What is common between Hindutva forces and the founders of Pakistan?
Around the first few decades of the 20th century, two complementing and opposing theories took hold of the Indian subcontinent - one which succeeded, and the other propelling its course slowly over 70 years, now making faster and more dangerous progress than it did 20 years ago.
I am talking about theocracy - the idea of a state governed by human versions of allegedly divine rules of conduct.
The "khwaab" seen by the thinking progenitors of what is now Pakistan, the dream of "one land, one religion", all united in the powerful force of one set of theological and cultural doctrines, had a set of ideas similar to what advocates of the Hindutva have today - the "cause" of making India politically, economically, socially, medically, philosophically and literally Hindu to all extent.
They wish to make a nation and state which bases itself in selective doctrines of the Indian subcontinent’s philosophical heritage. The only difference between the dream of Pakistan’s founders is that instead of carving one from within, they wish to strain the country of its allegedly lesser endowed subjects. Hence, instead of Dalits, tribals, Muslims, and other members of our heterogenous society noticeably different from the powerful casteist mainstream, wishing for and striving to make their own state within India’s geographical boundaries, are to be strained out of the country from within.
This is the "khwaab" of the rabid Hindu, to drown himself in the dream-like glory associated with the idea of unity, exclusionism, a return to the past, and the dream of living in a promised, unified land, where due to uniformity, things are less simpler and require lesser intellect, a marsh of slow, religiously motivated practitioners of humanity, for whom the answer to cancer as well as common cold is the older, lesser developed doctrine of Ayurveda, instead of the complex chemistries of our terrible colonisers.
As can be seen, there are two strains common between the Pakistan founders and the Hindutva propagators. There is an urge to be treated differently for being different culturally, and there is an aversion to modernity of every kind, with admiration of select passages of a generally misconstrued past. The state of Pakistan was founded because some people imposed their religious-political views on every other member who they saw as their community, and wished to make a pure state of one race, like the old-time fascination of the Nazis and a common element of self-realisation seeking nationalistically democratic states today.
The "Hindu Rashtra" is not only an aim for the right-winged Hindu voter and politician, but is also a key element of the global struggle between theocracies and republics, conservatism and modernism, as ideal versions of our end as states and societies. The forces of the Right become powerful in America with Donald Trump, and in India with the BJP, with Adolf Hitler in Germany, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Pakistan.
These forces of exclusionism resulted in the division of India into India and Pakistan, thereby founding a new state on the basis of theocracy and another state on the basis of secularism.
To love India is to love her Constitution. The Constitution written by our founding fathers was antithetical to the Pakistani cause. Now, the common forces which wish to bend and coerce the Constitution and the public into accepting their ideologies, are the state of Pakistan internationally and the growing Right nationally. This common ideology has the common aim of making exclusionist societies. The opposition of republics to theocracy is proved simple with the fact that Pakistan has been under military dictatorships for a long time in its short history. In our short history, the people who have a nostalgia-like fascination for dictatorships, crude rule of iron will etc, often share the same fascination of unitary and exclusionist societies as well. The psychological traits are common.
As alleged liberals, the only manner of countering the forces of Hindutva is to expose them for what they are. Their aims and methods resonate well with the ideologies of their sworn enemies, the people of Pakistan. Both parties, the Hindutva in India, and the Pakistani establishment, feed off their ideological commonalities, while being at loggerheads with each other in public domain.
The recent habits of the rabid to go to Muslim-majority neighbourhoods (as happened in Kasganj), and shout "Pakistan murdabad" actually add to the cause of Pakistan by creating a reactionary urge to sympathise with one’s alleged brothers, which furthers the Right in India as well as Pakistan.
The forces of theocracy collude despite their antagonistic predicament. Casteism, being an exclusionist ideology, also furthers their cause. And the one who suffers, at the end of the day is the poor man in the exclusionist neighbourhood, asked to prove his loyalty by bunches of miscreants who destroy their own cause by furthering it in the name of combating it, a characteristically contradictory state of affairs. Jinnah did what MS Golwalkar could not at the time, but the dream of Mahatma Gandhi’s India is still alive, and may it remain so.
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