Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Consider, next, the orthodox Hindu. He stages an agitation against the proposed removal of the word ‘Hindu’ from Banaras University, and secures the support of the Muslim League. He would start an agitation for a ban on cow-slaughter and Muslim communalists would support even that. For when they support him on such issues, both of them can establish a united front against Mr Chagla, and then the Muslim communalist would also be left free to stage nation-wide agitations for a re-display of the Prophet’s lost hair. He can bully critics of the Prophet. In short, he will always turn Hindu revivalism to his own benefit. It must be remembered that the obscurantism of one community helps to strengthen the obscurantism of other communities. If Hindu obscurantism is attacked and eliminated, it would also be a strong blow to Muslim obscurantism.

  Who then is really fighting Muslim communalism? The answer is, a handful of modern Muslims. Mr Chagla in fact leads the modern liberal Muslims. And all of us know Mr Chagla’s situation now. He is opposed by the Muslims and unsupported by the Hindus.

  There is no doubt that the picture I have painted of Indian Muslims is terrible. But it is true. One would be deceiving oneself if one tried to believe it was otherwise.

  This, however, is what we observe on the surface. On the surface, Muslim society appears to be mediaeval in its make-up. Yet, somewhere deep down, a change is taking place in this society. There is nothing dramatic about this change. It is largely imperceptible and indeed very slow. It is a process which began quite a few years ago. It has still to cover many stages before it reaches its completion. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan represents the first phase in the modernization of Indian Muslims. He wanted to modernize the Muslims although he was still opposed to the Hindus. Jinnah and Iqbal represent the second phase. In the beginning [when] they began to talk in the name of Islam … neither Jinnah nor Iqbal was anti-Hindu. However, Islamism ultimately led to anti-Hinduism. This is where the process of Muslim modernization was arrested. The Hindus, on the other hand, had progressed much further …

  However, a new generation of Muslims is emerging in India today. One can see the first glimmers of a genuine modern humanism in them. In the vast mass of a mediaeval Muslim society one witnesses a few young Muslims who have a modern, humanistic and rational attitude. They are still scattered and isolated like islands in a vast ocean. Their modernity is reflected in what they speak and write. It is seen in their actions.

  It may be useful to cite a few examples. Some educated Indian Muslims show the signs of a newly emerging attitude of unbiased detachment. For instance, Professor Mohammad Yasin’s book, Social History of Islamic India, Professor Athar Rizvi’s work analyzing Muslim revivalism in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Professor M. Mujeeb’s book Indian Muslims, reveal a new attitude of critical detachment. This kind of modern attitude is also shared by Professor Mohammad Habib [of Aligarh Muslim University] and the Head of the Department of Political Science at Osmania University, Dr Rashiduddin Khan. During my recent visit to Aligarh I had a chance to meet and talk to some men and women students as well as some of the teaching staff. Even among them I found the hopeful signs of a critically introspective attitude. In many cities in Northern India not only is the purdah fast disappearing but there is also a rapid spread of education among Muslim women. Many of these have married men of other faiths. It is significant to note that these men of other religions who married Muslim women were not urged to become Muslims. All these trends indicate the emergence of modernity among Indian Muslims.

  Are we going to welcome these new trends? Are we going to encourage them and let them flourish? This is what we have to decide now. We have to check Pakistani expansionism and protect our borders. We have to adopt a clear and decisive long-range policy towards Pakistan. We have to support Muslim modernism in India. We have to insist on a common personal law for all citizens of India. All marriages in India must be registered under a common Civil Code. Religious conversion should not be allowed, except when the intending convert is adult and the conversion takes place before a magistrate. Children born of inter-religious marriages should be free to practise any religion but only after they reach legal adulthood. If either a [Muslim] dargah or a [Hindu] temple obstructs the passage of traffic on a thoroughfare, it ought to be removed. Government should have control over the income of all religious property. This income should be spent on education and public welfare alone. It should not be obligatory to mention one’s religion and caste (even today, the admission form used in schools compels students to state their religion) …

  For all this to happen, the present division among the Hindus should cease to exist. Those Hindus who want to counter Muslim communalism unfortunately try to strengthen Hindu revivalism. And those Hindus who want to lead the Hindus and ultimately the whole of this nation on the way of modernity are unfortunately supporting Muslim communalists. This has to change. I am on the side of all Hindus who oppose Muslim communalism; but when the same Hindus help Hindu revivalism, I am opposed to them. I support all those who want to modernize the Hindus; but when they adopt a policy of not opposing Muslim communalism, I oppose them. If the Hindus develop a proper balance of mind, I believe the present tensions would soon begin to resolve.

