideologues. India’s staggering diversity is a formidable obstacleto it becoming a nation-state, a form of political organization the Indiannationalists most desire. Are there other forms better suited to its diversity?
THE ASCENDANCE OF THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY (BJP) topower following its impressive performance in the March 1998 national
election, is a triumph of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva nationalism (nation-alism based in Hinduness), as its votaries call it. A party at the fringes of Indianpolitics till the mid-1980s, it rapidly emerged as a principal national party in thesubsequent years by launching an aggressive campaign to rebuild a temple forLord Ram in place of a mosque at Ayodhya, the presumed birthplace of LordRam. Ram became the symbol of Hindu nationalism in its most dynamic phase,and it is for the first time that this hero of the epic Ramayana appearedprominently in the Indian political discourse.
In the first part of the paper, I attempt to explain why Ram and the epicRamayana came to be seen by a vast majority of the Hindus, particularly of thatpart of India that is the most underdeveloped, but traditionally shapes itspolitical culture, the Indo-Gangetic plain, as a symbol of the Indian nation. For
RELIGION ANDNATIONALISM IN INDIA
RAM THE GOD OF THE HINDU NATION
BHARAT WARIAVWALLA
The Round Table (2000), 357 (593–605)
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Bharat Wariavwalla is on the staff of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi,India. The work on this paper began when the author was a Hari Lela Fellow at the Department ofPolitics and Asian Studies of the University of Hull in Spring 1998. The author thanks theDepartment for all the assistance it gave him during his fellowship period and also its facultymembers, particularly Terry McNeill, Bhikhu Parekh, Noel O’Sullivan and Michael Burgess forstimulating discussions on the subject of religion and nationalism.
0035-8533/2000/050593-13 © 2000 The Round Table
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them the Indian nation is synonymous with the Hindu nation. Here I criticallyexamine Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as a print community to askwhy the Ramayana, a popular epic for centuries, could not be ‘imagined’ as ablueprint for the Indian nation earlier and why it came to be seen as such onlyin the mid-1980s.
The second part of the paper asks whether Hindu nationalism could succeedin creating a Hindu nation on the strength of Hindu religion and culture. Can anationalist creed be teased out of the vast and varied Hindu philosophicalthought, practices and rituals? Here I argue that these are too diverse to unitethe Hindus nationally. Finally, I ask whether a country of such staggeringdiversity as India can be a nation, and if so what kind of a nation?
God of the nation: Lord Ram
‘Ram drohi, desh drohi’: it means that a traitor to Lord Ram is a traitor to thenation. This is what a roadside graffiti read; it appeared en route the vastprocession the BJP leader, L. K. Advani, led in October 1990 for the cause of‘rebuilding’ a Ram temple in the place of a Babri mosque. This 16th centurymosque was built, the Hindu nationalists insist, at the site where once stood atemple dedicated to Ram.
The graffiti could well be the epigraph of the most successful political massmobilization the Hindu nationalists have ever launched.1 The BJP, then a minorparty in Indian politics, gained most from this mobilization: it emerged in 1991as the chief opposition party to the ubiquitous Congress Party and seven yearslater as the ruling party.
The mobilization was deeply coloured with religious meanings and symbols.It was called a yatra, a pilgrimage, and it had as its starting and terminatingpoints places that reminded the Hindus of their defeat by the Muslims. It beganat Somnath in the west where a temple was desecrated by an Afghan soldier offortune, Mehmood of Ghazni in 1026 and it was to terminate at Avodhya in theeast where a mosque was built on the site of a Ram temple in 1529 by a generalof the Mughal Emperor, Babur. The motive of the religious political mobiliza-tion was to take revenge on history. It is this that gave Hindu nationalism thedynamic it never had before.
Like any nationalism, Hindu nationalism too, pits ‘us’ against ‘them’. Thefollowing remark by Advani who launched the temple agitation clearly spellsout the purpose of the agitation:
it (the temple-mosque issue) is not just a legal issue, nor is it merely aquestion of history. It is essentially a question of a nation’s identity.Whom must this nation identify with, Ram or Babur?2
Ram , a revered mythological Hindu deity, and Babur, a modern Mughalemperor, are held as the contesting symbols of Indian national identity byAdvani, who then rhetorically asks the Indians to choose between them. One ofthem has to be banished, symbolically, from history to affirm the other as asymbol of Indian national identity. Rebuilding a Ram temple in place of theBabri mosque, would be that symbolic banishment of Babur from history.History would then be avenged, at least partly.
