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IIn his autobiography, French socialist intellectual Andre Malraux narrated the story of a meeting he had with Jawaharlal Nehru in 1958. What, Malraux asked Nehru, was the greatest challenge he faced as prime minister? “Creating a just state by just means,” replied Nehru without hesitation. Then, after a revealing pause, he added, “Perhaps, too, creating a secular state in a religious country.”

THE FURY: A burning Gujarat reflected the tenacity of secular ties

Fifty-five years after Independence, the Nehruvian ideal remains woefully unrealised. On paper, India is unquestionably a secular state with secure constitutional guarantees for all citizens. Yet, at a social and political level, secularism seems a delightful and, occasionally, a grotesque abstraction. If Britain—the country that shaped India’s Constitution—is a denominational state with a secular society, India is a secular state with a society divided along religious lines.

Since the early-1980s, the fires of sectarian conflict have been burning with varying intensity, pitting Indian against Indian. Historical memories, religious wounds and political manipulation have together generated a fierce communal rage that is destroying the soul of India. The otherwise sane and sober people are mouthing intolerance and even sanctioning horrific acts of violence and murder. Hate has become respectable and the consensus of tolerance and accommodation is being challenged.

IN THE NAME OF GOD: The Ram temple agitation not only weaved together all strands of Hindutva but also became an excuse for unleashing latent anti-minority sentiments

In a grim reminder of the Partition years, India has again become compartmentalised into Hindu, Muslim, Christian and other categories. The vision of a unified nationhood is at a discount. “The corruption of the soul has a new avatar—it is called religious fanaticism,” says Bangalore-based writer Anita Nair.

What is ominous is the intensity of feeling. Communal riots are not new to India, and prophets of doom and social collapse have been proved wrong on innumerable occasions. Yet, what happened in Gujarat is frightening in sheer magnitude. If the estimates of mob size in the firs registered are totalled, some 12 lakh citizens participated in the orgy of destruction and murder. The self-deluding belief that riots are the handiwork of lumpens and outsiders doesn’t ring true any longer. Rioting has assumed the dimensions of a mass activity, involving the middle classes too. Worse, there have been small but unpublicised copy-cat riots in Kaithal and Loharu towns of Haryana. Rajasthan too is simmering.

Even vhp’s ebullient International General Secretary Praveen Togadia sees something menacing in the explosion created by his own organisation. “The heat generated by Hindus is too much for a person like me steeped in the RSS culture of discipline and decorum. The Hindu youth seem to be looking for a Prabhakaran (LTTE leader).” For once, Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy is right: “It must be terrifying to be a Muslim in this country today.”n

The Birth of Intolerance

LOST CAUSE: Muslim youth seeking an identity found it in bin Laden’s Islamism

“In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison.” Salman Rushdie, writer

The Indian Constitution was born of tremendously lofty ideals, the most important of which was to fashion a new Indian citizen. “The people,” philosopher-statesman S. Radhakrishnan told the Constituent Assembly in December 1946, “whether they are Hindus or Muslims, princes or peasants, belong to this country ... It is not possible for us to think that we belong to separate identities.”

It was a noble vision, particularly when set against the daunting backdrop of a vocal and vibrant democracy. It was also a vision riddled with imperfections and unanswered questions. The Congress posited a secular India—as distinguished from the confessional state of Pakistan—but the ground rules of secularism were left vague. There was a good reason for this ambiguity: very divergent views on the subject.

Mahatma Gandhi was a deeply religious man and he could never countenance the separation of religious morality from political conduct. Nehru, on the other hand, was an agnostic who saw religion as an intensely private matter. Then there were leaders like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad who saw secularism as a matter of pragmatism.

The contradictions were bound to surface. There was a mismatch between a desire to be interventionist and protecting minority rights. For example, only minorities were given the right to establish and manage their own educational institutions—a privilege that led to the Ramakrishna Mission (unsuccessfully) claiming non-Hindu status in 1984. The directive principles pointed to a uniform civil code but in practice it was only the Hindu family law that was changed. When the Supreme Court granted a Muslim woman alimony in its 1985 Shah Bano judgement, the Rajiv Gandhi government moved quickly to overturn it by law. Today, the uniform civil code provokes a strident secular veto. Indian secularism was, in practice, sandwiched between intrusiveness, neutrality and an indifference to religion. There were occasional voices raised against the state’s alleged insensitivity to majority sentiments—as during the 1966 agitation for a ban on cow slaughter—but there was a broad political and social consensus in favour of just blundering along.

It was the BJP that destroyed the uneasy compromise. In an attempt to offset the Congress’ faithful Muslim vote bank, it proceeded to create its own parallel Hindu vote bank. In an aggressive campaign, it sought to nurture a sense of Hindu grievance over the Congress’ so-called appeasement of minorities. The then BJP president L.K. Advani crafted the term “pseudo-secularism” which captured the middle-class Hindu disquiet over disparate events like Sikh terrorism in Punjab, the exodus of Hindus from the Kashmir Valley and global Islamic militancy in the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution.

A sense of Hindu grievance was also fostered by a wave of secular overkill by Indira Gandhi after the Congress split in 1969. Anxious to nurture a radical constituency, she hit out at “reactionaries” and “communalists” and sought the help of the Left. As a political strategy it paid handsome dividends in the 1971 general election but the purge of the Congress old guard had some unwholesome consequences. First, the Congress became a personalised outfit centred on the Nehru-Gandhi family. Consequently, it was more prone to looking for immediate short-term gains, like encouraging Sikh extremists against the Akali Dal in Punjab. Second, the Congress always had a soft Hindu underbelly that could cushion and even accommodate Hindu religious politics within an acceptable framework. Indira Gandhi’s purge left this flank unattended and exposed to the BJP

The Ram Janmabhoomi movement which climaxed in the destruction of the Babri masjid was undeniably the issue that destroyed the secular consensus. The Ram temple agitation brought together all the strands of Hindutva that had never found a coherent focus. Its appeal was undeniably religious—the venerated figure of an epic hero-cum-God. Its imagery was historical—the sublimated but collective memory of temple destruction by past Muslim rulers. Its thrust was political—to identify the BJP as a party of all Hindus, not merely some castes. And its consequences were devastating—riots all over India between 1989 and 1993 and a resulting communal polarisation. The BJP rode to power on the shoulders of the Ayodhya movement. Today, it neither has the will nor the legitimacy to disown a movement that gave Hindus a sense of machismo.

But it is not the Hindus alone who were communalised. The growth of Islamic fundamentalism has proceeded along parallel lines—but as a global phenomenon. This has resulted in the mushrooming of foreign-funded madarsas throughout the country but most notably along India’s borders and a deification of Islamism by youngsters seeking an identity and bravado.

The link between Islamism and terrorist groups targeting India in Kashmir and elsewhere, created an explosive situation and snapped Hindu tolerance. Even after the growing domestic and international hostility following 9/11, Muslim leaders like Delhi’s Shahi Imam stood defiantly behind Osama bin Laden, espousing a fanatical cause. The Islamist posturing forced an entire community into the ghettos. The bonding that is a prerequisite for common citizenship broke down. Some would say irredeemably.