Keepers Of Our Traditions
                        The men who have written our communal history

As we fight the more obvious, militant expressions of communalism, says Ashish Rajadhyaksha, we should also recognise its more subtle forms---a well-entrenched conservatism among both Hindus and Muslims, which has traditionally defined
'official' history .

" It is ...extraordinary how the bourgeois class, both among the Hindus and the Muslims succeeded,
in the sacred name of religion, in getting a measure of mass-sympathy and support for programmes
and demands which had nothing to do with the masses, or even the lower-middle class ...These
narrow political demands, benefitting at the most a small number of the upper-middle classes, were cleverly made to appear to be the demands of the masses of that particular religious group. Religious passion was hitched on to them to hide their barrenness."
                                                                            Jawaharlal Nehru ("An Autobiography" page 138)

"...those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means."
                                                                    M.K. Gandhi ("Complete Works," Vol. 3, page 217)

Off Baroda's Lehripura Gate,a small but garish temple bears a newly-painted sign: "Photography
Strictly Prohibited". Cosmetic metallIc facades gleam in the sun with the usual sight of people
selling Hindu religious literature around It. What might have been little more than a normal roadside temple in Baroda, today bears new significance. For just beyond the gate, in some of the most
squalid and dilapIdated lanes of the city, lies a vast Muslim ghetto, the scene of violent communal clashes between September and December 1982.

On April 3, 1983, little saffron flags In Calicut, Kerala, flutter by the roadside on trees and telegraph
poles, heralding the arrival of the RSS chIef Balasaheb Deoras. Over twenty busloads of RSS
(Rashtrlya Swayamsevak Sangh) volunteers thunder into the city precincts. Crowds, herded into
the football stadium by the thousands, come down the street in a disciplined, three-abreast line
that continues throughout the afternoon. A colleague recalls that Hitler too held his big speeches
in football stadia...

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Saffron, representing traditional Brahmin purity, the colour of the religious vastra, the colour
of Shlvaji's flag, has become the new symbol of Hindu revivalism. Today it has resurged to
represent a regional chauvinism which is, at its most glaring extreme, a naked communalism. Shobha-yatras, traditional religious display-processions, these days often bear the saffron-green colours of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Festivals of a relatively recent origin, like
Shivaji Jayantiand Ram Navami are now inevitably accompanied by displays of communal
militance--in processions that must pass through areas where communal sensibilities run high,
in aartis that must be performed before mosques.

It doesn't take an Assam to see the consequence of such everyday acts of communal
intransigence, although Assam can demonstrate its scale. The rise of communalist
sentiment among India's urban middle and lower classes, while partly a natural phenomenon
of post-PartitionIndia, has been carefully orchestrated, built up to its present peak by some of
the largest cadre-based organisations active in the country.

In 1979 the country was hit by 304 riots, in 1980 by 427, and in 1981 by 319. While a few may
have been caused by immediate frictions between two large religious communities possessing admittedly different lifestyles and customs, most riots were caused by the deliberate inflammatory tactics of organisations who have an explicity communal programme.

It is obvious that conditIons in India, since the immediate pre-Independence period and later, have
been conducive to the whipping up of communal sentiments. But despite a near-daily occurrence
of the confrontations that result out of such hysteria and the tangible experience of communal
animosity in India's urban areas, we still lack a proper framework to analyse the phenomenon.
Almost every ideol-ogy that has confronted communalism has sought to intepret, in its own terms,
the history of Hindu-Muslim relations in India. Such a repeated imposing upon history of present
divides has proved to be a major barrier in comprehending communalism. As historian
Romila Thapar warns, "It is often forgotten that historical interpretation can be the product of a contemporary ideology".

Most debates on communalism usually begin with an analysis of the strong tinge of Hindu
revivalism that accompanied the nationalist movement. Bipan Chandra points out that in their
search for a national identity that would pre date the British, Indian nationalists were reluctant
to accept the period of Mughal dominion as representative of their aspiration. Since this period
was too close and fresh in people's memory to lend itself to an "official" interpretation, the Aryan,
'Vedic' , period was chosen to represent all that was glorious in India's past. In the eyes of Hindu nationalists, the Vedic age came to symbolise the pinnacle of Indian civilisation.

