Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

The Hindus of Hamstead Heath

And as for imported traditions, I would wish to feel as at home with them here in India as Swapan and I are with Hampstead traditions in a Hampstead pub. Doubtless, Swapan would attack his steak-and-kidney pie -- or at any rate his roast lamb -- with a fork and knife, taking special care not to eat his peas with a knife, instead of committing the outrage of attacking his pub lunch in the manner in which his fingers at home do violence to a dead hilsa. On the other hand, the bhadralok would simply excommunicate Swapan if he were to take a fork to a hilsa -- that is, if he didn't choke on the bones of the hilsa first!

Swapan's third question is: 'Is secularism a badge of commitment or an employment opportunity?' Well, going by the number of former accountant-generals and superannuated chief secretaries the BJP has taken on, I would guess Hindu fundamentalism is a post-retirement employment opportunity; and that the Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Foundation is not a bad perch for those who flunked the IAS exam.

The secularist NGO collecting his wad from the welfare ministry can at least comfort himself with the thought that his loot has come from an indigenous tax-payer, not some Hampstead crorepati whose corner of some foreign heath is forever Hindu.

Let us then take Swapan's next problem. 'Is there,' he asks, 'a link between anti-Hindutva and upward social mobility?' Oh, yes, there is a link between anti-Hindutva and upward moral mobility; possibly even between anti-Hindutva and upward social sensibility. But given the saffron chic that is overtaking our establishment, as radical chic overtook the West in the sixties and seventies, I would imagine that good, old-fashioned secularism, at, say, St Stephen's is passe compared to the neo-liberalism of Swapan's Young Fogie Right.

All the preceding questions are, however, by the way, more designed to show what, a clever boy is young Swapan than to raise the res. Which lies in Swapan Dasgupta's last rhetorical question: 'Is there a correspondence between those who despise Hindu nationalism and those who see India as an ethnic menagerie?' In a word, the answer to that is: 'Yes! What is narrow minded and wrong headed about Hindu nationalism is that it reduces the glorious diversity of India into the dull uniformity of its majority religion's alleged cultural profile.

The very expression Swapan uses - 'ethnic menagerie' - shows the contempt in which he holds the 15 per cent segment of Indians who, by definition, are excluded from embracing Hindutva. It is really this distinction between those, like me, who are 100 per cent Indian and those, like Swapan, who are at best 85 per cent Indian, that lies at the root of the argument over whether the Hindutva weltanschauung (world view) is the right one for India or the secularist view.

Swapan sees this. Unlike many less intelligent of his cohorts in the Sangh Parivar, Swapan understands that Hindu nationalism is an alternative vision of the nature of India's nationhood. It is. That is why it must be fought tooth-and-nail. And victory will go not to the party which co-opts the money bags of Hampstead Heath but to those who mirror the Indian and, therefore, necessarily, the Hindu view of India.

Pamphleteers of Swapan's persuasion believe that the Hindu in modern India sees Indian nationalism as coterminus with Hindu nationalism. The Hindu, they believe, is confused at the suggestion that there might be other strands too to the nation's identity. Yet, ever since 1952, when Indians first went to the polls on the basis of adult franchise and returned only two Jan Sanghis to the first Lok Sabha, the propagandists of the saffron brigade have failed to explain why Hindu nationalism has held such little appeal to the Hindu majority. The answer, of course, lies in one of the most of-repeated obiter dicta of the Sangh Parivar, that India is a secular country because Hinduism is a secular religion.

Precisely, that is precisely why the majority of Hindus rejects the view that India is exclusively - or even primarily - for its Hindus; or that the nationhood of modern India should be based on a reading of the past which declares as apostate one thousand years of Indian history. It is the ordinary, non-English-speaking Resident Indian who sees this most clearly.

Whatever the provocations of the NRI-funded Sangh Parivar, the Indian who has chosen India in preference to Hampstead as his pitribhoomi and his punyabhoomi wants to see India belonging to all its inhabitants, who do in fact, constitute an 'ethnic menagerie', even if there are less pejorative descriptions possible of our unity in diversity.

The forces of Hindutva do not understand this because their version of Hinduism is a semiticised Hinduism, an alien graft on to our indigenous tolerance and native sense of fairplay, Swapan seems to think he is on the winning side because the Hindi-speaking Hindu of Hinduism is now being liberated from the thrall of angrezi/mlechcha secularism.

What he does not understand is that westernised secularists like me are only articulating in a non-Indian tongue that spirit of goodwill and brotherhood for all which we have learned from our own people, our own parents, our own culture and our own traditions.

And when Swapan wants his Parivarists to insist on a mandatory translation of essays like this into an Indian language' so that the Parivar can then 'wait gleefully for the inevitable backlash,' he does not seem to know that columns like this one are going to be translated and published - as, for years, past - into Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.

If that has not brought the house down upon me it is only because I am retailing to the reader of the vernacular what he already instinctively knows; it is when I write in English that I find myself dialoguing with the only Hindu who still needs to be persuaded - the Hindu of Hampstead Heath.