Bharat Rising: Dharma and Democracy – I
Image Courtesy: The Economic Times
“Today, 18 May 2014, may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India. Narendra Modi’s victory in the elections marks the end of a long era in which the structures of power did not differ greatly from those through which Britain ruled the subcontinent. India under the Congress party was in many ways a continuation of the British Raj by other means” — The Guardian (1)
More than ten years have passed since the publishing of the article from which the above excerpt was extracted. Narendra Modi is now well into his third term as the Prime Minister of India. Has India become more Bharat in the past decade? If so, how?
Journalist Utpal Kumar in his book ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy” explores this in some detail (2). In the foreword, Union Minister Hardeep Puri highlights that Kumar’s book is in many ways a critique of the “Left-Liberal” mores that led to the undermining of India’s civilizational values after Independence, leaving Indians diffident and meek. Puri recalls that during his student days in the 1960s, these mores and the various shades of socialism espoused by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had a stranglehold over public discourse, which was controlled by a nepotistic elite group popularly known as “Lutyens Delhi”. They had a firm handle on the levers of power, even as Prime Ministers came and went. The minister expresses satisfaction that the dominant narratives of post-independence India are finally being questioned.
Setting the tone in the introduction, Kumar contrasts Vajpayee with Modi. Vajpayee operated in the larger “left-liberal” framework. He brought changes but never aimed at any fundamental transformation. In contrast, Modi not only chose to distance himself from this Lutyens elite, but he also made it one of his calling cards. In an interview in the run-up to the 2019 General Elections, Modi said, “Lutyens duniya jise maante hain, usko naa to mein apne me le sakta hoon, na apna bana saka hoon” (I could neither make the Lutyens’ world part of me nor become part of it) (3). This loss of patronage is why some well-known figures from the old order are often seen outraging about the “shrinking liberal space” in the country.
Dharma and Democracy
Kumar writes about how the Modi years have seen for the first time since the reconstruction of the Somnath temple in the 1950s a systematic restoration of temples across the country. Among the key ones are the renovated Kashi Vishwanath Temple complex, which was inaugurated by Modi in 2021. This was followed by the restoration of the Mahakaleshwar Temple in Ujjain. A Buddhist circuit has also been set up. The Indian Railways now operates a Buddha Purnima express train to facilitate travel within this circuit. Of course, the crowning achievement was the inauguration of the Ram Mandir on 22 January 2024 (the book went to press before the inauguration).
Bringing a wounded civilization back to good health entails a two-pronged effort, physical and psychological. While Kumar is appreciative of the work done so far on the physical aspect by renovating the Hindu shrines, he highlights that on the psychological front, the battles are just beginning. The key one is to re-write history from the perspective of the people of this land, and not from that of the invaders. The most glaring example of this distortion of history is the now-discredited Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), which in the absence of credible supporting evidence, was quietly changed to Aryan Migration Theory (AMT). He notes that the Vedas and Puranas mention out-of-India emigrations. Another glaring distortion is about the record of Muslim rulers in medieval India. What renowned historian Will Durant saw as “probably the bloodiest story in history” was projected by India’s so-called “eminent historians” as an era of the blossoming of Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb (“a syncretic culture in the Ganga-Jamuna river expanse that supposedly characterized a harmonious blend of Hindu and Muslim traditions and values”). The good news is that the process of historical awakening, noted by the acclaimed author Sir V.S. Naipaul, in 1993, in the wake of the Ram Mandir movement in Ayodhya, is well and truly underway.
Kumar quotes senior journalist Swapan Dasgupta who wrote in Awakening Bharat Mata, that after the passing of Sardar Patel in December 1950, the Congress Party under the stewardship of Jawaharlal Nehru began to shed any explicit identification with Hindu history, values, traditions, and imagery, in the effort to be consciously “secular”. M.C. Chagla was a noted jurist and Nehru’s cabinet colleague. In his memoir Roses in December, Chagla appreciated Nehru’s courage in getting the Hindu Reform Bill passed. However, he questioned the Nehru government’s refusal to reform Muslim personal law “on the plea that minorities will resent any attempt at imposition”. This Nehruvian notion of secularism, wherein minorities were appeased, culminated in the Shah Bano case of the 1980s and divisive vote-bank politics.
Against this backdrop, PM Modi’s placing the Sengol beside the Lok Sabha Speaker’s seat at the time of the inauguration of the new parliament building in 2023, heralded a fresh dawn. The Sengol, a symbol of the transfer of power in the Chola Empire, was also handed over to Nehru before his historic tryst with destiny speech in the Constituent Assembly in 1947. It subsequently was reduced to a “walking stick given to Pandit Nehru” in a museum. Now, the proud display of the Sengol is the sign of a country shedding shyness about its civilizational heritage.
Kumar highlights the double standards in Western academia and intelligentsia that seem to have two yardsticks, one for Hinduism and the other for Abrahamic faiths. Many wealthy Indians and Indian businesses and corporations regrettably have set up chairs in prominent US universities to support these very anti-India, anti-Hindu academics. Kumar attributes the actions of Indians to a mix of dhimmitude (a term popularized by Bat Ye’or to describe the historical social status of non-Muslims under Islamic rule) and ignorance. As for Western intellectuals, an ancient living civilization like India is an anathema to the Marxism-driven worldviews, which many of them consciously or subconsciously subscribe to.
