Was India tolerant before Modi?

Book Discussion

The Indian National Congress Party is repeatedly accused of Muslim appeasement by Narendra Modi and his followers. Did the Congress appease Muslims more than it did the Hindus? Neeti Nair deals with that question in the second chapter of her book, Hurt Sentiments, which I introduced in my previous post: The Triumph of Godse.

The first instance of a book being banned in India occurred as an effort to placate a religious community. That was in 1955. It was done by none other than the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. The book was Aubrey Menen’s retelling of The Ramayana. Menen’s writing has a fair share of satire and provocative incisiveness. Nehru banned the sale of the book in India (it was published in England) in order to assuage the wounded Hindu sentiments. The book “outrages the religious feelings of the Hindus,” Nehru’s government declared. That was long before the Indira Gandhi’s Congress government banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses which allegedly hurt Muslim sentiments. [The simple truth is that neither of the books was read by anyone in India except a handful of people whose sentiments weren’t brittle.]

The comical extension of the Menen history is that Nehru went on to ban a book which Menen had never written. In 1959, a rumour spread in India that Menen had published his own translation of the Ramayana in the USA. The Indian Embassy recorded its protest promptly to the American government. Nehru’s home ministry found Menen’s books “undoubtedly objectionable being not mere profane parodies but deliberate and malicious publications to pervert the great epic story.” 

I wonder what Nehru’s response was when he was informed later that Menen had never written any such book. Menen, who had personal associations with Nehru, asked the prime minister why he decided to ban his book. Nehru’s answer was uncharacteristically blunt and regal: “I haven’t read it.” Menen compared Nehru’s response to Queen Victoria who might have said, “We are not amused.”

A few years later, when Rushdie’s novel was banned in India in order to appease the Muslims, eminent writer Khushwant Singh referred to the Menen book also to argue that the Hindus were as intolerant as the Muslims in India.

B R Ambedkar couldn’t even publish his work, Riddles of Hinduism, because of the Hindu intolerance. It was published three decades after the author’s death and then Shiv Sena and RSS burnt the copies and attacked the Dalits. In the essay ‘The Riddle of Rama and Krishna,’ Ambedkar described Rama’s killing of Shambuka as “the worst crime that history has ever recorded.” Shambuka was a Shudra, the lowest caste in the Brahminical hierarchy. Shudras were not allowed to meditate in order to attain heaven and Shambuka dared to meditate. He was killed by Rama for that! Ambedkar questioned Rama’s spirituality in just one essay and so his book was banned and his people were attacked. That is the famed Hindu tolerance, says Neeti Nair.

Ambedkar used the Shambuka episode to argue that “a Hindu Rashtra, another name for Brahmin Raj, would spell the doom not only for the Muslims, but also for the Dalits, Shudras, tribals and women – the vast majority of the Indian population.” [Quoted by Nair from historian Yoginder Sikand’s study of Ambedkar.]

Even a book written by a Jain master Achari Shri Tulsi was found unacceptable by the Hindu organisations. Agni Pareeksha, the book in question, was the Jain version of Rama’s story.

Only the Brahminical versions of Rama’s story are acceptable to the right-wing in India. When the Delhi University [DU] prescribed A K Ramanjuan’s essay ‘300 Ramayanas’ to students of master’s degree in history, the right-wing took up their cudgels. Even when the court defended the university’s right to prescribe that book, DU chose to bow out of the controversy by withdrawing the book. The Hindu right-wing is so tolerant!

When the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was torn down by the BJP and its allies, a Congress prime minister was ruling over India. 

From Anita Nair's book

When an organisation called Sahmat [founded in the name of playwright, street theatre activist, and singer Safdar Hashmi who was killed by Congressmen, yes, Congressmen] organised an exhibition titled Hum Sab Ayodhya after the Babri Masjid demolition, the right-wing in India opposed it because of one panel which showed the Buddhist Rama. In one of the Jataka tales, the Buddha is an incarnation of Rama. The much-vaunted tolerance of India’s Hindus couldn’t tolerate Buddha being an incarnation of Rama.

So, let me return to the question in the title of this post: Was India tolerant before Modi?

Am I justifying Modi now? Impossible. Those who know me will also know that I will never do that. I have been a faithful observer of Modi from 2002 Gujarat riots. And I have been his faithful opposition too ever since. What I’m trying to do is to explode the myth that India was very tolerant by its culture and civilisation. I have only used the examples given by Anita Nair in her book which I’m trying to bring closer to some potential readers.

The blatant truth is that both the Congress and the BJP are pro-Hindu. The congress masqueraded majoritarian appeasement as secularism while the BJP projected majoritarianism as nationalism.

PS. There’s a sequel to this coming up soon. You can read the previous part here: The Triumph of Godse