Here, Yoginder Sikand interviews Dr. Goyal for Communalism Combat. He speaks, with an insiders view, of the singleminded perspective of the organization that militated against any wholistic, multi-cultural solutions to the communal problem right from the pre-partition era. He is also critical of the approach of large sections of secularists who have ignored vital aspects like education and history, and shunned any understanding of the liberative aspects of religion leaving a wide are open for communalists to manipulate.

Excerpts:

Q:  You were a fulltime member of the RSS since your matriculation. What made you turn into one of its most bitter critics? 

A:  As my work at the grassroots with the organisation progressed, I gradually began to realise that the RSS had no answer to any political question. The RSS was silent on what sort of society and economy it wanted to establish in its proposed Hindu Rashtra. It was silent on the issue of food shortage. Punjab witnessed a severe famine in 1945-46, and, as a fulltime RSS worker in Hoshirpur, I wrote to the RSS headquarters asking them what to do. They merely said that everything would be alright only if India were to become a Hindu Rashtra. This magic should certainly did not appeal to me.

Q:  What else promoted your dramatic ideological transformation? 

A:  Well, I was asking other questions also. For instance, what advice did the RSS have for the princely states? I got no answer. I also began to realise that had the RSS not engaged in poisonous propaganda, sections of the Muslim leadership would not have been interested in forming Pakistan.

Within the RSS, as an organization, I found no attempt to stop Partition. Later, I felt that the role of the RSS in the 1947 riots on both sides of the dividing line could be called more of a provocation that accelerated the Pakistan movement rather than decelerated it.

For instance, in west Pakistan, the role of the RSS was how to take non-Muslims out of Pakistan and not how to plan to keep them safely where they were. Non-Muslims formed between 30-40 per cent of the population in many areas. It would not have been easy to dislodge such a large population. The RSS however only organised retaliation in east Punjab rather than defence in west Punjab which I felt was very curious.

Q:  The RSS says that it seeks to liberate the Hindus and Hinduism. Would you say that they are expounding a Hindu Liberation theology?

A:  The RSS is not liberating but strangulating religion. Golwalkar himself was staunchly opposed to the liberative, progressive ideologies of Jainism and Buddhism. The RSS wants to throttle all liberative tendencies and contemplative, philosophic and humanistic currents, and replace them by a violent, combative, non-contemplative and rigidly authoritarian ideology.

Q:  What is the RSS view on the caste system?

A:  The RSS has never seriously challenged the caste system. They have never challenged those scriptures which ordain the caste system or the Varnashram Dharma. It has never repudiated what the Shankaracharya of Puri declared, forbidding temple entry to the dalits.

In fact in ’68 or ’69, Golwalker himself publicly advocated the caste system and said that the destruction of the caste system would mean the destruction of Hinduism itself.

Q:  It is said that by making a dalit lay the foundation stone of the proposed Ram temple at Ayodhya, the RSS has conclusively shown its opposition to caste?

A:  They asked a dalit to lay the foundation stone, alright. But if they are actually anti-caste, why have they not replaced even a single Brahmin priest by a Dalit for at least a non-Brahmin in even one of the numerous temples under their control?

Already you notice the status the RSS gives to women at a time when they are close to capturing power. Look at their primitive reaction to the recent Uma-Bharati-Govindacharya episode. Both of them are public figures and are unmarried. Even supposing there was something between them, why make such a hue and cry about it?

Q:  Why is it that traders in particular and the urban lower middle class, in general, provide the backbone of the support base of communal politics?

A:  Yes, this is true of all forms of communalism. This section feels most alienated, it has no group life. Generally, these people are objects of contempt since everybody suffers at their hands. Thus they crave for respectability, power and security; among them cult figures are very popular as it is ritualistic religion.

The poor, of course, have neither the time nor the resources for ritualistic religion. In the RSS, the lower middle class gets the “good life” that it so eagerly pines for. While others look down upon a shopkeeper, the RSS people will address him respectfully as ‘ji’ if he becomes an RSS activist. In a village, the RSS man who wants to set up a shakha will first contact the shopkeeper.

I remember that in Punjab, where the temple priests are looked down upon, RSS activists would first contact them to set up a shakha in the villages.

Q:  What do you have to say about the present attitude of the RSS towards the Congress party?

A:  The RSS is attempting to, if possible, convert the Congress into a BJP. There are only two ways of doing this – either by infiltrating its activists into the Congress, or by making the Congress believe that it has lost the Muslim vote and so it would be in the interests of the Congress itself to take up the RSS platform.

Q:  How did you begin your crusade against communalism?

A:  I left Punjab and came to Delhi and took up a teaching assignment at the Delhi University. Along with some close associates I set up the Sampradayikta Virodhi Committee. We began by closely examining the RSS periodicals, Organiser and Panchjanya. We took out relevant extracts, cyclostyled them and distributed the same among members of Parliament. Later, we launched Secular Democracy.

If a communal issue arises, students and teachers should be the first to react since they have the greatest access to information. In India, however, they react a bit too late, with the result that people’s passions have already been aroused and rational arguments and logic are the last thing they will listen to.

Take the case of the Ayodhya dispute. Secular historians reacted only two years after the issue had been blown out of all proportion by the communalists. No one from the university community has so far challenged the thesis that Jagmohan has propounded in his big tome on Kashmir.

Q:  What are the difficulties in combating communal biases within the educational system and what strategies could be used?

A:  The Indian education system is not free from communal bias, yet no one has bothered about the education system except for the RSS. It has sedulously sent its activists to infiltrate into schools. Most of the RSS workers I knew in the ‘40s later became school teachers.

The RSS-minded teachers invariably distort history. For instance, take this line in a history book, “Akbar was a very liberal ruler”, the RSS teacher merely adds the phrase, “Inspite of being a Muslim.” That’s enough: the whole image changes. The RSS leader says something and the RSS activists at various levels repeat the same thing in smaller doses.

This is a strategy that I emulated with our own pamphlets. Even though I drafted most of them, I released many of them under the names of other activists so that our work would be considered to be a body of opinion and not the view of merely one person. A body of opinion is far more effective than a single soul crying in the wilderness.

Instead of only writing profound historical treatises, they should write secular, progressive textbooks for school children so that secularism could be strengthened at the basic level itself. No one was prepared to do this.

Unlike the communalists, the secular mind in India has never submitted itself to organised, collective effort.

Q:  What about pressurising official bodies like the University Grants Commission to help secularists the educational system?

A:  I’ll give you an example of the apathy prevalent even in bodies like the UGC. I was on the advisory committee on biographies of the National Book Trust. I advised them to publish a biography of the late Maulana Hussain Ahmed Madni of the Jamiat-e-ulema-i-Hind. He was the first Muslim theologian to point out the distinction between quam (nation) and millat (community).

You will be shocked to know that the committee members had not even heard of Maulana Madni. I then asked the Indian Council of Historical Research and the UGC to translate his writings but they did not bother.

Q:  Are secular historians also to blame for neglecting crucial aspects of Indian social history?

A:  Yes, for instance, very little research has been done on comtemporary Muslim society, and nothing at all on the Muslim ulema. Take Bipan Chandra’s work on ‘Economic Nationalism in India’ which he says was first articulated by Naoroji and Gokhale. Actually, I am of the view that the first to expound “economic nationalism” in India was Maulvi Sayyed Ahmed Shaheed who led one of the first revolts against the British. He wrote several letters to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Scindia Raja and to others, exhorting them to drive out the British who had drained the country of its wealth.

What was this if not the origin of economic nationalism? Why has this been ignored in writing Indian history? We have been kept ignorant of a whole tradition.

We have forgotten that it was Babar who told his children that their rule will last so long as they treated their subjects as equals, irrespective of creed. I suppose you could call this a sort of rudimentary secularism.

We have also blindly accepted the European interpretation of Islam. The West forgets that Greek knowledge was carried to Europe by the Arabs, and that this proved to be the stimulus for the Renaissance. This contribution of Islam to the world is completely overlooked.

Q:  What, in your opinion, should be the attitude of secularists to religion?

A:  The secular opinion must not be offensive towards religion.

Liberation theology is a promising field where believers and others can make joint efforts. The essence of liberation theology is to liberate religion from the exploiters.

(This article appeared in the October 1994 issue of the monthly Communalism Combat that had a cover story, “Voices from Pakisan”; this article is on page 7)

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The post Did the RSS want Partition? An interview with Dr DR Goyal for Communalism Combat, October 1994 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Hate Speech can sound an ‘educated opinion’ or that is what Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) president Ravindra Narayan Singh, an orthopaedic surgeon, must be hoping people think, when he said Partition was a ‘cancer’ that was now in its ‘fourth stage’ in India. He was quick to ‘explain’ when asked pointedly by the media if he was describing Muslims in India as cancer, and said, “I am a doctor. So I was giving you just an example. That does not mean that I called them cancer.”

He claimed he was comparing the Partition of India leading to the creation of Pakistan to a surgery for removal of “cancer” reported the Indian Express. However, the implication of who, or which community chose to stay in India after Partition, is clear to all. According to Singh, this “cancer” has  reached the “fourth stage” in Independent India and now needs “chemotherapy”.

A clear implication that to him Muslims = “cancer”!

Singh was speaking to the media in Nagpur, Maharashtra, after laying the foundation for a new VHP building there. According to Singh, “When India was partitioned on the basis of religion, we had given a separate land for Muslims. Ye samjhiye ke hum apne desh se us cancer ko nikalna chahte the (It was akin to removing that cancer from our country). But, unfortunately, this did not succeed. Some Muslim brothers remained in India. We accepted them with magnanimity as per the Hindu tradition of ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ (the whole world is family) and ‘atithi devo bhava’ (guest is god).”

However, adding that it seemed to be a favour that Indian Muslims have been ‘allowed’ as it were to stay in their own country. Singh also hinted that Indian Muslims ‘should merge’ with his homogenous idea of India, and those who don’t will be ‘dissolved’ in the ‘homogenous river’. He said, “This does not mean that we get rid of 20 crore Muslims. You cannot ask them to leave the country. All I am saying is Muslims should live with us, like several rivers merge in Ganga and then together flow as Ganga only. There is no such thing as Ganga-Jamuni tahzeeb. I will not say hum se jo takraega wo chur ho jaega (those who clash with us will be torn to smithereens). I will say those who clash with us will dissolve in us, hum me wileen ho jaega.”

Treatment needed to save the ‘body’ and end this ‘cancer/ sickness’ 

According to him this ‘cancer’ has grown over seven decades since Independence, “Hum is baat ko bhool gaye ke cancer dheere dheere badhta hai. Aj 70 saal me wo ek fourth stage me aa kar hamare pure shareer me fail chuka hai. Is cancer ko hatane ke liye ab hamare paas bohot jyada vikalp nahi hai. Ab ise hatane ke liye hame chemotherapy ki vyavastha karni hai. Aisa treatment karna hai ke jisse shareer bhi bacha rahe aur bimaari bhi khatam ho. (But we forgot that this cancer slowly grows. In 70 years after Independence, it has reached the fourth stage and has now spread in the entire body. Now we don’t have many options to remove this cancer. We have to arrange for chemotherapy to remove it. We have to do such a treatment that the body will also survive and cancer, too, will be cured),” said Singh, as quoted by IE.

Singh invoked the ‘Muslim population is rising’ bogey as well as “Hindus are weakening” and added, “For this treatment, we have to become strong. We have seen that in the last 50 years Hindus have become weak due to two main reasons. One, due to lack of population control, disparity has grown between the population of Hindus and Muslims. If you have a building worth Rs 40 lakh, then they have 40 votes and the equations change due to that. This also results in weakening of our political standing.”

More Islamophobic drivel

Singh also accused Muslims of believing in “Ummah, where they don’t have a concept of a nation and hence they don’t have a concept of nationalism. They believe that the whole world should be of one religion.” 