The view that this period represented an epochal era in Indian history, and even world civilisation,
was further buttressed by emphasising its decline during Mughal and British domination. The
precept that such maleficence was now finally being reversed found large acceptance among
Hindu nationalists. This has led Muslim sociologists and historians to point out that while the
officialCongress programme was avowedly secular, and leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru did much to implement secularism, the nationalist movement itself never practiced secularism because of its inherently Hindu chauvinistic impulses. From leaders like Sardar Patel down to grassroots
organisers, the dominant tradition in the Congress remained Hindu.

A second position accepts the prevalence of such discrimination but also emphasises the strong tendency towards pan-Islamism to which Indian Muslims are still subject. It contends that visions
of a glorious past are an integral part of modern nationalism but pan-Islamism, particularly of the post-Independence period, remains unique to the country. It further contends that to attribute the
deep communal divide merely to revivalism and not to more active forces, is an entirely inadequate explanation.

A third position would seek to detach the communal problem from its religious base. This view
maintains that religious belief must not be confused with religious identity; only the latter may be termed communal. Therefore, to speak of communalism as an inevitable consequence of existing religious differences would be as absurd as to say that Nazism was an inevitable consequence
of the distinction between German Christians and German Jews. Such a position would disagree
with the assumption that communalism can only be got rid of by a secular re-orientation of the
religious source itself.

Clearly, these are not mutually exclusive positions. They disagree merely on the immediate
agencies they would seek to blame for the perpetuation of the communal divide. In this essay
we will deal with the key issues that recur in all these positions, and, in elaborating upon their
historical contexts, place them within the debate on communalism that rages till today.

Communal Strains In History
With the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of small Hindu kingdoms came a resurgence
of militant Hinduism. Just as Shivaji invoked the militant Bhawani and Guru Gobind Singh turned
to the Shakti, the manifestations of Kali came to be objects of prayer in eastern Indian households
where they were practically unknown before the 18th century. In the same way as the ransacking
of temples and imposition of jaziya had come to signify Muslim supremacy during the Mughal
period, so issues like cow-slaughter now came to signal the return of Hindu power.

Large-scale communal riots in Gujarat in the 18th century were apparently caused due to the
issue of cow-slaughter. One such riot has a remarkably. contemporary ring to it in the immediate
event that sparked it off: a Hindu youth playing Holi, threw colour over a passing Muslim, who
instantly sought retaliation.

The early to mid- 19th century saw the rise of various Hindu social reform groups. In Calcutta,
Raja Ram Mohan Roy started the Brahmo Samaj. Similarly, in Bombay the Prarthna Samaj
was founded. The social-reformism of this period was the result of strong opposition against the retrograde practices of Hindu society, like sati and female infanticide. But, it is important to note
that men like Ram Mohan Roy were never critical of, nor did they seek to change, the basic social structure of Hinduism.

The rise of a Hindu middle-class, which came with the introduction of the liberal values that
permeated British colonalism, was to be the originator of Indian nationalism. But since the
Hindu tenet that held this class together were never challenged, the nationalist identity was
also emphasised in the same terms. It was first expressed by writers like Bankim Chandra-
Chatterjee, and grew to major dimensions with the establishment of missions like those
founded by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Brahmo Samajist social reformism also turned
revivalist under the leadership of Devendranath Tagore and while a progressive group under the
leadership of Keshub Chandra Sen broke away from it in 1865, they were completely overwhelmed
by the much wider resurgence of militant Hindu sentiment embodied by the rise of Dayanand-
Saraswati and Aurobindo.

In Maharashtra this trend was more evident than in Bengal. Leaders like Vishnushashtri-
Chiplunkar and, later, Bal Gangadhar Tilak threw their weight entirely against the progressive
social reformists. They held the opinion that there was nothing basically wrong with Hindu
society, the few problems that existed would sort themselves out once the British were thrown
out.  They , therefore, called for a ceasing of all political and social activity outside of the
anti-British mainstream.  This anti-imperialism which emanated from both Hindu and Muslim
conservative groups has been interpreted as a progressive tradition; but as we shall see, it
would yield negative results later when their conservatism manifested itself bla tantly after the
transfer of power.