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The juxtapositioning of Ram and Babur by the Hindu nationalists tells us oftheir conception of time. They see time as a progression of events moving alongwhat Anderson calls the ‘homogenous empty time’, that is measured by clockand calendar.3 It is indeed a profoundly unHindu conception of time for whomtime is cyclical and not linear, as it is in the West. By juxtaposing Ram andBabur, the Hindu nationalists want to suggest that the Indian nation had beenfounded by Ram and was undone by Babur. This is standard fare for all xeno-phobic historians. They always think that their nation existed from timeimmemorial and that if it failed to develop into a fully grown nation, it wasbecause of the evil designs of foreigners and their internal collaborators.
It is the Muslim conquest and their long rule of India that prevented its emer-gence as a nation—this is the central theme of Hindu nationalism.4 A thousandyears of ‘shame’ is how the Muslim rule is described by the Hindu nationalists,and the Hindus, they say must erase it, at least symbolically, to regain for them-selves their nationhood. Advani’s political mobilization in the 1990s to rebuildthe Ram temple in place of the mosque was aimed at erasing this shame, at leastpartially, and thus in the process begin the rebuilding of the Indian, in otherwords, Hindu, nation.
It was not until the mid-1980s that the Ramayana figured prominently in theIndian nationalists’ political discourse—though the Ram-Babur debate hadgone on for decades, well before World War II. It came to be deployedpolitically by the Hindu nationalists against their opponents and was used bythem to arouse religious passion among the Hindus. Above all, they made theepic the representation of the Hindu nation.
Why the Ramayana with its rich political symbology was not used by theIndian nationalists in their fight against the British colonial rule is an intriguingquestion. Perhaps they wanted to keep the nationalist discourse secular, but thatwas not the only consideration. Except for Gandhi hardly any nationalist leaderspoke of the Ramayana. For Gandhi, who often talked of Ram Rajya, the reignof Ram meant an ideal moral polity and not the realization of a modern Hindunation.
Of all the Hindu religious texts and oral sacred accounts, the Ramayana is theone epic that could be read as a text, in Anderson’s sense of the nation as a printcommunity. Its central theme of the epic struggle between divine Ram anddemonic Ravana would be an ideal nationalist text, for it posits well the theme‘us against them’. In some of its 12th century renditions, as Sheldon Pollockshows, the invading Afghans and Turks were presented as the demon Ravanaby some Hindu kings.5 But at no time was the Ramavana used to mobilize theHindus nationally against the non-Hindus. It is only in the mid-1980s when theHindu nationalist organizations launched the temple agitation that Babur cameto be seen as the demon Ravana battling the divine Ram.
In his highly detailed work on Hindu nationalism, Christoph Jaffrelot thinksthat it is the televised rendition of the Ramayana in 1987–88 by the state-ownedtelevision that explains its great political impact at the popular event. He seesthis televised presentation in terms of Anderson’s idea of the nation as a printcommunity.6 No doubt the 98 episodes of the Ramayana serial, viewed by some100 million people, had a powerful political appeal for the Hindus, notably theHindi speaking ones of north India. It raised the Hindu nationalist conscious-
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ness in a way that no other event has.Assuming that the televised presentation of the Ramayana could be seen as a
narration of the Hindu nation, a question arises: why its numerous and highlypopular renditions in the pre-television age were not seen that way? The ques-tion bears on the central point of Anderson’s thesis that it was the availability ofcheap popular editions in vernacular languages of the old sacral texts that laidthe basis of national consciousness in Reformation Europe. Now the Ramayanais one epic that has been deeply entwined with the daily lives of the Hindus andevery one of its characters conveys to a Hindu a range of human emotions andexperiences. Its vernacularized Hindi version, Ramcharitramanas , whichappeared in the 16th century, is enacted on every Dussera day (Ram’s trium-phant return to Ayodhya after his defeat of Ravana) in the streets and bazaarsthroughout India.
Yet Ramcharitramanas was never read by the Hindu speaking people as thetext of the Hindu nation in the way the English read the Book of Martyrs as thetext of the English nation or the way the Germans read Luther’s Ninety-fiveTheses as the text of the German national liberation from Rome.
