How Secular Parties Played Their Part in Rise of Communalism

The following is an excerpt from Aditya Mukherjee’s book Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India. 

Though the role of colonialism and particularly the colonial government was critical in the growth of communalism, the end of colonial rule did not lead to the fading away of communalism as was hoped by many nationalist leaders.

In the 1930s, Jawaharlal Nehru had argued: “Communalism is essentially a hunt for favour from a third party – the foreign power…. Delete the foreign power and communal arguments and demands fall to the ground”.

Though this hope was belied and Nehru was among the first to see it, yet, no major sustained struggle was mounted against communalism after independence except in the first few years. A heroic effort was made in those years by the Indian nationalist leaders, Gandhiji (who sacrificed his life to the cause), Nehru, Patel and scores of others, to ensure that despite partition and the deep divide created by the holocaust-like situation, where millions were killed or rendered homeless, and the effort by the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] to exploit this situation to try and establish a ‘Hindu State’ in India, the Indian people gave themselves a secular democratic Constitution and in the first election of 1951 overwhelmingly rejected the idea of a theocratic state, a Hindu Rashtra.  They voted for a secular India and refused to have a ‘Hindu’ India as a mirror image of a ‘Muslim’ Pakistan. (I have discussed this heroic effort in some detail in chapter 14 below.)

I will in this section list very schematically and briefly some reasons why the communal forces have reasserted themselves over the decades. As a result of the secular legacy of the nearly hundred-year-long Indian National Movement, the heroic effort in the aftermath of the partition mentioned above and the cathartic effect of Gandhiji’s murder by a communalist, the communal forces were pushed back to the margins in the early years after independence but unfortunately, they were not extinguished. In fact, a certain complacency set in on this question, and the communal forces were able to gradually reassert themselves and have today once again emerged as the chief threat to the Indian nation.

In my opinion, the most important factor in the survival and reassertion of the communal forces was the fact that the secular forces failed to undertake any sustained ideological work to combat communal ideology, nor were they able to use state power to firmly contain the communal forces. The Hindu communalists led by the RSS as well as minority Sikh and Muslim communalists continued their propaganda, including in the education system.

After Gandhiji’s murder, the RSS was banned by Sardar Patel, the Home Minister, who was personally monitoring the investigation into Gandhiji’s assassination, and around 25,000 RSS workers were put in prison. They were released only after an undertaking was given by Guru Golwalkar, the head of the RSS, that they will not intervene in politics and in violent and secret activities and will only be a cultural organisation. However, as I have shown at some length in chapter 10 below, the RSS very soon set up schools (which rapidly multiplied over time) and through them as well as through their shakhas and publications continued to spread the communal ideas.

Also read: When Sardar Patel Took on the ‘Forces of Hate’ and Banned the RSS

Nothing was done to prevent the spread of these divisive and dangerous ideas by using state power. Nor was anything substantial done by secular political parties to counter the effects of such harmful propaganda through sustained anti-communal ideological work at the ground level. The honourable exception was the effort made in the 1960s through the NCERT [National Council Education Research and Training] to bring to our school children scientific and secular texts free from communal and colonial prejudices. The tallest of India’s historians were persuaded to write textbooks for school children, which remained popular for decades thereafter for their outstanding quality. (However, as I have shown in the next chapter, this effort too was gradually snuffed out by the growing communal forces).

Most shocking was what happened after the communal forces, particularly after 1999, acquired state power at the national level to rapidly spread communalism through the education system and other means which led to one of the worst riots in Indian history (Gujarat, 2002). The secular forces led by the Congress came back to power with the slogan of secularising education, of ‘de-Talibanizing’ education, and in the ten long years that they were in power from 2004 to 2014 did next to nothing on this front! Their record in being able to bring to book those complicit in the Gujarat tragedy was equally dismal.

This is surprising as, in the early years after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru repeatedly wrote to his chief ministers warning against the virulent communal propaganda through newspapers, rumours, etc., that was taking place, often leading to riots. He urged immediate action against such newspapers (and their editors) spreading communal hatred and against police officials and district magistrates for inaction during riots. He urged that proper compensation must be paid to the riot victims and it was “essential also that the guilty be punished and should be made to feel that it does not pay to create disturbance and to loot and kill.”

Yet, since the 1950s and 1960s, and even more so today, “hardly any organiser or perpetrator of communal riots was punished” and “virulent communal propaganda flourished with immunity.”

Second, even secular political forces, such as the Congress, which has ruled for most of the post-independence period, as well as the Left, which ruled in some provinces for long periods, have tended to meet the challenge of communalism inadequately because the problem was approached in economistic terms – a tendency which so committed an anti-communalist as Jawaharlal Nehru shared with the rest of the Left.

As early as the mid-1930s, Nehru once argued, “If a really popular Assembly met with the freedom to face and decide the real issues, immediately these real economic problems would occupy attention. The … communal problem will fade into the background for the masses will be far more interested in filling their hungry stomachs…” After independence Nehru focused on rapid economic development and the creation of the ‘temples of modern India’ (to use his well-known phrase), the dams, the bridges, the steel plants, etc., and it was hoped that it would phase out religious bigotry. It was hoped that economic development or growth of economistic class struggles would by itself lead to the erosion of communalism, a hope which has been repeatedly belied.

Also read: After Gandhi’s Assassination, Nehru Saw the Hindu Right as a Threat to the Indian State

As India’s recent history shows, communalism has often spread in economically developed areas and people suffering from hunger have often turned to communalism and communal parties and not class struggle. If a reminder was needed, we only need to recall how, after the sudden, ill-planned demonetisation of 2016, the very hard-hit suffering poor still voted for its architect, the chief of the communal forces at that time! Communalism needed to be combated at the level of what it essentially is: a pernicious divisive ideology.

