The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  I shall not enter here into the difficult question of the role Hindu tradition may have played in sustaining a dialogic culture and the tolerance of heterodoxy in India, with which this book is much concerned. Some of the most articulate and ardent advocates of tolerance and mutual respect in India were not themselves Hindu, such as Ashoka, who was a Buddhist, and Akbar, who was a Muslim, but they too belonged to a broad culture in which Hindu heterodoxy was vigorously present. As was discussed in the first essay, there is a long tradition of tolerating doubts and disagreements within Hinduism, going back to the ancient Vedas, some three and a half thousand years ago, which made room for profound scepticism: ‘Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? … Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not?’

  Indeed, as was discussed in Essay 1, in some of the controversies (for example, between Rama and Jāvāli in the Rāmāyaṇa and between Krishna and Arjuna in the Mahābhārata), intricate arguments against Rama’s and Krishna’s orthodox views are elaborately accommodated and carefully preserved in the body of the established texts themselves. Even though orthodoxy is shown to win at the end, the vanquished scepticism lives on, well conserved in the dialogic account. The Rāmāyaṇa notes that Jāvāli describes the decisions taken by the epic hero Rama – the same Rama whose divinity has been an act of faith in recently politicized Hinduism – as extremely ‘foolish’, especially for (to quote Jāvāli) ‘an intelligent and wise man’. Jāvāli is given the opportunity in the epic to spell out why he comes to that negative judgement: ‘I am really anxious for those who, disregarding all tangible duties and works that lie within the province of perception, busy themselves with ethereal virtue alone. They just suffer various miseries here on earth, preceding their annihilation by death.’2 The elaborate presentation of alternative points of views draws attention to the plurality of perspectives and arguments, and this tradition of accommodating heterodoxy receives, as was discussed in Essay 1, extensive support within well-established Hindu documents (for example in the fourteenth-century study Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (‘Collection of All Philosophies’), where sixteen contrary and competing viewpoints are sequentially presented in as many chapters).

  In contrast with this large view, many Hindu political activists today seem bent on doing away with the broad and tolerant parts of the Hindu tradition in favour of a uniquely ascertained – and often fairly crude – view which, they demand, must be accepted by all. The piously belligerent army of Hindu politics would rather take us away from these engagingly thoughtful discussions and would have us embrace instead their much-repeated public proclamations, for example that Rama, the epic hero, is an incarnation of God; that all Hindus worship him; and that he was born on a well-identified spot ‘nine lakh [900,000] years ago’.3 We are thus not allowed to see the Rāmāyaṇa as ‘a marvellous parable’ (as Rabindranath Tagore saw it),* but as a historical document which cannot be questioned. It is also taken to have enough legal status to give actively destructive Hindu politicians a licence to tear down a place of worship of other people (the Babri mosque, in this case, demolished in December 1992) to build a temple to Rama, in celebration of his alleged birth exactly there.

  There is also a further claim that, before it was demolished by the Hindu activists, the Babri mosque (or masjid) stood precisely at the site of an earlier Hindu temple, allegedly destroyed to build the mosque. This historical claim (whether or not correct), the authenticity of which is currently under scrutiny (by no less a body than the Supreme Court of India), has to be distinguished from the more gigantic claim that Rama, the divine incarnation, was born there, before recorded history began.

  Why any of these theories – historical or religious – even if they were accepted, would give a licence for religious vandalism or sectarian destruction is not at all clear. But in addition, even within the orthodoxy of Hinduism, the insistence that the religious claims of a particular group must be accepted as indisputable truth would be a remarkably constricted view. Many Hindu schools of thought do not mention Rama at all, and, among the texts that do, many hardly portray him in the spectacular light of divinity in which the present-day Hindutva activists insist on seeing him. Indeed, the Rāmāyaṇa itself, as just discussed, makes room for those who totally disagree with Rama to articulate, rather elaborately, their doubts.†

  In addition to favouring narrowly religious certainty, Hindu political activists clearly prefer to dwell on inter-religious confrontations, rather than on the tradition of the peaceful presence of different faiths, side by side. Indians – Hindus as well as others – can actually take some pride in the fact that persecuted minorities (such as Jews, Christians, Parsees) from abroad have come to India over many centuries, seeking a new and unpersecuted life, and have, by and large, found it possible. A continuation of that tolerant and receptive tradition can also be found in the liberal writings of modern-day political or literary leaders, such as Gandhi or Tagore. It is well represented in the speeches and religious writings of many non-aggressive Hindu leaders of our own time, such as Vivekananda.4

  It is not, however, particularly worthwhile to enter into a debate over whether the liberal, tolerant and receptive traditions within Hinduism may in any sense be taken to be more authentic than the narrower and more combative interpretations that have been forcefully championed by present-day Hindu politics. It is sufficient to note here that there is a well-established capacious view of a broad and generous Hinduism, which contrasts sharply with the narrow and bellicose versions that are currently on political offer, led particularly by parts of the Hindutva movement.