The civilizational identity of India has long been under assault from Islamists and missionaries. Islamists consider their long-term goal of making the entire world Dar al-Islam (Muslim region), a divine command. In this quest, any period of peace is viewed as an interim ceasefire till the final objective is achieved. The small number of relatively liberal Muslims do not offer a bulwark against Islamists. Jinnah, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, was no practicing Muslim and was known to have liked his alcohol and his ham. This did not prevent him from defending in court the killer of a Hindu publisher, who was murdered just because he published a book that a certain section of Muslims deemed blasphemous.
In other trouble, Christian missionaries have targeted India’s peripheries. Punjab in recent years, has seen a spike in conversions. As per a study published by the Centre for Policy Studies, a Chennai-based think tank, Tamil Nadu has been amongst the most favorable states for the growth of Christianity. Andhra Pradesh can now be added to this list. Kumar quotes Rajiv Malhotra’s exposé from Snakes in the Ganga about how many Sanatana traditions in South India are being de-Hinduized and then Christianized. The so-called “secularization” of Bharatnatyam is a case in point.
As for the Northeast, outsourcing policies to missionaries during the Nehruvian years led to great mischief. Kumar quotes well-known socialist leader Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, from an interview he gave on 22 July 1959. Dr Lohia said that Nehru, in conjunction with Dr. Elwin, an ex-padre and advisor on Assam tribal affairs, had evolved a national park theory for the Assam tribal people. They were treated akin to Gir lions and kept isolated. What were the consequences of such an outlook? In Nagaland, where the percentage of the converted population was less than one percent in 1901, the figure today is close to 90 percent. The story in other Northeastern states is not much different.
On the UCC (Uniform Civil Code), Kumar sounds a cautionary note. While a UCC merits support as an idea, Hindus should be careful that in the name of parity, their interests should not be compromised. In Kumar’s view, a bigger issue for Hindus today is the liberation of their temples from state control. There is no legitimate reason for Hindu temples to be managed by a secular state when the same control is not exercised on institutions of other religions.
One of the best-kept secrets in independent India has been episodes of atrocities committed against Brahmins. While conducting research on Indian history, American scholar Maureen Patterson discovered that the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 was followed by anti-Brahmin riots in Bombay, Pune, and Nagpur. These then spread to the Maratha strongholds of Satara, Belgaum, and Kolhapur. Congress Party leaders actively participated in the riots and exploited the age-old Maratha angst at the sidelining of descendants of Shivaji by Brahmin Peshwas. Then Congress Chief Minister of the Central Provinces, Dwarka Prasad Mishra, in his memoir conceded that many non-Brahmin Congressmen indulged in unlawful activities. Not much has also been recorded about the persecution faced by Brahmins in Tamil Nadu after the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) came to power in 1967. In 2023, the Solicitor General of India informed the Supreme Court about a DMK leader’s speech which called for the butchering of Brahmins, if they sought equality.
While the condition of Dalits post-1947 has seen a marked improvement, incidents such as those at Marichjhapi in 1979, which was a massacre, were never investigated (Hindus who had fled East Bengal, now Bangladesh, and settled in Marichjhapi in West Bengal, among other areas, were sought to be forcefully evicted by the Communist Government of West Bengal). Asks Kumar, was this because it threatened to expose the narratives of Leftists for social justice and of Dalit-Muslim bonhomie? No one knows for sure how many perished during those seventy-two hours of savagery orchestrated by the Communist West Bengal Government of the day, with the support of Muslim gangs. While the official death toll is 10, survivors have put the number as high as 10,000. Deep Halder’s Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre (4) offers the bloody details of the deadly violence orchestrated by Communists and carried out by Muslims. Kumar recalls these incidents with some sadness but notes with satisfaction that with the rise of Bharat, they are now being openly discussed.
A song from the 1954 film Jagriti – de di hamein azadi bina khadag binal dhal; Sabarmati ke sant tune kar diya kamaal (Saint of Sabarmati, you have our freedom without the use of sword) was the harbinger of things to come. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks on the Indian independence movement, published after its establishment in 1961, were replete with references to Nehru and Gandhi. Many other prominent names were reduced to footnotes. Post-2014, be it with the inauguration of the Statue of Unity on Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary in 2018 or that of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at India Gate in 2022, these great leaders of India are again finding a place in the public imagination. Ambedkar, who resigned from Nehru’s cabinet in 1951 citing differences, is today more powerful than when he was alive. The new parliament building was dedicated to the nation on May 28, 2023. The date coincided both with the birth anniversary of Veer Savarkar and the death anniversary of Nehru. It caused much debate and, in a way, symbolized the fading away of the Nehruvian order, which saw a few hundred government schemes and institutions named after the Gandhi-Nehru family by 2014.
Conclusion
The second and concluding essay in this series will focus on the later section in the book wherein Kumar delves into the impact a civilizational view of India, has started to have on her foreign policy.
References
1. The Guardian (May 18, 2014). “India: another tryst with destiny”
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2014/may/18/india-narendra-modi-election-destiny
2. Goodreads. ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207470456-bharat-rising
3. Baru, S (2021). India’s Power Elite: Class, Caste and a Cultural Revolution
4. Goodreads. ‘Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre’
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45753892-blood-island
