The Making of a Hindu Republic of India
Two landmark elections and a determined majoritarian push are reconstituting the idea of India as we knew it
MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT THIS. Republic 2.0 is coming. At any rate, a serious attempt is being made to usher it in. The second decade of the 21st century could well go down in history as the beginning of a conscious, deliberate and determined effort by Narendra Modi’s government to create the Hindu Republic of India. The logic is this: if Pakistan and Afghanistan can call themselves Islamic republics, and if another Muslim-majority neighbour, Bangladesh, can declare Islam to be its state religion, why can’t Hindu-majority India become a Hindu Republic? The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill is a foretaste of this change in the years and decades to come.
India has witnessed 17 parliamentary elections since 1952. Political parties have won and lost elections. Governments and prime ministers have come and gone. Barring the failed attempt to impose an authoritarian rule during the Emergency (1975-77), the Indian state and its democratic institutions, including the media, had remained more or less immune to the periodic transition of political power. Society, too, remained outside the control of the shifting fortunes of political parties.
But something different—altogether different and ominous—has started happening after the two landmark elections that took place in the decade that is about to come to an end. Modi’s rise to power in 2014, and his consolidation of power with a bigger majority in 2019, are no ordinary milestones in the evolution of the Indian state and society. They foretell a plan by the Sangh parivar, the ideological family to which the ruling party belongs, to transform the Indian state into a Hindu state, Indian society from a Hindu-majority society into a Hindu majoritarian society, and, finally, the Indian nation itself into a Hindu nation (‘Hindu Rashtra’). Is this what Modi means by his promise of creating a ‘New India’?
In the seven decades after India won freedom from British rule—and it was the culmination of a struggle in which Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and other communities participated in an inspiring show of national unity, a fact not negated even by India’s tragic Partition—never have Muslims been made to feel so alien in their own land as now. And never has India witnessed Hindu triumphalism so openly and aggressively as now.
Secularism, which is a preambular cornerstone of the Indian Constitution, Indian state and Indian society, is under assault like never before. Removing this cornerstone, de facto and de jure, and replacing it with a ‘Hindu First’ principle, both at the state and societal levels, has become the Bharatiya Janata Party’s foremost governance objective. Ask yourself: has Modi even once affirmed his commitment to secularism since becoming prime minister in May 2014? With the prime minister himself making no effort to hide his aversion to secularism, his vast legion of supporters has felt emboldened to trash it as ‘sickularism’, a ploy for Muslim appeasement, and, worse still, to brand its votaries as ‘anti-national’.
De-nationalising a community, or at least diminishing its place in the nation, is the hidden agenda of the Citizenship Amendment Bill and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). This legislation irrefutably discriminates citizens on the grounds of religion, and thus violates Articles 14 and 15 of India’s secular Constitution. By enacting it, the Modi government is asserting that India belongs more to Hindus than to Muslims. If ever a proof were needed that the current BJP leadership believes in the same ‘Two Nation Theory’ that the pre-Partition Muslim League propounded to demand a separate ‘Muslim Nation’, here it is. And this could well be the beginning of several more discriminatory laws and policies to come.