He added it appears to protect himself, that “this does not mean that we get rid of 20 crore Muslims. You cannot ask them to leave the country. All I am saying is Muslims should live with us, like several rivers merge in Ganga and then together flow as Ganga only.”

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At the time of India-Pakistan partition, both the newly formed States were yearning for legitimacy and the moral support from its citizens. Trapped between the clashing egos of these countries, abducted women of different communities) became the biggest sufferers.

Three weeks after India and Pakistan achieved their independence as separate states, representatives of both dominions met on September 3, 1947, and agreed that steps should be taken to ‘recover’ and ‘restore’ abducted persons. Both sides pronounced themselves against the recognition of forced marriages.

The partition of the sub-continent was an immensely harrowing tragedy for people on both sides of the border. During this process, thousands of women were abducted, sexually violated, raped, and in many cases married to their abductors. This fact did not go down easy down the throat of the patriarchal leaders of the States. Therefore, in a bid to regain some of their legitimacy lost during the loss of life and dignity during partition, India and Pakistan entered into an agreement to mutually ‘restore’ their daughters to their home countries. The Hindu and Sikh women and girls from Pakistan and their Muslim counterparts in India, would be literally exchanged.

The approach taken led to, on the Indian side the ‘Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949’ that was passed by the Indian Government. The act would treat all mixed marital unions between Hindus and Muslims as forced unions in which abducted women were married off against their wishes. A method was prescribed for the rescue of such women and their subsequent restoration to their homes in India or Pakistan. The aim was to locate all the “abducted persons” in the territory of India, and detain them in temporary camps. For this, police officers designated by the government were empowered to locate and capture such persons which he believed or had the suspicion, were abducted. No warrant was required and complete immunity was offered by the law, to such officers in searching premises, conducting inquiries and detaining such persons. The job was assigned to the local police, assisted by one AIG, two DSPS, 5 inspectors, 10 SIs, 6 ASIS and social workers.

Under the act, “abducted person” meant a male child under the age of sixteen years or a female of whatever age who is, or immediately before the day, March 1, 1947, was, a Muslim and who, on or after that day and before the day, January 1, 1949, has become separated from his or her family and is found to be living with or under the control of any other individual or family, and in the latter case included a child born to any such female after the said date.

In their article “An exchange of Women”, Scholars Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin discuss that tracing such women was a near impossible task, and to accomplish it, Ads were placed in papers, giving details of missing women. These were then taken up by social workers on both sides of the border in Punjab, and verifications made. Social workers used all sorts of ruses to find out where the abducted women were, sometimes disguising themselves as bangle-sellers, or fruit-vendors. No captor was willing to give up his claims: they heard that women were spirited away, hidden in tandoors, disguised as sisters and mothers–but never voluntarily given up. One liaison officer, who worked in Lyallpur for nine months before formal treaties were drawn up by India and Pakistan, told them: “I would slap the women and tell them I’d shoot them if they didn’t tell me whether there was a Hindu woman in the neighbourhood. They would tell me because they were helpless their men were not around at the time.” He claimed to have ‘recovered’ 800-900 women from Lyallpur alone this way.

These arrangements not only denied women any agency in determining where they chose to live, or who they chose to marry, but also ignored the contingent nature of individual predicaments and the diverse and complex tapestries of human relationships. Thus, there were cases where women had married their “abductors,” had children, and preferred to live with these men instead of being sent back to their families. There were Hindu families who were reluctant to accept women who had had ‘sex with’, or ‘been impregnated’ or worse still had children by, men of the other religion. Chastity and purity were considerations that surfaced frequently, so pregnant women were more likely to be shunned, while women who had children would be taken back only on condition that they gave up these children of mixed unions to orphanages. Older women were vulnerable in other ways. If they owned property, younger men would force these women to “adopt” them, in order to inherit their property. (Niraj-Gopal-Jayal, ‘Citizenship and its Discontents’)

The paradigm of the “recovery” and “restoration” of women was a form of biological citizenship, as it entailed not only determining the religion (at birth) of a woman, almost as if it were a biological characteristic, but also her biological status as a woman whose body had been violated, impregnated, or otherwise defiled by union with a male of another religious community.

Women’s citizenship was thus produced by three concentric circles: first, the citizenship of her father or husband, second, religious identity, and—on the basis of both of these—her imputed national identity. This mapping of religious difference onto citizenship of the nation meant that not only could abducted women not choose their citizenship, as men theoretically could, the assumption was that India was the natural home for Hindu and Sikh women, while Muslim women were naturally Pakistani.

By the time the Abducted Persons Act was repealed in 1957, approximately 20,000 women had been so “recovered” and “restored” to the biological citizenship of their respective “natural” nations.

The above analyses leads to a number of observations. First, the aspect of the State claiming a ‘lien’ over these women in a patriarchal backdrop. This is in a way, an imposition of nationality and by itself, an act of claiming dominion over these women, regardless of their preference or choice. The State in this case became an abductor itself. Comparing this, to the situation of various migrants or refugee groups which ‘seek’ and beg the State for inclusion and citizenship, asserting their nationality and belonging towards it, and yet are denied the privilege of citizenship.

Secondly, the aspect of a ‘natural citizen’ is expanded and includes into its folds the ‘natural’ characteristics of persons which become the deal makers (or breakers) when it comes to deciding their citizenship. In this case, even though India had proclaimed itself to be secular, it was deemed natural that the Hindu and Sikh women were to belong to India and the Muslim women were to be sent to Pakistan. This kind of an approach blatantly violates secularism as well as logic. The ties to the ‘nation’ were deemed as stronger and superior even to the marital ties and individual agency in hierarchy of the various markers of citizenship an individual possesses.

Thirdly, there is an important provision in the Abducted Persons Act – the provision which decides that the children out of these marriages should be considered as citizens of the country their mother has been held a citizen of.

The Constituent Assembly discussed the following question: If only one parent was entitled in these cases to transmit filiation as a basis for establishing citizenship, was the relationship with the mother or with the father to be considered relevant for creating the necessary credentials for citizenship?

It was argued by Shrimati Durgabai in the Constituent Assembly, that it was not the joint labour of the man and the woman but the plunder by men of women’s bodies that had created these children. Hence, ‘‘What right has the abductor to keep the child? The child has to go with the mother.’’

This is in itself a new paradigm approach. Consider the question of the legality of the children born to the union of an illegal immigrant and a citizen. As per the India’s Citizenship Act, such a child is not to be given citizenship regardless of which of the parent is a citizen, and the fact that the child was born in India. It proves thus, that a marker of citizenship is not the alleged illegality of one of the parents, but the colour in which the State looks at the child thus born, based on the ‘natural’ characteristic of that child which may or may not be sufficient in establishing the child’s claim over citizenship. A child which is more ‘Indian’ is thus one which pleases the political State’s agenda. This kind of an approach is necessarily a departure from the Jus Soli approach and an embracing of a Jus Sanguinis approach, which itself suffers from moral defects and arbitrariness as a preeminent marker of citizenship.

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The post Rein’state’ed – The case of the ‘exchanged’ women at Partition appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Citizenship Amendment Bill, which was recently passed in both houses of the Parliament, has elicited diverse and negative responses all over India. On the one hand, we see massive protests in the North-East, leading to the death of four people. On the other hand, there is a severe discomfort among those upholding the Indian Constitution and among the Muslim community all over the country. This Bill, in its present form, gives the right of citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians persecuted in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. What is glaring is that Muslims are missing from the list. What is also glaring and dangerous is that while those persecuted in these countries have been offered citizenship, countries like Myanmar, where the worst sort of persecution against Muslims has been seen in recent years, donot find any place in the list. Also, even in the countries which are mentioned in the bill, there are sects of Muslims which are persecuted, but have been left out.

A lot has been written against the bill and its intention of converting our plural India into a Hindu Rashtra. What is also disturbing is that the defence of this Bill has been done by blaming the Congress party and by stating that partition was done on the basis of faith! Both these formulations are a total lie. Mr. Amit Shah, while speaking in the RajyaSabha in an aggressive manner, retorted that “Is deshkavibhajan agar dharma keaadhar par Congress nakarihoti to is Bill kakaamnahinhota.” (Had the Congress not partitioned this country on the basis of religion, there would have been no need for this Bill). In response,ShahshiTharoor of Congress said that Amit Shah was not paying attention during the History class. The facts lie somewhere else.

Mr. Shah was a RSS worker who later joined the RSS student wing, ABVP. Contrary to what ShashiTharoor is saying, Shah has imbibed the history taught by the RSS combine, and seriously internalized it. We recall that even NathuramGodse, the murderer of the Father of the Nation, held Gandhi, the patriarch of the Congress party, as being responsible for partition. This is believed by most of the Hindu nationalists. Religion as the basis of nationhood is, by and large,said to have begun with Savarkar and then Jinnah. As such, the story is much older. Before coming to the genesis of the idea of religion as the root of nationhood, we also need to remember that the British, the colonial masters, were the prime force in encouraging Muslim League on the one side and Hindu Mahasabha-RSS on the other.

The British, to begin with, saw these organizations as helpful in the pursuit of their ‘divide and rule’ policy. Later, close to the peaking of the National movement in 1942, they started keeping yet another angle in mind – that of the geo-political realities of those times. Russia had emerged as the major other pole in the power politics of the world. It was posing a challenge to the British-American hegemony. Russia was also inspiring the anti-colonial movements. Many of the leaders of the freedom movement were influenced by socialist ideology. Keeping this in mind, the division of India was one of the steps the British had in mind. The idea behind this was that they can retain their hold in the region through the yet-to-be-formed Pakistan.

Coming to the genesis of nationalism in the name of religion, it was the reaction of the declining classes, landlords and kings to the changing scenario, where through industrialization, communication and modern education, India was emerging as a secular democratic nation. Different groups, Madras Mahajan Sabha, Pune SarvajanikSabha, Bombay Association, representing the emerging classes and newer social changes, started coming up and they, together, formed the political organization, Indian National Congress in 1885. In response to this, the declining classes became very uncomfortable with the changes which were the root of equality. The feudal classes, landlords, kings of both religions were deeply shaken as the system of birth based hierarchy, on which they were presiding, started crumbling.

At this point of time, the Muslim section started saying that Islam is in danger and Hindu sections presented Hinduism to be in danger. As the Indian national organizations and parallel activities of education for dalits and women started picking up, the feudal classes saw it as an assault on the religiously ordained inequality. While these organizations, initially, had the participation of landlord-kings, later they succeeded in winning over other elites and, still later, sections of ordinary people. This is the foundation of religious nationalism-Muslim and Hindu. So, on the one hand, we had Indian nationalism, which can broadly be identified with Gandhi, Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh, while on the other hand, there was the Muslim League, formed in 1906; the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915 and the RSS in 1925. The latter groups harped on our ancient glorious past while the India nationalist stream saw the need for struggle against the prevalent inequality.

The articulation of religious nationalism comes with Savarkar, who saw Hindus and Muslims as two opponents, and Muslim League, which felt that the Hindu majority would not let them have equal rights. Hindu and Muslim nationalists spread hatred against each other, forming the base of intense communal violence in times to come.

It was the gravity of the communal violence which forced Congress to gradually accept Lord Mountbatten’s (March 1947) proposal of partitioning the country. Congress, in its resolutionaccepting the partition, stated that though it opposes the ‘Two Nation theory’ (of Savarkar, Jinnah, Golwalkar, Muslim League, Hindu Mahasabha and RSS), under the given circumstances, it seemed to be the lesser evil as compared to the communal venom which was engulfing the nation at the time. Here, again, VP Menon, the architect of thePartition Plan, points out that Patel ‘accepted the division of India in December 1946, while Nehru would only acquiesce six months later’.

Maulana Azad and Gandhi, did not accept the idea at all, but in the face of the rising communal tide, they had to keep quiet about it. In the Amit Shah-RSS narrative, Congress is blamed but Congress, leading the freedom movement, never accepted the idea of religion as the basis of nation.

