It will not be easy to turn India into a ‘Hindu Pakistan’

India in 1947 decided on a political journey that was designed to rise above religion. To that end, it even agreed to pay a heavy price by accepting the country’s partition rather than mix religion with politics. Jinnah carved a nation called Pakistan for the Muslims, of the Muslims and by the Muslims. Instead, India under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership and Jawahar Lal Nehru’s stewardship laid the foundation of a modern nation based on equality for all, irrespective of faith, gender and caste.

A little over seven decades later, however, India resembles Pakistan like never-before. If the Muslim clergy in Pakistan is holding the country’s Supreme Court to ransom on the issue of a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, acquitted on the charge of blasphemy, Hindu sants and sadhus here are holding out threats to the Indian Supreme Court on the construction of Ram temple issue.

We may love it or loathe it, but the fact is that Indian politics is becoming increasingly driven by faith. We are, in fact, shockingly aping Pakistan in blending faith in our political discourse. Ironically, the tactics is almost the same as what the then Pakistani establishment led by the late Gen. Zia-ul-Haq evolved there. Zia, after deposing the elected government led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, came up with the theory that the raison d’etre of Pakistan could only be Islam. His logic was that if Pakistan was not an Islamic country, then what was the purpose of Partition? He not just came up with this theory but he also evolved means to transform Pakistan virtually into a theocratic state.

What instruments did Zia-ul-Haq use to transform Pakistan into an Islamic country ? A theocratic state needs to have a prominent role for the clergy in state affairs per se. Pakistan even under the army rule pretended to be a democracy. Zia, therefore, floated non-state actors as foot soldiers who used religion to perpetuate army rule in Pakistan.

Suddenly, outfits like Sipah-e-Sahaba sprang up across the country along with seminaries catering free food and lodging for hundreds of thousands of students from the poorer strata of Pakistani society studying free in those madrasas. Terrorist outfits like Tahkrik-e-Pakistan Taliban took up street violence on cue. It is an open secret that all such non-state actors were funded by Pakistan army and its spy wing ISI.

Whenever the BJP came into power, these outfits played the role of non-state actors for the BJP. So much so that now things have reached such a pass that Hindu clergy in the guise of sant samiti are directly appealing to Hindus to bring back the Modi government to power in 2019, ostensibly because it can best serve the interests of the Hindus.

Are we not doing the politics that Pakistan has been practising since late 1970s? Zia changed school and university curricula and so have we. Zia used outfits like Sipah-e- sahaba to terrorise his critics and here cow vigilantes have been used to cow down Muslims who were known to vote against the BJP. As Mullah driven outfits are threatening Pakistan’s Supreme Court, so are our sants and sadhus threatening the Indian Supreme Court.

Aren’t we becoming another Pakistan in the process? Indeed, we now look like Pakistan in very many ways. But I still have lot of hope about India. Pakistan is a different case altogether. First, Pakistan never turned into a genuine democracy. Once Jinnah died barely two years after carving Pakistan, its second ruler and Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan was assassinated and political instability followed. The army took advantage of the faltering political class in the country and by the early 1960s it took charge of the country. Since then, even elected governments worked under the army’s shadow. Zia-ul-Haq, using Islam institutionalised the army as the prime player of Pakistani establishment and it continues to function in the pole position since then.

India in contrast is a genuine democracy where elections of one kind or the other keep happening almost every year. If it is not the turn of parliamentary or provincial elections, it may be the cycle of local bodies/ panchayat/ zila parishad/students union/a club election etc. Democracy now is in the Indian DNA. It’s, therefore, next to impossible for any political outfit to hijack it by raking up religious sentiments every now and then. Some fanatics may win an election here and an election there raking up the fear of the other. But the strategy cannot work all the time.

The second major difference on the ground between India and Pakistan is within their consciousness levels. Pakistan is still a feudal society which has not experienced any transformation into a modern society based on a modern democratic structure. India has been a modern state since its inception. We have the checks and balances of a truly democratic society in place from the times we adopted our constitution. Here the writ of the law prevails though there have been instances of the order of the law being defied as it happened in 1992 in the case of Babri mosque demolition.

Besides, India, like any modern state, has had a history of all kinds of peoples’ movements like trade union movement, farmers movement, women rights movement, student rights movement, human rights movement, caste rights movements etc. These movements do not just add to peoples’ rights but they in the process also raise peoples’ consciousness. Political outfits in order to grab power may hijack peoples’ imagination once in a while but they cannot permanently roll back people into the state of backwardness from where they have already moved out.

No, never. It happened in India because of the inherent democratic strength of various key institutions that have been acting as checks and balances.

Ever since Narendra Modi has been in power, there have been numerous anti-government peoples’ movement in various parts of India. Farmers have marched in thousands in different states. Dalits have stood up for their rights many times in the past four years as have students and other segments of society and polity in India.

The long and short of the story is that India may resemble Pakistan in many ways these days. But the Sangh Parivar may still find it difficult to truly convert India into another Pakistan.