The independence of the Supreme Court, and its loyalty to the Constitution, will be severely tested when it is called upon to pronounce its judgment on the constitutional validity of the Citizenship Amendment Bill. But we cannot be fully sanguine about it. Without declaring Emergency, and with a large section of the media becoming its menacing cheerleader, the government is already altering the traditional architecture of the Indian state, which rests on the principle of checks and balances between its various pillars. Here is a telling example. The Election Commission chose to turn a blind eye when the prime minister sought to create a majority-minority polarisation in his speeches during the campaign for the 2019 Lok Sabha election. When a courageous member of the EC wanted the constitutional body to act in an independent and impartial manner, he was targeted for harassment. Thus, the message to the bureaucracy, and even
WHY DOES THE SANGH PARIVAR WANT REPUBLIC 2.0? BECAUSE IT PLAYED NO MAJOR ROLE IN THE CREATION OF REPUBLIC 1.0. IT HAS FEW HEROES TO CALL ITS OWN
to the judiciary, is clear: fall in line, or be ready to pay the price. No wonder, the apex court, deferring to the government’s political objectives in the matter, has shown no alacrity or inclination to take up the issue of the prolonged suppression of human rights and democratic rights of the people and their political representatives in Kashmir. Why does the Sangh parivar want Republic 2.0? Because it played no major role in the creation of Republic 1.0. It has very few heroes from that era to call its own. Hence its intense desire to co-opt Sardar Patel and Mahatma Gandhi (even though the latter is proving too problematic for such co-option). Hence its blatant attempts to falsify the history of Republic 1.0 by projecting the Congress not as its chief organiser but as its villain. Home Minister Amit Shah’s egregious statement in the Lok Sabha—“Congress is responsible for India’s Partition on the basis of religion”— should not be seen as merely polemical. It is aimed at securing legitimacy for the BJP’s own religion-based polarisation of India. The not-so-subtle appeal to the Hindu community is this: India’s struggle against the British rule is now history, but the struggle against the real ‘Other’—Muslims, who converted to Islam during the much longer ‘Muslim rule’—must continue until Hindu domination is established. This is indeed what the Sangh parivar wanted to achieve, but could not, prior to 1947— the whole of ‘Akhand Bharat’ to be made a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. Seven decades later, that grand ambition is unchanged. Politicisation of Hindu religion, and erecting the edifice of a new republic on the foundations of Hindutva will inflict enormous damage on multireligious India. The warning words of F.S. Aijazuddin, an eminent Pakistani scholar and a well-known friend of India, whom I met in Lahore recently, still ring in my ears: “We Pakistanis have paid a huge price—violent conflicts, sectarianism, extremism, intolerance and loss of rights and freedoms—because we allowed Islamisation of our state and society. If India wants to commit the same mistake by allowing its Hinduisation, you are most welcome. But remember that the price you will pay will be far higher.”
TECHNOLOGY DEFINED THE 2010-2019 decade and promises to drive the next into uncharted waters. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, machine learning and bionics graduated from science fiction to practical reality. Digital technologies ruled, and data became the new resource. Technology has emerged as the currency of power and is beginning to transform geopolitics. Confronted by an unfamiliar terrain and still prisoner to outdated templates, states succumbed to nationalist and nativist urges, creating political fractures precisely when the world in the making demanded responses that transcend national boundaries and compel collaboration. Digital technologies became pervasive, permeating social processes and human interaction. The world has become densely interconnected and information flows are instantaneous.
This reinforces democracy through easy access to information even as it enables state authority to deploy more refined instruments of authoritarian control. Liberal democracy was in retreat as political preferences swung in favour of the ‘strong and decisive leader’ who could rise above the hesitancies and ponderous nature of democratic processes. This was a decade marked by the rise of populist and authoritarian leaders, who were able to tap into the widespread resentment at growing wealth and income inequalities spawned by the application of new technologies that required new skills and capabilities. We have witnessed this in the unexpected election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. It is also evident in the support for Brexit in the UK. China has a powerful and authoritarian leader in Xi Jinping while Russia’s Vladimir Putin cultivates an image of a strong and decisive leader. The European Union, which represented a model of pooled sovereignty and regional integration, began to fragment, and has its own crop of populist leaders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has emerged as the undisputed political leader in India. There were early expectations of accelerated growth and deepening reforms under a government enjoying parliamentary majority and strong leadership. Each leader, in his own fashion, asserts the primacy of his nation’s interests over others. India has also witnessed a surge of nationalistic sentiment. But this contradicts the reality that most challenges that countries confront are transnational in character and not amenable to national or even regional solutions. Technology has blurred the line between domestic and external. Only a spirit of internationalism and reliance on multilateral institutions and processes will enable us to deal with challenges, such as climate change, cybersecurity, peace in outer space and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and global health pandemics. This glaring contradiction has defined the past decade.
