Fields of Blood (58 page)

The British
partition of the subcontinent into Hindu
India and
Muslim
Pakistan in 1947 was similarly problematic, since both were established as secular states in the name of religion. The brutal process of partition caused the displacement of over seven million people and the deaths of a million others who were attempting to flee from one state to join their coreligionists in the other. In both India and Pakistan, vast numbers found themselves unable to speak the so-called national language. A particularly volatile situation was created in
Kashmir, which despite a Muslim majority was given to India, because it was ruled by a Hindu maharaja. That British decision is still contested, and a similar arbitrariness was felt in the separation of eastern and western Pakistan by a thousand miles of Indian territory.

As they struggled for independence before partition, Hindus had engaged in an intense discussion about the legitimacy of fighting the British, shaped in large part by the
Bhagavad-Gita,
a text that has deeply shaped the collective memory of India. Ahimsa was an important spiritual value in India, yet the
Gita
seemed to sanction violence.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), however, disagreed with this interpretation. He had been born into a vaishya family and had many
Jain friends who influenced his later attitudes. In 1914, after working for years as a lawyer in
South Africa to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, he had returned to India and become interested in the issue of home rule, founding the
Natal Indian Congress Party and developing his unique method of resisting colonial oppression by nonresistance. Besides the Hindu religious tradition, he had been influenced by
Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount,
Leo Tolstoy’s
The
Kingdom of God Is Within You,
John Ruskin’s
Unto This Last,
and
Henry David Thoreau’s
Civil Disobedience.

Central to Gandhi’s worldview was the insight, first developed in the
Upanishads, that all beings were manifestations of the
Brahman. Since everybody shared the same sacred core, violence went against the metaphysical bias of the entire universe. This deeply spiritual vision of the oneness of existence directly countered the aggressive separatism and chauvinism of the nation-state. Gandhi’s peaceable refusal to obey the self-serving obduracy of the British regime was based on three principles: ahimsa,
satyagraha
(the “soul force” that comes with the realization of
the profound unity of humanity), and
swaraj
(“self-rule”). In the
Gita,
Gandhi maintained,
Arjuna’s initial refusal to fight had not been true ahimsa, because he still regarded himself as different from his enemies and had not realized that they were all, friend and foe alike, embodiments of the Brahman. Had Arjuna truly understood that he and Duryodana, the adversary he was about to fight, were ultimately one, he would have acquired the “soul force” that had the power to transform an enemy’s hatred into love.

But as we have seen, the same texts and spiritual practices can lead to entirely different courses of actions. Others opposed this interpretation of the
Gita.
The Hindu scholar
Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) argued that
Krishna’s validation of violence in the
Gita
was simply an acknowledgment of life’s grim reality. Yes, it would be nice to remain peacefully above the fray, but until Gandhi’s “soul force” actually became an effective reality in the world, the natural aggression inherent in both men and nations “tramples down, breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes as we see it doing today.” Gandhi might discover that he had caused as much destruction of life by abjuring violence as those who had resorted to fighting.
⁸
Aurobindo was voicing the view of Gandhi’s critics, who thought that he closed his eyes to the fact that the British response to his nonviolent campaigns actually resulted in hideous bloodshed. But Aurobindo was also articulating the eternal dilemma of
Ashoka: Is
nonviolence feasible in the inescapably violent world of politics?

Nevertheless, Gandhi saw his theory through to its ultimate conclusion. Nonviolence meant not only loving your enemies, he maintained, but realizing that they were not your enemies at all. He might hate the systemic and military ruthlessness of colonial rule, but he could not allow himself to hate the people who implemented it:

Without reverence for the sanctity of every single human being and the “equanimity” long seen in India as the pinnacle of the spiritual quest,
“politics bereft of religion,” Gandhi believed, were a “death-trap because they kill the soul.”
¹⁰
Secular
nationalism seems unable to cultivate a similarly universal ideology, even though our globalized world is so deeply interconnected. Gandhi could not countenance Western
secularism: “To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest creature as oneself,” he concluded in his autobiography. Devotion to this truth required one to be involved in every field of life; it had brought him into politics, for “those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”
¹¹
Gandhi’s last years were darkened by the communal violence that had erupted during and after partition. He was assassinated in 1948 by a radical nationalist who believed that Gandhi had given too many concessions to the Muslims and had made a large monetary donation to
Pakistan.

