The Bihar election results overshadowed the Shah Rukh Khan episode, but the issues raised are of such far-reaching significance that I return to it with deep concern.
Let me recall that in response to Shah Rukh Khan's reflections about growing intolerance in the country, none less than the BJP General Secretary, Kailash Vijayvargiya, branded him a "traitor" and added his now infamous comment that Shah Rukh Khan's "
aatma" was in Pakistan. And the notorious BJP MP Yogi Adityanath proclaimed that Khan was welcome to go to Pakistan since his language was no different to that of Hafiz Saeed.
In saying what he did, Shah Rukh Khan was saying no more than what hundreds of distinguished non-Muslim creative artistes have been saying these past several weeks - that, to quote Shah Rukh, there is "intolerance, extreme intolerance" growing in our land and that "not being secular is the worst crime you can commit in this country".
Vijayvargiya picked on Shah Rukh only because of his religion. That is par for the course for those Indians - all of whom belong to the Sangh Parivaar or its even more extreme off-shoots - who draw a salience between "Muslim" and "Pakistani". Not for them the telling fact that there are probably almost as many Muslims in India as there are in Pakistan. Not for them the instructive thought that with India home to the world's third largest population of Muslims, it is as impossible in the 21st century to conceive of Islam without India as it is to conceive of India without Islam. Moreover, conversion under 666 years of Muslim rule (1192-1858) was so marginal that the 1872 census showed the Muslim share at only 24%. And much of that 24% found themselves in the Muslim-majority provinces that went into constituting Pakistan.
All Indian Muslims were given the opportunity of migrating to Pakistan. But it was only a small minority of Muslims that moved to Pakistan as '
muhajir'. By refusing to change nationality, the Indian Muslim passed the ultimate 'loyalty' test. To ask him to take the test again and again and again is outrageous.
Yet, the Vijayvargiyas and Adityanaths are such gems of the Savarkar-Golwalkar thought process that notwithstanding our having secured independence for an India in which the Hindu majority constitutes about 80% of the population, the Sangh Parivaar continues fighting the Sultanate and the Moghuls as if history had not moved on. Their equation of Hindutva with Bhartiyata is the root cause of all their useless thoughts and thoughtless actions. They just do not seem to comprehend that the task before the nation is to carry forward what Nehru used to call the "emotional integration" of India, not promote the disintegration of India's composite personality.
Ironically, their idiom is the idiom of Jinnah's Muslim League who asserted, as Savarkar did, that Hindus and Muslims constituted "two nations". To continue the argument 70 years after India's Muslims proved that Pakistan was a politico-geographical expression, not the homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims that it claimed to be, is to flail at windmills. They just do not see that Pakistan is being riven by internecine religious sectarianism because it was founded on religion alone and identifies itself with one religion only. They want to replicate in India a Hindu form of Islamic nationalism. The last thing we want in India is to see religious communities or sects pitted against each other.
Nehru's India recognised the danger of carrying the Pakistani example into India. Gandhiji recognised this even more: hence his decisive choice of a dedicated secularist to lead India as Prime Minister. Hence too the unyielding priority given by our leaders up to the aberration of 2014 to not make India in the image of Islamic Pakistan, but maintain ourselves as a secular Republic. We have thus so far avoided the Pakistani syndrome: "What unites Pakistan is Islam; what divides it is Islamisation".
The Sangh Parivaar wants us to be like Pakistan, harking back to an invented past, prioritising Hindu over Muslim citizen, ending Indian history in 711 AD, the year Muhammad bin Qasim came to India, even as Pakistan officially dates its history as beginning from that same date! Even as Pakistani religious extremists condemn any compromise with anything non-Quranic, Sanghi extremists denigrate the plea for religious tolerance and harmony as "
tushtikaran", and consider every Indian Muslim to be a "Pakistani".
It is this mindset that even so noble and iconic an Indian as Shah Rukh Khan has to contend with. No wonder he fights back, "No one can question my patriotism. How dare anyone?" Since the "Muslim-Pakistani" mindset is that of the Sangh Parivaar as a whole, and by no means confined to fringe elements, the otherwise excessively voluble Narendra Modi and his twitter crowd keep as quiet as they can over Hindutva-inspired statements by their closest and dearest, such as General Secretary Vijayvargiya, because at heart their thinking is no different. Otherwise, why make someone like Vijayvargiya - a handpicked nominee of Amit Shah - a General Secretary, and the likes of Adityanath, MPs and MLAs of the party? It would be extraordinarily hard to distinguish between what Modi really believes and Vijayvargiya clearly believes.
The Sangh Parivaar is an ideological entity. It is founded in the conviction that India belongs primarily to its Hindus. They dislike Muslims; they wish to avenge themselves on the community; and the easiest way they have found of doing so is to draw equivalence between "Muslim" and "Pakistani". For them, India is Hindu and any non-Hindu Indian, by definition, outside the pale. This atavistic notion lies at the base of their thinking.
That is why it is so extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between Vijayvargiya and Modi since from childhood up both have devoted themselves to the same core ideology. As the well-known journalist and
TV commentator Sidharth Bhatia puts it, "It is part of their indoctrination, their training and their upbringing. Muslims, for the hardcore Sanghi, are by default either traitors or, at best, second class citizens who must know their place". That is why Modi finds silence golden every time one of his ideological clones reveals the real truth about the Hindutva family. Hence the fielding of minor characters like Venkaiah Naidu (who, as Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, has repeatedly failed to rein in his MPs, Yogi Adityanath and others of his ilk) to pronounce the expressed view of subaltern Parivaarists is "not the view of the BJP".
If so, why not sack them? And why this deliberate silence on the part of the BJP Prime Minister? Surely, he should be in the lead apologising to Shah Rukh Khan. After all, don't Shah Rukh Khan's followers and fans far outnumber Modi's?
(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.