Contempt, Charity And Cleansing

Such Hindus may or may not form a majority; but that they are numerous enough to matter is suggested by the Sonia phenomenon. I did not think it possible that her entry into active politics would change anyones mind, but it has. She has drawn crowds and evoked enthusiasm; as a result, new life has been breathed into the Congress. Obviously those crowds do not care a hoot that she is an Italian Catholic by birth; for them, those who paint red dots on their foreheads, who wear brown vegetable seed necklaces, or who mistake incomprehensible Sanskrit for everyday Hindi are Indians, but not the only Indians. For them, anyone who loves India, anyone who cares for its people, is an Indian. These Indians, however unpatriotic they might seem to the orthodox BJP cadres, have votes enough votes to matter at election times.

 

However, mercenary considerations may not have entered Vajpayees mind when he rejected the view attributed to him; he may genuinely be averse to it. I am prepared to entertain this possibility in view of the fact that Vajpayee is old enough to have encountered this view in another context. For our British rulers, who briefly imprisoned Vajpayee, thought in exactly the same way about Indians Hindu, Muslim, Christian, the whole lot. Consider the following view expressed by Charles Grant in his Observations on the state of society among the Asiatics of Great Britain:

We cannot avoid recognising in the people of Hindostan, a race of men lamentably degenerate and base, retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation; yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by a great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices, in a country peculiarly calculated by its natural advantages to promote the prosperity of its inhabitants.

That is tiraskar in nineteenth-century language; although later it was not so frankly expressed, the British continued till the end to think rather poorly of Indians. Nor was it confined to the British; the westerners in general agreed with their view.

Then there was the view that the Indians were poor, unfortunate wretches who needed to be helped out of their stupor. This was the approach of the English church: it translated itself into gifts of old clothes, schools for poor Christians, and jobs in the railways for Anglo-Indians. The British in India did not do much charity, but that did not prevent them from being charitable.

And finally, cleansing. The British did a lot of it in early days: they extirpated the thugs, pacified the country, banned suttee, and started paying civil servants regularly. Macaulays minute on education was all about the replacement of corrupt oriental ways of thought by British rationalism. Today we think quite favourably of that minute because all middle-class Indians from Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Jyoti Basu are products of western education; but at the time it was written, it was a pretty patronising document.

That was how the British thought about us. Amongst them too there were debates about whether to treat Indians with contempt, with charity or to purify them. In the end, however, none of the three worked; the British simply lost India because they could not work out a viable way of living with Indians. Indians found all three treatments odious, and made a sufficient nuisance of themselves to persuade the British to leave.

The Muslims cannot persuade the Hindus to leave; the Hindus are too numerous. But nor can the Hindus the Muslims, who are also too many. Bal Thackerays threats to throw Muslims into the Arabian Sea were just so much hot air; it has escaped, and now he has changed his message.

Thus it seems to me that the line of thought attributed to Vajpayee is impractical and can lead us nowhere; but in getting there, its pursuit can lead to much conflict and misery. It did in the British era, and the end came, two hundred years later, with separation. In our democracy, the end must be the abandonment of a politically unattainable chimera; whether that end is reached quickly or slowly, painfully or painlessly, is the choice faced by the Hindu joint family. The sooner the choice is made, the more distress we will be spared, and the further we will go. For we are very backward, others have stolen a march over us while we fought our internecine battles, and we have far to go.

Instead of contempt, we should think of brotherhood. Instead of charity, we should think of equality. Instead of cleansing, we should think of evolving a composite culture, which would be neither Hindu nor Muslim, neither northern nor southern, neither Sanskritic nor Arabic, but uniquely Indian. Indian Muslims are labourers, carpenters, musicians, filigree workers, silverfoil makers, waste-paper collectors. So are Indian Hindus. Let us keep this diversity; let it blossom. Let there be beauty queens, jazz players, flamenco dancers, opera singers, mountain climbers, indiscriminately Hindu, irretrievably Muslim. To Vajpayee, swadeshi means Indians can do it. These are the things Indians should do not just do by excluding others, but do better than others even things that only foreigners do now.