Rahul Gandhi’s recent Kedarnath pilgrimage has spurred some to say that Congress has again started playing soft Hindutva card to take on the hard-core line Sangh Parivar and BJP embodies. Defining things this way amounts to a travesty of truth, for Congress while coursing its way through the vicissitudes of mercurial Indian politics has never stopped playing such a card, not even when Jawaharlal Nehru was at its helm. It has always remained inclined to take into account what cultural nationalism signifies as a sort of ‘private discourse’ while firming up tactical moves in tune with the imperatives of ground-level politics. However, by way of its ‘public posture’, it keeps on vigorously espousing secularism to keep its electoral applecart intact. Keeping aside the political exigency, it may be said that Congress does adore the assimilative, plastic, all-embracing genius that is quintessential India. Its differences with the Sangh Parivar lie merely in the approach as to how to have the non-Hindu communities absorbed in the cultural mainstream of India.
While addressing the Madurai session of the AICC in October 1961, Nehru said: “India has, for ages past, been a country of pilgrimages. All over the country, you find these ancient places, from Badrinath, Kedarnath and Amarnath, high up in the snowy Himalayas down to Kanyakumari in the south. What has drawn the people from the south to the north and from the north to the south in these great pilgrimagesIJ It is the feeling of one country and this feeling has bound us together. Our ancient books have said that the land of Bharat is the land stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the southern seas. This conception of Bharat as one great land has come down the ages and has joined us together, even though we have had different political kingdoms and we may speak different languages and follow different faiths. This silken bond keeps us together in many ways.”
Again, while addressing the teachers and the students of the Muslim Aligarh University less than a year after India became free- in January 1948, Nehru said: “I am proud of our inheritance and our ancestors who gave intellectual and cultural eminence to India. How do you feel about this pastIJ Do you feel you are also sharers in it and inheritors of it and, therefore, proud of something that belongs to you as much as to meIJ Or do you feel alien to it and pass it by without understanding it or feeling that strange thrill that comes from the realisation that you are the trustees and inheritors of this treasureIJ”
B R Nanda, an eminent historian, wrote: “The Muslim elite suffered from a remarkable disinclination to imbibe even a modicum of the cultural heritage of the pre-Muslim India. This was in sharp contrast to what happened in Indonesia and several other countries of West Asia. In Indonesia, several Hindu traditions and rituals survived among Muslims, and a version of the Ramayana has been staged through the centuries. The Muslims of the Arabia and West Asia cherished some of the heroes of the pre-Muslim era…But for the Muslim elite in the Indian sub-continent, history began with Prophet Muhammad and the Arab conquest of India, and most, if not all, of the prior Hindu-Buddhist experience was irrelevant. Educated Muslims did not think Yudhishtra as a model king, Arjuna as a model warrior or Kalidasa as an ideal poet…Indian Muslims have accepted the great figures of ancient Persia and ancient Greece, but not the heroes of ancient India as their intellectual progenitors; the Ramayana and Mahabharata could not become part of their literary heritage as the Shahnama and Sikandarnama did.”
The left-leaning votaries of secularism may cry foul of Congress leaders religiously attending Dassera festival in Delhi, senior Congress ministers when they are in power attending bhoomi puja before governmental projects are inaugurated and the like. But this epitomises what can be called the perennial Congress dilemma vis-à-vis the secular/Hindutva discourse. The Congress can hardly leave the political space open for the Hindutvabadi forces which, the party has realised, cannot be repressed by merely glorifying secularism. Several episodes in India’s tumultuous history like the Ram Mandir movement which catapulted BJP into a major political force almost overnight and the gory aftermath of Godhra killing in Gujarat apart from the Delhi massacre in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination have amply proved the existence of the forces representing cultural sensitivity of the majority community. The party has realised that if ignored, the repressed collective psyche might erupt in cataclysm, resulting in incalculable electoral backlash and in serious damage to India’s secular image at large.