Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  A wide range of Hindu thinkers, social reformers, and politicians followed the British in dismissing the centuries of Muslim domination as a time of darkness and upholding imperial rule with all its social reforms and scientific advances as preparation for self-rule. Some denounced British imperialism as exploitative, but even they welcomed its redeeming modernity and, above all, the European idea of the nation—a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values, and sense of purpose—which for many other colonized peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering West.

  Muslim leaders, on the other hand, were slow to participate in the civilizing mission of imperialism; they saw little place for themselves in the idea of the nation as espoused by the Hindu elite. British imperialists followed their own strategies of divide and rule; the decision to partition Bengal in 1905 and to have separate electorates for Muslims further reinforced the sense among many upwardly mobile Indians that they belonged to distinct communities defined exclusively by religion.

  It is true that Gandhi and Nehru worked hard to attract low-caste Hindus and Muslims; they wanted to give a mass base and wider legitimacy to the political demands for self-rule that intensified in the early twentieth century under the leadership of the Congress Party. But Gandhi’s use of popular Hindu symbols, which made him a mahatma among Hindu masses, caused many Muslims to distrust him. Also, many Congress leaders shared the views not of Gandhi or of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who criticized Western-style nationalism, but of such upper-caste ideologues as Veer Savarkar and Guru Golwalkar, the spiritual and ideological parents of Hindu nationalists of today.

  2. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: Indian-Style Fascism

  On the evening of January 30, 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mahatma Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting in the grounds of his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times in the chest and abdomen. Gandhi was then seventy-nine years old and a forlorn figure. He had been unable to prevent, and so was widely blamed by many Hindus for, the bloody creation of Pakistan as a separate homeland for Indian Muslims. The violent uprooting of millions of Hindus and Muslims across the hastily drawn borders of India and Pakistan had tainted the freedom from colonial rule that he had been so arduously working toward. When the bullets from an automatic pistol hit his frail body at point-blank range, he collapsed and died instantly. His assassin made no attempt to escape and even, as he would later claim, shouted for the police.

  Millions of shocked Indians waited anxiously for further news that night, fearing unspeakable violence if Gandhi’s murderer proved to be a Muslim. There was much relief, and also some puzzlement, the next morning when the assassin was revealed as Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India, a region relatively untouched by the murderous passions of the partition.

  Born in a lower-middle-class family, Godse began his career in 1932 as a Hindu activist with the RSS, which had been founded by a Brahmin doctor called Hegdewar in the central Indian city of Nagpur seven years previously. The RSS was, and remains, dedicated to establishing a Hindu nation by uniting Hindus from all castes and sects and by forcing Muslims, Christians, and other Indian minorities to embrace Hindu culture. Godse received both physical and ideological training from members of the RSS and absorbed their ideas about the greatness of pre-Islamic India and the havoc wrought upon Hindus by eight centuries of Maslim invasions and tyranny.

  During his trial, Godse made a long and eloquent speech in English explaining his background and motives. He claimed that Gandhi’s “constant and consistent pandering to the Muslims,” whom he described variously as fanatical, violent, and antinational, had left him with no choice. He blamed Gandhi for the “vivisection of the country—our motherland” and denounced the latter’s insistence upon nonviolence, saying that it was “absurd to expect [four hundred million] people to regulate their lives on such a lofty plane.” He claimed it was the terrorist methods of Hindu and Sikh freedom fighters, not Gandhi’s nonviolence, that had forced the British to leave India, and hoped that with Gandhi dead, “Indian politics would surely be practical, able to retaliate,” and the nation, he claimed, “would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan.”

  Godse requested that the judge at his trial show him no mercy, and he did not appeal against the death sentence passed on him. He went to the gallows in November 1949 shouting such slogans as “Long Live the Undivided India” and singing paeans to the “Living Motherland, the Land of the Hindus.” The Indian government under Pandit Nehru banned the RSS a few days after Gandhi’s murder and arrested thousands of its members. The ban was lifted a year later, after the RSS agreed to have a written constitution and confine itself to “cultural” activities, a promise it quickly broke.