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Daniya Rahman in conversation with Alok Sarin and Sanjeev Jain

 
The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India has been collated and edited by Alok Sarin, practising Clinical Psychiatrist at Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research, New Delhi and Sanjeev Jain, Professor of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru. The book tries to bring together the issues of partitioning and dividing the human experience, and its impact on the cultural life, including medical and psychological health. The contributors include social scientists, literary critics and psychiatrists, who try to engage in this debate at various levels. This diversity of approach emphasises the complexity of constructing issues related to mental health, at both an individual and societal level. This book is a reminder to the discipline of psychiatry that it must remain broad-based and multifaceted in its approach to address mental health problems and human suffering and is the editors’ attempt at initiating conversations both within and outside the field of psychiatry.

Image Courtesy: Scroll.in
Daniya Rahman:  One of the most powerful aspects of trauma, whether individual or collective, is the inability to speak of that trauma. Is that there isn’t as much oral evidence as one would expect in a public space? Or, is there oral evidence in languages other than English, which we do not have access to? Do you both think that Dr. Narendra Nath’s book The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India, was successfully able to provide the multidisciplinary gaze that you’d set out to depict?
Alok Sarin and Sanjeev Jain: We hope so. It is a multidisciplinary gaze, as the various historians and social scientist contributors to the volume attest. We did not have much access to resources in other languages, but have used first-hand accounts of doctors, workers and people as close to the ground as we could. The lack of voices is a persistent concern in all historical recapitulation, but the lack of any effort to chronicle and preserve these is major handicap. 

DR: As you have also discussed in your article, ‘Balm and Salve: The Effect of the Partition on Planning and Delivering Health Care’, the new colonial discourse of psychiatry opened up new dimensions to the understanding of the normal and the abnormal, through a systematisation of mental health conditions, what rupture did the event of partition make in that and how do you think, the Indian mental healthcare institutions dealt with the aftermath of partition?
SJ: There was no new colonial discourse on psychiatry as such. The majority of psychiatric services were in the mental hospitals, and the few other services do not seem to have left any records of specifically dealing with these issues. The psychiatrists at that time were all trained in the UK or the USA and were contributing to, and participating in the metropolitan medicine and psychiatry of the early 20th century. The partitioning of the patients of the mental hospitals was a process, that showed how even the most marginalised were ground up by the inexorable bureaucratic process of drawing lines that divided lands, bodies and minds. For a while, the teaching courses suggested that topics such as mob psychology be studied, but these were soon abandoned. Some psychiatrists did try to formulate a new vision for social psychiatry, but these too were ignored after a while, as psychiatry became very different from the 1960s. We had no generation of social scientists and psychiatrists (Hannah Arendt, William Reich, Erich Fromm, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi etc.) who would place trauma amongst other issues in the mainstream consciousness and conscience of the people.

DR: We see the survivors not being able to give voice to their experiences, how difficult was it dealing with such conditions, with the silence that came with the trauma of partition and the guilt and complicity that was the response of the collective trauma of this event?
AS: There are many different ways of looking at the themes of trauma, dislocation, migration, violence and disempowerment. To complicate this, the emotional overlays of sadness, guilt, remorse, despair and a sense of complicity will all influence the way that both individual and collective memory, respond and resolve, if at all. Our attempt is neither to replicate or to validate earlier work, nor to attempt a definitive answer- it is more an effort to interrogate the silences. We do this, in a sense, sideways, by looking at both the medical services and institutions, and by encouraging dialogue in the social sciences.

DR: Conversely, there is a debate regarding the place of the truth in the recounting of the survivors’ memory in a post-traumatic condition. How did the mental healthcare institutions, the public healthcare sector, and the government navigate that? What was the situation broadly, within the asylums, and other psychiatric institutions, in the wake of partition?
AS and SJ: We have tried to rely on documentation created during the period as eye-witness accounts.  Though there is apocryphal evidence of some ambiguities in the accounts, we have not been able to vouchsafe that. On the other hand, the numbers transferred across the border, the difference in numbers and concerns as what fate had befallen those who were unaccounted, debates of who (regional administration or the central) would look after these patients suggests that there was considerable confusion. A new asylum was hastily created in Amritsar, and plans for one in Delhi were drawn up. Details are in the book.

DR: What is the current situation like, with the new generations who have never directly experienced the violence of Partition, but have imbibed those memories through the narratives of others? Do they have a sense of inherited trauma being transmitted upon them? How are they dealing with it? How are the mental healthcare institutions dealing with it?
AS and SJ: Since we have never had a considered response, no formal accounting, no formal judicial or medical issues discussed (the special issue of the Indian Medical Gazette that was supposed to discuss this never appeared) there is little formal active discussion of these issues. It is part of a mythical past, a lost ‘paradise’, and the processes that caused this are justifiably looked at with some rancour. One is unsure about how people are ‘dealing with it’ means. It is not a conscious process, since there are no efforts to memorialise or acknowledge the events. How much this erasure from consciousness contributes to a social ennui and lack of ‘rootedness’ may be speculated upon. The regularity with which other partitions are created and fomented has been a political and psychological reality. What this fractured and fractionated sense of identity means to us in South Asia, both as professionals and citizens, should be a matter of concern. This concern is not palpable, and thus the concern about the ‘silence’.

Daniya Rahman is a member of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers’ Forum.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

The post Interrogating the Silence Around the Partition of India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

FOREWORD

These above mentioned nasty characteristics of the RSS are in full flow in the case of the recent Hindutva hoodlums’ attack on Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the name of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Here is a brief recap of the attack: The former Vice President of India, Hamid Ansari was to address students of AMU as part of awarding the life-time membership of the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union (AMUSU) ceremony on May 2, 2018. This programme of Ansari, the former VP of India had the clearance of the intelligence agencies and local state administration as per the protocol.

According to Ansari, his programme at AMU was publicly known and the authorities concerned had been officially intimated about the standard arrangements, including security for the occasions. Despite all this “the access of the intruders to close proximity of the university guesthouse where I was staying remains unexplained”.[iii] The Hindutva hoodlums justified the attack arguing that in AMUSU a photo of founder of Pakistan was displayed. Jinnah’s photo was there as he was conferred life-time member ship in the year 1938. It never bothered the Hindutva gang for more than 80 years but resurrected this issue as Hindutva rulers in power in UP were losing fast support of the common Hindus. Ansari, rightly said that precise timings of the attack on AMU and “the excuse manufactured for justifying it” raises serious questions. The Hindutva arsonists demanding removal of Jinnah’s portrait thought that nation did not know that Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, ran coalition governments with the Hindu Mahasabha in 1942-43, as we will see later. 

FEW FACTS ABOUT JINNAH WE MUST KNOW

It is pertinent to know the past of Jinnah before he became a prophet of Muslim separatism. He was a die-hard secularist and part of Congress leadership, including, Dada Bhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishan Gokhale, Annie Besant, MK Gandhi, Nehrus (Moti Lal Nehru and Jawaharlal Nehru), Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel and other such icons who led the freedom movement against the British rule.

Jinnah was not supporter of the militant activities against the British but when Bhagat Singh was jailed and judicial process to hang him started in his absence, he delivered a powerful speech against his trial in the Central Assembly (the then Parliament of India), on September 12, 1929. Jinnah said:

“the man who goes on hunger strike has a soul. He is moved by that soul, and he believes in the justice of his cause. He is no ordinary criminal, who is guilty of cold blooded, sordid wicked crime… I do not approve of the action of Bhagat Singh… I regret that rightly or wrongly the youth of today is stirred up… however much you deplore them and however much you say they are misguided, it is the system, this damnable system of governance, which is resented by the people,” [iv]

Earlier, in 1916, he was the leading defence counsel of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (a favourite of the Hindutva clan) in a sedition case against him; punishment for which could be death penalty. Jinnah won the historic case against the British government to the terrible humiliation of the foreign rulers.

Around 1935, there arose a serious religious conflict between Sikhs and Muslims of Lahore over possession of a religious site which was claimed to be a [shaheedee/of martyrs] Gurudwara and a mosque by Sikhs and Muslims respectively. The Muslim party approached Jinnah to fight legal battle on its behalf. Jinnah refused the brief and kept away from the case. He parted with the Gandhi led Congress in 1920-21, as former was against mass politics, specially, involving religious leaders in national politics. Congress tried to isolate him and instead of fighting back, he chose to take a path which led him to lead the same Muslim League which he had described as representative of feudal and aristocratic elements of the Muslim community. In his personal habits and religious beliefs, he could not be counted as a practicing Muslim. Incidentally, he did not know how to read or write Urdu, being proficient in English and Gujarati.

Importantly, when Jinnah was apostle of the Hindu-Muslim unity and stood for the freedom of a united India, he was denigrated by the Hindutva camp; Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Azad being the other victims.     

HINDU NATIONALISTS AND NOT JINNAH PROPUNDED THE TWO NATION THEORY

Long-long before the appearance of Muslim advocates of the two-nation theory, Hindu nationalists had propounded this idea. Muslim League practitioners of the Two-nation theory were late comers. In fact, in this case, they borrowed heavily from the Hindutva school of thought.
 
BENGALI BRAHMINS WERE THE FIRST TO VUSUALIZE INDIA AS A HINDU NATION.

The ball was set rolling by Hindu nationalists at the end of the 19^th century in Bengal. In fact Raj Narain Basu (1826–1899), the maternal grandfather of Aurobindo Ghosh, and his close associate Nabha Gopal Mitra (1840-94) can be called the co-fathers of Two-nation theory and Hindu nationalism in India. Basu established a society for the promotion of national feelings among the educated natives which in fact stood for preaching the superiority of Hinduism. He organized meetings proclaiming that Hinduism despite its Casteism presented a much higher social idealism than ever reached by the Christian or Islamic civilization.

Basu not only believed in the superiority of Hinduism over other religions but also was a fervent believer in Casteism. He was the first person to conceive the idea of a Maha Hindu Samiti (All India Hindu Association) and helped in the formation of Bharat Dharma Mahamandal, a precursor of Hindu Mahasabha. He believed that through this organization Hindus would be able to establish an Aryan nation in India.[1] He visualized a powerful Hindu nation not only overtaking India but the whole world. He also saw,
 

Nabha Gopal Mitra started organising an annual Hindu Mela (fête). It used to be a gathering on the last day of every Bengali year and highlighted the Hindu nature of all aspects of Hindu Bengali life and continued uninterrupted between 1867 and 1880. Mitra also started a National Society and a National Paper for promoting unity and feelings of nationalism among Hindus. Mitra argued in his paper that the Hindus positively formed a nation by themselves. According to him,
 

 R. C. Majumdar, a keen observer of the rise of Hindu nationalism in Bengal, had no difficulty in arriving at the truth that,
 

 
ROLE OF ARYA SAMAJISTS

The Arya Samaj in northern India aggressively preached that Hindu and Muslim communities in India were, in fact, two different nations. Bhai Parmanand (1876–1947), a leading light of the Arya Samaj in northern India who was also a leader of both Congress and Hindu Mahasabha, produced an enormous anti-Muslim literature which stressed the fact that India was a land of Hindus and Muslims should be relocated.
 
Long before V. D. Savarkar (1883-1966) and M. S. Golwalkar (1906-73), who laid down elaborate theories of Hindu Rashtra allowing no place for minorities, it was Bhai Parmanand who declared in the beginning of the twentieth century that followers of Hinduism and Islam in India were two different peoples because Muslims followed a religion which originated in Arab lands. Parmanand specialized in writing popular literature in Urdu in which the main emphasis would be on Hindus being true sons of India and Muslims as outsiders.[1]As early as 1908–9, Parmanand called for the total exchange of Hindu and Muslim populations in two specific areas. According to his plan, elaborated in his autobiography,
 

 
Lajpat Rai (1865-1928), a renowned leader simultaneously of Congress, Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj,
 

 
By 1924 he was more articulate in summarizing his Two-nation theory. He wrote:
 

 
Lajpat Rai proposed the partition of Punjab in the following words,
 

 
It may be noted that Muslim flag-bearers of Two-nation theory had fair knowledge of theories propounded by Lajpat Rai and others. However, instead of challenging this anti-national and anti-Muslim theory, they simply copied it.
 
