Author: Manoj Mitta
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: April 18, 2002
For all the controversy aroused
by his observations on religion, Atal Bihari Vajpayee has got away with
one particularly clever falsehood. While releasing a book by K.R. Malkani,
Vajpayee sought to give respectability to the term 'Hindutva' by ascribing
it to no less a person than Swami Vivekananda. Vajpayee's critics failed
to notice that there was no way Vivekananda could have ever talked of Hindutva
because the term was coined a good 20 years after his death by Hindu Mahasabha
leader Veer Savarkar. But Vajpayee's attempt to appropriate Vivekananda
is reminiscent of the equally dubious means adopted by the Supreme Court,
seven years ago, to put its seal of approval on Hindutva. This judgement
bears fresh scrutiny, especially because of the BJP's unabashed reversion
to Hindutva in the wake of Godhra.
We must first confront one great
irony. NHRC chairman Justice J.S. Verma, who has earned plaudits for being
the first person in authority to have raised his voice against state-sponsored
communal atrocities in Gujarat, was the very person who had authored the
1995 Hindutva judgement in his earlier avatar as a Supreme Court judge.
But then Verma also authored the 1994 Ayodhya judgement and regular readers
of this column will recall its analysis of how he betrayed a pro-Hindu
slant in that case too. Indeed, there seems to be a pattern to how Verma
arrived at his pro-Hindu rulings in crucial cases by misrepresenting the
law as well as facts. In Verma's method of reasoning, anything that did
not fit in with his conclusion simply did not exist for him.
Take, for instance, the Ayodhya
Act's stipulation that the acquired land of 67 acres can be returned to
trusts formed only after the demolition of the mosque. In his 1994 verdict,
Verma completely disregarded this stipulation without a word of explanation.
Instead, he gave the gratuitous ruling that the Act allows the acquired
land to be returned to its original owners. And this was seized by the
VHP - and even Attorney General Soli Sorabjee - to contend recently before
the Supreme Court that the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas could be permitted to hold
shila pujan on the acquired land. In much the same way, Verma conferred
legitimacy on Hindutva through his 1995 judgement by misrepresenting earlier
verdicts of the Supreme Court on Hinduism.
Verma held that Hindutva as such
cannot be ''equated with narrow fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry''.
When somebody makes such a categorical statement about Hindutva, you would
assume that he has discussed what a sample of proponents and opponents
of that ideology wrote. But Verma did nothing of that sort in his judgement.
Why, he did not mention even Savarkar, who came up with the term Hindutva
in 1923 in a book under the same name propounding the ideology. Verma,
instead, went by judicial precedents relating to Hinduism. But none of
those old judgements, dating back to the sixties and even earlier, make
any mention of Hindutva because that ideology was then limited to the political
fringes and was nowhere near becoming a subject of debate before the apex
court. As Hindutva entered the mainstream only in the late eighties, Verma's
was the first - and is still the only - Supreme Court pronouncement on
the subject.
Yet, by a sleight of hand, Verma
made out that the precedents he quoted dealt with Hindutva as well. On
that basis, he equated Hindutva with Hinduism and said: ''Considering the
terms Hinduism or Hindutva per se as depicting hostility, enmity or intolerance
towards other religious faiths or professing communalism, proceeds from
an improper appreciation and perception of the true meaning of these expressions
emerging from the detailed discussion in the earlier authorities of this
.'' In other words, whatever liberal virtues his predecessors saw in Hinduism,
Verma attributed them all to Hindutva as well.
So, going by Verma's logic, the
terms Hinduism and Hindutva are often interchangeable and you could very
well call Nathuram Godse a model Hindu and Mahatma Gandhi an adherent of
Hindutva. The only attempt Verma made to discuss Hindutva separately in
his judgement is when he quotes Islamic scholar Maulana Wahiduddin Khan,
saying it was a ''strategy worked out to solve the minorities problem''
through ''Indianisation''. Verma correctly paraphrased Khan's opinion on
Hindutva to mean ''development of uniform culture by obliterating the differences
between all the cultures coexisting in the country''. This might make you
think that Verma was admitting, howsoever obliquely, that Hindutva negates
the cherished notion of unity in diversity. But, far from making any such
admission, Verma seemed to hold the imposition of a uniform culture as
some kind of a desirable object like, say, uniform civil code. He found
Hindutva as unexceptionable as Hinduism and the problem lay only in the
''misuse of these expressions''. If the same man has today taken the lead
in fighting a manifestation of Hindutva in Gujarat, we can only heave a
sigh of relief and wish him all success in his current mission.