  Not much is known about the RSS in the West, although both the former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his deputy, L. K. Advani, belong to it and have never repudiated its militant ideology, the ideology of Hindu nationalism that seeks aggressively to “Hinduize” South Asia and has often threatened to plunge the region, which has the largest Muslim population in the world and two nuclear-armed nations, into catastrophic war.

  After September 11, 2001, the Hindu nationalists presented themselves to the West as reliable allies in the fight against Muslim fundamentalists. But in India their resemblance to the European fascist movements of the 1930s has been clear for a long time. In his manifesto We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1938), Guru Golwalkar, director of the RSS from 1940 to 1973, during which time both Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani joined the organization and rose to become senior leaders of its political wing, said that the Nazis had manifested “race pride at its highest” by purging Germany of the Jews. According to Golwalkar, India was Hindustan, a land of Hindus where Jews and Parsis could only ever be “guests,” and to which Muslims and Christians came as “invaders.” Golwalkar was clear about what he expected from both the guests and the invaders:

  The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea 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.

  Golwalkar and his disciples in the RSS and Congress saw India as the sacred indigenous nation of Hindus which had been divided and emasculated by Muslim invaders, and which could be revived only by uniting India’s diverse population, recovering ancient Hindu traditions, and weeding out corrupting influences from Central Asia and Arabia. This meant forcing Indian Muslims to give up their allegiance to such alien lands and faiths as Mecca and Islam. and embrace the so-called Hindu ethos, or Hindutva, of India, an ethos that was, ironically, imagined into being with the help of British Orientalist discoveries of India’s past.

  By the 1940s the feudal and professional Muslim elite of India had grown extremely wary of the Hindu nationalist strain within the Congress. After many failed attempts at political rapprochement, this elite finally arrived at the demand for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims. The demand expressed the Muslim fear of being reduced to a perpetual minority in a Hindu majority state and was, initially, a desire for a more federal polity for postcolonial India. But the leaders of the Congress chose to partition the Muslim-majority provinces in the west and east rather than share the centralized power of the colonial state that was their great inheritance from the British.

  This led to the violent transfer of millions of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims across hastily drawn artificial borders. The massacres, rapes, and kidnappings further hardened sectarian feelings; the RSS, which was temporarily banned after Gandhi’s assassination, found its most dedicated volunteers among middle-class Hindu refugees f
rom Pakistan, such as the former home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, who was born in Muslim-dominated Karachi and joined the RSS as early as 1942. The RSS floated a new party, the Jana Sangh, later to become the BJP, which entered electoral politics in independent India in 1951 with the renewed promise of a Hindu nation; although it worked for much of the next three decades in the gigantic shadow of the Congress Party, its sudden popularity in the 1980s now seems part of the great disaster of partition, which locked the new nation-states of India and Pakistan into stances of mutual hostility.

  In Pakistan, a shared faith failed to reconfigure the diverse regional and linguistic communities into a new nation. This was proved when the Bengali-speaking population of East Pakistan seceded, with Indian help, to form the new state of Bangladesh in 1971. Muslim in India continue to lack effective spokespersons, despite, or perhaps because of, the tokenist presence of Muslims at the highest levels of the government. Politically, they are significant only during elections, when they form a solid vote bank for those Hindu politicians promising to protect them against discrimination and violence. Their representation in government jobs has steadily declined.

  Secularism, the separation of religion from politics, was always going to be difficult to impose upon a country where religion has long shaped political and cultural identities. But it was the only useful basis on which the centralized government in Delhi could, in the name of modernity and progress, establish its authority over a poor and chaotically fractious country. However, when Sikh and Muslim minorities in the states of Punjab and Kashmir challenged the great arbitrary power of the Indian government, Nehru’s heirs, his daughter, Indira, and grandson Rajiv, were quick to discard even the rhetoric of secularism and to turn Hindu majoritarianism into the official ideology of the Congress-run central Indian government.