HINDU NATIONALIST MOONJE, HAR DAYAL, SAVARKAR AND GOLWALKAR AS PROPHETS OF TWO-NATION THEORY

Dr. B. S. Moonje was another prominent Congress leader (who equally dabbled in organizing the Hindu Mahasabha and later helped the RSS in its formation) who carried forward the flag of Hindu Separatism long before Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution of March 1940. While addressing the third session of the Oudh Hindu Mahasabha in 1923, he declared:
 

It was sheer semi-illiteracy of Moonje that he presented England, France and Germany as justification for India for Hindus. The English, the French and the German identities had nothing to do with religions, these were secular identities of the people living in those countries.

Lala Har Dayal (1884–1938), a well-known name in the Ghadar Party circles, too, long before the Muslim League’s demand for a separate homeland for Muslims, not only demanded the formation of a Hindu nation in India but also urged the conquest and Hinduisation of Afghanistan. In a significant political statement in 1925, which was published in the Pratap of Kanpur, he stated:
 

 
All such ideas of declaring India as a Hindu nation and excluding Muslims and Christians from it were further crystallized by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his controversial book Hindutva as early as 1923. Interestingly, he was allowed to write this polarizing book despite being in the British jail. According to his definition of the Hindu nation, Muslims and Christians remained out of this nationhood because they did not assimilate into Hindu cultural heritage or adopt Hindu religion. Savarkar decreed:
 

 
Savarkar, the originator of the politics of Hindutva, later developed the most elaborate Two-nation theory. The fact should not be missed that Muslim League passed its Pakistan resolution in 1940 only but Savarkar, the great philosopher and guide of RSS, propagated the Two-nation theory long before it. While delivering the presidential address to the 19th session Hindu Mahasabha at Ahmedabad in 1937, Savarkar declared unequivocally,
 

The RSS, following into the footsteps of Savarkar, rejected out rightly the idea that Hindus and Muslims together constituted a nation. The English organ of the RSS, Organiser, on the very eve of Independence (August 14, 1947) editorially chalked out its concept of nation in the following words:
 

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a keen researcher of the communal politics in pre-independence India, while underlying the affinity and camaraderie between Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League on the issue of the Two-nation theory wrote:
 

Ambedkar agonized by the evil designs of Savarkar regarding the Two-nation theory and Hindutva rhetoric over it, wrote, as early as 1940, that,
 

HINDU MAHASABHA LED BY SAVARKAR RAN COALITION GOVERNMENTS WITH MUSLIM LEAGUE

The children of Hindu nationalist, Savarkar ruling India presently are oblivious of the shocking fact that Hindu Mahasabha led by Savarkar entered into alliances with the Muslim League in order to break the united freedom struggle, specially, the 1942 Quit India Movement against the British rulers. While delivering Presidential address to the 24th session of Hindu Mahasabha at Cawnpore (Kanpur) in 1942, he defended hobnobbing with the Muslim League in the following words,
 

Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League also formed a coalition government in NWFP also.

MUSLIMS AGAINST PARTITION OF INDIA

One of the greatest lies concerning Partition of India, continuously spread by the Hindutva gang is that all Muslims of India in unison demanded Pakistan and they got the country divided. This lie believed as truth by the Hindutva cadres has become the most important cause of persecution of Muslims in India. It is true that India was partitioned in 1947 due to Muslim League’s demand for a separate homeland for Muslims. And there is no denying the fact that the Muslim league was able to mobilize huge mass of Muslims in favour of its demand. But it is also true that very large sections of Indian Muslims and their organizations stood against the demand for Pakistan. These Muslims against Partition challenged the Muslim League theoretically and confronted the latter on streets. Such Muslims fought heroically, many times paying with their lives. The lie of culpability of all Indian Muslims for Partition continues to be spread not only due to the nasty anti-Muslim politics of Hindutva but also due to the fact that Indian Muslims are not aware of the great heritage of their ancestors who challenged the politics of the Muslim League, politically, religiously and physically.

Within weeks of the Pakistan resolution of the Muslim  League at Lahore, Indian Muslims organized MUSLIM AZAD CONFERENCE in Delhi (Queen’s Park, Chandni Chowk) between April 27-30, 1940 (it was to conclude on April 29 but was extended by one day due to tremendous participation and pressure of the work) with 1400 delegates from almost all parts of India attending it. The leading light of this conference was former Premier of Sind,  Allah Bakhsh who presided over the conference.  was one of such heroes.
 

The major Muslim organizations represented in this conference were All India Jamiat-ul-Ulema, All India Momin Conference, All India Majlis-e-Ahrar, All-India Shia Political Conference, Khudai Khidmadgars, Bengal Krishak Proja Party, All-India Muslim Parliamentary Board, the Anjuman-e-Watan, Baluchistan, All India Muslim Majlis and Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadis. The Azad Muslim Conference was attended by duly elected delegates from United Province, Bihar, Central Province, Punjab, Sind, NWF Province, Madras, Orissa, Bengal, Malabar, Baluchistan, Delhi, Assam, Rajasthan, Delhi, Kashmir, Hyderabad and many native states thus covering the whole of India.[xxi] There was no doubt that these delegates represented “majority of India’s Muslims.”[xxii]
 

Apart from these organizations a galaxy of leading intellectuals of Indian Muslims like Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari (who was in the forefront of struggle against the communal politics of Muslim League, died in 1936), Shaukatullah Ansari, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Syed Abdullah Brelvi, Shaikh Mohammed Abdullah, AM Khwaja and Maulana Azad  were associated with this movement against Pakistan. Jamiat and other Muslim organizations produced large number of booklets in Urdu against Two-nation theory and in support of co-existence of Hindus and Muslims in India.

Allah Bakhsh, in his presidential address declared the Pakistan resolution as suicidal for Muslims as well as India. Stressing the inclusive nature of Indian society and polity he said:
 

ALLAH BAKHSH MURDERED BY ASSASINS HIRED BY THE MUSLIM LEAGUE

How many of us know that long before MK Gandhi’s murder by the Hindu nationalists, Allah Bakhsh was murdered on May 14, 1943 by professional assassins hired by the Muslim nationalist (Muslim League leaders) at Shikarpur town in Sind. Allah Bakhsh had become a symbol of unity amongst against the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan. He needed to be liquidated as Gandhi had become the biggest stumbling block in the Hindutva project of converting India into a Hindu rashtra.

THE MUSLIM LEAGUE TERROR

All leading leaders of anti-Pakistan movement were physically attacked, their houses looted, family members attacked, mosques where they stayed or addressed Muslims were damaged, Shiekh-ul-Islam, Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani was victim of violent attacks in UP and Bihar. Maulana Azad, Ahrar leader, Habeebur Rahman, Maulana Ishaque Sambhali, Hafiz Ibrahim, Maulana M. Qasim Shajahanpuri and many other leading ulama faced murderous attacks. At places  ulama were attacked with daggers causing severance of body parts, they were shot and office of the Jamiat at Delhi was set on fire. Momin Conference meetings were special targets of attack, its cadres killed and Conference had to warn the Muslim League of war.

According to a contemporary document,
 

HINDU NATIONALISTS WHO BELIEVED IN THE TWO-NATION THEORY PARADED AS INDIAN NATIONALISTS

Despite all these facts only Muslims are branded as guilty men of Partition and originator and perpetrator of the Two-nation theory. The leading Hindu nationalist leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malviya, M. S. Aney, B. S. Moonje, M. R. Jayakar and N. C. Kelkar, Swami Shardhanand etc. (some of whom were also Congress leaders) did not subscribe to an all-inclusive India but were committed to the building of an exclusive Hindu nation. They believed that India was primordially a Hindu nation and should be nurtured as one. Nevertheless, they went around as great Indian ‘Nationalist’ leaders.

In fact, the majority community had the advantage of disguising their communalism under the cloak of nationalism. Take one glaring example, Madan Mohan Malviya. While he was President of the Indian National Congress which stood for a composite India, in 1909, 1918 and 1933 he also presided over the sessions of Hindu Mahasabha in the years 1923, 1924 and 1936. He was the originator of the most divisive slogan ‘Hindi-Hindu-Hindusthan.[xxiv] Despite his history of spreading communal hatred he continues to be known as a great Indian nationalist leader.

If Muslim leaders can be distinguished on the basis of whether they believed in a multi-religious India or in the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims, then the same distinction should apply to Hindu leaders. When we study Indian nationalism we are generally told that all Hindus were nationalists whereas there were few patriotic Muslims and the rest were with the anti-national Muslim League. In order to clear the air we need to define what nationalism meant in Indian context. If Indian nationalism had been about creating a multi-religious secular nation state, only those who shared this commitment would be called nationalist or patriotic. But this is rarely the case when we discuss communal Hindus or Hindu Nationalist leaders. Despite their being decidedly against a multi-cultural India, they are still held up as nationalist icons. The truth is that the Hindu nationalist leaders were decidedly anti-patriotic or anti-national, in precisely the same way as the Muslim League was.

In the same way that not all Hindu leaders were patriotic by this standard, not all Muslims were anti-patriotic. A large number of Muslim individuals and mass-based Muslim organizations opposed the Two-nation theory and the creation of Pakistan with all their resources, often laying down their lives. The saddest part is that the children of the Hindu nationalists, inheriting the politics of Two-nation theory  are ruling India. This ruling elite whose political ancestors like Moonje, Savarkar and Golwalkar played no role in the freedom struggle, cooperated with the Muslim League and the British rulers are questioning the patriotism of the Indian Muslims.

TASK FOR INDIAN MUSLIMS

The Indian Muslims instead of getting defensive against this onslaught by the anti-national Hindu nationalists, must aggressively challenge the propaganda against Muslims. The history is with them. Indian Muslims are children of those fearless Muslims who waged a glorious fight against the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan. They did not agree to Pakistan but were helpless victims of a deal amongst the British rulers, the Muslim League and the Congress for partitioning India. The following statement of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi to MK Gandhi in June 1947, after Congress had agreed to the partition of India, symbolized the pervasive sense of betrayal of anti-Pakistan Muslim. He wrote:

“We Pakhtuns stood by you and had undergone great sacrifices for attaining freedom. But you have now deserted us and thrown us to the wolves…”[xxv]

Whereas the children of Savarkar and Golwalkar who rule India today, hail from a heritage which propounded Two-nation theory and allied with Jinnah. The Muslims against partition of India had a solid case for not dividing the country on the basis of religion. Their resolve and commitment for a united democratic-secular India was clear from the following anti-Pakistan poem titled, ‘Pakistan chahne walon se’ (To those who want Pakistan) penned by renowned poet, Shamim Karhani which became Indian Muslim’s anthem against the Muslim League. Since Muslim League had converted the demand for Pakistan into a religious project, Shamim Karhani responded in the same vocabulary. Every Indian Muslim should be proud of it.

Humko batlao tau kiya matlab hae Pakistan kaa
Jis jagah iss waqt Muslim haen, najis hae kiya who ja.
[Tell me, what does Pakistan mean? Is this land, where we Muslims are, an unholy land?]
 
Nesh-e-tohmat se tere, Chishti kaa seena chaak hae
jald batlla kiya zameen Ajmer kee na-paak hae.
[Your slur has wounded Chishti’s breast; Quick, tell me, is Ajmer impure?]
 
Kufr kee vaadi maen imaan kaa nageena kho gaya
Hai kiya khak-e-najis maen shah-e-meena kho gaya.
[Can you say the precious jewel of Islam ‘Shah Meena’ has lost in the unholy valley of Infidelity?]
 