The point here is that Anderson’s idea of the nation as a print communitycannot explain why some Hindu and Buddhist sacral texts which had beenvernacularized and popularized have not inspired the idea of a nation.
Nation-state and civilization diversity
Hindu nationalism primarily aims at making India a modern nation-state. In thissense it is modern even though it is garbed in religious cultural terms. Bynation-state I simply mean an entity that emerges as a result of the greatercongruence between the state, a legal administrative structure within a giventerritory, and the nation, a community tied together by religion, language,myths of common descent and other subjective elements.
It is in the logic of nationalism that it should subsume the state of the nation.Why it is so, is best answered by Margaret Canovan. It is the nation, she says,that provides the central mediation between state and community, between theindividual and the collective, the mundane and the sacred, the present and thepast.7
Hindu nationalists call the nation-state they want to build or resurrect—likeall nationalists they too think it has always existed from time immemorial—aHindu Rashtra. The word appears repeatedly in the recent writings andspeeches of the Hindu nationalists, though it is never clearly defined. At timesthe Hindu Rashtra is defined by them as a geographical area from theHimalayas to the seas, at times it is seen as an area encompassing the Hinducivilization and at other times it refers to an ancient cultural entity calledBharat.
But I think the meaning that the word Hindu Rashtra has come to acquire inthe context of the Hindu nationalist thought is a state, in the Weberian sense,that is underpinned by something distinctly Hindu, be it religion, culture, mythsor memories. To make the state coterminous with the cultural community is theobjective of the Hindu nationalists, as indeed it is of most nationalists fromGiuseppe Mazzini to Dr Mohammed Mahathir.
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K. Govindacharya, a BJP theoretician, forcibly states that the Indian state isto be made coterminous with the Hindu cultural community. Explaining thesignificance of the demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992, he saysthat the event brings to the fore the long-standing conflict between twonationalisms: ‘geo-cultural nationalism’ and ‘dharmasala’ nationalism.According to him, the ‘geo-cultural’ nationalists are the Nehruvian nationalistswho want to make India a nation on the basis of a territorial state and thecommon citizenship principle, while the ‘dharmasala’ nationalists are thosewho want to root Indian nationhood in dharmasala , the traditional inns of theHindu pilgrims.8
When Govindacharya talks of Indian nationalism springing from the Hindupilgrim inns, he sounds like a late 18th or early 19th century German Kulturnationalist, Herder or Fichle. For Herder, as for many Hindu nationalists,culture is an instrument with which to forge national unity. What they seek todo by invoking religion and culture is to spark off a Hindu risorgimento thatwould energize the Hindus to politically lift themselves and make India amodern nation.
The BJP leader, L. K. Advani, explicates well the purpose of the ‘nationalist’campaign launched in the name of the Ram temple:
I have called (this) cultural nationalism not only the substratum of India’sunity but also a dynamo for the country’s progress and transformation intoa modern progressive and prosperous nation. The dynamo is missing. If inthe last 45 years we have experienced a setback it is because of this factor.There is nothing to unite us. Secularism, Constitution democracy, these bythemselves have not been adequate inspiration for the masses.9
The statement above clearly suggests that Advani and the BJP which herepresents are for a civic nation as envisaged in the Constitution of 1950. Theyare for secularism and democracy which are two important constitutiveelements of a civic nation. However, as the statement says, these ideas andinstitutions cannot ‘adequately inspire the masses’, presumably because theyare too Western in origin; only Hindu cultural nationalism can inspire themasses and thus transform this country into a ‘modern progressive andprosperous nation’, Advani believes.
This and other statements made by the BJP leaders before and after thedemolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992 suggest that the party is fora civic nation, though they believe it ought to rest on the affective ties drawnfrom H induism. This is the v iew of the modera tes among the H indunationalists; the hardliners, notably those belonging to such militant organiza-tions such as the VHP and the RSS, are for an Indian nation based on thereligious and cultural dominance of the Hindu majority. The moderates and thehardliners have periodically clashed since the coming of the BJP to power inMarch 1998.
The Hindu nationalists assume that the Hindu religion is an ally of Hindunationalism. Are they? Could Hindutva nationalism, a nationalism based onHinduness, be teased out of a vast and varied body of Hindu thought, religiouspractices and rituals? A larger question is whether the nation-state as a form ofpolitical organization could emerge from a society of such staggering religious,
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cultural, linguistic diversities as India’s. Here I shall focus only on someaspects of religious diversity to argue that they militate against a pan-Hindunationalism.
