Stream Of Unconsciousness

Yet, he displays his anti-Muslim prejudices without any reservation. This admirer ofSavarkar—whose books he read when he was 19—harks back to the old notion that"the Hindu psyche was traumatised with the impact of Islam". He admits that"one should not wallow in the past", but he cannot help dwelling on theinnumerable destructions of temples. While the Hindu "is pathologically averse toviolence"—as the communal riots of the last 15 years have amplydemonstrated!—"the Muslim learns to use the knife, as it were, from thebeginning...and is therefore prepared to resist and survive."

Here is another contradiction: the Muslim can only be stigmatised for all his misdeedsbut he may be a role model too! And the Christian as well. In the most personal letter ofthe book, Goradia tries to dissuade a Hindu lady from marrying an Englishman in too muchhurry because "being an Englishman" he cannot understand "an Indianfaith". But in the same page he draws his definition of love from Francis Bacon! Theideologues of Hindu nationalism such as Savarkar and Golwalkar have done the same: theirnotion of "cultural nationalism" was explicitly borrowed from European writers.

Interestingly, the uniform of the rss is adapted from the British police. They couldnot strengthen the Hindu society except by imitating the dominating other. Goradia says itplainly: "It is time we pulled ourselves together and explained ourselves to theothers in their own idiom." This is what I've called the strategy ofstigmatisation and emulation of "threatening" others which found expression, forinstance in the Hindu nationalists' attempt at endowing their religion with achurch-like structure through the Vishwa Hindu Parishad: Hindutva is not Hinduism but asemitised creed.

But, of course, Goradia claims that Hindutva is Hinduism and even that it isIndia—this is the third contradiction of his book. For the author "Hindu,Bharatiya or Indian" is all the same. In fact, "the Hindu universe extends toall living beings including animals, birds and reptiles" and he even wonders if thesoul of his mother "has not gone and settled in the body of, say, a Muslimchild". If not because of reincarnation, Muslims are Hindus because their ancestorswere Hindus who got converted. Muslims, therefore, are welcome to look at themselves asHindus. This is the great tradition of Hindu tolerance that Goradia finds so moving:Muslims can follow any creed privately, provided they regard themselves as Hindus byculture—and believe, for instance, that Krishna "first personified the unity ofIndia" as "president of the Adhaka-Vrisni league or confederation of five Yadavarepublican committees". The fact that many Muslims and Christians descend from Hinduconverts is evident from their "collective memory" since they have not"necessarily forgotten their caste". The author explicitly assumes that one is aHindu primarily by his caste.

While Goradia does not rehabilitate caste as such, he advocates the recognition ofnatural hierarchies: "Justice should be progressive and not equal because people arenot equal. The karma of each soul is different; so is his or her bhagya or taqdeer".Equality is a wrong idea associated with the semitic religions whereas liberty is "atthe core of the Hindu faith". But the Hindu ideal of liberty has been suppressed by awestern-inspired Constitution emphasising equality which needs to be reformed according toGoradia who remains very vague in this regard. His cautious but firm reservationsregarding any positive discrimination policy reflects the most commonplace plea of theurban elite on behalf of merit. He argues, in the same vein, that the State should beliberal in the realm of economy, Goradia's sphere par excellence. But swadeshi shouldprevail anyway!

The author's claim in favour of less equality stands in contradiction with hisnationalist aim. Can one really build some Hindu Rashtra if social groups aredifferentiated in such a way that they feel discriminated against? It is only possible ifthey don't feel so, if they accept to play the role of junior partners, like thechildren in a joint family. It is certainly not just by chance if Goradia feels "anation is the extension of a joint family". The conservative overtone of this organicnationalism is the last but not least contradiction of the "saffron book".

The Hindutva ideology is bound to fail if its proponents are not prepared toacknowledge the rise of those who strive for equality and are emancipating themselves.

(Christophe Jaffrelot, director of ceri, Paris, is author of The Hindu NationalistMovement and co-editor of The bjp and the Compulsions of Politics.)