  The Emergence of Hindutva

  How old is the Hindutva movement? It is a relatively new development in Indian politics, but it has become a powerful force. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political party that represents the Hindutva movement in the Indian parliament, was in office in New Delhi between 1998 and 2004, through leading a coalition government, until its electoral defeat in May 2004.

  Although Hinduism is an ancient religion, Hindutva is quite a recent political movement. A political party called the ‘Hindu Mahasabha’ did exist before India’s independence, and its successor, the ‘Jan Sangh’, commanded the loyalty of a small proportion of Hindus. But neither party was a political force to reckon with in the way the BJP and its associates have now become. With its coalition partners, which include largely secular but regional parties from different parts of India (some with only local support) and a relatively tiny militant Hindu party (the Shiv Sena, with a local base in the state of Maharashtra), the BJP took control of the central government in 1998, and, after some defections, formed a new coalition to secure a joint electoral win again, in 1999.

  The BJP’s rise has been meteoric. In the Lok Sabha (the powerful lower house) of the Indian parliament, the BJP had just two seats in 1984. In 1989 it won 85 seats. By 1991 it had managed to get 119 seats, by 1998 it had 182 seats, and in 1999 it again captured 182 seats. While that was still a minority, in a house of 543 seats in all, it was adequate for the BJP, as the largest single party, to be the leading partner of a coalition (National Democratic Alliance) that ruled India until 2004. In the May 2004 elections, however, the BJP went down from 182 seats to only 138, with the Indian National Congress emerging as the largest party in parliament (with 145 seats), commanding majority support with its own allies (218 seats in all) and the backing of the parties of the left (60 seats).

  If the BJP suffered a substantial decline, losing a quarter of its parliamentary seats, most of the ‘secular’ parties in the BJP-led alliance suffered a catastrophic debacle, with the AIDMK in Tamil Nadu losing all its seats, the Trinamool in West Bengal losing all but one, and the economically dynamic Telegu Desom Party of Andhra Pradesh being reduced to 5 seats from a previous total of 29. The voters seem to have been particularly harsh on most of the secular collaborators of the BJP.

  Even though the BJP is no longer dominant, in the way it wa
s over the last few years, it remains a politically powerful force, and is working hard to return to office before long. The BJP has maximally received around a quarter of the votes cast in Indian general elections. This happened in 1998 – its vote share fell from a peak of 26 per cent in 1998 to 24 per cent in 1999, and down to 22 per cent in 2004, with Congress getting 27 per cent. Yet the BJP does have loyal support from a committed group of supporters, and it is an important part of the contemporary Indian political scene. But since the BJP is dependent on its coalitions to get into office, its effective strength depends on its ability to attract support from beyond the immediate BJP fold.

  The BJP’s powerful role in mainstream Indian politics and the might of the Hindutva movement are parts of the new political reality in India. In the early years after independence, the broad and inclusive concept of an Indian identity which had emerged during the long struggle for freedom commanded sweeping allegiance.5 The determination to preserve that capacious identity was strengthened by the deep sense of tragedy associated with the partitioning of the subcontinent, and also by considerable national pride in the fact that despite the political pressure for ‘an exchange of people’, the bulk of the large Muslim population in independent India chose to stay in India rather than move to Pakistan. This inclusive identity, which acknowledged and embraced internal heterogeneity and celebrated the richness of diversity, went with an adamant refusal to prioritize the different religious communities against each other.

  It is this spacious and absorptive idea of Indianness that has been severely challenged over recent decades.6 At the risk of slight oversimplification, it can be said that the movement sees Hindutva (literally, ‘the quality of Hinduism’) as a quintessential guide to ‘Indianness’. Even though the movement had relatively little public support at the time of Indian independence, the idea of ‘Hindutva’ as a political ideology had already been launched more than two decades earlier. Indeed, the concept of Hindutva was elaborately discussed in a book of that name, published in 1923, authored by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, often called ‘Veer’ (valiant) Savarkar, a Hindu chauvinist leader of remarkable energy.7 While it is often assumed that in pre-partition India the claim that the Hindus and Muslims formed ‘two distinct nations’ – not two parts of the same Indian nation – was formulated by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (in the context of making a case for the partition of the country on religious lines), it was in fact Savarkar who had floated the idea well before – more than fifteen years earlier than – Jinnah’s first invoking of the idea. Nathuram Godse, who murdered Mahatma Gandhi for his failure to support the demands of Hindu politics of the day, was a disciple of Savarkar.8

  The BJP gets political support from a modest minority of Indians, and, no less to the point, a limited minority of the Hindus. As was noted earlier, the proportion of total votes in Indian parliamentary elections that the BJP has maximally managed to get has been only about 26 per cent (as was mentioned earlier, it has now fallen to 22 per cent), in a country where more than 80 per cent of the total population happen to belong to the Hindu community. It is certainly not the party of choice of most Hindus – far from it. There is also a distinctly regional pattern in the political divisions in India. Indeed, there are several Indian states in which the BJP has never won even a single parliamentary seat.