There is a distinct affinity between nationalism and certain religions. Protes-tantism as Linda Colley says in her superb work, ‘made the invention of GreatBritain possible’.10 The French church was instrumental in the making of theFrench State under the Capetians and the Valvois which in turn created theFrench nation.11 But Hinduism is too varied in religious thought and practices toprovide for the intellectual basis of an all embracing Hindu nationalism, or evenbecome its ally.
It is non-theistic and therefore does not have a body of core doctrines fromwhich can be derived some elements of a nationalist ideology. It has noorganized clerics who could propagate religious nationalism as the Shia clericshave done in Iran, the Sikh priests in Punjab, the Catholic church in Poland orthe Buddhist priests in Sri Lanka. It is non-teleocratic and therefore does nothave such notions as the Golden Age, the Fall or Redemption, that appear,albeit in secular terms, in some European nationalist thoughts.
The religiously sanctioned caste division is another powerful barrier to theemergence of pan-Hindu nationalism. The relationship between caste and king-ship in pre-colonial times produced, as Quigley says, ‘fragile, patrimonialstates, endlessly crumbling and being rebuilt’.12 They were not like the bureau-cratized and territorial states that emerged under the Tudors and the Valvois andwhich later became British and French nations. Perhaps it is the absence of anall embracing Indian state, Embree, speculates, that prevented the transforma-tion of the Brahaminical idea of India as a Kulturnation into staatsnation.13
The caste system as it has evolved under the dual impact of modernizationand democratization also stands in the way of the spread of pan-Hindunationalism. The old ascriptive caste system has been profoundly changed, eventransformed, by the processes of modernization and democratization. Ourconcern here is not with how it has changed but, rather, why in its presentchanged configuration it militates against the Hindu nationalism.
In the setting of competitive politics the caste becomes a resource in thehands of the political actors who use it to advance their status, wealth andpower. They still use the old ascriptive caste identities as the base, but todaythey build upon it political parties representing the interest of several relatedcastes, usually the lower castes of the old (and current) hierarchical castesystem.14 The result has been the growth of several caste based parties, particu-larly in the Hindi speaking area, an area where the BJP had sought to increaseits electoral strength by launching a vast political mobilization in the name ofthe Ram temple. It is the lower and some intermediate castes and the outcastes(the untouchables, now officially called Scheduled Caste or SC Dalits) who sawthe Hindu nationalism as a serious threat to their hard won social status—though not all scheduled castes/tribes are ‘outcastes’. But for the ‘outcastes’ theBJP was a party of the upper caste and class Hindus. Ram was ‘their god’ theyangrily claimed.
Nothing brought out so vividly the deep caste divide in the Hindu socialorder as a policy move that occurred in August 1990, just the time when theagitation for the Ram temple was gathering momentum. In August 1990 the
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government of V.P. Singh, the leader of a centre-left Janata Party announced areservation up to 27 per cent of government jobs for the lower and intermediatecastes, officially labelled Other Backward Classes (OBC). Such an affirmativeaction in favour of the OBCs had been proposed for a long time but its imple-mentation into a policy in August 1990 by the Singh government was no doubtdictated by electoral considerations: it wanted to win the OBC votes. Often it isthe mundane considerations of votes that prompt major policy changes in ademocracy.
The Hindu nationalists felt most threatened by the move. They knew it wouldbe enthusiastically received by the OBCs which comprise a little over half theIndian population. The BJP did not quite oppose it for the fear of losing theOBC votes, but it did not fully support it either. Instead it suggested economicrather than caste criteria for it. The party was very much on the defensive on theissue of affirmative action. It realized that its opponents’ political plank ofsocial equality through affirmative action could be as appealing to the people asits own plank of Hindu religious unity. The last thing it wanted was to see thisappear in the charged political atmosphere of the late 1980s as a contestbetween Hindu religious unity and social equality among the Hindus. Somepopularized the contest as one between Ram and roti (bread).