If the rise of militant Hindu nationalism took place , with the growth of a middle-class that was
exposed to Western education and the commercial opportunities provided by the British, with the Muslims a conservative tradition was established precisely because of the lack of such a dynamic.
The erstwhile Muslim elite of the Mughal period which was mainly landed turned more and more
insular, often retreating into their jagirs where they indulged themselves in courtly decadence.
They shunned British education and refused to actively assert themselves in trade and commerce.
To justify such a retreat they invoked religious sanctions and declared that British India was a
heretical country of which Muslims could not be part.

This conservatism was reflected in the rise of the Wahabi movement in northern and central
India and in the Farizi movement in east India. The Wahabi movement was inspired by
Muhammad ,Ibn Abdul Wahab, a Saudi Arabian, who led a protest in the 18th century
against what he claimed were 'innovations' in Islam that had no Koranic sanction. The Wahabi
and Farizi cults forbade the prayers of Id and Jumma, since they thought that the conditions in
India were not congenial to the growth of Islam. They declared British education a sin, and banned
it except in very special circumstances. For instance, one of the fatwas of Shah Abdul Aziz, the
Ulema leader, sanctioned Western education since it would lead to "knowing the secret meanings
of the words (of the enemy)".

These conservatives were pretty much in control of Muslim society, and it was not until the late nineteenth century when leaders like Sir Syed Ahmad and the Aligarh school emerged that
progressive education was finally made available to Muslims. But by then, the conservative
Muslim leaders had succeeded, to an extent, in adapting themselves to the changing political climate,and were to be a strong lobby in the nationalist movement. This asserted itself vigorously
in the Khilafat movement which swept India dwring the period 1915-17.

Khilafat: The Rise of The Conservatives
The myth of Muslim monolithism, of a Muslim people politically and culturally united as separate
from " Indians" has been almost solely a creation of religious and conservative Muslim leaders.
Leaders like Shah Waliullah, the ideological founder of the Ulema ( the priestly class) were the
first to put forth such precepts.  These were later accepted and expanded and little though was
given to the fact that Muslim society itself was divided by cleavages of caste and sect.

From the Mughal period, Muslims have been divided into ashraf (upper caste, usually foreigner,
and inevitably holding a high post in the courtly hierarchy), ajlaf (lower caste, usually a
converted Hindu) and riyazil (untouchable, also called kamina). Consequently lower Muslim
castes have often had more in common with their regional customs than with the Islamic practices dictated by a doctrinaire elite.

If despite this they have still maintained a semblance of monolithic unity, it is only because of the
Ulema and the religious control that is exercised through the madarasas and maktabs that impart religious education allover the country.

New Muslim Leadership
By the early twentieth century, however, a new urban Muslim leadership had begun to seriously undermine the dominance of the Ulema. "Thus, for the first time in history we find two types of
Muslim intelligentsia, educated and trained in two different academic and intellectual traditions,
strange to each other and dividing the society into conflicting attitudes, inclinations, priorities and interests. This had never happened before in such glaring terms".

The Khilafat issue was eagerly seized upon by all the factions within the nationalist movement;
the fledgeling Muslim League and the Ulema were, of course, directly concerned. The Congress
too took up the issue because Gandhi felt that this was an opportunity to demonstrate the
solidarity of the Congress with the Muslims. The Muslim League, dominated by educated
professionals after 1911, needed the Ulema to rally the vast sections of Muslim society they
still controlled, and the Ulema saw this as an ideal point to make a decisive entry into
nationalist politics.

Mushirul Hasan writes, "IdeologIcally they (the League and the Ulema) had nothing in common,
but this did not prevent them from combining against what they commonly perceived as a threat
to Islam. The orthodox and the anglicised were drawn together and as in a flash of lightning, saw
that after all they were not too unlike each other as they had imagined (Mohammed Ali's words)".

