(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)
The 56-inch mountain has at long last heaved - and produced the proverbial mouse.
After eight months of maun vrata over issues of religious tension, Narendra Modi has now disclosed that his "government will ensure that there is complete freedom of faith" and "will not allow any religious group, belonging to the majority or the minority, to incite hatred against others, overtly or covertly".
Excellent - except that this is what he should have said - and done - at the Shah Alam refugee camp in Ahmedabad in 2002 when an anti-Muslim pogrom was taking place under his watch. There was neither a word of sympathy then, nor any action to establish that his Government was with the victims, not the perpetrators. Indeed, it was not until he was compelled to accompany Prime Minister Vajpayee to the Shah Alam camp a full month later that he even made his first visit to the camp. And when, finally, a word of sympathy came from him a decade or so later, it was to compare the murdered, injured and looted Muslims to a puppy dog accidently coming under the wheels of a car.
And talking of Parliament, why did Modi so adamantly refuse to come to the Rajya Sabha and say exactly what he did to the Syrian Christians? The Opposition was demanding no more. They wanted him to unequivocally declare on the floor of the sacred precincts of Parliament that he "consider(ed) the freedom to have, to retain and to adopt, a religion or belief (as) a personal choice of a citizen". He did not because he was afraid of being questioned about the gap between such an oral declaration and the ugly effects of ghar waapsi, love jihad and election-oriented riots strewed around him.
"Spiritualism", said Modi, "is rooted in India's heritage". Of course it is. But it is a spiritualism that derives from India being a confluence of virtually every religion the world has or has known. Compare any page of Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India and Modi's speech, and the gap becomes glaring between a truly profound understanding of India's numerous spiritual traditions and Modi's one-way street. For Modi to affirm, however, that important religions have gone into the making of India's contemporary spiritual heritage would be to deny Savarkar's fundamental proposition that only those Indians are genuine Indians who regard India as not only their "pitrubhoomi" but also their "punyabhoomi". That is precisely why he spoke of "Mother India" having given "birth to many religious and spiritual streams" but completely ignored the many religions and spiritual streams that have come into India, that have been imported into our cultures and civilization over and over again. Consider the contrast between Modi's boast that "some of them (religions born in India) have even travelled beyond Indian borders" with sidelining the religions born outside India but which have travelled into India, crossing Indian borders and becoming part and parcel of our composite Hindu and non-Hindu heritage. Modi's speech privileges those religions born within India over those whose origins lie elsewhere. That is not the Hindu tradition. It is Hindutva at its most naked.
The time now is for Modi to fulfill - particularly with respect to his own Sangh Parivar and associated outfits - that he really will "act strongly in this regard."
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