Deen kaa makhdoom jo Kaliyer kee abaadi maen hae
Aah! Uskaa aastana kiya najis vaadi mae hae.
[Is the place of high dignity at Kaliyar where Makhdoom (Master of Din/religion) is resting is an unholy valley?]
 
Haen imamon ke jo roze Lucknow kee khaaq per
Ban gaye kiya tauba-tauba khitta-e-napak per.
[Whether the Mausoleums/Shrines of Imams at Lucknow are built on impure land?]
 
Baat yeh kaisee kahee tu ney kee dil ne aah kee
Kiya zameen tahir naheen dargah-e-Noorullah kee.
[A deep sigh came out over your statement. Can you say the Shrine of Noor-ul-lah (at Agra) is not pious?]
 
Aah! Iss pakeezah Ganga ko najis kehta hae tu
jis key paany see kiya Muslim shahidon ne wazoo.
[Alas! You call the holy Ganga water impure, which was used by martyrs for the ablution (wazoo).]
 
Nam-e-Pakistan na le gar tujhko pas-e-deen hae
Yeh guzishta nasl-e-Muslim kee badi tauheen hae.
[Don’t take the name of Pakistan if you have least respect for your faith because demanding Pakistan is immense disrespect to our Muslim predecessors.]
 
Tukre-tukre ker nahin sakte watan ko ahl-e-dil
Kis tarah taraj dekhen gey chaman ko ahl-e-dil.
[Those who have a sensible heart cannot split the country and how will they dare to see a ruined and plundered motherland?]
 
Kiya yeh matlab hae ke hum mahroom-e-azadi rahen
Munqasim ho ker Arab kee tarah faryadi rahaen.
[Do you want us to remain devoid of freedom and lament like divided     Arabs?]
 
Tukre-tukre ho kay Muslim khasta-dil ho jayegaa
Nakhl-e-jamiat sarasar muzmahil ho jayegaa.
[By division Muslims will split and the tree of community will wilt.][xxvi]
 
پاکستان چاہنے والوں سے
– شمیم کرہانی
ہم کو بتلاو تو کیا مطلب ہے پاکستان کا
جس جگہ اِس وقت مسلم ہیں، نجس ہے کیا وہ جا
 
نیشِ تہمت سے تیرے، چشتی کا سینہ چاک ہے
جلد بتلا کیا زمیں اجمیر کی ناپاک ہے
 
کفر کی وادی میں ایماں کا نگینہ کھو گیا
ہے کیا خاکِ نجس میں شاہِ مینا کھو گیا
 
دین کا مخدوم جو کلیر کی آبادی میں ہے
آہ! اس کا آستانہ کیا نجس وادی میں ہے
 
ہیں اماموں کے جو روضے لکھنو کی خاک پر
بن گئے کیا توبہ توبہ خطہء ناپاک پر
 
بات یہ کیسی کہی تو نے کہ دل نے آہ کی
کیا زمیں طاہر نہیں درگاہ نوراللہ کی
 
آہ! اس پاکیزہ گنگا کو نجس کہتا ہے تو
جس کے پانی سے کیا مسلم شہیدوں نے وضو
 
نامِ پاکستاں نہ لے گر تجھ کو پاسِ دین ہے
یہ گزشتہ نسلِ مسلم کی بڑی توہین ہے
 
ٹکڑے ٹکڑے کر نہیں سکتے وطن کو اہلِ دل
کس طرح تاراج دیکھیں گے چمن کو اہلِ دل
 
کیا یہ مطلب ہے کہ ہم محرومِ آزادی رہیں
منقسم ہو کر عرب کی طرح فریادی رہیں
 
ٹکڑے ٹکڑے ہو کہ مسلم خستہ دل ہو جائے گا
نخلِ جمیعت سراسر مضمحل ہو جائے گا

——————————————
Shamsul Islam
For some of S. Islam’s writings in English, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu & Gujarati see the following link:
http://du-in.academia.edu/ShamsulIslam

The post Guilty men of the two-nation theory: A Hindutva project borrowed by Jinnah appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The post Manto Lives appeared first on SabrangIndia.

My engagement with partition and separatism is largely confined, I must confess, to South Asia, where I have studied the India/Pakistan question, the break-up of Pakistan into two, and the Sinhala/Tamil issue in Sri Lanka.

In my research I have focused also on India’s freedom movement, the movement for Pakistan, and the protagonists of the two movements. In addition, I have spent time on the history of Punjab, once an independent kingdom, later a large northern province of British-ruled India, and since 1947 divided between Pakistan and India. Recently I have begun exploring the story, from about 1600, of the large South India region.

The engagements indicated above have formed the perspective for what is being offered below. It is certainly a weakness that I am unable to offer a comparative analysis of partition involving also the Middle East and Ireland. Hoping nonetheless that my summations would be of some interest, I offer them for what they are worth.

*

Though it did not use the name “Pakistan,” the Muslim League resolution of March 1940, passed in Lahore in what then was northwestern India, was a major milestone on the journey to Partition. Moved by Fazlul Huq, prime minister of Bengal, India’s large eastern province, the resolution declared that the League, which was headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), would accept nothing short of “separate and sovereign Muslim states, comprising geographically contiguous units… in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the northwestern and eastern zones of India.”^[1]
 
Though not a member of the Muslim League, Huq led a Bengal peasants’ party which was in alliance with the League. The “contiguous units” mentioned in his resolution were not specified, their boundaries were not defined, and there was also a clear suggestion (soon to be dismissed as a typing error) of more than one Muslim-majority state being demanded.
 
The resolution asked not for a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims, nor for removing all of them to the subcontinent’s northwestern or eastern zone, but for the separation from India of Muslim-majority areas. In their stump rhetoric during provincial elections held in the winter of 1945-6, Muslim League leaders indeed spoke of “a Muslim homeland,” and the vast post-1940 literature on India’s partition is replete with that phrase, but the Lahore resolution refrained conspicuously from asking for it. This usually forgotten fact is worth recalling.

If we leave out Assam, in terms of borders India’s partition was essentially the partition of Punjab and Bengal, a partition tragically accompanied by upheaval, which in Punjab became carnage as well. East Bengal’s carnage would come 25 years later, when Pakistan split and Bangladesh came into being.

 
Also not well remembered about the 1947 partition is that it broke up only two of India’s numerous provinces: Bengal in the east and Punjab in the northwest. The borders of every other province remained intact, even as some provinces became part of Pakistan and many remained part of India. This statement should be qualified: occupying the subcontinent’s northeast, the large Assam province, which stayed with India, lost to Pakistan a Muslim-majority segment called Sylhet, in area about one-twentieth of pre-1947 Assam, following a referendum there.
 
If we leave out Assam, in terms of borders India’s partition was essentially the partition of Punjab and Bengal, a partition tragically accompanied by upheaval, which in Punjab became carnage as well. East Bengal’s carnage would come 25 years later, when Pakistan split and Bangladesh came into being.
 
Regions other than Punjab also saw large-scale violence in 1947 or in the months preceding, notably Bihar and UP in November 1946, Calcutta in August 1946, east Bengal’s Noakhali district in October 1946, and the Northwest Frontier Province in the summer of 1947.
 
However, Punjab’s large-scale killings, which began in March 1947 and rose to an immense level in August and September 1947, comprised a category by itself, with anything between half a million and a million killed in the province, the western half of which went to Pakistan, and the eastern half to India.
 
Also in a category of their own were Punjab’s migrations, with around 6 million Muslims crossing into west Punjab in 1947 and about the same number of Hindus and Sikhs into east Punjab. As a result, West Punjab became purely Muslim, and East Punjab purely non-Muslim, except for a small pocket called Malerkotla, most of whose Muslims did not leave.
 
In the Frontier province, almost all its non-Muslims, a very small percentage of the population, left for India. In Sindh, probably more than half of its Hindus moved to western and central India, but a great many remained in Sindh, which today has roughly 4 million Hindus, about 8 percent of the province’s population.
 
There were significant cross-migrations in Bengal too.
 
Many Muslims from UP, Bihar, Delhi and elsewhere in northern and central India moved to Pakistan and especially to Karachi, which from a Sindhi city became an Urdu city. Some Muslims from Bombay and southern India also shifted to Pakistan. However, except for East Punjab, the vast majority of India’s Muslims stayed where they were.
 
This very brief summary highlights the fact that Pakistan’s emergence in 1947 did not mean, and was not intended to mean, the herding of the subcontinent’s Muslims into a Muslim homeland. It also indicates that the 1947 Partition impacted different parts of the subcontinent in different ways.
 
In other words, regions within the two newly freed nations appeared to be as significant as the two nations, a point to which I will return.
 
*
 
Reasons usually given for the 1947 Partition include, firstly, a Muslim fear that with British departure the subcontinent’s Hindu majority would want to avenge perceived injustices under the long Muslim rule that preceded British conquest; secondly, imperial divide-and-rule; and, thirdly, the failure of two large all-India parties, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, to reach a compromise on how a free India should be run.
 
Each of these is a credible if also partial explanation. Students of the subcontinent’s history will likely run into all of them. But a fourth reason is also worth looking at: a clash, starting very early, between two notions of purity.
 
Islam’s arrival in India is of course an ancient story. In the south, Muslims coming as traders settled on both coasts from the 8^th century onwards. In the west, an Arab commander occupied Sindh early in the 8^th century.  In the north, Islam arrived with invading armies from the 11^th century. From the 12^th century to the 19^th, Muslim monarchs sat on Delhi’s throne and from there ruled much or most of India.

An ideological/social clash was visible from the start. An arriving Islamic scholar seemed certain of the purity of his monotheistic faith and the impurity of what he saw as the polytheistic faith of the Hindus.

 
An ideological/social clash was visible from the start. An arriving Islamic scholar seemed certain of the purity of his monotheistic faith and the impurity of what he saw as the polytheistic faith of the Hindus.

There were exceptions. The scholar Alberuni, who accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni into India in the 11^th century, stayed ten years in the country, interviewed numerous Pandits, and found that some Hindu philosophers were ‘entirely free from worshipping anything but God alone.’[2] However, a majority of Islamic clerics, including those employed by the ruling court in Delhi, spoke of the purity of Islam and the impurity of Hinduism, thereby offending the Hindu psyche.
‘Purity of faith’ was even used to promote the notion that killing adherents of an ‘impure’ religion was a pious deed.

On the other hand, a caste Hindu encountering the invading armies, or civilians in their wake, was certain that these newcomers were impure by birth. Only someone born into a Hindu high caste could be pure. Others, including all foreigners, were not.
 
At the top, descendants of conquering Muslim rulers made India their home, marrying Hindu women, embracing much of the local culture, and in some cases trying to improve the condition of all their subjects.
 
They thought of themselves as Indians. Hindostan was the name of their kingdom or empire, and many of their subjects accepted these rulers as Indians. This was also true for regional principalities. For instance, to the people of Mysore in the last four decades of the 18^th century, Haidar and Tipu were Indians or Mysoreans. Disliked or liked, they were not foreigners.
 
Similarly, to the people of Punjab, a majority of whom were Muslims, their Sikh ruler in the first quarter of the 19^th century, Ranjit Singh, was not an alien but a Punjabi chief.
 
At the grassroots, coexistence and interdependence became the norm, especially among the ‘lower’ classes, who formed the majority. However, the birth/belief tension was never removed, even though most people put it to one side and lived their modest lives. But coexistence and frequent participation in each other’s festivals did not lead to fusion. A single community capable of breaking bread together was not created.
 
We encounter the purity question in a story related by Mark Wilks (1759-1831), who arrived in southern India in 1777 as an 18-year-old soldier for the East India Company and joined the war against Tipu-ruled Mysore. After Tipu’s defeat and death in 1799, Wilks served as the Resident of Mysore, and wrote a history of Mysore. Later he was made governor of St. Helena, a south Atlantic island owned by the East India Company, where Napoleon was interned at the time, so that Wilks became, in effect, Napoleon’s jailor.