  Epilogue

  India in the World

  I

  As the preceding pages demonstrate, the Indian political tradition has been both continuous as well as cumulative. To be sure, the continuities may have been emphasized by the way in which this book has been structured. But the tradition itself is by no means the product of an editor’s artifice. The ways in which thinkers who come later refer to those who came before, the ways in which they challenge or contest those who are their contemporaries—these make it clear that what we have here is not a random collection of interesting individuals, but a connected political tradition.

  The essentially disputatious nature of this tradition is manifest throughout this book. Even though I have termed him the ‘first liberal’, Rammohan Roy was not writing on a clean slate. In advocating a free press and greater rights for women, he was articulating ideas which challenged both the dominant mores of Indian (or specifically Hindu) society, as well as the policies promoted by the British in India. The thinkers profiled in Part II were more directly arguing amongst themselves. Tilak and Gokhale were major leaders of the Indian National Congress who disagreed about the direction that their party should follow. Neither Phule nor Shinde were members of the Congress, yet both shared a hometown (Poona), a language and culture (Marathi and Maharashtrian) and a political situation (subjecthood within the British Empire) with Tilak and Gokhale. The emphasis of one on the rights of the lower castes and of the other on the status of women was, directly or indirectly, a refutation of the credo that Gokhale and Tilak (albeit in different ways and with different emphases) advanced with regard to greater representation for Indians as a whole. As for Syed Ahmad Khan, he stood outside the ambit of the Congress and of Hindu society; in opposing the former, he wished at the same time to make his fellow Muslims as sensible of the need for modern education as the latter.

  Part III features a different set of protagonists and a more intense set of arguments. These centre on the figure of Mahatma Gandhi. As we have seen, Gandhi took elements from both Tilak and Gokhale, but not mechanically. Rather, he adapted, reinvented, refined, synthesized and transcended their legacy in forging a political programme he thought more appropriate to the times. Gandhi’s ideas, in turn, were expanded by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, contested by Rabindranath Tagore, challenged by E.V. Ramaswami and rejected by B.R. Ambedkar and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Sometimes, these thinkers hark back to earlier and still revered members of the tradition—as in Tagore’s invocation of Rammohan Roy. More often, they address themselves directly to Gandhi, who is their often named and sometimes unnamed interlocutor or disputant. Nor does the debate stop there; for Gandhi, in reaction to his critics, reformulates his ideas to make them more consistent or more appealing to his diverse audiences.

  Moving to Par
t IV, it is evident that Nehru locates himself in the tradition of Congress nationalism that Gandhi best embodied and whose other exemplars included Tilak, Gokhale and Tagore. To be sure, like Gandhi again, some ideas are all Nehru’s own (those on foreign policy, for example). Yet other ideas (for example, on Hindu–Muslim harmony), while deriving from Gandhi, are restated in ways that challenge Jinnah’s claim that the Congress cannot be fair to Muslims, or M.S. Golwalkar’s claim that only Hindus can be reliable citizens of independent India.

  Golwalkar himself can only be understood as being, in key respects, the Other of Nehru—opposing or inverting not just his attitude to Indian Muslims, but his economic and foreign policies for independent India as well. The other thinker-activists in this section had more complicated—and, dare one say, more interesting—political genealogies. Lohia, Rajagopalachari and Narayan had all been deeply influenced by Gandhi. Like Nehru, they considered themselves followers or disciples of the Mahatma. However, they read the message of the master in ways congenial to their own orientation and political practice. Like Gandhi, Lohia was sceptical of the uses of English; like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari was sceptical of the professedly benign intentions of the modern state; and, like Gandhi again, Narayan was sceptical of the efficacy of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, these thinkers were also innovators. Lohia, with regard to caste; Rajagopalachari, with regard to the economy; and Narayan, with regard to the people of India’s borderlands—all offered perspectives different from and in many ways opposed to those of Nehru.

  As for Verrier Elwin, he too knew and admired Gandhi. Yet he believed that the national movement had neglected the problem of the tribals, in contrast to the problems of women and lower castes which they had seriously reflected upon. In his writings before and after Independence, Elwin sought to make politicians and policymakers more sensitive to the rights and claims of the tribals of central and north-eastern India.

  Our last exemplar, Hamid Dalwai, was deeply aware of this long lineage of debate and disputation. In his writings, he refers to Rammohan Roy, Syed Ahmad Khan, Mohandas K. Gandhi, M.A. Jinnah, Jotirao Phule and Jawaharlal Nehru; sometimes appreciatively, at other times critically. He places himself in this tradition explicitly, by naming his organization the Muslim Satyashodhak Samaj, as well as implicitly, by calling for a Muslim Nehru (who might indeed have been himself).

