Lala Lajpat Rai: A Hindu leader who was secular at heart | M.R. Narayan Swamy

BOOK REVIEW

Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood

by Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav

Penguin/Viking

ISBN: 9780670094073
Pages: xliii + 748; Price: Rs 1,299

Who was the real Lala Lajpat Rai? A veteran Congress leader and a leading star of the Indian freedom movement? Fiercely anti-British and who died due to grievous injuries he sustained in a street protest? A Hindu Mahasabha leader who advocated the interests of the Hindus? Did his ideas ever gel with those of V.D. Savarkar? Was he perhaps some shades of all these?

The questions are relevant because proponents of Hindutva today make an emphatic claim on Lajpat Rai as one of their own. He is seen as an ideological ancestor of Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist ideology which Savarkar first elaborated in 1923.

The author, an intellectual historian of modern South Asia with impeccable credentials, admits that Lajpat Rai’s ideas and politics in the 1920s did intersect with Savarkar’s in significant ways. This was the decade when a distinct and more extreme form of Hindu nationalism, represented and inspired by Savarkar’s Hindutva ideology, rose in popularity, leading to the formation of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) in 1925. There was a time when Lajpat Rai feared that the Pan-Islamism of Muslims in northwest India, if not all Indian Muslims, was linked to a desire to establish Muslim dominions in India.

He also espoused, somewhat like Savarkar, that the Hindu political decline and vulnerability was attributable to their adoption of non-violence. Both Lajpat Rai and Savarkar did converge in viewing India’s Muslim minority, despite their notably smaller numbers, as stronger than India’s Hindu majority. This was the key reason for Lajpat Rai to oppose Gandhian non-violence in favour of a muscular, violence-ready politics of what came to be called Hindu sangathan.

But despite the genuine intellectual overlaps, Lajpat Rai’s views remained very distinct from Savarkar’s. Unlike Savarkar who valorized violence, militarization and aggression as integral to politics, Lajpat Rai viewed Hindu sangathan as a temporary measure to display Hindu strength at a time when constitutional negotiations were underway. Indeed, Lajpat Rai was aware of the harmful effects of a rapidly aggressive Hindu communal politics and so sought to limit it by keeping it under the wing of the Congress party’s Indian nationalism.

Lajpat Rai also did not embrace Savarkar’s staunch belief that Hindus constituted the only nation in India, and that India’s Muslims and Christians could be a part of the nation only by abandoning their religions and assimilating into Hindu culture. Lajpat Rai never defined nationhood in a manner that excluded Muslims and Christians just because they had disowned Hindu culture. And unlike Savarkar, Lajpat Rai neither insisted on equating Hindu culture with India nor saw Islam and Christianity or Muslim and Christian cultures as essentially alien and foreign to India.

As the author makes it clear, Lajpat Rai never espoused a diversity-averse, exclusionary and forcefully assimilationist Hindu nationalism. Unlike Hindutva which saw Muslims and Christians essentially as second-class citizens of India, Lajpat Rai was equivocal in considering them as equal citizens of a future pluralist secular Indian nation-state – and this did come into being after independence.

It is true that Lajpat Rai articulated both militant Hindu politics and a secular Indian nationalism. But his advocacy of militant Hindu consolidation and even violence ultimately aimed to realize not a Hindu state guided by the anti-secular goal of Hindu domination but instead a secular Indian nation-state. His views, at times confusing, were influenced by the fact that he was a Hindu from the then undivided Punjab where Muslims were in a majority.
This gave rise to a complex intellectual position – ‘secular-communal complex’ or ‘secular-communal’ combine. Such a thinking was marked by internal tension, friction and risk. But his Hindu communal politics did not invalidate the intellectual significance of his secular Indian nationalism. His attachment to the idea of a Hindu majority was not equivalent to a desire to establish Hindu cultural-political domination over the country’s religious minorities.

Despite his association with the Hindu Mahasabha, Lajpat Rai did not wish the Indian state to have Hinduism as its established religion. He did not conceive the country as a Hindu theocracy. And he considered the separation of religion from the state and broader politics as an essential condition for building a secular Indian nation. He was also clear that Hindu majoritarianism was to be checked not by dissolving the majority but by granting certain constitutional guarantees to the minority. It was because of his lifelong service to anti-colonial nationalism that prompted Bhagat Singh, a fellow Punjabi, to avenge Lajpat Rai’s 1928 death.

Making a giant leap forward, the book makes a solid case that those among the Hindu right today who link questions of Indian citizenship to religion, and overtly or covertly dream of having hierarchically arranged citizenship rights on the basis of religion, with Hindus as first-class citizens and Muslims as subordinate, second-class ones, may be aligned with Savarkar; but they violate the vision of secularism held dear by Lajpat Rai.

The eminently readable book is the first systematic and comprehensive study of Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought. Its primary aim is to show that the dominant historiographical assumption that his though embodied a ‘Hindu nationalism’ and constituted an antecedent of Hindutva is much too simplistic. This is also perhaps why he dropped Arya Samajist tenets and embraced Hinduism’s multiple non-Vedic texts. Not only did he suggest federalism as a solution to India’s religious-cultural diversity (this happened), but he also suggested Hindustani in two scripts to be India’s national language (this did not happen). To him, the ‘Muslim’ period in India was not one of conquest and domination by foreigners but one in which Muslim rulers became indigenous and ruled as Indian.

The author also seeks to challenge the teleological tying of all Hindu nationalist conceptions to Hindutva and open up space to explore the internal complexity within ‘Hindu nationalism’. A study of Lajpat Rai makes one consider the possibility that some among the Hindu right have articulated, and are possibly still articulating, a form of ‘secularism’. In that sense, India could be witnessing a contestation between different conceptions of secularism. The author is also against generalizing Mahatma Gandhi as a nationalist and Savarkar as a loyalist collaborator or feeling alarmed at the Hindu right calling Gandhi’s killer Nathuram Godse a patriot. “Godse, Savarkar, Lajpat Rai, Gandhi and Nehru were all nationalists. The point is that they were different kinds of nationalists, espousing different kinds of nationalism.â€

Lest anyone misunderstand, the author is not mixing up nationalisms of different hues. She recognizes the two broad varieties. Some nationalism – and examples abound in the world – are more immature, chest-thumping, muscular, rigid, narrow-minded and even dishonest. “As a people, we Indians need to much more seriously, deeply and urgently ask ourselves what kind of nationalists/patriots we really want to be? What kind of nation do we want India to be? And which ideological, cultural and political resources from within and outside, and from our past and present, can help us achieve this?â€

Indeed, understanding Lajpat Rai’s thought – for a large part of his life he was caught in a dilemma about how to define nationhood in India – can yield intellectual-political thoughts relevant for the country today. This is an excellent book, an extraordinary retelling of the politics and ideas of an Indian icon.

(Review Author: M.R. Narayan Swamy)