Writing of one Khan Jehan Khan as ‘a brave, able and interesting officer under Tippoo’ (590), Wilks says that this Jehan Khan

was born a bramin and [was] at the age of seventeen a writer in the service of [a Muslim chief] at Bednore, when [Bednore] surrendered to a British general.

On the recapture of that place by Tippoo, this youth (Wilks continues) was forcibly converted to Islam and highly instructed in its doctrines. He was soon distinguished as a soldier and invested with high command.

On the other hand, a caste Hindu encountering the invading armies, or civilians in their wake, was certain that these newcomers were impure by birth. Only someone born into a Hindu high caste could be pure. Others, including all foreigners, were not.

In 1799, [Jehan Khan] fell, desperately wounded, in attempting to… repel the British assault at Seringapatam. He recovered and was appointed to the command of the infantry of the Hindu raja [appointed by the Company].

This raja belonged to the family of the Wadiyars who had ruled Mysore before power was seized by Haidar Ali, Tipu’s father. After Tipu’s fall and the restoration of the Wadiyars (says Wilks), Jehan Khan ‘made advances… to be readmitted to his rank and cast as a bramin’. ‘A select conclave’ of Brahmin priests held that Jehan Khan could be readmitted but ‘with certain reservations to mark a distinction between him and those who had incurred no lapse from their original purity.’ Continues Wilks:
[B]ut the khan would have all or none. ‘I prefer,’ said he, in conversing with me on the subject, ‘the faith of my ancestors, but the fellows wanted to shut up my present road to a better world, and would not fairly open the other… I feel myself more respectable with the full privileges of a Mussulman than I should as a half-outcaste bramin (590-91fn).[3]

In a speech in March 1948 in Chittagong, now part of Bangladesh, Muhammad Ali Jinnah would provide what, coming from him, was a rare non-political justification for the Pakistan call. ‘I reiterate most emphatically,’ said Jinnah, ‘that Pakistan was [fought for] because of the danger of complete annihilation of human soul in a society based on caste.’[4] In this remark, Jinnah was giving expression to the injury received by many of the subcontinent’s Muslims from the notion of caste superiority.
In July 2005, when my wife Usha and I interviewed over two dozen persons in Pakistan on their memories of 1947, some interviewees recalled the belief of their Hindu friends and acquaintances that their home would be polluted if a Muslim ate there.
 
Thus Md Saeed Awan, who told us in Lahore (on July 24, 2005) that he was born in 1925 in village Khanpur in sub-tehsil Makerian in tehsil Dasooba in Hoshiarpur district in east Punjab, and that his father was headmaster of a junior-level school in Khanpur village, added:
 
I went to Arya High School in Makerian. I led a campaign in the school after a Hindu mithai-seller shook off a Muslim boy who had touched his tray of sweets, saying, ‘Bharasht kar diya’ – ‘You have polluted [these sweets].’… Dogs were licking his cooking vessels but a Muslim boy could not be allowed to come close. .. The headmaster, Agya Ram Bhalla, got the mithai-seller to apologize in front of the whole school.

Chaudhry Muhammad Hayat, a retired Squadron Leader from Pakistan who had played for the joint services cricket team, spoke to us of his boyhood as a Jat in village Sook Khurd, not far from the town of Gujrat, which lies between Lahore and Rawalpindi. He recalled:
North of [Sook Khurd] was the village of Nichra where many [Muslim] Jats lived. [In Nichra] there was [also] one dera where five or six Hindu families lived, some of whose men were educated and served in Rawalpindi. Everyone lived in aman and chayn and took part in each other’s joys and sorrows.

One boy of my age [from the Hindu dera], Chunni Lal, studied with me. I used to visit his home and well remember his father Haveli Ram…. Chunni Lal and I sometimes ate in each other’s homes.
With that last sentence, Hayat was pointing out the unusualness of ‘eating in each other’s homes’.

*

(The author, an eminent historian and writer recently presented this as a Paper at the University of Illinois- Partition in South Asia, Palestine and Ireland at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in September 2016. We are grateful that he has shared this with us for publication on Sabrangindia/Communalism Combat. We have carried the Paper in Two Parts for the convenience of our readers-Editors)

References
Saying No to Partition: Muslim leaders from 1940-1947
Indian Nationalism v/s Hindu Nationalism
Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Scathing Attacks on Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra
Mahatma Gandhi: 'My Ramrajya means Khuda ki Basti… but a Secular State'
Indian Nationhood after Weathering Partition

The post Clash Between Two Notions of Purity: India’s Partition appeared first on SabrangIndia.

All this rests on a basis that is obvious unstated by the BJP. But its ideologue V.D. Savarkar spelt it out boldly. It is that Hindus constitute a separate “nation”. Hindutva is another name for the two-nation theory — a “Hindu nation”, as distinct from other Indians, over whom it rules to promote “Hindu interests”. Savarkar was also the author of both Hindutva and the two-nation theory. 

This is the very basis that underlies Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s insidious ventures. A secular Constitution is being silently chipped away by executive acts to establish a Hindu Raj. The shell will remain. The kernel will be gone. Its architect, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, would have fought against it. So must we — Indians who reject the two-nation theory and value our secular credo.

If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country. No matter what the Hindus say Hinduism is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity. On that account it is incompatible with democracy. Hindu Raj must be prevented at any cost.” (Dr B.R. Ambedkar; Pakistan or the Partition of India, 354-55.)

Image courtesy http://www.columbia.edu

With an eye to the Assembly elections, the BJP has once again launched a menacing campaign for the establishment of Hindu Raj in India and thus effectuate V.D. Savarkar’s concept of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, in short. The opening salvo was fired by its president, Amit Shah. But it was left to Arun Jaitley, Finance Minister, to let the cat out of the bag when, on March 26, 2016, he lauded “the nationalism of Savarkar”: “This is a huge challenge for us. This is a big ideological challenge. We should consider this an ideological battle” (Hindustan Times, March 27, 2016). Why now, nearly two years after the BJP regime came to power? The answer is obvious. Having concealed the Hindutva card cleverly and touted “development” instead in 2014, the BJP has now reverted to its original faith and to its mentor, Savarkar, author of Hindutva: Who is a Hindu. He was judicially indicted by Justice J.L. Kapur of the Supreme Court as a participant in the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi.

On February 8 this year, Amit Shah acknowledged with pride that Modi “has been working to the true traditions andculture of this country and this is a proud moment for Hinduism (Sanatan dharma)”. By performing aarti at Kashi, Modi had aroused hopes in the hearts of millions of people that he would protect “our” culture. The context lends added significance. He was speaking at Vrindavan after visiting the Banke Bihari Mandir “to seek blessings” and inaugurating the Priya Kantju temple. The Times of India’s correspondent Anuja Jaiswal, who reported the speech (February 9), correctly sized up what Shah was up to:

Setting the tone and tenor for the BJP’s ‘Mission UP 2017’, the party’s president, Amit Shah, played the Hindutva card by portraying Narendra Modi as a true Hindu nationalist… whose idea of governance was not limited only to material (bhautik) development of the country but also spiritual (adhyatmik).

One has reason for disquiet when men in power profess to look after the people’s spiritual needs (emphasis added, throughout).
The plans had evidently been made earlier. The incident at the Jawaharlal Nehru University on February 9 came in handy, as did the Member of Parliament, Asaduddin Owaisi’s justified refusal to chant “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”. The symbolism of the Mother in Hindutva’s credo deserves greater notice than it has received so far.

Secularism has ever been an integral part of Indian nationalism ever since the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. These swadeshi McCarthyites prescribe their own loyalty oaths to the rest of the countrymen. Joseph McCarthy did not wield governmental power. His Swadeshi followers are in the driving seat of power. He did not pretend religious sanction. They do. It is one thing to refer to one’s country as a motherland in common parlance; another as Mother (with a capital M). The former is an object of love and loyalty. The latter is an object of worship. Politics merges with religion.

When, on March 17, 2016, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) joint general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale declared that “anyone who refuses to say ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ is anti-national for us”, he was proclaiming the Sangh Parivar’s version of nationalism; namely Hindu, not Indian, nationalism.

Two days later, Amit Shah raised the pitch. The BJP “will not” tolerate “criticism [sic] of the nation”; “will not tolerate criticism of the country”. Besides “anti-national activity cannot be justified on the plea of freedom of expression” (Asian Age, March 20). How will the BJP and the RSS express their refusal to “tolerate”? By acts of violence? Whatever constitutes “criticism” of the country or the nation as distinct from that of the state’s acts and policies? Clearly, the Sangh Parivar sets itself up as an umpire of what constitutes “anti-national” activity, very much as Joseph McCarthy took it upon himself to decide what constituted “Un-American” activity.

The BJP’s assertion of right and power is a menace to democracy. No one has a right to take the law in his own hands, define the offence by himself and exert himself to express his refusal to “tolerate” it. Even the state cannot wield executive power without the sanction of the law laid down by the legislature.

But Amit Shah is not deterred by legalities. “BJP workers should launch a campaign against anti-national activitiesacross the country,” he said on March 19 (DNA, March 20). The BJP’s national executive went one better with an even vaguer resolution on March 20 (“will firmly oppose any attempt to disrespect Bharat [sic]” (The Hindu, March 21).

To Jaitley the slogan “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” was above debate. “The ideology of nationalism guides own beliefs and philosophy” (Hindustan Times, March 21). Confusion of thought is coupled with clumsiness of expression. Nationalism is a concept, not an “ideology”. What part of the BJP’s “philosophy” does it guide? But, of course, Jaitley’s nationalism is Hindutva, not Indian nationalism. 

During this entire debate Modi never spoke up, not even when intolerance began to rage over the land. He has his Dev Kant Barooahs. If on February 8 Amit Shah praised him to the skies, on March 20, Urban Development Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu called him “God’s gift to India”, citing two clinching bits of evidence — his wax statute at Madame Tussauds museum in London and a place on Time magazine’s list of 100 most important persons in 2015 with a deserved elevation this year to the top 30 (Hindustan Times, March 21).

Coming as it does from a man of such high sophistication as Venkaiah Naidu, the testimonial acquires great weight. Not long ago, he had called L.K. Advani Loha Purush (iron man), and A.B. Vajpayee a distant second Vikas Purush(development man). He can be trusted to shower equally offensive encomiums on Modi’s successor, should the wheel of his fortune turn for the worse. Modi’s Cabinet is stuffed with persons of impressive sophistication such as Uma Bharati, Smriti Irani and Ravi Shankar Prasad.

It is unlikely that such praise by Amit Shah or Venkaiah Naidu offends Modi. The 18th century English poet Alexander Pope’s immortal lines fit him to perfection in "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot": 

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,            
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,    
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,    
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise;    
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,    
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;    
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,    
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;    
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,    
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend;    
Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieged,    
And so obliging that he ne’er obliged;    
Like Cato, give his little senate laws,    
And sit attentive to his own applause    

Modi’s silence
The Economist foresaw this trend five months ago. The BJP had “made a naked appeal to Hindu unity. Mr. Modi himself intervened to hint that its opponents were planning to take affirmative action privileges away from lower-caste Hindus in favour of Muslims.

The BJP’s election victory last year was attributed to its promise of competence and good governance. It persuaded enough voters that the Hindu-nationalist part of its agenda and the shadow over Mr Modi’s past — allegations of his complicity in anti-Muslim violence in the state of Gujarat in 2002 — were marginal. Now many worry that Hindu nationalism is a pillar of Mr. Modi’s vision after all. During its previous stint in power the BJP ruled with a parliamentary minority and had to ditch some of its Hindu aims, such as a federal ban on cow slaughter. Now, although it has a majority on its own, with a coalition as an optional extra, many hoped its emphasis on economic progress would nevertheless serve as a constraint.