As they forged their national identities in the peculiarly tense conditions of India, Muslims and Hindus would both fall prey to the besetting sin of secular nationalism: its inability to tolerate minorities. And because their outlook was still permeated by spirituality, this nationalist bias distorted their traditional religious vision. As violence between Muslims and Hindus escalated during the 1920s, the
Arya Samaj became more militant.
¹²
At a conference in 1927, it formed a military cadre, the
Arya Vir Dal (“Troop of Aryan Horses”). It declared that the new Aryan hero must develop the virtues of the
Kshatriya—courage, physical strength, and, especially, proficiency in the use of weapons. His principal duty was to defend the rights of the Aryan nation against the Muslims and the British.
¹³
The Arya was anxious not to be outdone by the
Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (“National Volunteer Association”), usually referred to as RSS, founded in central India three years earlier by Keshav 
B. Hedgewar. Where the Arya had adapted the British idea of “religion” to “Hinduism,” RSS had fused traditional religious ideals with Western nationalism. It was primarily a character-building organization designed to develop an ethos of service, based on loyalty, discipline, and a respect for the Hindu heritage, and it appealed particularly to the urban middle classes. Its hero was the seventeenth-century warrior
Shivaji who, empowered by his fidelity to traditional Hindu ritual as well as his organizational skills, had led a successful revolt against the
Moghuls. He had managed to weld recruits from disparate peasant castes into a unified army, and RSS vowed to do the same in British India.
¹⁴

Thus a new religiosity was coming to birth in
India, one that cultivated Hindu strength not by evoking ahimsa but by developing the traditional warrior ethos. Yet this combination of the
Kshatriya ideal with secular nationalism was dangerous. For RSS, Mother India was not simply a territorial entity but a living goddess. She had always been revered as a holy land, and her seas, rivers, and mountains were sacred, but for centuries she had been desecrated by foreigners and would shortly be raped by
partition. Traditionally, the
Mother Goddess had embraced everyone, but with its new nationalist intolerance of minorities, RSS insisted that she could no longer admit Muslims or East Asian Buddhists.

Hedgewar was an activist rather than an intellectual, his thinking deeply influenced by
V. D. Savarkar, a brilliant radical imprisoned by the British whose classic
Hindutva
(“Hinduness”) had been smuggled out of prison and published in 1923. It defined the Hindu as a person who acknowledged the integrity of Greater India (which stretched from the
Himalayas to
Iran and
Singapore) and revered her not only as Motherland, as other nationalists did, but also as Holy Land.
¹⁵
This fusion of religion and secular nationalism was potentially toxic. In Savarkar’s books, the emerging Hindu national identity depended upon the exclusion of Islam: the whole complex history of India was presented as a struggle to the death with Muslim
imperialism. Even though Hindus had always been the majority population, they had been conditioned by centuries of imperial domination to see themselves as an embattled, endangered minority.
¹⁶
Like so many subject peoples, they had developed a history of injury and humiliation, which can corrode a religious tradition and incline it toward violence. Some experienced their long oppression as a national disgrace. During the 1930s
M. S. Golwalkar, the second leader of the RSS, felt an affinity with the ideals of
National Socialism, in part the product of
Germany’s humiliation by the Allies after the
First World War. Foreigners in India had only two options, Golwalkar argued: “The foreign races must lose their separate existence … or [they] may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights.” Golwalkar praised the Germans for “purging the country of the Semitic Races”; India, he believed, had much to learn from this
Aryan “Race pride.”
¹⁷

The horror of partition could only inflame the history of grievance that was so dangerously poisoning relations between Muslims and
Hindus. As the psychologist
Sudhir Kakar has explained, for decades hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Muslim children have listened to tales of the violence of that time, which “dwell on the fierceness of the implacable enemy. This is a primary channel through which historical enmity is transmitted from one generation or the next.” It also created a rift between secularist and religious Hindus.
¹⁸
Secularists convinced themselves that this violence could never happen again. Many blamed the British for the tragedy; others regarded it merely as a terrifying aberration.
Jawaharlal Nehru,
India’s first prime minister, believed that the
industrialization of the country and the spread of scientific rationalism and democracy would counter these communal passions.

But there was a disturbing portent of future trouble. In 1949 an image of
Ram, incarnation of
Vishnu and chief exemplar of Hindu virtue, was discovered in a building at the site of his mythological birthplace in
Ayodhya on the eastern Gangetic plain. This was also the site of a mosque said to have been established by
Babur, the first
Moghul emperor, in 1528.
¹⁹
Devout Hindus claimed that Ram’s image had been placed there by God;
Muslims, naturally, denied this. There were violent clashes, and the district magistrate, a member of RSS, refused to remove the image. Because their images require regular worship, Hindus were henceforth permitted to enter the building for devotional chanting on the anniversary of the miraculous arrival of Ram’s statue. Forty years later this sacred geography would trump the scientific rationalism so confidently predicted by the secularists.

The founder of
Pakistan,
Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), was an unabashed secularist who simply wanted to create a state in which Muslims would not be defined or limited by their religious affiliation. In fact, the nation was defined by Islam before it had even begun. This inevitably raised certain expectations, and from the beginning, while the government was still resolutely secularist, there was pressure to resacralize political life. The
Deobandis became particularly powerful in Pakistan. They endorsed the modern system of territorial nationalism and secular democracy and offered free education to the poor in their madrassas at a time when the state school system was collapsing due to lack of funding. Their students would be isolated from mainstream secular life and schooled in the Deobandis’ peculiarly rigid and intolerant form of Islam.
To protect their Islamic lifestyle, the Deobandis also founded a political party, the
JUI (Association of Ulema of Islam). By the late 1960s, having accumulated tens of thousands of students and alumni, they were in an excellent position to pressure the government to Islamize civil law and the banking system, thereby creating jobs for their
ultrareligious graduates.