A misguided solution to the communal divide

As the communal divide has increasingly come to define the Indian political order, the London-based journalist, Hasan Suroor, has rushed into the arena with a radical solution — declaration of India as a “Hindu Rashtra”, albeit one that is founded on democratic principles.

Mr Suroor sets out his case with some clear propositions: India’s experiment with secularism, never particularly robust or widely accepted, has now broken down. The “national mood” has shifted irrevocably towards a “pro-majoritarian tilt”. Indeed, almost all Indian political parties have become anxious to exhibit their own affiliation with the Hindu faith.

Clearly, this situation calls for “exploring a pragmatic and more effective approach” to the national order: Mr Suroor finds this in declaring India as a “Hindu Rashtra”, one that would adopt Hinduism as its official creed. But this would not be a “majoritarian jackboot regime”; its model would be western-style Christian democracies, the best example being the United Kingdom. Though it has an established Church, the Church of England, the political order provides a legal framework that guarantees the rights of all citizens, regardless of their faith, and promises them justice and dignity in an equal society.

Mr Suroor is confident that India’s Hindu state would reflect these values — has not the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat himself repeatedly said that the Hindu state would be inclusive of all faiths and there would be no changes affected in the existing Constitution?

Like all quick-fix solutions to complex issues, Mr Suroor is on the wrong track both in terms of his diagnosis of the problem and the solution he so cavalierly offers.

The author’s intervention in the ongoing debate relating to the idea of India is born out of concerns due to the aggressive assertions of majoritarian authority and the systematic “Othering” of the Muslim community to project the supreme power of the Hindu majority. Why does Mr Suroor believe that this aggressiveness will abate and the democratic rule of law will prevail with the mere declaration of the Hindu Rashtra?

In fact, it is very likely that the formal emergence of the Hindu state will further empower majoritarian zealots and, rejecting any respect for constitutional norms, they will shape a national order that is intolerant, abusive and monolithic. Even without the official declaration of Hindu raj, are we not already witnessing the steady erosion of respect for democratic values, accompanied by the emasculation of institutions that should uphold them — the security forces, the media and the judiciary?

Western models are not particularly helpful as large sections of their population have distanced themselves from faith. Instead, Mr Suroor should have scrutinised the Israeli experience more closely — this so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” has institutionalised the privileged status of the Jewish community and the second-class status of its Arab citizens. It also frequently uses state laws and institutions to wreak violence and abuse on Arab citizens and millions of those who live in the occupied territories.

In his anxiety to promote his “solution”, the author overstates his case. Throughout his early residence in India, he only experienced Hindu-Muslim discord and saw no evidence of inter-communal camaraderie. Again, he asserts that, since the Babri Masjid demolition, “an entire generation of Muslims has grown up in a climate of anti-Muslim rhetoric and prejudice”, completely ignoring the two decades before Prime Minister Narendra Modi mobilised Hindu identity for electoral advantage. Even now, as he himself notes, there is no enthusiasm among Hindus for a hard Hindu Rashtra —their commitment to a united, modern and technologically-advanced India that pursues an independent foreign policy remains intact.

The author would have served his — and the national — purpose better if he, instead, had noted that popular support for the Bharatiya Janata Party has consistently remained around a mere 35 per cent, that this party has regularly been defeated in important state elections, and that there are widespread concerns about serious deficiencies in matters of governance — demonetisation, the pandemic, the economy, as well as political initiatives, such as those in Jammu and Kashmir, where the people remain disgruntled and violence continues, and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which remains unimplemented three years later.

Mr Suroor’s unifocal concentration on the Hindu-Muslim divide has prevented him from analysing the reality of the caste divide that undermines the projection of a monolithic “Hindu” community. He has also not looked closely at the wellsprings of Mr Modi’s electoral successes at national level — the pervasive unhappiness with the corruption associated with earlier Congress governments and, even now, the absence of a credible opposition to the ruling party.

Mr Suroor should have placed the Indian political experience in the context of global trends in favour of populist leaders — the sense of exclusion from the success narratives of globalisation, the mobilisation of populist leaders of sub-national identities for electoral benefit, the poor record of such leaders in power particularly during the pandemic, and the steady disenchantment of voters with populist appeals.

India’s democratic, pluralistic and accommodative order was not the creation of one person — Jawaharlal Nehru. He was only giving shape to the profound values that have shaped the national ethos over millennia — Mohan Bhagwat’s recent remarks affirm that this understanding is shared across the Indian political spectrum. Mr Suroor should not give up on this tradition so blithely.

The reviewer is a former diplomat