By Randeep Purewall and Kulwindar Singh

Every country has an essence, a spirit which animates and inspires it. For India, that spirit is its history of tolerance which made possible a rich, pluralistic civilization.

If that spirit is lost, so is India. If communalism and the sectarian strife it engenders extinguish India’s spirit, the collapse of the union cannot be far behind.

Through the centuries India has endured invasions, conquests and even colonization, yet it still lives on. The threats of terrorism and bomb blasts alone cannot destroy this ancient civilization.

What can destroy India is the destruction of its tolerant spirit from within. For India to survive and truly flourish as a great power, there has to be inter-communal harmony and only India's spirit of tolerance and acceptance of its pluralism can give all communities a voice, a place, a face within the mosaic.

India has historically nurtured many paths to truth, religious or otherwise, as well as to the idea of a universal humanity that transcends distinctions of creed, caste, and nation.[2] This ethos produced the composite civilization that is India.

As foreign cultures flowed into India, they were immersed into the local civilization to produce an ever richer cultural pluralism.[3] The fusion of the Indus and Aryan culture laid the basis for Hindu religion and philosophy. The mingling of Hindu and Islamic culture gave India the elegance of Mughal architecture and the message of equality and tolerance preached by Kabir and Guru Nanak. The Hindustani language (Hindi and Urdu) emerged through the confluence of the local language of Delhi with Persian, Turkish and Arabic.

Against this social and cultural backdrop, the various people of the subcontinent in which they could live with one another and partake in a common civilization while at the same time retain a distinctive sense of identity within that civilization.

With the advent of the British Raj, this social structure took a new turn. From thereon, two ideas of Indian nationalism emerged: one, the pan-India nationalism which accepted the idea of a composite civilization; the other, a series of communally based nationalisms from which Hindu nationalism, along with other religious-based nationalisms, erupted onto the national stage.

The internal threat to India then is this Hindu nationalism, a modern phenomenon which sought to imbue Hinduism with the characteristics of Semitic religion including a single God, scripture, founder and holy city. Hindu nationalism then was an attempt to "unite" the scattered, diverse and disunited Hindu communities of India into a single tight-knit entity which could withstand any threat, perceived or real, from the more "united" communities of Islam and Christianity [4]

Like any idea, Hindutva, the most recent incarnation of Hindu nationalism, seeks to create a reductive, monolithic Hinduism. It has on the one hand become a uniting idea for Hindus troubled by a lack of "selfhood" or cohesiveness among Hindus and on the other hand an ideology propagated by a narrow clique of interested individuals who seek to better their own political and economic agenda by playing on disparities between different religious and social groups, by distorting history to that end and by promoting fear among (upper-caste) Hindus of a menacing "other", be it Muslim, Pakistani or Dalit.

Ironically, the Hindutva agenda, far from created a strong, united India would encourage social divisiveness and hamper the cause of an all-inclusive nationalism. Hindutva also threatens to distort Hinduism itself, whose tolerance and respect for pluralism has in part been responsible for creating the composite civilization of India.

It is said that the past defines the present, and the present defines the future. If the spirit of Indian tolerance is allowed to flourish, then so too will India will flourish as it has done so in the past. If communal nationalism became the dominant ideology and psyche of the Indian people, then the tolerance that made India would be lost.

India can only be held together if all groups that comprise it feel they have a legitimate place and voice as part of one nation. By imbuing the social and cultural foundations of India once again with the spirit of tolerance, Indians can check the cancer of communalism and keep alive a tolerant, multi-cultural India for tomorrow.

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[1] Sue Ellen Charlton, Comparing Asian Politics: India, China, and Japan (Westview Press, Boulder, CO: 1997), 89.
[2] Tharoor, Sashi, India: from Midnight to the Millenium (Harper Perennial, NY: 1997), 129-130.
[3] Tharoor, Sashi, India: from Midnight to the Millenium (Harper Perennial, NY: 1997), 9.
[4] Buruma, Ian, “India: The Perils of Democracy” in “India: A Mosaic” (New York Review of Books: NY – 2000), at page 23.

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