The Man and the Mystique

NARENDRA MODI HAS triumphed in the national elections in India again. This is the third time he has done so. He is the first prime minister after Nehru to do so. How does one account for this hat-trick?

Mahatma Gandhi and Narendra Modi are, in many ways, a study in contrast, yet the basis of Mahatma Gandhi’s charismatic appeal to the Indian people may provide us with the secret of Modi’s popularity. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, in his famous work The Discovery of India, accounted for Mahatma Gandhi’s appeal in terms of his psychological impact on the Indian people. He explained that not everybody agreed with the specific agenda of Mahatma Gandhi, or followed his lifestyle. Nehru even confessed that he did not himself accept all of Gandhi’s teachings. But he went on to point out that the primary impact of Gandhi was psychological—that the dominant impulse under the British rule was fear—of the army, the police, the landlord, starvation, and so on. As against this, Mahatma Gandhi’s soft but firm voice was raised: “Be not afraid.” He even went on to compare Mahatma Gandhi to a psychoanalyst. It was as if Gandhi had dived deep into the psyche of a nation, exposed its deepest fears, and thereby rid it of them.

What Mahatma Gandhi did for the Indians, Narendra Modi may have done for the Hindus of India.

The reader might balk at this statement and ask: What did the Hindus have to fear? Do they not constitute theoverwhelming majority in India? Yes, they are a statistical majority, but they had the psychology of a minority. In order to understand this, one needs to delve into history. One needs to realise that although a Hindu-majority country, India has been a colonised country for almost eight hundred years. First, there was the period of Muslim rule over India, which extended from roughly circa 1200CE to 1800CE, and during which the Hindus were second-class citizens in their own land—dhimmis according to Islamic law. This was followed by a period of two hundred years of British/Christian rule. Once again, the Hindus were subject to a foreign power. What this meant was that Hindus had to keep their Hindu identity suppressed in order to live under first Middle Eastern, and then Western, colonisation.

It requires an effort of imagination to understand that the situation did not change for the Hindus even after India became independent in 1947. India then became a secular state. A secular state is supposed to be neutral in terms of religion, but it did not turn out to be the case. Hindus were discouraged from asserting their religious identity lest the minorities feel threatened. This was, in a sense, a legacy of the Independence movement during which Hindu identity had to be kept under wraps so that Muslims, Christians, and others could participate in the struggle for independence, without fear of Hindu domination.

Indian secularism evolved in a direction which became increasingly anti-Hindu in character. Part of it can be attributed to the electoral process, once elections came to be held from 1952 onwards. Various political parties in India could secure power by consolidating the vote of the minorities, such as the Muslims and the Christians, while the Hindu vote got divided along the lines of caste, region, and language.

Indian secularism evolved in a direction which became increasingly anti-Hindu. Part of it can be attributed to the electoral process. Parties could secure power by consolidating the vote of the minorities

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Some situations cannot be fully understood until they are experienced. What I say may surprise the reader, but I felt freer as a Hindu to practise my faith in Canada than in India when I visited it. During this period of the eclipse of Hindu identity, I once met the future Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, at Harvard University, and requested him to contribute a chapter to a book with the provisional title The Hindu Intellectual Between Tradition and Modernity. He respondedby saying: “Could you not make it the Indian Intellectual?” It was as if one had to disown one’s Hindu identity in order to appear secular. It was also during this period that I met the distinguished Indian public figure, Karan Singh. In the course of our meeting, he described the situation of the Hindus in India as follows: for the Muslims there is Islam, for the Christians there is Christianity, but for Indians there is secularism.

The political climate against Hinduism was so adverse during the period of communist rule over West Bengal, from 1977 to 2011, that the Ramakrishna Mission, an essentially Hindu body founded by no less a figure than Swami Vivekananda himself, had to declare in a court of law that it was not a Hindu body, but followed a minority religionknown as Ramakrishnaism. This clearly illustrates how minorities enjoy more rights in a secular India than the majority, consisting of the Hindus. It is not as widely known as it should be that out of the 900,000 Hindu temples which dot India, at least 100,000 are under the control of various state governments. Some have put the figure at 400,000. No Muslim or Christian religious institution is subject to such control. As early as 1963, the American scholar, Donald Eugene Smith, had warned, in his India as a Secular State, that the right of the government to take over a religious institution posed a serious threat to Indian secularism. That the Indian government did so, only in the case of Hindu establishments, led to a kind of asymmetrical secularism which contributed greatly to the rise of Hindu nationalism.

It could be said that while Indians became free in 1947—free from British rule, the Hindus of India became free only in 2014—with the election of Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister. Modi’s rule has had the effect of psychologically liberating Hindus, the way Gandhi’s movement had the effect of psychologically liberating the Indian people.

And that is why they keep voting him in.

About The Author

Arvind Sharma

Arvind Sharma is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University, Montreal. He is the author of , among other titles, Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought and Hinduism and Its Sense of History

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