How these issues were fought and who won or lost in the various electionsthat took place at the state and national levels since the issues of the temple andsocial equality were first raised in 1990 does not concern us here.15 What isworth noting here of these election outcomes is that the BJP polled a recordvote of about 21 per cent in the 1991 national election, thanks in part to itsenergetic exploitation of the temple issue, but failed to increase it in theslightest in the 1996 election. At the national level the party’s vote was stagnantbetween the 1991 and 1996 elections, and this is despite the triumphant event(from its point of view) of the demolition of the Babri mosque.
Clearly the temple issue could not rally large sections of the backward andScheduled Castes behind it because they saw it as a facade for the perpetuationof the caste hierarchy. A leader of the Scheduled Caste, Kanshi Ram, used tovividly demonstrate what the BJP cry of Hindu religious unity meant to himand his followers. In his frequent television appearances he would point to apencil he held vertically and say this is the caste hierarchy, and then lay thepencil horizontally and say that this is what he wants to do to it—flatten it.
Hindu nationalism is conceptually ill equipped to deal with the religiouslybased hierarchical caste order. The fondest hope of the Hindu nationalistideologues has been to subsume, if not dissolve, the caste divisions by a pan-Hindu nationalism. They have failed. Reconciliation between the religiouslysanctioned caste order and nationalism, which at the minimum must accordequality to all nationals, is a major conceptual problem of Hindu nationalism. Itis impossible to analyse here in any detail the position various Hindu nationalistleaders have taken on the caste question before and after independence in 1947.Summed up very briefly and perhaps inadequately, most of the pre-indepen-dence leaders skirted the hierarchical caste order; but their occasional treatmentof it was distinctly influenced by the Western idea of equality; in fact much ofthe nationalist thinking here developed against the backdrop of Western liberalthought. What the Hindu nationalists said about the caste order was that it was
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basically an occupational division of the traditional Hindu society and that sucha division originally had no religious sanction. They attempted to secularize thecaste order.16 Only later, they maintained, this occupational division of theHindu society degenerated into a rigid social hierarchy defined by one’s birth.Presumably this stagnation of Hindu creativity came as a result of the defeat ofHinduism by Islam, the Hindu nationalists would say.
Post-independence writings and policy statements of Hindu nationalistleaders, particularly those who belonged to the RSS and the Jan Sangh (laterrenamed BJP), emphasized the equality of all castes. They had to, if theywanted to win votes. In response to those liberal and Marxist ideas which haddominated the post- independence Indian thinking, the Hindu nationalistideologies advanced the idea of integral humanism.17 What it argued, oftendidactically, is that the society, polity, economy and the individual are allrelated to each other by the supreme principle of dharma (a highly complexidea, but what it means here is duty that devolves on oneself as a member of thesociety). Ergo: all Hindus must obey their dharma. Integral humanism of theHindu nationalists is somewhat similar to Action Francaise’s nationalismeintegrale.
This is a serious plea, for one’s sense of duty (dharma) can only come fromone’s caste status and thus the idea of integral humanism, though dressed inliberal and egalitarian terms, turns out to be a defence of the caste system.Basically conservative, Hindu nationalism cannot disown the caste system norcan it radically reinterpret it as Gandhi did. Gandhi upheld the caste division butgave it, as Bhikhu Parekh shows in his seminal work on Gandhi, such apowerful egalitarian reinterpretation so as to rally the low and the outcastHindus in his nationalist struggle against Britain.18
All this leads to a larger question: can a nationalism that appeals only toreligion, ethnicity or language have an appeal in a country as diverse as India? Ihave dealt at some length with the religious and caste diversity of Hinduismbecause this paper is concerned with Hindu religious nationalism. But ethnicand linguistic diversity is just as imposing and pervasive as the religiousdiversity and I shall only allude to them here to grapple with the larger problemof diversity and nation.
There are 4635 distinct communities, as identified by the ‘Peoples of India’project the government undertook in 1986.19 Several criteria, such as castes,sub-castes, local and regional dialects or languages, ethnicity, religiouspractices and so forth have been considered in its definition of a community.Perhaps they are not precise enough, as some scholars have said, but I cite thisfigure simply to convey the magnitude of the country’s diversity.
