Commentary/Ashwin Mahesh

Over the next decade or two, Hindu-Christian discord could become as vexatious as the Hindu-Muslim troubles

Reading through a collection of articles on the golden jubilee of Independence, it is easy to see what is missing. There are several pieces affirming the wonderful achievements of these years, and several others decrying all that has been lost. But can we record this past era without attaching our approval or disdain? Can we turn our minds away from analysis, and towards observation? And what would we find then?

Perhaps the greater merit lies not in judging the past, but in recording it. As we rejoice in 50 years of nationhood, it is quite pertinent to ask why we are celebrating. What were we able to do on August 16, 1947 that we were not able to do the previous day?

The overwhelming answer to that is we were free to determine our own destiny -- and this answer is broad enough that thousands of other freedoms derive from it naturally. But in what way have we shaped our destiny that is manifestly Indian? The deluge of opinions on the first 50 years that we've seen these past few weeks cannot be complete unless this question is explored in greater detail.

The single most important change that occurred at that hour is this -- for the first time in several hundred years, we were free to be a Hindu nation. Our national character, suppressed for several centuries, was unshackled.

True, we did not establish a state based on religion, but that is beside the point. We had the freedom to exercise control over our society in ways that reflected our aspirations more fully than in the past. And to the extent that the population is mostly Hindu, those aspirations would inevitably lead to the establishment of Hinduism as the de facto religion of the nation as well. If nothing else, a national culture supported by the unsuppressed and unabashed espousal of Hinduism began to emerge.

The institutions of a civil society are rooted in education and health. And British colonialism had one accompanying component that has great significance in this regard -- under British rule, a significant number of our educational institutions as well as our hospitals were run by arms of the church. The British preferred their own cultural and moral values to ours, and in pursuit of that, they may have supported Christian institutions and neglected native Indian ones. Even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, the top schools and hospitals in many cities were the Christian-run ones.

The majority of these were founded with a missionary objective, no doubt. But their character was quite different from that of the mainstream. Hindu children who went to these schools were taught songs from the Christian tradition, and learned about God from nuns and priests. When we got sick and were admitted to Christian hospitals, it was quite normal, and still is, for a priest or evangelist to come by and pray for quick and complete recovery.

I am not going to get into why these institutions functioned the way they did. Some have suggested that this was nothing more than deliberate undermining of Indian culture. Others counter this reflects the selfless commitment of missionaries. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but regardless of the motivation, the result was the same. We were a society whose important pillars -- health and education -- were held up in large part by the church.

Independence changed this significantly. Our elected leaders, unlike their non-elected British predecessors, were (and are), for the most part, Hindus. If anything, the vote-per-person process ensured that non-Hindus were not even proportionately represented in legislative assemblies. Sure, minorities still have several constitutional guarantees that allow them to run their own institutions, and they continue to play their role to this day. But that's hardly the norm for the nation as a whole.

Post Independence, schools, colleges and hospitals that were motivated by non-religious factors began to spring up all around the nation. Today, they've gone through their growing pains and are beginning to be established. The lists of the best is no longer limited to Christian institutions, or even mostly made of such.

It remains fashionable to have been to Bishop Cotton's or Xavier's, but it is quite evident now that one does not necessarily derive the best education only from doing so. Just as common, in fact, is the notion that it is great to go to Vijaya College or Rashtriya Vidya Mandir. (I use these names only as examples, not to indicate any quality therein). IITs, IIMs, the RECs, and many other institutions have eroded the dominance of the institutions backed by religion. Private universities, if and when they become widespread, will accelerate this trend further.

The same is true with hospitals. Apollo and AIIMS are the national benchmarks these days. Manipal is getting to be a pretty good teaching hospital, quite comparable to CMC in Vellore, according to one recent report. These newer, non-religious (and in some cases, Hindu) institutions reflect our demography much better. Although many of these newer institutions are not religiously based, such secularism inevitably makes them Hindu in character. In a society of equal opportunity, the culture of the majority will inevitably dominate. Profit oriented institutions thus reflect not just their economic objectives, but their social underpinnings as well.

This is a vital component in the recent resurgence of Hinduism as a nationalist force. In the past, I have argued in this column that because British culture is derived from the Christian ethic, we have erred in deriving our constitution from the British. When the national character, based on indigenous religious and social habits, is freed from the shackles of colonialism, it is bound to challenge a socio-economic establishment founded on the cultural preferences of the colonisers.

Education has always been a safe bet in the quest for prosperity. Now that successful schools and colleges which reflect Indian moral and religious persuasions have become widespread, we are starting to see a generation of graduates who owe their success not to church-supported institutions, but to private non-religious enterprise and to the Department of Technical Education.

The resurgence of Hinduism reflects the declining importance of missionary institutions in social life, perhaps more than any real rise in people's interest in Hinduism. It is very unusual that materialism and religious zeal should grow together; I'm hard-pressed to think of one. And when we consider that conservative strongholds are often in urban middle class neighborhoods, we see right away that the two are related. Secure in their prosperity, more and more Hindus (as well as non-religious people who have no particular preference for Christianity) see no need for institutions that feed off a different religion.

Whereas, in pre-Independence times, parents sent their kids to the best schools despite the fact that the religious and moral values taught in several of them were often distinct from their own, they no longer have to do that. Today's parents look to non-religious or Hindu schools as the most appropriate choice for their wards, a choice that was less available 50 years ago. In much the same way, today's choices in health care reflect not only the quality of the medicine being provided, but some underlying preference for particular providers as well.

When we look at society in this light -- using education and health as social pointers -- we see Indian nationalism as an inevitable consequence. Once a critical mass of people who owe no allegiance to religious institutions has been established, the momentum it creates is enough to sustain it. Today, there are not very many new schools being opened by foreign missionaries. And in any case, they are vastly outnumbered by institutions run by educational entrepreneurs.

As we seek to build a nation that reflects our culture, it seems inevitable that the religious tensions that lead to vengeance should arise. Eventually, Hindu-dominated and non-religious institutions will acquire socio-economic positions commensurate with their numbers in our population. The missionary institutions may then be obsolete or unimportant to the national character. Certainly, their ability to give shape to the national character will be much reduced.

This is potentially damaging, not only to Christians, but to others as well. It is better to have an equilibrium established through cooperation than through divisive politics and discrimination. In recent years, much religious tension in India has focused on Hindu-Muslim problems. But over the next decade or two, Hindu-Christian discord could become just as vexatious. Greater numbers has placed Muslims more in the line of an assertive majority, but conflict with other religious groups could easily follow.

At least a few Christians are already concerned about rising levels of discrimination in Indian society. Perhaps today's Hindu-dominated India is merely extracting the price for the insults it suffered in past years at the hands of other faiths. If this is resurgence, it is also dangerous. Religious tension is a poor substitute for nation-building.

It is not only the conservative who takes pride in such changes; so do liberals. After all, building the institutions of a prosperous society can hardly be unwelcome. We will see movements that espouse the strengthening of Indian languages, Indian dress, Indian culture on television, the abolition of the right to proselytise, the Uniform Civil Code, and many more.

Many of these will appeal to liberals because of the intellectual propriety of the positions, and to conservatives because of the potential achievement of their cherished causes. These things are not to be mistaken for Hindu resurgence alone. Their apparent Hinduism could well be secondary; what they really reflect is a newly emergent socio-economic India demanding to see its own face established as the dominant visage of our nation.

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