Mr Modi’s willingness to play communal politics in Bihar, and his failure to take a firm stand against those perpetrating crimes in the name of Hinduism, cast doubt on that. Perhaps, with his eye already on re-election at the end of his term by 2019, he feels that he cannot alienate the BJP’s Hindu activists, who are an essential part of his support and electoral machine. This is a disturbing notion, implying that defeat as well as victory in Bihar might make Mr. Modi more beholden to the extremists. Worse, however, is the thought that perhaps he agrees with them” (November 7, 2015).

The assault on an Indo-Canadian, Supinder Singh Khehra, in Quebec City in the last weekend of March by four men drew instant condemnation by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was then in the United States. He said that such “hateful acts” had “no place in Canada.

We stand clearly against the kind of discrimination and intolerance that it represents” (Hindustan Times, April 3, 2016). Modi’s silence on graver outrages against the minorities in the country reveals him in his true colours. It is the duty of the Prime Minister of a country to condemn outrages against the minorities. He sets the tone and conveys a message. The British Prime Minister David Cameron does so repeatedly as a matter of course. Modi prefers to convey by his silence a different message to his followers. The BJP’s leaders’ ravings about “nationalism” and “anti-nationalism” serve only to invite attention to their own cover-up. The Hindutva which they so ardently believe in is only a wrapping for the two-nation theory. Both were espoused by the same man, their hero — Savarkar. He had inherited a poisoned legacy and injected his own added poison.

Lajpat Rai’s Ideas
In 1899, Lajpat Rai published an article in Hindustan Review in which he declared that “Hindus are a nation in themselves, because they represent a civilisation all their own”. This was not a new idea even then. Lajpat Rai was directly influenced by a conception of Hindu nationalism in the aftermath of the “purification” of Hinduism by the Arya Samaj. In 1902, Lajpat Rai entered into a debate in the pages of Hindustan Review and Kayastha Samachar with an anonymous “Hindu Nationalist” and Pandit Madhao Ram, about the basis for initiating a discussion on Hindu nationalism.

“In several key passages of his response, Lajpat Rai expressed a series of gestatory ideas, many of which were to find their way virtually unchanged in Savarkar’s definitive Hindutva” (Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths, 50). In 1917 he proclaimed that he was “a Hindu nationalist”. 

In 1923, Lajpat Rai argued that Muslims should have four States (the Pathan Province, western Punjab, the Sind and eastern Bengal). But he added: “It should be distinctly understood that this is not a united India. It means a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India.” Lajpat Rai is credited with being “the first major leader of the national movement to propose the theory of two exclusive nations in India and is said to have proposed this from the late nineteenth century” (ibid., page 73).

Dr Ambedkar quoted another Sangh Parivar luminary, Lala Hardayal’s statement in Pratap of Lahore in 1925, which he called his political testament. 

I declare that the future of the Hindu race, of Hindustan and of the Punjab, rests on these four pillars: (1) Hindu Sangathan, (2) Hindu Raj, (3) Shuddhi of Moslems, and (4) Conquest and Shuddhi of Afghanistan and the Frontiers. So long as the Hindu nation does not accomplish these four things, the safety of our children and great grandchildren will be ever in danger, and the safety of the Hindu race will be impossible. The Hindu race has but one history, and its institutions are homogeneous. But the Musalmans and Christians are far removed from the confines of Hindustan, for their religions are alien and they love Persian, Arab and European institutions (Pakistan or Partition of India, 117).

As president of the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar repeatedly espoused the two-nation theory well before M.A. Jinnah did. It flowed logically from his Hindutva, in which Hindus alone constituted a nation. At the Mahasabha’s annual session in Ahmedabad in 1937, he said, 
Several infantile politicians commit the serious mistake in supposing that India is already welded into a harmonious nation or that it could be welded for the mere wish to do so. These, our well-meaning but unthinking friends, take their dreams for realities… Let us bravely face unpleasant facts as they are. India cannot be assumed today to be a Unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary these are two nations in the main, the Hindus and the Muslims in India (ibid, 131). 

He said later in 1939: “We Hindus are marked out as an abiding Nation by ourselves.” It must shun “territorial nationalism” which implies that all who are born in India belong to the Indian nation. He opts for “cultural nationalism” — only they are nationalists who subscribe to Hindu “culture” (read: religion). This is the “cultural nationalism” which Savarkar propounded. Golwalkar supported it, as did L.K. Advani and the BJP’s election manifestos. Are those people Indian nationalists or Hindu nationalists?

Savarkar urged: 
Let us Hindu Sanghathnists first correct the original mistake, the original political sin which our Hindu Congressites most unwillingly committed at the beginning of the Indian National Congress movement and are persistently committing still of running after the mirage of a territorial Indian Nation and of seeking to kill as an impediment in that fruitless pursuit the life growth of an organic Hindu Nation. (L.G. Khare (Ed.); Hindu Rashtra Darshan, 63)

Golwalkar’s theory
Savarkar’s ideology is writ large in Golwalkar’s book We or Our Nationhood Defined (1938). The book was cited in a formal legal document filed in 1978 before the District Judge of Nagpur by the RSS as an organisation. In a speech in Mumbai on May 15, 1963, Golwalkar said that “he found the principles of nationalism scientifically explained in Savarkar’s great work Hindutva. To him it was a textbook, a scientific book”. He publicly acknowledged his debt to the book Rashtra Meemansa by Savarkar’s elder brother Babarao (G.D.) Savarkar. Golwalkar’s own Bunch of Thoughtsreflects a deep impress of Savarkar’s Hindutva.

In his essay of 1939, "We or Our Nationhood Defined", Golwalkar gave free rein to his emulation of Savarkar. He wrote: 
Guided by this Religion in all walks of life, individual, social, political, the Race evolved a culture, which despite the degenerating contact with the debased ‘civilisations’ of the Mussalmans and the Europeans, for the last ten centuries, is still the noblest in the world.

He elaborated: 
Applying the modern understanding of ‘Nation’ to our present conditions, the conclusion is unquestionably forced upon us that in this country, Hindusthan, the Hindu Race with its Hindu Religion, Hindu Culture and Hindu Language, (the natural family of Sanskrit and her offsprings) complete the Nation concept; that, in fine, in Hindusthan exists and must needs exist the ancient Hindu nation and nought else but the Hindu Nation. All those not belonging to the national i.e. Hindu Race, Religion, Culture and Language, naturally fall out of the pale of real ‘National’ life.

We repeat; in Hindusthan, the land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation — satisfying all the five essential requirements of the scientific nation concept of the modern world. Consequently only those movements are truly ‘National’ as aim at re-building, re-vitalising and emancipating from its present stupor, the Hindu Notion. Those only are nationalist patriots, who, with the aspiration to glorify the Hindus race and Nation next to their heart, are prompted into activity and strive to achieve that goal. All others are either traitors and enemies to the National cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots. (43-44)

His bluntness of speech was much admired by his followers. Read this: 

There are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race. That is the only sound view on the minorities problem. That is the only logical and correct solution. That alone keeps the national life healthy and undisturbed. That alone keeps the Nation safe from the danger of a cancer developing into its body politic of the creation of a state within the state. From this standpoint, sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations, the foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation, and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights. There is, at least should be, no other course for them to adopt. We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races who have chosen to live in our country. (47-48) 

This is the ideology that inspires the Ghar Wapsi programme. 

Rejecting “territorial nationalism”, Golwalkar said that the "amazing theory was propounded that the Nation is composed of all those who, for one reason or the other, happen to live at the time in the country":

… But as we have seen we Hindus have been living, thousands of years, a full National life in Hindusthan. How can we be ‘communal’ having, as we do, no other interests but those relating to our Country, our Nation?… Let us rouse ourselves to our true nationality, let us follow the lead of our race-spirit, and fill the heavens with the clarion call of the Vedic seers ‘from sea to sea over all the land — One Nation’, one glorious, splendorous Hindu Nation benignly shedding peace and plenty over the whole world. (59, 63 and 67)

Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts (1968) was avidly devoured by the Parivar’s men and ran into several impressions. It is to the Sangh Parivar what Hitler’s Mein Kampf was to the Nazis. The chapter headings reveal the author’s mindset — “Territorial Nationalism” (which he rejects); “Internal Threats”, which are “the Muslims, the Christians” and “the Communists”. 

These gems reflect Golwalkar’s brilliance:

In fact, we are Hindus even before we emerge from the womb of our mother. We are therefore born as Hindus. About the others, they are born to this world as simple unnamed human beings and later on, either circumcised or baptised, they become Muslims or Christians…
Everybody knows that only a handful of Muslims came here as enemies and invaders. So also only a few foreign Christian missionaries came here. Now the Muslims and Christians have enormously grown in number. They did not grow just by multiplication as in the case of fishes.

They converted the local population. We can trace our ancestry to a common source, from where one portion was taken away from the Hindu fold and became Muslim and another became Christian. The rest could not be converted and they have remained as Hindus…
It is our duty to call these our forlorn brothers, suffering under religious slavery for centuries, back to their ancestral home. As honest freedom-loving men, let them overthrow all signs of slavery and domination and follow the ancestral ways of devotion and national life. All types of slavery are repugnant to our nature and should be given up. This is a call for all those brothers to take their original place in our national life.

And let us all celebrate a great Diwali on the return of those prodigal sons of our society. There is no compulsion here. This is only a call and request to them to understand things properly and come back and identify themselves with their ancestral Hindu way of life in dress, customs, performing marriage ceremonies and funeral rites and such other things. (130-131).

By now we know the name for this. It is “Operation Ghar Wapsi”:

Here was already a full-fledged ancient nation of the Hindus and the various communities which were living in the country were here either as guests, the Jews and Parsis, or as invaders, the Muslims and Christians. They never faced the question how all such heterogeneous groups could be called as children of the soil merely because, by an accident, they happened to reside in a common territory under the rule of a common enemy…

The theories of territorial nationalism and of common danger, which formed the basis for our concept of nation, had deprived us of the positive and inspiring content of our real Hindu Nationhood and made many of the ‘freedom movements’ virtually anti-British movements. Anti-Britishism was equated with patriotism and nationalism. This reactionary view has had disastrous effects upon the entire course of the freedom struggle, its leaders and the common people. (142-143)

…Then came the question of Muslims. They had come here as invaders. They were conceiving themselves as conquerors and rulers here for the last twelve hundred years. That complex was still in their mind. History has recorded that their antagonism was not merely political. Had it been so, they could have been won over in a very short time. But it was so deep-rooted that whatever we believed in, the Muslim was wholly hostile to it. If we worship in the temple, he would desecrate it. If we carry on bhajans and car festivals, that would irritate him. If we worship cow, he would like to eat it. If we glorify woman as a symbol of sacred motherhood, he would like to molest her. He was tooth and nail opposed to our way of life in all aspects — religious, cultural, social, etc. He had imbibed that hostility to the very core. (147-148) 

Those “twelve hundred years” are exactly what Modi talked about in his first speech to the Lok Sabha as Prime Minister.

“The name ‘India’ given by the British was accepted. Taking that name, the ‘new nation’ was called the ‘Indian Nation’.And the Hindu was asked to rename himself as ‘Indian’” (150). This is the “nationalism” that Savarkar, Golwalkar and the BJP espouse — not Indian nationalism. In 1969, the BJP’s ancestor, the Jana Sangh, revived the cry in the name of “Indianisation”. A resolution passed at its Patna Session on December 30, 1969, exhorted: 

Every effort should be made to revive and strengthen the sense of nationalism which is the sum total of cohesive forces in any country. This requires a clear understanding of the concept of nationalism and its main-springs… With the lapse of Preventive Detention Act, the need for enacting a law of treason has become an imperative necessity. This law should define treason and treasonable activities.

