Sir Mark Tully travels through India examining how the collapse of secularism has created a vacuum in which Hindu Nationalism is flourishing.
Mark Tully on making Hindu Nation
Looking at the past of Northern Ireland, at the recent bloodstained history of the Balkans, at the future difficulties of reconciling Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq, anyone who says the world needs religion in politics might well be dismissed as ignorant or insane. Anyone who says religion is needed in Indian politics, where only last year Hindus in Gujarat took bloody revenge for a Muslim attack on a train, could surely be accused of criminal irresponsibility. But during my travels around India searching for an answer to militant Hinduism everyone I met felt religion should have a place in politics.
Which religion?
In Ahmedabad we visited the scenes of some of the worst violence last year. Among the victims I met was Sher Khan, a courageous 14-year-old boy who had been shot in the side. He will never walk again but still hopes to open a small shop. Yet in the ashram or retreat in Ahmedabad where Gandhi spent 12 of the most crucial years of his campaign against the British the spiritual director said the Mahatma believed religion should "pervade politics".
But which religion? Ahmedabad is a stronghold of the National Volunteer Corps, known as the RSS, which is the heart of the Hindu Nationalist movement. The VHP, the missionary branch of the RSS, preaches militant Hinduism as the religion for India. We saw their missionary zeal when we drove for five hours to visit one of the many schools they have established in the remotest corner of Gujarat. I feared we might not get back to Ahmedabad for our flight when the gear-stick came away in the driver's hand. But he understood his vehicle's eccentricities, and without blinking an eyelid put the gear stick back where it belonged.
Mishaps
So we caught our plane to Kerala in the deep South to discover how Indian Muslims and Christians felt about the threat from the missionary VHP. There the head of an Orthodox Christian Seminary said secularism was inadequate to take on militant Hinduism because it didn't take account of the value Indians put on religion. A Muslim minister in the State Government agreed.
On our way to discuss the secular creed of the Congress party which ruled India for almost all the first 50 years after independence we had two rail mishaps. One train was so crowded we weren't allowed on board, the other left the station so rapidly the porters stowing our mountain of filming equipment were still on board. Eventually reaching Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh I found that the state's Chief Minister Digvijay Singh felt that the secularism his Congress party pitted against the RSS ideology needed to be redefined to take account of the India's deeply religious ethos.
We only just made it in time for our interview with the Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani because of an air mishap, the pilots radar collapsed. Although Advani's Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, is part of "the RSS family" he was anxious to disassociate himself from its more extreme members. He blamed their anger on the Congress party's secularism which he said left no room for Hindus to take pride in their religion. The Congress Chief Minister had also felt that was a weakness of his party's secularism. But India has also accommodated Islam and Christianity almost since their birth and they too need space. So it's not surprising that the Chief Minister and many others want India's ideology to be its age-old tradition of religious tolerance. That is Indian, not godless Western secularism.
Mark Tully, August 2003