Gandhi's decision to induct theology and religion into nationalist politics was obviously fraught
with danger. It led to the heightening of religious issues detracted from the more progressive
and even anti-colonial drive of the khilifat agitation.  Soon after their entry, the Ulema made a
determined bid to take over the Muslim League itself. They kept pushing Gandhi to take a more
militant stand on the question of minorities, and to emphasise religious issues over nationalist
ones.

According to Mushirul Hasan, the Ulema were not to last long in politics since the decision of
the Turkish national assembly to separate the khalifa from Sultanate" took the wind out of their
sails". Nevertheless, the conservative tradition had been re-emphasised and a two-hundred
year-old past had been restated in contemporary terms.  From now on the problems of the
Muslim minority were firmly placed within an ideology of separatism.

A Theory Of Two Nations
This tradition of conservatism culminated in what came to be called the "two-nation theory",
a theory justifying a geographically separate Pakistan on the grounds that Muslims had never
been a part of India.

Poet Mohammed Iqbal, who is believed to have been the first to propose this premise and give
it an ideological thrust, emphasised that Islam was not only an ethical ideal but also a certain
kind of polity. To limit Islam as merely one religion among others, as the secular programme
promised, was to deny Muslims the freedom of religion, for Islam was nothing without the
social order it postulated.

A characteristic of most Islamic states is the attempt which is made to establish governance
along Koranic lines, to assume that solutions to problems, even those of a day-to-day nature,
are to be found in the Holy Book as interpreted by the Shariat. Naturally, as sole interpreters
of the Koran, as men who had the sole right to decide what had Koranic sanction and what
did not, the Ulema and the religious clergy became an indispensable part of state functioning.
It is often stated that Iqbal was not communal. This is probably true since one aspect of his
demand for a separate Muslim region (he never asked for a separate statehood) was that
Islam in India should rid itself of the stamp. of "Arab imperialism".

Iqbal had merely demanded a federal state of the North- West reserved for Muslims. But, in
1935, Dr. Sayed Lateef postulated the idea that India should be divided into 15 zones, 11 of
which should be Hindu and four, Muslim. The Cambridge group, however, demanded nothing less
than"a separate federation of our own outside India". Thus the demand for Pakistan
snowballed, culminating in a final non-compromise demand for a separate state made by
Muhammed Ali Jinnah.

Gandhi And The Indian Bourgeoisie
It is possible to see that, despite the various programmes , for modernisation which the
British bequeathed, the Indian . social-reformists ana, later, the Indian bourgeoisie, have
failed to carry through a progressive democratic revolution which would place religion in a
modern context. The framework that Marx refers to when he describes religion as
"at the sametime the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress"
has never been evident, even among our apparently progressive political leaders.

The enormous difficulty that even our liberal sections continue to face in severing their ties
from religious  conservatives is evident. .Our ruling class has traditionally tolerated such
conservatives because of their political usefulness. The British tolerated them, even sought
to make use of them; the Indian bourgeoisie continues to work in tandem with them. The
explanation of why they have not been able to, or have chosen not to sever ties remains
unformulated.

Following World War II, the Congress, still led by progressives like Nehru, was nevertheless
becoming an umbrella for increasingly disparate and heterogenous groups. It had come to
relyon feudal caste groups like the Patels of Gujarat, the Marathas of Maharashtra, and the
Thakursof U.P. who become powerful votaries and substantially augmented its political
power-base.The Indian industrialists, who had become a considerable force following the
War, were, as A.R. Desai has pointed out, practically "subsidising the Gandhian movement".

As a consequence, the very measures Nehru hoped to implement, which in his dreams would
lead India to enlightenment, were distorted to perpetuate traditional underdevelopment. Just as
our nationalist bourgeois class professed Gandhism, even wore khadi and made public speeches supporting. Gandhi, while assiduously maintaining its parochial, and communal outlook on trade
and society, so they often thought nothing of making individual fortunes by exploiting traditionally underdeveloped, decentralised sectors.

G.D. Birla, an avowed Gandhian, was not above giving Rs. 3000 per month to four Hindu
Mahasabha leaders each, including Savarkar, to ensure that they did not harm his interests.
More recently, Mrs. Gandhi, at least at one time a representative of the progressive bourgeoisie,
never broke the hold Acharya Vinobha Bhave had on her, by which he all but passed into law the blatantly communal demand for a ban on cow-slaughter.