  The politics of Hindutva is promoted by a family of Hindu political organizations of which the BJP is only one part. The ‘Sangh Parivar’, as it is called, is led by the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) or ‘organization of national volunteers’, which is in many ways the core organization of the parivār (Sanskrit for family). The RSS provides theoretical analyses as well as functional activities in the promotion of Hindutva. The Sangh Parivar also includes the ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad’ (VHP), or the World Council of Hindus, devoted not just to religion (as the name indicates) but to intensely religious politics championing what they see as Hinduism. It also includes the ‘Sewa Bharti’, dedicated to welfare programmes linked with the Hindutva movement. There is in addition the ‘Bajrang Dal’, the violently energetic youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which has been accused – by the international Human Rights Watch as well as the Indian Human Rights Commission – of direct involvement in the killing of Muslims in the Gujarat riots in 2002. The BJP is the official political arm of the Sangh Parivar, and most of the major leaders of the BJP have been members of the RSS for a long time.

  The Hindutva movement has had a strong effect on recent political developments in India, and has added very substantially to the politics of sectarianism.9 It is therefore important to investigate the nature of the intellectual claims it makes and the arguments it presents. Since the Hindutva movement has been accompanied by violent physical actions, including the killing and terrorizing of minorities (as happened in Bombay in 1992–3 and in Gujarat in 2002), it is difficult to have patience with its intellectual beliefs and public proclamations. But losing patience is not a useful way of addressing any problem – even one with such violent associations. The heterogeneity reflected by the different components of the Hindutva movement also demands that its intellectual wing should receive attention, notwithstanding what their more violent comrades prefer to do.

  In fact, while the hard core of ‘Hindutva’ advocates is relatively small in number, around them cluster a very much larger group, whom I will call ‘proto-Hindutva’ enthusiasts. They are typically less zealous than the Hindutva champions and are opposed to violence in general (and are typically quite put off by it),10 but they nevertheless see a basic asymmetry between the pre-eminence of Hinduism in India and the claims of other religions which are ‘also present’ in India. They agree, thus, with the ideology of Hindutva in giving a primary status to the Hindus in India, compared with the adherents of other faiths.

  The argument for this asymmetry seems to draw on two facts:

  (1) the statistical fact that the Hindus form an overwhelming majority of Indians (no other community comes anywhere close to it numerically), and

  (2) the historical and cultural fact that the Hindu tradition goes back more than three thousand years in Indian history (at least to the Vedas) and that nearly every part of the Indian culture bears the historical imprint of Hindu thoughts and practices.

  Both are undoubtedly weighty considerations and deserve serious attention and scrutiny.

  Numbers and Classification

  The statistical argument starts clearly with a correct premise: more than four-fifths of the Indian citizens are Hindus in terms of standard classification, even though the beliefs of Hindus, as already discussed, are often thoroughly diverse (the ‘official’ number of Hindus includes even agnostics and atheists of Hindu social background). This statistical fact has appeared to many – not just the Hindutva enthusiasts – to be grounds enough for an immediate identification of India as a pre-eminently Hindu country. That summary reductionism appeals also to many international journalists – even of the leading newspapers in Europe and America – who persistently describe India as a ‘mainly Hindu country’: it saves space in newspaper columns and seems accurate enough in some sense.

  It also attracts academics who can perhaps be described as ‘intellectual simplifiers’. For example, in his famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,11 Samuel Huntington places India firmly in the category of ‘the Hindu civilization’. In taking this peculiarly reductionist view, Huntington’s perspective has to downplay the fact that India has many more Muslims (more than 140 million – larger than the entire British and French populations put together) than any other country in the world with the exception of Indonesia and, marginally, Pakistan, and that nearly every country in Huntington’s definition of ‘the Islamic civilization’ has far fewer Muslims than India has. Something goes wrong here with the number-based assessment. But perhaps the difficulties in using the statistical argument lie in the nature of the argument itself.

  The first difficulty is that a secular democracy which gives eq
ual room to every citizen irrespective of religious background cannot be fairly defined in terms of the majority religion of the country. There is a difference between a constitutionally secular nation with a majority Hindu population and a theocratic Hindu state that might see Hinduism as its official religion (Nepal comes closer to the latter description than does India). Furthermore, no matter what the official standing of any community as a group may be, the status of individual citizens cannot be compromised by the smallness (if that is the case) of the group to which he or she belongs.*

  To make a comparison, when the United States declared independence in 1776 the different religious communities were quite diverse in size: the new polity could have been described as being a ‘largely Christian country’ in the way India is seen by some as a ‘mainly Hindu country’. But this did not derail the need for the US constitution to take a neutral view of the specific beliefs of the members of the different communities – non-Christian as well as Christian – irrespective of group dimensions. The respective sizes of the different religious communities should not be allowed to disrupt the rights, including the sense of belonging, that every citizen should be able to enjoy.