  II

  This book represents the public face of the Indian political tradition. But there was also a private face. Consider, for example, this fascinating exchange between two ‘makers of modern India’ at the time of the country’s second general elections in 1957. While the campaigning was on, the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, received an extraordinary letter from a comrade-turned-political adversary. This was Jayaprakash Narayan, who by now had abandoned politics for social work, but who nonetheless made speeches on behalf of the Opposition candidates in the elections. In his letter, Narayan suggested that the prime minister function as a ‘national rather than a party leader’; that, even while he ran the government, he should ‘encourage the growth of an Opposition’ so as to ‘soundly lay the foundations of parliamentary democracy’ in India.

  During the elections, Narayan had tried, and failed, to get Opposition parties to avoid three-cornered contests in individual constituencies, since from a division of the vote only the Congress would benefit. ‘In doing so,’ Narayan told Nehru, he was

  not guided by dislike of or hostility to the Congress as you have repeatedly been suggesting but merely by certain dispassionate political principles. According to parliamentary democracy theory it is not necessary for the opposition to be better than the ruling party. Equally bad parties in opposition are a check on one another and keep the democratic machine on the track … [A]s a Socialist my sympathies are all with the British Labour Party, but I concede that when Labour is in power the Conservatives perform a valuable democratic function without which the Labour government might become a menace to the people. So, I realise that if my advice had been followed by the opposition parties, it would have led to some undesirable parties gaining somewhat in strength. I was prepared, however, to take that risk on the ground (a) that between the two evils of absoluteness of power and a little increase in the strength of certain undesirable parties, the former was the greater evil and (b) that there would be five years after the election in which a sound opposition party could be created.

  In one of his speeches, Nehru had apparently chastised Narayan for ‘playing hide-and-seek’ between the pillars of politics and social service. The younger man, he said, ‘claim[ed] to have given up politics’ but ‘continue[d] to dabble in it’. Narayan replied that he did ‘not see why only active party and power politicians should express political opinions and no others. Politics would then be reduced to a sordid party game with which the citizen would have no concern’. There was a particular responsibility for Gandhian ‘constructive workers’ to speak out. These workers, insisted Narayan, would

  betray their ideals if they did not boldly play a corrective role, offering friendly, constructive, non-partisan advice and criticism and, if need be, even opposition in the form of non-cooperation and the like. Nor can eschewing of party politics mean indifference to the manner and outcome of elections. True, those who have eschewed party politics are not expected to take any partisan stand, but they may, with complete consistency, raise general political and ideological issues for the guidance of the electorate, the parties and the candidates.

  Narayan ended his letter on a somewhat despairing note. Whatever the outcome of the elections, he remarked,

  the verdict is inescapable that the present political system has proved a failure. Therefore, the need after the elections is for the leaders of the country to get together in order to find out if there is a better alternative. I think there is and, in the larger interest of the country, we must seek it out. It is here that your leadership is most needed, because without you this cannot be done.

  Narayan’s letter extended over six typed pages; Nehru’s reply was even longer. He had ‘quite failed to understand’ what Narayan meant ‘by my becoming a national leader, rather than a party leader’. ‘What does a national leader do?’ asked Nehru:

  If it is meant that he should collect a number of important people from different parties and form a government, surely this can only be done if there is some dominant common purpose. Without such a purpose, no government can function. Sometimes, such national governments are formed in wartime, when the only dominant purpose is winning the war and everything is subordinated to it. Even so, they have not been much of a success in parliamentary democracies. Apart from a war, however, we have to deal with political and economic problems, national and international. There must be some common outlook and unity of purpose in dealing with these problems. Otherwise, there would be no movement at all and just an internal tug of war.

  Nehru argued that by being a ‘party leader’ he had not sacrificed any policy that he may have followed had he been a ‘national’ leader. The economic and foreign policies of his administration were, he believed, in the best interests of the nation. They were not merely a reflection of the Congress Party’s prejudices or preferences. If the government that Nehru led had made any compromises, this was ‘not because of the party, but because of the facts that encompassed us. We have to function as a Government dealing with these facts and not with theoretical propositions’.

  Nehru then turned to the question of a robust Opposition to the Congress. ‘So far as I understand parliamentary democracy,’ he said,

  it means that every opportunity should be given for an opposition to function, to express its views by word or writing, to contest elections in fair conditions, and to try to convert the people to its views. The moment an opposition is given some kind of a protected position, it becomes rather a bogus opposition and cannot even carry weight with the people. I am not aware of any pattern of parliamentary democracy in which it has ever been suggested that the opposition
should be encouraged, except in the ways I have mentioned above.