Third, after independence, even the secular forces made certain compromises with communal forces. In a society already communalised to a considerable extent, the logic of electoral politics led even secular parties of all hues, including those of the Left (which has had the best secular credentials), to resort, in varying degrees, to short cuts to popular mobilisation, by appealing to or allying with parties that appealed to the existing communal consciousness rather than attempting the relatively difficult and long-term task of altering that consciousness.

A related weakness was the tendency of the secular forces to exhibit a certain softness towards minority communalism, or towards parties that took the support of minority communalists, often on the plea that they were relatively backward or were being discriminated against by the majority community. This tendency was exhibited even by sections of the Left. This was a major factor in enabling the majority communalists to extend their influence. A heavy price was paid for ignoring the sage advice given by Jawaharlal Nehru, again as early as the 1930s, that one cannot use one variety of communalism to combat the other. “One communalism does not end the other, each feeds on the other and both fatten.” Softness towards minority communalism made the growth of majority communalism much easier.

Also, the technique of trying to meet the communal challenge by accommodating or absorbing a section of the communalists within the ranks of the secular parties (witness, for example, the repeated merger of Akali factions into the Congress in Punjab) or by trying to give concessions to and dealing with moderate communalists in an effort to first neutralise the extremists and then marginalise the moderates, have failed miserably. The result has, been, in the first case, the dilution of the secularism of the secular parties and in the second, the lending of legitimacy to communal politics and the constant upping of the demands of the so-called moderate communalists.

The secular forces outside the Congress, including the Left, fared no better. In their desperation to dislodge the Congress and come to power, they have tended to line up opportunistically with avowedly communal forces. In the process, they have let loose dangerous political forces. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of compromising with communalism was this opportunistic alliance that secular parties made with communal parties to unseat a secular opposition. Communal parties, which had become virtually untouchable after the partition of the country and the murder of the Mahatma, thus once again began to gain respectability or legitimacy in Indian politics.

The first major instance of this was when the JP movement joined hands with the RSS in an effort to overthrow the elected Congress government of Indira Gandhi, in the years before the declaration of the emergency in 1975. When questions were raised about the fascist nature of the RSS, JP went so far as to say, “The Jana Sangh and the RSS are neither reactionary nor fascist…. If the Jana Sangh and RSS are fascist then I too am a fascist.”

It was not surprising that the Janata Party, which came to power after the lifting of the emergency in 1977, had allowed Jana Sangh (the political wing of the RSS) to merge into the party. Thus allowing a communal party closeness to state power at the central level for the first time since independence. (I have discussed in the next chapter how this was immediately used to launch an effort to communalise education and remove secular texts.)

The same error was repeated in 1989 when the V.P. Singh led Janata Dal, shockingly, along with the Left, made an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party or the BJP (the new name taken by the Jana Sangh after breaking away from the Janata Party) to overthrow the Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi. The BJP thus acquired certain acceptability across a broad political spectrum in India. Their presence in parliament shot up from 2 seats in 1984 to 86 in 1989! The trajectory of the meteoric rise of the BJP since then is now history. They now occupy the centre stage in the Indian political arena.

Also read: How the BJP – Master of Mixing Religion and Politics – Is Taking India for a Ride

Fourth, the gradual ceding of the nationalist space by the secular forces has contributed a great deal to enabling communalists, who were pro-colonial and thereby played an anti-national role when the Indian people were struggling for freedom, to successfully masquerade today as the real nationalists and garner the tremendous mass appeal that the nationalist sentiment commands. The very acceptance of the self-description of the majority communalists as ‘Hindu Nationalists’ was a grave error.

During the entire national movement for independence, they were called communalists, not Hindu nationalists, as it was so obviously a contradiction in terms; by restricting the nation to the Hindus the others were left out thus dividing the nation itself. But the phrase gained currency among foreign journalists and even major academics like Christophe Jaffrelot and is now routinely used by Indian analysts and journalists.  This was when Jawaharlal Nehru had very early warned that majority communalism easily “masquerades under a nationalist cloak.” (Minority communalism would by definition have to be separatist.)

“Hindu nationalism”, he said, is “but another name for communalism”, a phenomenon which he said represented “the betrayal of the freedom struggle, denial of every vestige of nationalism, suppressive of every manly instinct in the Hindus.” The current masculine, aggressive, alpha-male nationalism that is being paraded by the Hindutva forces was squarely characterised by Nehru and the Indian national movement as ‘anti-national.’

The secular forces have made it easier for the communalists to occupy the nationalist space by themselves neglecting, critiquing and even ridiculing the national liberation struggle and its tallest leaders. The condemning of Gandhiji, Patel, Tilak, Aurobindo as communal or semi-communal, the branding of the national movement as bourgeois, and its leaders as agents of the bourgeoise if not of imperialism itself, or as upper caste leaders fighting for their prescriptive groups rather than representing the people of the country, etc., was done by secular ideologues, generally from the Left. (See chapter 8 and 13 in this volume.)

The need, on the other hand, was to first own up to the ancestry and the great legacy of the Indian national movement, one of the most powerful national liberation struggles in the world, and then standing on its shoulder build upon it by making advances, going beyond the breakthroughs made by that struggle. Its rejection simply made it easy for the communalists to appropriate its legacy. Witness the bizarre attempt to appropriate Gandhi, Patel, Tilak, Aurobindo, Bhagat Singh, Subhash Bose, etc., by the majority communal forces while each one of them was deeply secular and staunch critics of communalism.

Aditya Mukherjee retired as Professor of Contemporary History, Jawaharlal Nehru University.