There were some bright interludes. In 2015, leaders gathered in Paris concluded a historic Paris Agreement on climate change. This consensus document commits signatories to the agreement to limit average global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees centigrade, but aim for an even lower 1.5 degrees centigrade rise. Negotiations to translate the agreement into practical actions by member states continue. The commitments made so far fall woefully short of the stated objective. There is a tendency to believe technology will somehow find solutions to the climate crisis, but there is a very real possibility that the world may be struck by an irreversible ecological catastrophe before technology comes up with an answer.
The decade witnessed major shifts in the geopolitical landscape. While the US remains the sole superpower with a global military reach, its relative influence has declined as a consequence of the continuing and rapid rise of China and the emergence of other major regional powers. The US-China trade war is not so much about trade as a reflection of the
growing strategic competition between the established and the aspiring superpower, and the key driver is technology. China is challenging American ascendancy in high technology, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotechnology, and is steadily narrowing the gap in capabilities. So far, the US and Chinese economies have been densely intertwined, but we are seeing signs of a partial decoupling. China dominated the decade with a determined bid to assert its status as a co-equal power with the US. Xi Jinping’s assumption of the top leadership position in 2012 launched a new and more assertive phase in China’s foreign policy. The occupation and militarisation of islands in the South China Sea, the declaration of an air defence zone over its northern part and the submission at the UN of a formal claim to the whole of South China Sea as China’s territorial waters signalled the end of Deng Xiaoping’s prudent policy of maintaining a low profile and not seeking a leadership role prematurely. Xi Jinping also announced, in 2013, the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to establish a transport, communications and digital connectivity network across the world, with China as the hub. It is estimated that the overall plan would see an investment of nearly $1 trillion in Chinese funds. India’s own neighbourhood has been a target, with the pride of place going to Pakistan, which may receive over $60 billion in project funds under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The asymmetry between India and China in terms of economic and military capabilities increased steadily during the decade and posed a major challenge to Indian foreign policy. The Modi government’s assumption of office initially led to a more assertive posture against China, culminating in the stand-off between Indian and Chinese forces at the India-Bhutan-China trijunction on Doklam plateau in 2017. Since then, there has been an effort on both sides to avoid escalation of tensions and to refrain from provocative behaviour at the border. The ‘informal’ summit between PM Modi and President Xi, in the wake of Doklam, at Wuhan in April 2018, followed by a second summit at Mamallapuram in October this year, represents a serious effort to keep relations on an even keel. This did not lead to any slowing of Chinese penetration in our immediate neighbourhood. India continued to strengthen its security cooperation with the US, Japan and Australia in the ‘quadrilateral’ coalition aimed at countervailing Chinese power in what has come to be known as the Indo-Pacific region. A worrying trend during the decade has been the slowing down of the Indian economy and the resurgence of more autarchic economic strategies by the government. This has been reflected in the review of free trade agreements concluded by India with several countries during the previous decade. The recent decision not to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a shift from the economic reform and liberalisation pursued by governments of every political persuasion since 1991-92. Tariff rates are being increased, implementing an import-substitution strategy, which will inevitably retard the globalisation of the Indian economy. The BJP government brought new energy to India’s foreign policy with Modi carving out a high-profile role for himself on the international stage. But an expansive external role cannot be sustained with a place at the margins of the regional and global economy. India’s international image has also been adversely impacted by news about rising pollution in cities and a deteriorating law and order situation. Normalcy has yet to return to Kashmir and relations with Pakistan are at an all-time low. The decade is ending on a note of disappointment and anxiety.
A WORRYING TREND HAS BEEN THE SLOWDOWN IN THE INDIAN ECONOMY AND THE RESURGENCE OF MORE AUTARCHIC ECONOMIC STRATEGIES BY THE PRESENT GOVERNMENT