Bihar saves India

Dubai eye
The past week has been rather special. Even for a cynic like me, this has been a rare period of national pride. First there were all these spirited, fearless voices of civil society with writers, artists, filmmakers, academics and even scientists speaking out against the gathering darkness in India.
And now comes the tsunami of people’s revolt; the powerful voice of sanity from the land of Buddha and Ashoka helping India once again find its natural balance and poise. Bihar provided the catharsis that India badly needed.
It fell to the lot of the eternally stereotyped people of Bihar to show the emperor the reality of his clothes. In 1977, it was Bihar that gave the battle cry against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency tyranny.
In the winter of 1990 it was in the same state that the Ayodhya juggernaut of the original Hindutva strongman, Advani, was stopped in its tracks. Again it is in Bihar, on Advani’s 88th birthday, that the second coming of Hindutva has met its most humiliating defeat. On both occasions, it is the inimitable Lalu Yadav who turned out to be Hindutva’s tormentor.
But it’s not Lalu, the underrated Falstaff of Indian politics, but former Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar that Modi and the BJP are rightly wary of. With his clean, liberal image, fantastic record as an efficient administrator and broad acceptability across the political spectrum, he is best suited to take on Modi for the top job in the 2019 elections. To top it all, Nitish now has three chief ministerial terms under his belt a la Modi minus the scars of Gujarat.
In his desperation to unseat Nitish, Modi addressed nearly 40 rallies and turned the battle for Bihar into a very personal, nasty duel, putting his own prestige on line. Perpetually moaning about Nitish’s ‘betrayal’, he sounded less like a prime minister and more like a jilted lover. Little surprising then that the stunning outcome has set the cat among the pigeons in the BJP camp – with veterans like Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Yashwant Sinha demanding the scalps of Modi-Shah duo for the drubbing.
The biggies of world media like the New York Times, which have been increasingly critical of Modi’s tolerance and encouragement of Hindutva bigotry and violence, have been quick to hail the results as a strong rebuke and message to the prime minister: “Voters in the country’s third most populous state have sent Mr Modi a message: Put an end to the hatemongering!”
Indeed, speaking through the Bihar voters, India has sent a resounding message to powers that be: Divide the country in the name of false gods at your own peril. Hindutva’s cows have finally come home.
This vote, coupled with the valiant fight put up by the civil society to save the much abused Idea of India, has helped restore one’s faith in the tenacity and free spirited nature of the nation.
For all the hatred and venom systemically spewed by the Sangh and its numerous outfits all these years, and notwithstanding the ascendancy of the BJP, India remains magnanimous of spirit and tolerant in its character.
No wonder last year Modi had to endlessly chant the innocuous mantra of ‘development’, rather than peddle the Hindutva agenda, to rally broader support even when India had grown weary of the corruption and cluelessness of the Congress.
Secularism or its Indian variant embracing all faiths has been in the grain of this country. Long before the modern concept of tolerance and secularism caught up with the world, Ashoka, who embraced Buddhism after slaying thousands in Kalinga, passionately promoted and practised them.
As Prof Nayanjot Lahiri, author of ‘Ashoka in Ancient India’ suggests, India’s current rulers could learn a lesson or two from the great emperor. The seventh rock edict, one of the many installed by Ashoka across his vast realm, says that it is the Emperor’s wish that everywhere in his dominion all religious sects should live in peace and harmony.
Ashoka returned to this theme of proto-secularism in his twelfth edict, a supreme proclamation of respect for all religious and philosophical sects. Its core feature is the belief that there should be a public culture in which every sect honours every other (they “should learn and respect one another’s Dharma”).
One wonders if Mughal emperor Akbar was inspired by Ashoka when he came up with his own extreme idea of peaceful coexistence in the form of Deen-e-Ilahi, angering Muslim scholars.
India embraced this core philosophy of Ashoka when it became independent and gifted itself a new constitution. While the towering influence of Gandhi and the role of Ambedkar and other authors of the constitution must be lauded for following this ideal in letter and spirit, it is Nehru and the first line of leadership of greats such as Maulana Azad, Rajaji and many others who ensured that India stuck to a path of reason, tolerance and progress.
It is hardly surprising then that Nehru and his formidable legacy has become the chief target of the Hindutva brigade as it seeks to paint India saffron and hijack the national narrative.
After all, if India has remained a secular, plural democracy mirroring its awesome diversity and hasn’t unravelled the way Pakistan did, a great deal of credit goes to Nehru and the force of his liberal personality and his left-leaning humanist convictions.
Having ruled independent India in its first defining 17 years, Nehru, consciously or unconsciously, shaped the polity in his own image and defined its direction and worldview. He often wrote letters to the state chief ministers and kept a close watch on the state affairs and institutions to ensure India remained on the path of tolerance, secularism and inclusive growth.
He repeatedly warned against majoritarianism and went out of his way to ensure that the religious minorities did not feel left out of the national mainstream. Dilip Kumar, a Pathan born in Peshawar, was seen as the hero and face of the Nehruvian India.
Perhaps if Jinnah and Liaquat Ali had lived a little longer Pakistan would have carved itself a more stable path too without frequent political experiments and interruptions from the men in khaki.
Those who stayed out of India’s freedom struggle and never went to jail know only too well that without demolishing the foundation and legacy of an inclusive India as enshrined in the constitution, the structure of Hindu Rashtra cannot be raised.
Therefore, the current civil society movement to take back India and reclaim the Idea of India must be taken to its logical conclusion. Doubtless, the battle on the political front is crucial. Equally critical though, if not more, is to fight the scourge of communalism and hate in all forms and in all spheres of the national life.
The bouts of intolerance that we see everywhere today, the latest being the violence over Tipu Sultan’s birth anniversary, are the direct outcome of decades of relentless efforts by the RSS and its numerous outfits to poison impressionable minds and sow the seeds of communal hatred and venom.
It is an open secret that through its vast network of thousands of shakhas, schools and outfits such as Hindu Yuva Vahini and Durga Vahini, the RSS has been indoctrinating generations of Indians, much like the European fascist parties, raising them on an ideological diet of hatred, imagined historical slights and fear of the multiplying Muslims. The BJP government has already undertaken a massive exercise to rewrite all textbooks and history to reflect its own jaundiced worldview.
All those who care for India and its traditions of tolerance and pluralism and do not like to see it end up as a giant version of Hitler’s Germany must take on the forces of darkness and cleanse the body politic of the scourge of communalism. Intolerance is the biggest threat facing the country. This is the only way to reclaim the Idea of India.
The writer is a Middle East based columnist.
Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com