  The uprisings in Punjab, and then Kashmir, were portrayed by the Indian government and the middle-class media as fundamentalist and terrorist assaults on secular democracy. In fact, although tainted by association with Pakistan and religious fanaticism, the Sikhs and Kashmiri Muslims expressed a long-simmering discontent with an antifederalist state in Delhi, a state that had retained most of the power of the old colonial regime and often wielded it more brutally than the British ever had. The uprisings were part of a larger crisis, one that has occurred elsewhere in postcolonial nations, the failure of a corrupt and self-serving political and bureaucratic elite to ensure social and economic justice for those it had claimed to represent in its anticolonial battles.

  By the 1980s, when the Hindu nationalists abruptly rose to prominence, the Congress had disillusioned lower-caste Hindus and looked incapable of preserving even the interests of its upper-caste Hindu constituency. It kept raising the bogey of national unity and external enemies. But the disturbances in the border states of Kashmir and Punjab only gave more substance to the Hindu nationalist allegation that the Congress with its “pseudosecularism” had turned India into a “soft state,” where Kashmiri Muslims could blithely conspire with Pakistan against Mother India.

  It was in the 1980s, with the Congress rapidly declining and the pseudosocialist economy close to bankruptcy, that the Hindu nationalists saw a chance to find new voters among upper-caste Hindus. Like the National Socialists in Germany in the early 1930s, they offered not so much clear economic policies as fantasies of national rebirth and power. In 1984 the VHP announced a national campaign to rebuild the grand temple at Ayodhya; the mosque the first Moghul emperor, Babur, had erected was, they said, a symbol of national shame; removeing it and rebuilding the temple were a matter of national honor.

  Both history and archaeology were travestied in this account of the fall and rise of the eternal Hindu nation. There is no evidence that Babur had ever been to Ayodhya or that this restless, melancholic conqueror from Samarkand, a connoisseur of architecture, could have built an ugly mosque over an existing Rama temple. Rama himself isn’t known to recorded history; the cult of Rama worship arrived in North India as late as the tenth century AD, and no persuasive evidence exists for the Rama temple that apparently once stood on the site of the mosque.

  But the myths were useful in reinforcing the narrative of Muslims cruelty and contempt. At first, they found their keenest audience among wealthy expatriate Hindus in the U.K. and the United States, who generously bankrolled a movement that in upholding a strong self assertive Hinduism seemed to allay their sense of inferiority induced by Western images of India as a miserably poor country. In India the anxieties that persuaded many upper-caste Hindus to support the BJP were much deeper. In 1990 the government in Delhi, then headed by defectors from the Congress Party, decided to implement a long-standing proposal to reserve government jobs for poor “Backward-caste” Hindus. Upper-caste Hindus were enraged at this attack on their privilege. The BJP saw the plan for affirmative action as potentially destructive of its old goal of persuading lower-caste groups to accept a paternalistic upper-caste leadership as part of presenting a united Hindu front against Muslims.

  Later that year the leader of the BJP, L. K. Advani, decided to lead a ritual procession on a faux chariot—actually a Chevrolet—from Gujarat to Ayodhya, where he intended to start the construction of the Rama temple. Appropriately, he set out from the temple in Somnath, Gujarat, which, looted by a Turk conqueror in the eleventh century AD, was lavishly rebuilt in the early 1950s by devout Hindu leaders of the Congress Party. This wasn’t just playacting, however; more than five hundred people, most of them Muslims, were killed in the rioting that accompanied Advani’s progress across India. Hindu policemen were indifferent and sometimes even participated in the violence. When I was in Benares recently, a friend casually pointed out a distant relative of his walking down the street. He was a retired police officer who liked to boast of how he had shot and killed fourteen Muslims during a riot in the city of Meerut.

