India, to put the matter brusquely, has been a battleground between two civilisations (Hindu and Islamic) for well over a thousand years, and three (Hindu, Muslim and Western) for over two hundred years. None of them has ever won a decisive enough or a durable enough victory to oblige the other two to assimilate themselves fully into it. So the battle continues. This stalemate lies at the root of the crisis of identity the intelligentsia has faced since the beginning of the freedom movement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The intelligentsia is incidentally not a monolithic entity. Though its constituents are not too clearly differentiated, they should broadly be divided into at least two groups.
The more resilient and upwardly mobile section of the intelligentsia must, by definition, seek to come to terms with the ruling power and its mores, and the less successful part of it to look for its roots and seek comfort in its cultural past. This was so during the Muslim period; this was the case during the British Raj; and this rule has not ceased to operate since independence.
Thus in the medieval period of our history there grew up a class of Hindus in and around centres of Muslim power who took to the Persian-Arabic culture and ways of the rulers; similarly under the more securely founded and far better organised and managed (British) Raj there arose a vast number of Hindus who took to the English language, Western ideas, ideals, dress and eating habits;… they, their progeny and other recruits to their class have continued to dominate independent India.
They are the self-proclaimed secularists who have sought, and continue to seek, to remake India in the Western image. The image has, of course, been an eclectic one; if they have stuck to the institutional framework inherited from the British, they have been more than willing to take up not only the Soviet model of economic development, but also the Soviet theories on a variety of issues such as the nationalities problem and the nature of imperialism and neo-colonialism.
Behind them has stood, and continues to stand, the awesome intellectual might of the West, which may or may not be anti-India, depending on the exigencies of its interests…
Some secularists may be genuinely pro-Muslim,… because they find high Islamic culture and the ornate Urdu language attractive. But, by and large, that is not the motivating force in their lives. They are driven, above all, by the fear of what they call regression into their own past which they hate and dread. Most of the exponents of this viewpoint have come and continue to come understandably from the Left, understandably because no other group of Indians can possibly be so alienated from the country’s cultural past as the followers of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, who have spared little effort to turn their own countries into cultural wasteland.
As a group, the secularists, especially the Leftists, have not summoned the courage to insist that in order to ensure the survival of the secular Indian state, Muslims should accept one common civil code. They have contented themselves with vague statements on the need for the majorities to join the mainstream, never drawing attention to the twin fact that, of necessity, Hindus constitute the mainstream and that this mainstream is capable of respecting the identities and rights of the minorities, precisely because it is constituted of Hindus….
The state in independent India has, it is true, broadly speaking, to be neutral in the matter of religion. But this is a surface view of the reality. The Indian state has been far from neutral in civilisational terms. It has been an agency, and a powerful agency, for the spread of Western values and mores. It has willfully sought to replicate Western institutions, the Soviet Union too being essentially part of Western civilisation. It could not be otherwise in view of the orientation and aspirations of the dominant elite of which Nehru remains the guiding spirit.
Muslims have found such a state acceptable principally on three counts. First, it has agreed to leave them alone in respect of their personal law (the Shariat)…. Secondly, it has allowed them to expand their traditional…educational system in madrasahs attached to mosques. Above all, it has helped them avoid the necessity to come to terms with Hindu civilisation in a predominantly Hindu India. This last count is the crux of the matter….
In the existing West-dominated political-intellectual milieu, it is understandable that BJP leaders act defensively. But it is time they recognise that defensiveness can cripple them, as it did in the past when they sought respectability in claims of adherence to Gandhian socialism, whatever it might mean, and this time in a context favourable to them. The Nehru order is as much in the throes of death as its progenitor, the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist order. A new order is waiting to be conceived and born. It needs a mother as well as a mid-wife.
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The above excerpts are taken from an editorial written by Girilal Jain in 1990. Born into a poor rural family in 1922 and educated at Delhi University, Jain was jailed by the British during the 1942 Quit India campaign. He was a prominent journalist in independent India who became the editor-in-chief of Times of India.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 