8. The Sangh's anti-intellectualism
A very serious flaw which Gandhians and the
Sangh have in common is their anti-intellectualism. Though Gandhi reputedly
rebuked RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar for not publishing any doctrinal
statements, i.e. for not giving any intellectual articulation to his
nationalist movement, he essentially shared Hedgewar's aversion for an
intellectual job well done. Both of them made people march many miles, both
led their followers to make great sacrifices, and both failed to
substantially raise their followers' political understanding. They did not
bother to educate them (and themselves) in analyzing the character of the
different forces in the field, all on the plea that "an ounce of practice is
worth more than a ton of theory".
Instead of developing an
analysis and tracing the Hindu-Muslim conflict to its (Quranic) roots, they
chose to work on people's emotions. Gandhi practised emotional intimidation
on the Hindus with his ascetic gimmicks, but failed completely before the
doctrinal wall of rejection which Islam had erected against his
"Hindu-Muslim unity". Gandhi's pleas for this interreligious unity were
like the attempt at air travel by a premodern person: without studying the
laws of physics and applying them through the appropriate technology, all he
could achieve was to jump from a tower and fall to his death. Calling for
the tearing-down of the wall of hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims
without properly understanding its causes was an anti-rational endeavour
doomed to bitter failure; Gandhi merely banged his own head against the wall
until his skull broke.
Gandhi's anti-intellectualism
was evident in other fields too. He refused to make a proper study of the
history and doctrines of his own religion, replacing its complexity and
richness with the monolatry of a single booklet, the Bhagavad-Gita, which he
also refused to study properly, subjecting it to a dogmatic sentimental
interpretation instead. Thus, Gandhi's reading of the Gita (heavily
influenced by the "Sermon on the Mount" aspect of Christianity) included the
untenable claim that the Gita teaches absolute non-violence. In reality,
one of the Gita's main themes is refuting the typically Gandhian
anti-confrontationist arguments given by Arjuna in the first chapter.
Admittedly, Gandhi was not the
first to twist Hindu scripture to suit his own pet theories, e.g. Shankara,
Ramanuja and Madhva managed to identify each his own version of Vedanta
philosophy as the "true" meaning of the Upanishads. But these acharyas
applied their intellect and erudition to make their point, while Gandhi
haughtily rejected the importance of intellectual skills in discerning the
true meaning of a text, claiming that moral character was the decisive
factor in correctly understanding scripture. He was wrong: people of bad
character may understand scripture quite well (an example from Hindu
tradition is Ravana, a well-educated scoundrel), while people of good
character may not understand it at all (e.g. all those good people who are
outside the civilizational ambit of a given scriptural tradition).[1]
The result of Gandhi's
anti-intellectualism was that he conducted his politics like a sleep-walker:
wilfully blind to the character of the forces he was dealing with. And
since people, even very ordinary people, cannot be satisfied for long with a
diet of exalted emotions and counter-commonsensical activism, his refusal to
address the doctrinal aspect of certain political problems (the Muslim
challenge, the paradoxical situation created in Indian politics by World War
2, the rising lure of Marxism) made people look for an ideological framework
elsewhere. Gandhi's focus on emotions was good for spectacular scenes of
millions marching, but it failed to achieve the political goals which these
millions thought they were serving. The independence of a united India
never came, nor was truncated India in any sense a Ram Rajya or a
realization of any ideal Gandhi ever stood for.
The Communists, by contrast,
worked on people's minds. They gave them (not just their card-carrying foot
soldiers but nearly the whole opinion-making and decision-making classes) a
framework with which to analyze political events and cultural trends. It is
quite clear which approach was more fruitful: soon after Marxism appeared on
the Calcutta scene, it eclipsed the Hindu Renaissance (when Sri Aurobindo
retired from public life, people like Hedgewar failed to take over his
torch), and by the time Gandhi died, Gandhism as a genuine political
movement had been blown away by Marxism. For several decades after
Independence, non-Communist politicians implemented Communist policies,
because they were mentally trapped in Marxist schemes of analysis; by
contrast, even nominally Gandhian politicians betrayed everything Gandhi
ever stood for (except Muslim appeasement, which Indian Marxists also
promoted). In the long run, emotions are inconsequential, and the
Communists prospered and could make others implement their own policies just
by promoting their own thought.
Like Gandhi, the RSS and BJP
cloak many of their campaigns and political demands in terms of emotions,
and this approach proves as futile as in Gandhi's case. Thus, a complaint
about the lack of national consciousness in the school curriculum is titled:
"The education system does not promote national sentiments".[2]
Patriotic feelings develop naturally on the basis of a genuinely felt common
destiny, but in the case of many Muslims, this natural process is thwarted
by the Islamic ideas in which they are indoctrinated. So, the only way to
"promote national sentiments" is a job of intellectual persuasion: remove
this doctrinal hurdle by helping Muslims to discover that the basic doctrine
of Islam is mistaken. If you are too lazy to study Islam and find out what
is wrong with it, all your efforts to "promote national sentiments" among
youngsters brought up on a diet of anti-Hindu teachings will prove futile.