In BJP’s Manifestos
That explains the formulations on “cultural nationalism” in the BJP’s election manifestos, some of which have been quoted above. The one of 1998 was headed “Our National Identity: Cultural Nationalism”. It said in plain language: 

Our nationalist vision is not merely bound by the geographical or political identity of Bharat but it is referred by our timeless cultural heritage. This cultural heritage, which is central to all regions, religions and languages, is a civilisational identity and constitutes the cultural nationalism of India, which is the core of Hindutva. This we believe is the identity of our ancient nation ‘Bharatvarsha’…

The BJP is convinced that Hindutva has immense potentiality to re-energise this nation and strengthen and discipline it to undertake the arduous task of nation-building. This can and does trigger a higher level of patriotism that can transform the country to greater levels of efficiency and performance. It is with such integrative ideas in mind the BJP joined the Ram Janmabhoomi movement for the construction of
Shri Ram Mandir at Ayodhya.

The 2004 manifesto was as explicit:
Cultural Nationalism: The BJP draws its inspiration from the history and civilisation of India. We believe that Indian nationhood stems from a deep cultural bonding of the people that overrides differences of caste, region, religion and language. We believe in the Cultural Nationalism for which Indianness, Bharatiyata and Hindutva are synonyms — is the basis of our national identity.

This stark conflict between Indian and Hindu nationalism has been noted by all. Dr. D.R. Purohit’s analysis (in Hindu Revivalism and Indian Nationalism 1990) is incisive:

The two nationalisms, as Dr Beni Prasad puts it — the Hindu and the Indian — were fundamentally in opposition to each other with respect to their ideals. The former was exclusive, narrowly-based, mixed with religion and partial: it considered the Hindus the only nationals of Hindusthan and did not include other communities living in India within its scope; it had grown even militant and aggressive towards other religions. The latter believed in a composite culture of India, and viewed India as a nation composed of all the communities living therein. It was broad-based, pacifist, secular, democratic and liberal in temperament. One exalted a community over other communities while the other emphasised unity in the diversity of various communities. The one had great belief in centralised leadership and in militancy; the other was wedded to liberal and democratic traditions…

Thus the forces of Hindu nationalism defended by the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh presented a formidable challenge to the growing forces of Indian nationalism during the thirties and the forties of the twentieth century. It was, so to say, a struggle for existence between two ideologies, and as such there could be little room for cooperation between the rival ideologies. Its positive qualities apart, in so far as Hindu nationalism clung to its limited ideal and lost sight of the comprehensive national ideal, it did hinder the steady growth of the Indian national movement. (174-175)

It continues to perform this nefarious role even in this day and age in 2016 by passing off Hindutva or Hindu nationalism as the real nationalism and arrogating to itself a right to denounce Indian nationalists as “anti-nationals”. Hindutva, a euphemism for the two-nation theory, exposes these bogus nationalists.

A blight has descended on our great land with these “anti-nationals” — incompetent in governance; rapacious for power; intolerant of dissent; hostile to minorities; repressive of autonomous cultural and educational institutions, especially universities; and betrayers of Indian nationalism. This is a government that openly proclaims that it rules only in the interests of the majority community — as Advani had urged. 

With Narendra Modi as Prime Minister; an Arun Jaitley as the Finance Minister; a Rajnath Singh as the Home Minister; a Smriti Irani as the HRD Minister; a Ravi Shankar Prasad as the Telecom Minister; a Sadananda Gowda as the Law Minister; and others of the same kind, too numerous and inconsequential to deserve mention, what the celebrated Junius wrote in a letter, on January 21, 1769, on the misgovernance of the regime of the day, is all too true of the Ministry that rules India today: 

If, by the immediate interposition of Providence, it were possible for us to escape a crisis so full of terror and despair, posterity will not believe the history of the present times. They will either conclude that our distresses were imaginary, or that we had the good fortune to be governed by men of acknowledged integrity and wisdom: they will not believe it possible, that their ancestors could have survived or recovered from so desperate a condition.
(The author is an Indian lawyer, historian and author. He has practiced as an advocate in the Supreme Court of India and in the Bombay High Court.The publication of this essay has been possible due to the permission extended by the EMS Smrithi Organizing Committee, Ayaanthole from Idea of India, Background Papers, EMS Smrithi Series compiled by M.N. Sudhakaran et al, Thrissur, June 2016).

Courtsey: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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On January 13, 1948 Gandhiji began his last fast to protest the brutal killings that had bloodied the streets of Delhi and other parts of India and Pakistan following the Partition of the sub-continent. His speech that day at the Prayer Meeting is worth recalling given the Goebellian propaganda around his motives propagated by the votaries of a Hindu nation

Brothers and Sisters,
Today I may not finish my speech in 15 minutes as usual, as I have much to say.

Today I have come to the prayer meeting because for the first twenty-four hours after beginning a fast, the body does not feel it or should not feel it. I began eating at half past nine this morning. People kept coming and talking to me. I finished eating a little before eleven. So I have been able to come to the meeting and this is not surprising. Today I can walk about and sit up and I have also done some work. From tomorrow there will be some change. Rather than coming here and not speaking, I might as well sit in my room and think. If I have to utter the name of God, I can do it there. I therefore feel that I shall not be coming to the prayer meeting from tomorrow. But if you do wish to join in the prayer you may come if you feel like it. The girls will come and sing the prayer. At least one of them will come. I have told you my programme in case you should feel disappointed at my not coming.

I had written down yesterday's speech and it has been pub­lished in the newspapers. Now that I have started my fast many people cannot understand what I am doing.

Who are the offend­ers- Hindus or Sikhs or Muslims? How long will the fast last? I say I do not blame anyone. Who am I to accuse others? I have said that we have all sinned. That does not mean that anyone particular man has sinned. Hindus in trying to drive out the Muslims are not following Hinduism. And today it is both Hindus and Sikhs who are trying to do so. But I do not accuse all the Hindus and Sikhs because not all of them are doing it.

People should under­stand this. If they do not, my purpose will not be realized and the fast too will not be terminated. If I do not survive the fast, no one is to be blamed. If I am proved unworthy, God will take me away. People ask me if my fast is intended for the cause of the Muslims. I admit that that is so. Why? Because Muslims here today have lost everything in the world. Formerly they could depend on the Government. There was also the Muslim League.

Today the Mus­lim League is no longer there. The League got the country partitioned and even after the Partition there are large numbers of Mus­lims here. I have always held that those who have been left behind in India should be given all help. It is only humanity.

Mine is a fast of self-purification. Everyone should purify himself. If not, the situation cannot be saved. If everyone is to pu­rify himself, Muslims will also purify themselves. Everyone should cleanse his heart. No one should find fault with the Muslims what­ever they may do. If I confess before someone that I have done wrong, then it is a kind of atonement.

I do not say this in order to appease the Muslims or anyone else. I want to appease myself which means that I want to appease God. I do not want to be a sinner against God. Muslims also must become pure and live peacefully in India. What happened was that for election purposes Hindus and Sikhs recognised the Muslim League. I shall not go into that history. Then followed the partition. But before partition became a fact the hearts had already become divided. Muslims were also at fault here, though we cannot say that they alone were at fault. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, all are to blame. Now all of them have to become friends again. Let them look to God, not to Satan. Among the Muslims too there are many who worship Satan. Among the Hindus and the Sikhs many worship not Nanak and other Gurus, but Satan. In the name of religion we have become irreligious.

Since I have undertaken the fast for the cause of the Mus­lims, a great responsibility has come to devolve on them. They must understand that if they are to live with the Hindus as brothers they must be loyal to the Indian Union, not to Pakistan. I shall not ask them whether they are loyal of not. I shall judge them by their conduct.

I shall terminate the fast only when peace has returned to Delhi. If peace is restored to Delhi it will have effect not only on the whole of India but also on Pakistan and when that happens, a Mus­lim can walk around in the city all by himself. I shall then terminate the fast

Then the name of the Sardar is being mentioned. The Mus­lims say that I am good, but the Sardar is not and he must be removed. They say that Jawaharlal too is good. They say if I join the Government it will be a good thing. They object only to the Sardar. I must tell the Muslims that their argument serves no pur­pose, because the Government is the whole Cabinet, neither the Sardar nor Jawahar by himself. They are your servants. You can remove them. Yes, Muslims alone cannot remove them. But at least they can bring to the Sardar's notice any mistakes which in their opinion he commits. It will not do merely to criticize him by quoting some statement or other he might have made. You must say what he has done. You must tell me. I meet him often and I shall bring it to his notice. Jawaharlal can dismiss him and if he does not, there must be some reason. He praises the Sardar. Then the Govern­ment IS responsible for whatever the Sardar does. You too are responsible for he is your representative. That is how things go in a democracy. Therefore I shall say that the Muslims must become brave and fearless. They should also become God-fearing. They must think that for them there is no League, no Congress, no Gan­dhi, no Jawaharlal but only God; that they are here in the name of God. Let them not take offence at whatever Hindus and Sikhs may do. I am with them, I want to live and die with them. If I cannot keep you united, my life is worthless. The Muslims thus carry a great responsibility. They must not forget this.

The Sardar is blunt of speech. What he says sometimes sounds bitter. The fault is in his tongue. I can testify that his heart is not like his tongue. He has said in Lucknow and in Calcutta that all Muslims should live here and can live here. He also told me that he could not trust those Muslims who till the other day followed the League and considered themselves enemies of Hindus and Sikhs and who could not have changed overnight and suddenly become friends. If the Leage is still there who will they obey, Pakistan or our Government? The League's persistence in its old attitude makes him suspect it, and rightly so. He says that he no longer has faith in the bona fides of the League Muslims and he cannot trust them. Let them prove that they can be trusted. Then I have the right to tell the Hindus and Sikhs what they should do.

The song these girls sang was composed by Gurudev. We sang it during our tours in Noakhali. A man walking alone calls others to come and join him. But if no one comes and it is dark, the Poet says, the man should walk alone because God is already with him. I asked the girls especially to sing this song which is in Bengali. Otherwise they would have sung only Hindustani songs. The Hin­dus and Sikhs should cultivate this attitude if they are true to their religions. They should not generate an atmosphere in which the Muslims should be compelled to flee to Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs should become brave and show that even if all the Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan were to be killed there would be no retaliation in India. I do not want to live to see our people copy Pakistan. If I am to live I shall ask every Hindu and every Sikh not to touch a single Muslim. It is cowardice to kill Muslims and we must become brave and not cowards.

I shall terminate the fast only when peace has returned to Delhi. If peace is restored to Delhi it will have effect not only on the whole of India but also on Pakistan and when that happens, a Mus­lim can walk around in the city all by himself. I shall then terminate the fast. Delhi is the capital of India. It has always been the capital of India. So long as things do not return to normal in Delhi, they will not be normal either in India or in Pakistan. Today I cannot bring Suhrawardy here because I fear someone may insult him. Today he cannot walk about in the streets of Delhi. If he did he would be assaulted. What I want is that he should be able to move about here even in the dark. It is true that he made efforts in Calcutta only when Muslims became involved. Still, he could have made the situation worse, if he had wanted, but he did not want to make things worse. He made the Muslims evacuate the places they had forcibly occupied and said that he being the Premier could do so. Although the places occupied by the Muslims belonged to Hindus and Sikhs he did his duty. Even if it takes a whole month to have real peace established in Delhi it does not matter. People should not do anything merely to have me terminate the fast.

So my wish is that Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, and Muslims who are in India should continue to live in India and India should become a country where everyone's life and property are safe. Only then will India progress.
(Speech at the Prayer Meeting, New Delhi, January 13, 1948, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Vol-90, P. 413)

 … My fast, as I have stated in plain language, is undoubt­edly on behalf of the Muslim minority in the Union and, therefore, it is necessarily against the Hindus and Sikhs of the Union and the Muslims of Pakistan.
It is also on behalf of the minorities in Pakistan as in the case of the Muslim minority in the Union.
(Excerpt from the Speech at Prayer Meeting, New Delhi, January 15, 1948, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Vol-90, P. 428-429)

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