India’s linguistic diversity is unimaginable: 35 languages spoken by morethan a million people each, and more than 22 000 dialects. A common languagefor the country is a lost cause. The nationalists wanted to make Hindi orHindustani the national language but they had to abandon their objective in themid-1960s in the face of fierce and violent opposition of the non-Hindispeaking people of the South, particularly of Tamil Nadu to it. In fact by re-organizing the country along the lines of distinct regional languages in 1956 theNehru government conceded, reluctantly, to the reality of the linguisticdiversity of the country. It is inconceivable that out of this diversity there could
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emerge an ethnic, religious or linguistic ethnie that could evolve a nationalistideology that would appeal to all . There are no ‘anciently established’majorities, to use Michael Walzer’s term for such ethnic-religious-linguisticmajorities, in India.20 There have been no English, Prussians, Piedmontese, theWASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) or the Punjabis, the Copts or theAlwaites to foist their kind of ethnic nation on other ethnic groups. About theonly group here, we may say somewhat facetiously, that has somewhat success-fully impressed the idea of an Indian nation on the rest of the country is one thatunmistakeably displays the diversities of India—and its absorption of foreigninfluences. Witness thus the minuscule group of Westernized, English speakingIndians—it is a super caste.
Is India a nation?
The author of the Indian national anthem said no. It cannot and should not be anation said the bard, Rabindranath Tagore, in 1917, when Indian nationalismwas still in the making. He was against the very idea of the nation because hethought the nation was destructive of civilization which he deeply valued.Unlike Herder, he thought that nation and culture were antagonistic. He alsothought, as he said in his essay, ‘Nationalism’, that India, unlike Europe, wastoo diverse to become a nation:
Her problem was the problem of the world miniature. India is too vast inits area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in onegeographical receptable. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is,namely one country made into many.21
Tagore’s point that India is too diverse to be a nation should be kept in mindwhile assessing the India nation building project of the past 50 years. Here is avery broad assessment of it. India is not a nation-state as the Indian nationalistshave been attempting to make her since independence. Both the Nehruvian andHindu nationalists think, indeed like many Third World nationalists, that this isthe most desirable form of political organization. For them the model nation-states are those of their colonizers, Britain and France. They only knew aboutthem when they began their nation building enterprise.
Both the Nehruvian and Hindu nationalists seek to build India into a nation-state, but they differ, not very greatly, on how to build it. For the former, it isthe state that is the principal instrument of forging a modern Indian nation; forthe latter the state but also the Hindu religion and culture that are the instru-ments for building an Indian nation-state.
I maintain that the Indian state, though vastly effective in safeguarding thecountry’s territorial integrity and perhaps in building a huge étatist economy,has largely failed in laying the basis of nationhood. On two vital issues it hasfailed in the rôle of a nation builder: national language and common civil code.Here are the bare facts relating to these issues. The Constitution of 1950 haddecreed that Hindi, along with English (described as the official associatelanguage of the Indian Union) was to be the official language of the country and15 years hence, in 1965, it was to become its only official language. A commoncivil code for all Indians, regardless of their religious affiliations, is prescribed
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by the Directive Principles of the Constitution.On both issues the wielders of the state power retreated and have given them
up, perhaps now for good. The Congress Party commanding an imposingmajority in Parliament and Nehru enjoying an immense personal popularity inthe country could not carry through their policy plank of Hindi as the nationallanguage in the face of opposition to it from the non-Hindi speaking area of theSouth. In 1965, the time when Hindi was to come into force as the nationallanguage of the country, there were violent demonstrations against the moveand the government abandoned it.
The Hindu nationalists are more fervently committed than the Nehruviannationalists to the cause of Hindi, and yet they too realize that they cannotsustain it without alienating the non-Hindi speaking peoples of the country.Both streams of Indian nationalism must resign themselves to living withEnglish, a language of a tiny minority, and the consequent cultural estrange-ment between it and the vast majority of the ‘population’.
The common civil code issue surfaced with what is called the Shah Banuaffair in 1985. Shah Banu, a Muslim divorcee, sued her husband in the court oflaw, asking for alimony on the ground that as an Indian citizen she was entitledto do so under the prevailing common civil code. In a judgement of criticalimportance that involved the sensitive issue of the personal code of a religiousminority versus the common civil code prescribed by the Directive Principles ofthe Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that Shah Banu had the rightto receive alimony from her husband. In other words, the court upheld theIndian Civil Code over the Muslim personal law, the Shariat laws.
