Restless ghosts of India’s past

 

I, Me, Myself

In his latest book, Modi’s India, Christophe Jaffrelot identifies majoritarian inferiority complex as the driving force of India’s ethnic nationalism. The collective ego of the Hindus is marked by a painful lack of self-esteem engendered by the many conquests or colonisation by people like the Mughals and the British. Coupled with this subjugation was the dread of the declining population. The Hindu population declined from 74.3% in 1881 to 68.2% in 1931. This obviously gave rise to a fear that the Hindus would eventually be overrun by the others, especially the Muslims. Though the population ceased to be a problem later with significant increases in Hindu population (84.1%in 1951), lack of self-esteem continued to haunt the nation’s majoritarian psyche.

V D Savarkar was driven to describe Hindus as a “mighty race” because of this national inferiority complex. Savarkar was not much of a Hindu. He hardly practised that religion. He was a racist. But he inspired the religious nationalists of the country particularly because of his hatred of Muslims. Savarkar was convinced that the Muslims were just incapable of loving the country (the punyabhoomi of India) because their allegiance was to the land of the Prophet as proved by the Khilafat movement. Soon, Golwalkar added the Christians and the Congress people to the list of India’s enemies. Any nationalist movement gains more strength when more people are made to look like enemies.

Hedgewar’s RSS was quick to join hands with Savarkar and Golwalkar. One of the major goals of RSS was to drill into its members the physical strength that Hindus supposedly lacked, says Jaffrelot. B S Moonje, Hedgewar’s mentor, was an admirer of the Muslim virility and he started eating meat in order to acquire that sort of virility, Jaffrelot points out.

But a carnivorous diet may not be enough to supplant a nation’s inferiority complex. The ghosts of the past are sure to haunt any nation that suffers from such complexes. When Hindus today seek to demolish mosques and churches, they are actually trying to put certain ghosts of the past to sleep. Ghosts of national shame.

But those ghosts won’t go to sleep so easily. In fact, complexes don’t vanish unless positive actions are taken. Assaults are never positive. They create more problems, more complexes, more guilt. And the situation is sure to get worse. Instead, the nation can prove their virility by building harmonious relationships based on mutual understanding and acceptance. The weak fight, the strong build understanding and acceptance.

India’s tragedy is that it has a leader who suffers from more inferiority complex than the nation itself. His craze for stylish apparel, his eagerness to hobnob with world leaders, and his substandard mockery of his rivals are ample proof (among a lot many others) of his irresistible complexes. A nation and a leader whose complexes match well may not be a good mixture for laying the ghosts of the past to sleep. That is why our ghosts are so restless.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 413: Let bygones be bygones. Bury the past. Tell the ghosts to sleep. Let Babur and Nehru rest in peace. Of course, they are. We are not. Restlessness of mediocrity rules us. Yes or No? #bygonesindia