The Self-Confident Hindu

The Question the Thread Threw Up

Yesterday I asked whether Modi made India great again. The thread beneath it, the liveliest we have had in a while since the discussion on Gender, promptly asked a harder question: is Modi good for the Muslims? It is a fair question and it deserves to be held properly, so let me put two commitments on the table before anything else. Every minority and every people has its rights. And hatred is to be avoided at any cost. Nothing below moves either commitment an inch.

With that said, there is a question beneath the question, and it is the one this post is about. Is a self-confident Hindu a bad thing? Because that, stripped of the slogans, is what this era is actually contesting: whether the majority population of India, indigenous to the land, which did not opt for Partition, and which wrote its minorities in as full citizens, may consolidate its dharma, its mythos, its ideology into a confident and unified global identity.

Britain swears in her seventh prime minister of the decade today; India, one tenure deep since 2014, argues instead about what its majority is allowed to become. I know which argument I would rather be having.

Who Appropriated Whom

“Indians have been appropriating/adopting foreign culture for at least the past 4,000 years.” Q

Adopting, certainly. But appropriating runs the arrow backwards. Did India appropriate the zero (inventor:  Brahmagupta), or give it like it did the “Arabic” numerals? Nalanda drew students from across Asia for centuries; Buddhism, born on Indian soil, remade China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. One of China’s four great classical novels is Journey to the West, and the west in question is India. Columbus was hunting a route to India when he blundered into the Americas.

For most of recorded history the Indian subcontinent sat at the hub of the trade routes east and west and served as the reservoir the world drew on for the knowledge of the spirit. A civilisation that exports its mathematics, its religions, and its universities is not an appropriator. It is a source. Of course a civilisation can be both source and sponge; every great one is.

The question is the direction of the net flow. And it held its identity through a millennium in which political power over much of the subcontinent lay with Abrahamic conquerors, Muslim, then Christian, which is not a small thing to have done.

Foreign Conquest

None of this requires denying what that millennium gave. The Taj could only have been raised here. Biryani, Urdu, the ghazal, perhaps the English language itself as India wields it: the syncreticism real and it is glorious. But gifts do not retroactively turn a conquest into an invitation.

The indigenous development of Indian identity was interrupted; Iran suffered the same interruption and has never stopped arguing with herself. To say so is not hatred. It is history, read dispassionately.

And a people retains the right to resume its interrupted development where it chooses, peacefully, and within the constitution it wrote for itself (by a representative of its most subaltern classes). That last clause is not ornamental. It is the whole difference between confidence and revenge.

The Nehruvian Contract

Consider Nehru’s wager. Had he promised a Hindu republic in 1947, India’s minorities would very likely have embarked on Pakistan-style constructs of their own, and the subcontinent would have fractured further.

A counterfactual, yes, but not a reckless one: Partition itself demonstrates the mechanism. He promised the opposite, and for 67 years, until the election of Modi, India kept the contract.

Here is the part that many refuse to see: it keeps the contract still. India remains constitutionally equal and constitutionally secular, and it houses the largest minority population on earth as full citizens: voting, building, arguing, thriving unevenly the way everyone in India thrives unevenly.

There are hard questions, Kashmir first among them, and honesty requires reading the Pakistan-administered side alongside the Indian ones.

The thread yesterday traded cases and counter-datasets, Dadri against declining riot statistics, and that argument should continue in daylight; it is exactly the conversation this blog exists to host. But a majority growing confident within a constitution is not a majority tearing one up.

The Lover’s Quarrel

Calvin’s objections, that Aadhaar and UPI have Congress-era parentage, that the contractor class takes its cut of the highway boom, that personal incorruptibility has not percolated downstream, made the essay he criticised better, and we commended on them in the thread: facts that skewer our contentions are music to our eyes.

The outsider’s reading, teaches nothing. It reads every Indian advance as failure. Meanwhile the country simply gets on with it: a cricketing superpower, dominant in the game’s economy and increasingly ambitious beyond it, richer and more confident and more herself than at any point in our lifetimes. Inshallah, the next decade will be better still.

Inextricable Indianization

Dharma permits enormous accommodations of identity; that is its genius. Ghalib could only have emerged in an Indian context. So could the Taj. The Middle East has harees; the subcontinent turned it into haleem, and no one who has eaten both knows which is taster. There is pilaf across the Islamic world; there is biryani here. There is a magic to this land that masala-fies and beautifies whatever arrives, and perhaps that is the definition of India: inextricable Indianization.

It began at the very first encounter, Iranian-plateau farmers meeting the indigenous hunter-gatherers of the subcontinent, joined by the Munda arrivals from the east and later the Steppe pastoralists with their Sanskrit, streams braided into a composite that has held from the Indus cities to this morning’s repeat sambar with filter coffee. A civilisation that has digested everything from the Yamnaya to the Mughals to the East India Company is not endangered by its own self-confidence.

On the contrary. An anxious majority is a danger to its minorities; a self-confident majority, held to its contract, is their best guarantee.

Confidence within the constitution, never in place of it. So, is Modi good for the Muslims? Let’s continue auditing that question however the self-confident Hindu is not a problem to be managed. She is, if the contract holds, the precondition of everyone else’s ease.