Fearful of Muslim reaction to what they perceived to be the judiciary’s inter-vention in the Muslim personal law, the Rajiv government enacted the MuslimWomen’s Bill in 1986. What in effect it says is that the Shariat laws are bindingon a Muslim woman. Thus an Indian citizen belonging to a particular religiouscommunity is legally denied the right to appeal under the provisions of theIndian Civil Code to which all other Indian citizens can appeal to.
The Nehruvian nationalists, who believe that a common legal system is thebasis of a civic nation, conceded to the Muslim demand that they be governedby their religious laws. The Hindu nationalists who have consistently advocateda common civil code for all have also dropped their advocacy, at least for awhile, out of fear that this would be seen as intolerance on their part of thecountry’s religious diversity.
Without making any judgement as to the desirability or otherwise of having anational language and a common civil code, let me say that on both these issuesthe Indian state failed in its nation building rôle. The opposition the governmentfaced on the language and common civil codes issues could have been easilyhandled by a state that has faced far more difficult law and order situations. Ithas successfully but rather repressively quelled strife and unrest in Punjab andKashmir in recent years. Yet on the language issue the wielders of state powerwere unwilling to use it to evolve a national language for the country. Here thestate could not and would not do what the post-revolutionary French state did:forge a standard written and spoken French out of myriads of patios.22 In thepost-War years the state has brought about democratically a fair degree oflinguistic homogenization in Italy and Israel.
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A common civil code too could have been legislated if those in power, theCongress Party under Rajiv Gandhi, had used state power to legislate it. Theopposition to it of the orthodox Muslim was rather weak and unorganized, andit could have been dealt with by the state without much use of force.
The point I am making here is that those commanding state power are reluc-tant and even unwilling to use it on issues of language, caste or religion. Inother words, they largely refrain from using the state power for social transfor-mation. Is this because they respect the old religious, linguistic or castediversities or is it because they think that levelling them would result in largedomestic unrest? Whatever the answer, this vindicates, at least partly, Tagore’sproposition that India is too diverse to be a nation.
Perhaps one can still argue that a country can be regarded as a nation despitethe absence of a national language. Multilingualism characterizes manycountries today, even the old ones which became monolingual either as a resultof state policies or other factors. Immigration and increasing assertiveness ofminority linguistic communities within a country also raise doubts about thesurvival of monolingual nations.
However, what we are witnessing in India is an ungainly mix of multi-lingualism and monolingualism. By the linguistic reorganization in 1956 of thecountry which replaced the old administrative division of the Raj, the ver-nacular languages began to revive within their linguistic boundaries.
But a single language, English, is superimposed on top of these vernacularlanguages. A language spoken by 2 per cent of the people is for all practicalpurposes the link language of the country. It is the language of power andprivileges and a language whose knowledge is necessary for one to gain highpositions in business, industry and government. Some multilingual developingcountries, unable to evolve a national language from their indigenouslanguages, have made the language of their colonizers their national language.But they pay the price for its perpetuation: permanent cultural estrangementbetween the elite and the masses.23
Inability to devise a common civil code for all Indian citizens is also a majorimpediment to India becoming a nation-state. I discuss here the issue of thecommon civil code in the larger context of the question of citizenship. TheIndian concept of citizenship, entirely derived from the British and Americanconcepts, is that anyone born or residing in the country for a stipulated length oftime is an Indian citizen. But apart from the juridical meaning of citizenshipthere is also its political meaning: equality of all those living in a giventerritory. It is in this sense that it becomes a basis of the nation. That all livingin a particular territory, are equal, is a potent idea to dissolve ascriptive com-munities based on religion, birth privileges, race or any affective ties. France isa good example of nation building by the citizenship principle (jus soli).24 Thefamous remark of a deputy of the Centre, Clermont Tonnere, apropos thepassage of the Jewish Emancipation Bill in the French National Assembly in1791 pithily says what it means to be a French citizen. ‘One must refuse every-thing to the Jews as a nation and give everything to the Jews as individuals.’25
The Indian state does not say something like this to Muslim citizens.The Indian state has been most diffident in using its vast powers to extend the
principle of citizenship to ascriptive communities. I cited earlier the Shah Banu
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case to show the failure of the Indian state to uphold the right of a Muslimwoman to appeal under the prevailing common civil code. There are many otherinstances of the state compromising the citizenship principle in favour ofcommunity rights. In fact the Indian state relates itself more readily to com-munities than to individuals.