Desai writes that this class supported Gandhi mainly because his demands for non-violence, his idealisation of poverty etc. were effective in keeping the lower classes from wresting more specific economic concessions from the Indian ruling class. This must be recognised as substantially true,
but the tragedy perhaps lies elsewhere. It is that the communal divide, which is little more .
than another kind of social divide that capitalism should be expected to eradicate, has effectively adapted itself to the present environment. The rulers have changed, but the instruments of rule have remained the same.
 

Communalism Today
In India today, the extreme right-wing, which presents a major fascist threat, mainly takes on a communal guise. With an M.G. Ramachandran or a Shiv Sena adherent this can overflow into
regional chauvinism or even casteism. With parties like the Bhartiya Janata Party, communalism
has practically been institutionalised into a contemporarlly valid manifesto.

Gandhi has often been accused of having been the man who tinged the nationalist movement with
Hindu colours. While this may be true it must also be noted that unlike the present communal organisations that would speak of 'Gandhian Socialism' Gandhi himself used religion to Mobiles
the masses. He did, to that extent, thwart the conservatives, like .the Hindu Mahasabha leaders,
and established the beginning of an indigenous bourgeois revolution.

The Mahasabha originally established by leaders like Lajpat Rai and Madan Mohan Malaviya,
was initially successful because it expressed the dissatIsfaction of the rightwing members of
the Congress to Gandhi's overtures to the Muslims during Khilafat. Initially, the Mahasabha
sought to establish a political base of its own, and even fought against the Congress in the
1937 and 1946 elections --with disastrous results. Politically the Mahasabha was never very
strong, but this should not detract from the enormous cultural impact it has had on Hindu
communalism. It remains the first organisation to give expression to latent communal
tensions, and to extend them into a programme.

The ban imposed upon the Mahasabha by the Congress in 1948, and their regrouping under
the Jana Sangh label in 1951, ushered in what we may now describe as the "New Communal
Programme". This has manifested itself in a militant perpetuation of Hinduism. It is
characterised by the demands to make Sanskrit compulsory, adapt all languages to the
devnagiri script etc. The advocates of Hindu nationalism have taken every opportunity to
prevent minority sections from harbouring any. economic or political aspirations.

In stable conditions, these communal organisations concentrate on building their cadres,
fighting reservation policies and other measures designed to help minorities. In unstable
conditions, they usually swing into battle, creating communal riots whenever possible and,
as in Assam, even masterminding vast pogroms.

It is ridiculous to equate all this activity with religious issues. Indeed, religion seems to hardly
play any role in the actual building up of RSS cadres. The average RSS or Shiv Sena volunteer,
for instance, is attracted to these organisations mainly because their militance and discipline
create an identity and pride, albeit false, which is otherwise lacking. To that extent, despite
their religious stand, they are no different from any cadrebased or paramilitary organisations.

Religious conservatism, however, still seems to permeate through Muslim organisations.
While essentially the All- India Majlis-e-Mushawarat's programme remains Islamic, the
genuine apprehensions that Muslims harbour as a minority are turned into the familiar
lslam-in-danger theme. Even a leader like Syed Shahbuddin, who has the potential of
providing a genuinely secular alternat1ve to Muslims has to speak a communal language
to enter the Majlis-e- Mushawarat. Consequently, the possibility of a leadership that
would fight the conservative tradition, while also fighting for the rights of minority groups,
remains absent.

In its absence, and with the growing threat from Hindu communal fronts, the possibility
of a leadership that would accept the communal divide without itself being self-consciously
communal is remote. Leadership that accepts the communal issue either does so with
the intention of perpetuating it or, as with Left parties, places the problems of religious
minorities well below those of the peasantry or the urban proletariat.

We can begin to think of solutions to the communal problem only if a new attitude emerges,
one that will overcome the strongly-entrenched conservatism of the last 200 years, and which
will recognise this issue as being one of the most deeply-rooted means of social divisions
practiced by our ruling classes.