AUGUST 19, 2019 INDIA TODAY 35that the assertive Hindu mobilisation that began
with the Ayodhya movement and which found
some reflection in the elections of 2014 and 2019
was a sharp break from the ‘idea of India’ that had
moulded India’s emergence as an independent
country. This is highly debatable.
In any case, the invocation of ‘idea’ in the sin-
gular is deeply problematic. In a country as large
and varied as India, there were multiple currents.
There were enlightened constitutionalists such as
Gopal Krishna Gokhale who felt that freedom had
to be preceded by social and political modernity.
They were wary of uncontrolled mass involvement
in politics. Then there was the poet Rabindranath
Tagore whose love for India’s folk traditions was
accompanied by his sharp rejection of national-
ism and endorsement of universal values. Some
Muslim activists had misgivings over both the
very idea of nationalism and even a united India.
And finally, there were the likes of Periyar and B.R.
Ambedkar with a sharp focus on social liberation,
particularly the destruction of the caste system.
The India that regained its political sovereignty
in 1947 was not born of a single idea of nationhood.
It embraced many and, often contradictory, cur-
rents. The Nehruvian consensus that dominated
the intellectual space till the 1990s was one of the
important inputs. As was Hindu nationalism that,
in political terms, was a subterranean current
but held a greater sway over popular mentalities.
Gandhi recognised the importance of forging a
rainbow coalition and insisted that the first gov-
ernment of independent India should also include
non-Congress notables such as B.R. Ambedkar
and Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
In today’s India, the belief that Prime Min-
ister Narendra Modi is a political interloper who
has muscled his way to the centre stage taking
advantage of the venality and leadership short-
comings of the Congress and other ‘secular’ forces
is prevalent in some circles. It is based on two
questionable assumptions.
The first of these is the mistaken belief that the
terms of India’s post-Independence narrative were
set in stone and incorporated both the preference
for a ‘scientific temper’ and the constitutional
consensus. “The day of national cultures is rapidly
passing,” Nehru wrote with astonishing certitude
in his An Autobiography in 1936, “and the world
is becoming one cultural unit....” The real conflict
was between traditional cultures, often defined
by faith, and the “conquering scientific culture of
modern civilisation”. In practice, this implied that
India’s civilisational heritage, while important
as decorative trappings, was secondary in thebattle for the liberation of Bharat Mata from a thousand years
of slavery. The imagery of the nationalist movement—from
chants of ‘Vande Mataram’ to the twinning of Bharat Mata
with gau mata—was explicitly Hindu. This had been so since
the beginning of the 20th century, when Aurobindo equated
nationalism with the sanatan dharma and Lokmanya Tilak
twinned the celebrations of Ganesh and Shivaji into platforms
of self-rule. Religion, wrote historian William Gould in a study
of nationalist mobilisation in the 1930s and 1940s, “helped to
provide the necessary framework, space, discipline and mobili-
sation, and in the process the political meaning of ‘Hinduism’
was refined as an idea... (The) Hindu people were represented
as being coterminous with the Indian nation”.
This didn’t imply that India was perceived as a land for
Hindus—or what is now described as Indic religions. It meant
that the understanding of Indian as essentially Hindu—used in
the loosest and predominantly cultural sense—was part of the
national common sense.
It is pertinent to recall this facet of the Indian nationalist
legacy in the context of a raging debate since the 1990s. Con-
temporary ‘secular’ scholarship has attempted to demonstrate
Illustration by TANMOY CHAKRABORTY