Intolerance as identity

The challenge before the Indian political leadership is to neutralise Narendra Modi, who uses religion to divide people, unlike Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi, who preached spiritual oneness of the whole universe.

"DIFFERENCE is the first sign of thought," Swami Vivekananda once said, "It is the clash of thought that awakens thought... Let each have his individual thought in religion. This thing exists already. Everyone is thinking in his own way, but this natural course has been obstructed all the time and is still being obstructed." In essence this is a definition of social identity, an identity that is validated by diversity, a pluralist nature; it is many faceted and is consequently, if paradoxically, visible as an identity. It was what Vivekananda saw in India and something he spoke about on many occasions. He also said: "Love for yourselves means love for all, for you are all one."

These are some of the thoughts of a great Hindu reformer and thinker, and are being used deliberately in the context of the present distortions that are being touted about by some self-appointed `leaders' of Hindus and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) claim his to be `theirs'. But more of them later.

Vivekananda was in the forefront of a tremendous social revival that eventually brought in Mahatma Gandhi and the movement for freedom; but it was he who first realised, and spoke of, the power of religion in India. "Each nation," he said in his lecture at Madras called "My Plan Of Campaign", "like each individual, has one theme in this life which is its centre, the principal note round which every other note comes to form the harmony. If any one nation attempts to throw off its national vitality, the direction that has become its own through the transmission of centuries, that nation dies... In India religious life forms the centre, the keynote of the whole music of national life... Social reform and politics has to be preached through that vitality of your religion. Every man has to make his own choice, so has every nation. We made our choice centuries ago." But he also said: "The other great idea that the world wants from us today is that eternal grand idea of the spiritual oneness of the whole universe... that you and I are not only brothers, but that you and I are really one..." In our diversity, in our different faiths, we were, according to him, really one.

Gandhi too realised the immense power that religion had in India, and that, with the diversity in religious beliefs could be used to define India's identity in very compelling terms. The goal was then freedom from colonial oppression, freedom as an assertion of human dignity, and the fervour in the masses was embodied, not unintentionally, by the image of the Mahatma. The Eton and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru could not have embodied it, even though he had the personality to take the huge movement forward; the down-to-earth, shrewd Sardar Patel could not have done it and knew he could not. Only the image of the Mahatma, clad in his loincloth, holding his daily prayer meetings, the metaphor of religious devotion, could.

The folly of it all, was, of course, that no one had really thought out what they would do after freedom came. Nothing else explains the hasty, almost careless putting together of the structures of power, keeping much of what the colonial rulers had set up for their own purposes, adding a little here and a little there. The Governors were replaced by Ministers and many of them had little idea of what to do except do what the civil servants who had served the colonial rulers loyally as long as they were there told them to do.

Separately, a more coldly rational road to power had been worked out, on a kind of Hinduism that would have appalled Swami Vivekananda. "Everything that is common with our enemies weakens our power of opposing them... The necessity of creating a bitter sense of wrong and invoking the power of undying resistance especially in India that had under the opiates of Universalism and non-violence lost the faculty even of resisting sin and crime and aggression, could best be accomplished by cutting off even the semblance of a common worship..." This was written by V.D. Savarkar in his book Hindutva. This was the road that the VHP and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) have been taking for decades now; they see intolerance as strength, not diversity intolerance translates into uniting as Hindus, of making a clear difference between them and the others, those whom they now find it fashionable to call `pseudo-secularists'.

This is the belief that has logically led to the policy and strategy being used by Narendra Modi in his bid to keep political power. Use religion (very clever, that; it was what both Vivekananda and Gandhi had realised long before him) but use it to isolate, not to unite. Use it to foment hate, not love. Split the people who have been known for centuries as Gujaratis into Gujarati Hindus and Gujarati Muslims, or, in Modi-speak, Gujaratis and Muslims. Do it by murdering hundreds of them, raping their women and looting their properties. Looting is another canny strategy much loved by Modi's mobs; they actually came up in their Ford Ikons and Esteems to take things away from Muslim-owned shops. Of course the Muslims had made one fatal mistake; being Gujaratis they were successful businessmen and had built up fairly substantial shops and departmental stores. It was then so easy for Modi's creatures to incite mobs to loot these shops, while Modi kept the police away from this part of his strategy. It would not have done if the law had acted to defend Muslims; the isolation had to be felt in every possible way. Isolation. Elimination.

How familiar it all is. Modi could never have been a part of a minority community anywhere. To be a part of a minority in the midst of a hostile majority needs courage and faith. Imagine Modi as a Jew in Nazi Germany; he simply would never have been one. He would have lost no time in being on the side of the majority putting on the jackboots and the swastika (the swastika!) of the Nazi Party. Then he would have all the courage that he now professes. At bottom the man is, of course, a coward, fear writ all over him. Take him to Pakistan and he would wet himself. As Graham Greene said, `Hate is the automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.'

Here, safely in Gujarat, Modi sees the value and the potential of hate, the refusal to tolerate the way others live, unless it is completely subservient to your way of life and even that will not do. M.L. Sondhi (admittedly now an embittered man) once told me that I would be hopelessly wrong if I thought that all that talk about throwing Muslims into the sea, or pushing them into Pakistan was mere rhetoric; they actually mean it very seriously.

That is, he said, in fact Modi's agenda, what he has in mind in the long term. His jeering "Hum do hamare pachees" (We two and our 25) was not just abuse; it was abuse with a motive behind it.

Not today, perhaps, but in the not-so-distant future he is going to use hate and intolerance endlessly to whip up the hysteria that is necessary to bring his plan about. And he will snap his fingers at the increasingly impotent leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party, push them aside as Hindenburg was pushed aside, and determine how to go ahead with his vicious version of a Hindu rashtra: how to isolate the enemy Savarkar wrote about, how to eliminate them. Think back, for a moment to what Vivekananda said. You and I are really one. It has been a long road from there to the darkness of the present day.

If the central leadership of his party has any sense left it will stop him now. Whatever the election results, he is an evil force that no party that professes the welfare of the country can tolerate. Do they not see the abomination he has made of the word `patriotic'? And if they cannot, if they refuse to act or are incapable of acting, everyone else who is concerned about the country's future, about the democracy that we have, in some form or the other, kept going, need to confront this monster and strip from him the facade of being a political leader. This is the true challenge before the other political parties, and the only one; this is one battle they must take on, if they are indeed leaders who care for their country, irrespective of the elections, and they must make sure they succeed in neutralising him.