Hindu Rashtra or Bharat Rashtra?

When Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath spoke of making India a Hindu Rashtra, he touched a raw nerve. For seven decades, India has been weaned on the concept of Bharat Rashtra. The “idea of India” is religion-neutral. Secularism has been central to this idea. The problem of course lies with the definition of secularism. My idea of secularism (empower all, appease none) is not Sitaram Yechury’s or Rahul Gandhi’s idea of secularism (empower none, appease some). The problem with Hindu Rashtra is not its underlying concept of national unity within religious diversity which has been India’s civilisational ethos for 5,000 years but the way the word Hindu is misinterpreted. A Hindu Rashtra does not mean, and certainly should not mean, a Hindu-centric Rashtra where Muslims, Christians, Parsis and Jews are treated as second-class citizens. It simply means an all-encompassing civilisational unity that transcends religion.

There is, to put it bluntly, a Hindu in every Indian – whatever his or her private faith. That kernel of Hinduism is not religious but civilisational. A Tamil Hindu, for example, has more in common with a Tamil Muslim than with a Punjabi Hindu. In India’s complex geography and a history dotted with invasions by Christians from Britain and Muslims from Central Asia, religion became a lightning rod for politicians ranging from Jinnah and Gowalkar to today’s leaders who use their counterfeit versions of secularism to divide, not unite.

The problem is exacerbated by two other factors. First, India is one of the most innately religious countries in the world. Research has shown that well over 90 per cent of Indians of all faiths believe in God and pray regularly. In Britain, in contrast, regular Church-goers have dropped by nearly 50 per cent over the past 20  years. The second complicating factor is that India’s Muslims are civilisationally and culturally more “Hindu” then they care to admit. This causes several dichotomies. The call by the head of the Ajmer Dargah, Syed Zainul Abedin, to support a ban on eating beef underscores the growing divisions within the Muslim community. Shias, Sufis and Bohras are more akin to India’s civilisational ethos than Sunnis. It is the former’s syncretic Muslim culture rather than the Wahhabi-influenced Sunni fundamentalism that India needs.  

Despite the efforts of Pakistan to radicalise India’s Muslims, they remain largely immune to the currents of Islamist fundamentalism sweeping other parts of the world. If not, 180 million Muslims could have converted India into the world’s suicide bomb capital. Even in Jammu & Kashmir, where Pakistan has tried since 1989 to Islamise the Valley, Kashmiri Muslims, while sullen and resentful, use stones, not suicide bombs, as their weapons of choice, again demonstrating the residual influence of Sufism in Kashmir’s plural history.  

So is Adityanath wrong about Hindu Rashtra? Should he not instead have said Bharat Rashtra? It is much the same argument as the one between Hindutva and Bhartiyata. This is what I wrote in another newspaper in October 2014: “India is a nation of plural and parallel identities: within its fold lie all religions – equal, separate, but bound by a common thread of Bharatiyata. So why not call Hindutva Bharatiyata? Atal Bihari Vajpayee famously did just that, saying the terms were interchangeable: Hindutva is Bharatiyata, he said, and Bharatiyata is Hindutva.”

The murder of Pehlu Khan by a cow protection group is a vile criminal act and the culprits, even if they have political connections with the BJP, must be swiftly brought to justice. There is, though, the counter-narrative of a dairy farmer, Mohammed Yunus of Mewat, who escaped Pehlu Khan’s fate and looks after cows and their calves with a tenderness that is in stark contrast to the violence of the VHP goons who killed Khan. Yunus represents Bharat Rashtra and, one suspects, as he tends to his cows, wouldn’t mind a bit if it were called Hindu Rashtra. Just as Hindus must rise above religion and accept Bharatiyata’s plural embrace, Adityanath should regard a plural Bharat Rashtra as his guiding force. Votes may come by invoking religion but vikas will come only when all Indians rise above their religion.

The writer is author of ‘The New Clash of Civilizations: How The Contest Between America, China, India and Islam Will Shape Our Century’.