I thus maintain that India is a failed nation-state. But it is a fairly viablemulticultural state. The scale of its diversity is well described by the lateMexican poet and diplomat, Octavio Paz, who calls it an ‘ethnographic andhistorical museum. But it is a living museum, one in which the most moderncoexists with archaicisms that have survived for millennia.’26
Paz’s portrayal of India, though somewhat hyperbolic, is reasonably accurate.What it fails to note, however, is how this museum is held together. There is themighty Indian state which strictly regulates the entry of the outsiders to themuseum, determines to the extent it can, the order of its exhibits and above all,ensures that it remains one entity. It severely punishes all attempts to divide itsassets: for example, the secessionist movements in Punjab and Kashmir inrecent years.
However, had the coercive power of the state been the only basis of Indianunity, it would not have survived for 50 years. It could have gone the way of theUSSR. What holds this ethnographic and historical museum and present daymoving mosaic together is that it is managed by the consent of all. Repre-sentative democracy permits this management of diversity; it also furnisheslegitimacy in the use of state power. So long as the state refrains from levellingthese diversities in the name of the nation, it can manage them successfully27—so perhaps India is not inevitably doomed to be a failed nation-state.
Notes and references
1 Today these nationalists together form what is called a Sangh Parivar, anextended family, and it notably consists of the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, areligious political organization founded in 1964 and the Rastriya SwayamsevakSangh, a founding (1924) organization of the Hindu nationalists. There arenumerous other organizations which also belong to this Sangh Parivar. To avoidusing foreign words, I shall refer to Parivar as Hindu nationalists—though it isopen to question whether they are Hindus in the real liberal tradition or realnationalist bigots.
2 L. K. Advani, Press Statement, 1987.3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition, Verso, New York,
1991, p 24.4 See V. D. Savarkar, Historic Statements, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1967; and
M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Vikrama Prakashan, Bangalore, 1966.5 Sheldon Pollock, ‘Ramayana and Political Imagination in India’, The Journal of
Asian Studies, Vol 52, No 2, May 1993, pp 261–297.6 Christoph Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, Viking, 1996, pp 400–401.7 Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory, Edward Elgar Publishing,
Cheltenham, 1996, pp 68–80.8 K. Govindacharya, 1992.9 L. K. Advani, Interview, Organizer, February 1993.
10 Linda Colley, Britons Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, Yale University Press,
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New Haven, 1992, p 54.11 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1992, pp 91–188.12 Quigley, 1993, p 129.13 Ainslie T. Embree, Imagining India, edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Oxford
University Press, New Delhi, 1989, pp 9–40.14 See Subrata K. Mithra, ‘Caste Democracy and Politics of Community Formation
in India’, in Mary Searle Chatterjee and Ursula Sharma, eds, ContextualisingCaste, Blackwell, Cambr idge, pp 49–71; and D. L. Sheth, Caste and theSecularization Process in India, Unpublished, 1998, pp 1–34.
15 See V. B. Singh and Malik K. Yogendra, Hindu Nationalists in India: The Rise ofthe Bharatiya Janata Party, Westview Press, Boulder, 1994, pp 127–177.
16 See Lajpat Rai, A History of Arya Samaj, Orient Longman, Bombay, 1967.17 M. S. Golwalkar, Deendayal Upadhyaya and D. B. Thengads, Integral Approach,
Suruchi Prakashan, New Delhi, 1991.18 Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, Sage, New Delhi, 1989,
pp 207–246.19 K. S. Singh, People of India: An Introduction, Anthropological Survey of India,
Calcutta, 1992, pp 1–50.20 Michael Walzer, ‘What does it Mean to be an American?’, Social Research, Vol
57, No 3, Fall 1990, pp 591–614.21 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, Macmillan, London, 1917, p 123– though
arguably the reverse is happening in Europe now.22 Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France,
1870–1914 , Chatto & Windus, London, 1979.23 Hobsbawn, 1996, pp 1064–1079.24 Roger Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp 1–33.25 Clermont Tonnere quoted in Michael Walzer, What it Means to Be an American,
East-West Press, New Delhi, 1994, p 43.26 Octavio Paz, In Light of India, The Harvill Press, London, 1997, p 75.27 Bharat Wariavwalla, ‘Okonomische Liberalisierung und politischer fundamental-
ismus’, Comparative Jahrgang, 1994, Heft 6, pp 78–92.
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