  It is strange to look back now and recall just two decades ago the temple-mosque controversy was hardly heard of outside Ayodhya. Local Hindus first staked a claim on the mosque in the mid-nineteenth century, and British officials allowed them to worship on a platform just outside the building. In 1949, two years after independence, a Hindu civil servant working together with local abbots surreptitiously placed idols of Rama inside the mosque. The story that Lord Rama himself had installed them there quickly spread. The local Muslims protested. Prime Minister Nehru sensed that nothing less than India’s secular identity was threatened. He ordered the mosque to be locked and sacked the district official, who promptly joined the Hindu nationalists.

  The idols, however, were not removed, and Muslims gradually gave up offering namaz at the mosque. During the three decades that followed, the courts were clogged with cases concerning Hindu and Muslim claims on the site. In 1984 the VHP began a campaign for the unlocking of the mosque. In 1986 a local judge allowed the Hindus to worship inside the building. A year later Muslims held their largest protest demonstration since independence in Delhi.

  Until 1984, however, Babur’s mosque remained relatively unknown outside of a small circle of litigious, property-hungry abbots in Ayodhya. Religion was a fiercely competitive business in Ayodhya. The local abbots fought hard for their share of donations from millions of poor pilgrims, and, more recently, wealthy Indians in the United States and the U.K., and they were notorious for murder and pillage; the attack on Ramchandra Paramhans that he blamed on Muslim terrorists was probably the work of rival abbots. But as the movement for the temple intensified, entrepreneurs of religiosity such as Paramhans were repackaged by Hindu nationalist politicians as sages and saints and turned into national celebrities. Rama himself suddenly evolved from the benign, almost feminine, calendar art divinity of my childhood to the vengeful Rambo of Hindu nationalist posters.

  The myths multiplied in October 1990, when Advani’s Chevrolet chariot procession was stopped and police in Ayodhya fired upon a crowd of Hindus attempting to assault the mosque. The largest circulation Hindi paper in North India, Dainik Jagran, spok
e of “indiscriminate police firing” and “hundreds of dead devotees” and then reduced the death toll the next day to thirty-two. The rumors and exaggerations, part of a slick propaganda campaign, helped the BJP win the elections in four North Indian states in 1991. The mosque seemed doomed. When on December 6, 1992, a crowd of mostly upper-caste Hindus, equipped with shovels, crowbars, pickaxes, and sometimes just their bare hands, demolished Babur’s mosque, the police simply watched from a distance.

  Uma Bharti, one of the more vocal of Hindu nationalist politicians, cheer-led the crowd, shouting, “Give one more push and break the Babri Masjid.” The president of the VHP announced the dawn of a “Hindu rebellion,” while a leader of the BJP said for “those who want to see the flag of Pakistan flutter over Kashmir, the process of showing them their right place has begun.”

  That evening the crowd rampaged through Ayodhya, killing and burning thirteen Muslims, some of whom were children, and destroying scores of mosques, shrines, and Muslim-owned shops and houses. Protests and riots then erupted across India. Altogether two thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Three months after the massacres, Muslim gangsters in Bombay retaliated with bomb attacks that killed more than three hundred civilians.

  In Delhi, the elderly Congress prime minister, Narasimha Rao, napped through the demolition. The next day he dismissed the BJP governments, banned the RSS and its sister organizations, and promised to rebuild the mosque. The leaders of the BJP tried to distance themselves from the demolition, saying that it was a spontaneous act of frustration, provoked by the anti-Hindu policies of the government. However, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) concluded that such senior leaders of the BJP as L. K. Advani, subsequently home minister of India, had planned the demolition well in advance. As for the anti-Muslim violence, Advani claimed in an article in The Times of India that it would not have taken place had Muslims identified themselves with Hindutva, the same sentiment echoed after the riots in Gujarat.