UNMASKING INDIAN SECULARISM: Why We Need a New Hindu-Muslim Deal by Hasan Suroor

Author:Hasan Suroor [Suroor, Hasan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Published: 2022-05-05T11:00:00+00:00

The Hindu Mahasabha wanted a country for Hindus speaking Hindi while the Muslim League preferred to have a country of Urdu-speaking Muslims. By doing so, both organisations also adopted the principle of having a ‘common enemy’. For instance, the Hindu Mahasabha considered Pakistan (read Muslims) as its common enemy while the Muslim League hated India (read Hindus), mistaking a secular nation as the homeland of Hindus.19

For all its official opposition to the division of India, the Hindu Mahasabha helped the argument for Partition by making political alliances with Muslim League. I have said it before, but it bears reiteration that far from being enemies, they were ideological twins, joined at the hip in their single-minded pursuit of their respective goals, even if it meant collaborating with colonial rulers. Both threw their weight behind the British crackdown on the Congress party and benefited from it. The Hindu Mahasabha took an official stance when, in his presidential address at the Kanpur session of the Mahasabha in 1942, Savarkar defended the decision calling it a policy of ‘responsive co-operation’ even as he denounced the Congress as a ‘pseudo-nationalist body’. Historian Shamsul Islam has chronicled at length the Hindu Mahasabha’s flirtation with colonial rulers in Hindu Nationalism and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. According to academic Jyotirmaya Sharma, Savarkar’s ‘commitment to the creation of a Hindu Rashtra superseded the goal of political independence of India’.20

That Savarkar’s ideological successors should now appropriate the mantle of ‘nationalism’ has more than a touch of irony. It is rewriting history. As Laliwala pointed out, ‘At this crucial juncture in India’s polity, it is important to know this dishonourable genealogy of the Hindutva ideologues with which the present-day Hindu Right-wing is associated.’21

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