A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance,” said Jawaharlal Nehru in his famous ‘Tryst With Destiny’ speech. One may ask, how long did he mean when he said, “when the soul of a nation, long suppressed?” Did he mean only 190 years of British rule from 1757-1947? Or was he alluding to a much longer period during which India’s soul was crushed into a lifeless slumber, from which it was emerging into “life and freedom”?
What was suppressed was India’s soul, her ancient spirit, and not the modern idea of India. Therefore, freedom would mean the revival of that spirit from which a thousand ideas of India could flow as they did before being suppressed. The famed diversity of India, both the Vedic and non-Vedic traditions, is a legacy of that past, and not a gift of the conquerors. Using the idea of India to negate the spirit of India has been a bad idea. If India was subjugated for its religion, its resurgence, too, had to be religious. The freedom that, in the name of secularism, kept Hinduism out of public space, was half freedom.
The construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya is an act of a wounded civilisation healing itself, and the Pran Pratishtha ceremony is the iconic moment, “when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance”. Indian renaissance and Hindu resurgence are the same. In a country where almost 80 per cent of the population is Hindu, and most of the rest are former Hindus, the cultural idiom of the civilisational resurrection had to be Hindu.
Muslims and Hindutva
The resurgent spirit, encapsulated in the word Hindutva, is the motor of this civilisational rise in which Muslims have as much share as Hindus. However, without the Hindu revival, there can’t be an Indian renaissance. If Hindus fall, India falls, each one of us falls; and if Hindus rise, India rises, each one of us rises.
“Muslims need the rise of Indian civilisation, the Hindutva, no less than the Hindus. Indian Muslims, too, like Hindus, need self-renewal; unlike Hindus, they have proved incapable of engaging in such an exercise even under the stimulus provided by British rule. Only the triumph of Hindutva can help create a milieu, which obliges them to try and overcome the inertia of tradition reinforced by the ulema,” wrote journalist Girilal Jain in his book, The Hindu Phenomenon.
There has never been a better time for Indian Muslims, both materially and religiously. They have never been better fed, better clothed, better educated and better employed. The economy is growing, India is surging ahead, and the Muslims are reaping the benefits as much as the Hindus. Above all, they have never been more secure than now. The riot-after-riot secular raj is long over. Among Muslims, radicalisation has subsided, violent instinct has been tamed, the separatist narrative has lost conviction, and politics of the vote-bank has crashed. The focus has now shifted to education and employment.
Politically, with the universal adult franchise in an ever-deepening democracy, Muslims are more enfranchised and empowered than in any Muslim-majority country. Muslim women have been secured against the scourge of Triple Talaq, and soon they will have the same rights as men under the Uniform Civil Code. As for the religious well-being of Muslims, the proliferating madrasas, burgeoning mosques, blaring azans, minaret-dominated skylines, the lakhs upon lakhs going for Hajj and Umrah, and the pronounced religious dress and appearance of Muslim men and women are proof enough.
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How Hindutva helped Pasmandas
The advent of Indian Muslims under Hindutva is best reflected through the rise of Pasmandas, ‘lower caste’ Muslims of Hindu ancestry who constitute a major chunk of India’s Muslim population. Under the secular raj, the indigenous Pasmanda provided the numbers while foreign-origin Ashraaf Muslims kept the leadership. During the 1990s, when Hindu backward castes burst onto the political scene, their Pasmanda Muslim counterparts remained invisible and unrecognised because they had no other identity except Muslim. Their rightful place was usurped by the Ashraaf leadership, who were little more than clients of the so-called secular parties.
Without Hindutva, the Pasmanda discourse would never have been mainstreamised, and the voice of the overwhelming majority of Muslims, including all Muslim women, would remain muzzled in the name of religious unity and correctness.
The Pasmanda ascent is part of the rise of downtrodden Indians, which would not have been possible without the unremitting self-criticism of Hindu thinkers, and continuous reform and revival of the last 200 years. From Raja Rammohan Roy to Dayanand Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda, and from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Bhimrao Ambedkar to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Narendra Modi, there has been a steady evolution of Hindu social reform. India’s revival is a direct outcome of these reform movements, which focused on the removal of caste and gender inequalities.
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Hindutva is self-assured, all-embracing
These critiques tapped into the Hindu scriptural authority, and thus, couldn’t be opposed brazenly. Today, it’s no longer possible to make an ideological or theoretical argument to keep the lower caste low and oppressed genders oppressed. The reforms, intertwined as they were with political empowerment and affirmative action, filled these classes with agency for initiative and action. India’s resurgence is mainly owed to these sections. Some analysts call it ‘subaltern Hindutva’. The rise of Muslim subalterns, the Pasmanda and the women, is powered by the same civilisational rejuvenation.
The Hindu resurgence, known as Hindutva, is the contemporary articulation and public rehabilitation of the civilisational heritage of India. It’s a modern reformulation of an ancient tradition. It is self-assured and outward-looking, generous and all-embracing. Indian Muslims have been a part of this rise by default. They have been gaining, and have everything to gain from India’s rise.
Vivekananda said: “For our own motherland a junction of the two great systems, Hinduism and Islam — Vedanta brain and Islam body — is the only hope.” His hope remained unfulfilled because the Muslims didn’t regenerate themselves as the Hindus did under the colonial stimulus. Now, with the spark given by Hindutva, it’s time for their regeneration too. As Indians, the world is their oyster. Therefore, they should be the greatest proponents of the idea of Akhand Bharat and India as Vishwa Guru. Their destiny is Indian. They don’t have a future as part of the illusion called Islamic Ummah. India will never again be a province, a sultanate, of the caliphate.
The Muslims have lost nothing and have been gaining everything from India’s success. If they still regard themselves as victims, it’s a psychological warp created by motivated narrative makers — the Hindu liberals and their Muslim clients. They need just clarity to cure them of their victimhood syndrome. Much like the state policy of India is not decided by priests and the shastras, it will not be determined by the dictates of Islamic jurisprudence and the sentiments of the Ashraaf.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)