The BJP's statements on
Ayodhya are full of calls to "respect people's sentiments" (the title of
the BJP brochure containing L.K. Advani's historic Lok Sabha speech on
Ayodhya dd. 7 August 1989).[3]
In general, sentiments should be respected, but not absolutely. Sometimes,
hurting sentiments is the inevitable and relatively unimportant consequence
of a rightful and necessary act, e.g. there is no doubt that imperialist
Muslims felt hurt in their sentiments when the BJP supported Hindu society's
claim to Ayodhya, ignoring the Muslim community's cherished God-given right
to occupy other religions' sacred places. At any rate, sentiments cannot be
the basis of a judicially enforceable claim: thieves also develop a
sentimental attachment to some of their stolen goods, yet that doesn't give
them a right to these goods. The Ayatollahs may have been genuinely hurt in
their sentiments by The Satanic Verses, but that gave them no right
to kill its author or even to ban the book. Even people who feel no
sentimental attachment to the Rama Janmabhoomi site, such as myself, can
find that the site rightfully belongs to Hindu society alone, on impeccably
objective and unsentimental grounds. The appeal to sentiment is normally
but the last resort of people who have failed in defending their case on
more serious juridical and historical grounds.
Gandhi's experiences should
have taught the Sangh that emotionalism is powerless. So should its own
failures with this approach. For seventy years the RSS has been busy
inculcating "patriotic feelings", and this has not made an iota of
difference in preventing the rise of separatism in Panjab, Kashmir and the
northeast. The result of this approach in the Ayodhya dispute should serve
as an eye-opener: the appeal to sentiment failed to win a single skeptic or
secularist or Muslim over to the Hindu position. Spreading knowledge is a
far more powerful way of influencing public opinion than these impotent
attempts to promote certain emotions. Yet the Sangh Parivar has not adapted
its strategy, it simply repeats a strategy which is a proven failure. That
brings us to another typically Gandhian flaw in the Sangh: its stubborn
refusal to learn from feedback.
A defining characteristic of
all life forms is that, to a greater or lesser extent, they act upon
feedback: they adapt their behaviour in reaction to its observed effect. If
you put your hand in boiling water, you feel pain and immediately pull your
hand back; by contrast, a stone falling into this boiling water does not
show the least inclination to pull back. Higher life forms even develop
feed-forward mechanisms: rather than first undergoing the effects of a
certain behaviour before adapting it, they are capable of foreseeing its
effect and of either aborting or pursuing the intended behaviour depending
on the expected effect. Once you know enough about boiling water, you can
foresee the effect of putting your hand into it, and adapt your behaviour
accordingly so as to handle boiling water without letting it touch your
skin. But dead entities do not have these capacities of adapting to
feed-back or feed-forward information. A glass falling from the table does
not foresee the effect and does not try to avoid it; even after having
fallen to pieces and being glued together again, it will still not do
anything to avoid falling next time. Dead entities don't learn.
Going by this criterion, both
Gandhi and the Sangh have always been quite dead. In the Khilafat movement,
Gandhi bent over backwards to please the Muslim leadership, he gave them a
blank cheque, yet they didn't show any gratitude or sympathy, but rather
intensified their anti-national commitments and their political separatism.
His attempt to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity by means of all-out appeasement
was a dismal failure. Yet, he kept on repeating the same approach for
twenty-five years, and even after this had yielded Partition, he still kept
on repeating it. There is no indication that he ever did any introspection
to correct this disastrous policy on the basis of the feedback which he was
receiving from reality. Once he had embarked on this course, he simply
continued in the same orbit like any dead object in space subject to the law
of inertia.
Similarly, the Sangh is not
learning from its experiences. For example, to reassure its bonafide
critics (e.g. foreign journalists who are not part of the secularist coterie
but have interiorized its misinformation for lack of anything better) about
the bogey of "Hindu fundamentalism", RSS and BJP spokesmen always plead that
"a Hindu state cannot be anti-secular, it is a contradiction in terms" or
that "Hinduism and theocracy cannot co-exist".[4]
They have been saying this for decades and keep on repeating it quite
placidly, but to my knowledge, they have never ever checked whether the
message actually came across.
As labels go, it would not be
unfair to describe the Arya Samaj as "Veda fundamentalists", or Swami
Karpatri and the Puri Shankaracharya as "Manuwadi fundamentalists", so
India-watchers may have a point when they do conceive of the notion of
"Hindu fundamentalism". The RSS is certainly not a fundamentalist
movement, is definitely not working for a Scripture-based law system, but
the simplistic argumentation usually given, viz. that its being Hindu by
itself excludes the possibility of fundamentalism, is just not the right
one. At any rate, nobody seems ever to have changed his mind under the
influence of this plea. The worst part of it is not that it fails to
convince anyone, but that the Hindutva spokesmen have never even bothered to
register this fact, much less to draw any practical conclusions from it.

[1]
Gandhi's definition that "every good man is a Hindu" is a related
example of Gandhi's propensity to replace the intellectual subtleties
inevitable in a proper definition of something as complex as Hinduism
with vulgar sentimentalism and simplistic moralism. It also happens to
be incorrect, e.g. Confucius was a good man but not a Hindu by any
definition, while Ravana and Duryodhana were Hindus by any definition
even though they are remembered as incarnations of evil.
[2]
Organiser, 6/10/1996; emphasis added.
[3]
Remark that the expression avoids the term "Hindu" (in contrast with
Respect Hindu sentiments, the subtitle of the VHP's "Hindu agenda"
issued before the 1996 Lok Sabha election campaign). In his The
Concept of Hindu Nation (p.2), Abhas Chatterjee relates how a
"prominent political personage regarded by most people as a champion of
Hindu Rashtra" (meaning L.K. Advani) prohibited an enthusiastic audience
from raising the slogan: "He alone will rule this country who stands by
the Hindu cause", and wanted the latter expression replaced with "the
nation's cause".
[4]
Rama Jois: Supreme Court Judgment on 'Hindutva' (Suruchi
Prakashan 1996), p.63.
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