Meeting Dr Adeel Hussain after several years was a pleasure indeed. What added to the pleasure was the locus of our meeting, Lahore. It was his first visit to Lahore after 25 years. A young academic of Pakistani extraction, who currently teaches at Leiden University in the Netherlands but lives in Germany, possesses a set of talents, which truly makes him a unique prospect in the realm of academia.

Lawyer, intellectual historian, political theorist and a keen student of continental (Western) philosophy make a synthetic whole in his persona. His varied experience(s) while at the University of Berlin, University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and then at the University of Cambridge have given him an intellectual profundity that is very rare. On top of it, he speaks several languages and that gives him an extra edge over his peers, engaged in academic pursuits. I earnestly think Leiden University couldn’t get anyone better than Adeel to be at its politics and law faculty.

My first interaction with Adeel Hussain was at the South Asian Centre at the University of Cambridge where he was enrolled as an MPhil student in 2011. Prof Chris Bayly asked me to be his supervisor. This laid down the foundation of a lasting friendship. He was one of a very few graduate students at CSAS who had some connection with Pakistan. The majority consisted of Indian boys and girls.

Like previous occasions, we talked mostly about academics and eventually ended up discussing the current strife that India is confronting in the wake of the passage of the Citizen (Amendment) Act on December 11, 2019. As it is well known by now, it amended the Citizenship Act of 1955 by providing a path to Indian citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian people fleeing persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before December 2014. Muslims are not eligible.

This is the first time religion has been overtly used as a criterion for citizenship under Indian law. The rest of the column pertains to that particular part of our ruminative conversation. First of the three variables, he thought, contributing to the rise of Hindutva was the antipathy of the Hindu middle class towards the Muslims.

Ever since modernity entered the social landscape of the subcontinent, religion had acquired seminality as an identity marker. Reform movements like Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha (officially Akhil Bh rat Hind Mah sabh or All-India Hindu Grand-Assembly, established in 1915) with their exclusionary ideologies, gained substantial traction among the Hindu bourgeoisie.

It will not be out of place to mention that the establishment of Muslim League and Partition of Bengal (in 1905) also spurred Hindu stalwarts, like Madan Mohan Malaviya, to set up Hindu Mahasabha. The separate electorate under the Minto Morley Reforms persuaded Malaviya and people of his ilk rather decisively to found that organisation.

It was to the credit of Gandhi who brought the major chunk of these reform movements with extremist agendas within the nationalist political frame of the Indian National Congress. However, some of Sabhite elements retained their autonomous status. The ideology gained crucial importance from 1980s onwards.

With the inclusion of Ulema-i-Deoband in Congress, an equilibrium of sorts was struck and Congress could, therefore, lay claim to being an inclusionary party that also represented communities and factions other than the Hindus. Having said that, Adeel asserted, within the ranks of the Congress, Hindus outweighed other communities. It was the shrewd handling of the Congress leadership that the demonstration of Hindus’ belligerence towards the Muslims didn’t exceed tolerable limits. There was no doubt that Hindus accepted Muslim presence within Congress with a pinch of salt. People like Bal Ganga Dhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai and Madan Mohan Malaviya had been quite vociferous in their opposition to the Muslims.

The partition in 1947 and the establishment of Pakistan exacerbated the Hindu antipathy for the Muslims. The cult of Sheranwali in Delhi, Bal Thakrey’s Shiv Sena drew their legitimacy in the eyes of Hindus by invoking Muslim separatism that culminated into partition.

The second variable, according to him, was the caste orthodoxy, which is another identity marker. The caste system (Jati or varna system) is a Hindu-specific social organisation. Theoretically, Muslims don’t subscribe to it because their religion forbids such social hierarchy. Thus, in India that is supposed to be meant only for the Hindus, Muslims are obviously dis-enfranchised simply because they don’t fit into the caste frame that regulates Hindu social structure.

Plurality and democratic practice for over 70 years could not break the caste/jati girdles. Even Nehru’s much-trumpeted secularism failed to unhinge the firmly-rooted system of caste differentiation. That was one reason the Shuddhi movement failed to yield any tangible result because it was caste affiliation of a converted Hindu which could not be sorted. Caste system is not open to new entrants.

The third variable was Congress’ inability to keep Hindu Mahasabha, the mother organisation of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, under the umbrella of Congress. Adeel blamed Rajiv Gandhi for allowing anti-Congress elements to organise themselves as Bhartiya Janata Party. My own reading is that it was the emergency that Indra Gandhi promulgated in 1975, which discredited Congress and Janta Party emerged as an alternative under Morarji Desai. The bigger quandary was about the state sponsored secularism and elections being called after regular intervals, nevertheless Hindutva made its way as an alternative to Nehruvian secularism and established its sway as a dominant ideology that belies rationality. It is strange that a clownish character, Yogi Adityanath, is put in charge of India’s biggest state.

Despite all that has been done by Modi-led BJP government the resilience shown by the Indian civil society and the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University is commendable. The opposition to Modi is gaining strength with every passing day. We both concurred that it is the civil society, and not the Indian electorate, that holds the promise for a safe plural India. The problem, however, remains that the electorate, and not the civil society, has the power of ballot. Thus, plurality being a defining feature of democracy is threatened in India by its own electorate, yet another fact that belies rationality.