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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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HINDU NATIONALISM : THE FIRST PHASE |
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| Mahatma
Gandhi could not have been thinking of Ram only as a member of the
Hindu pantheon when he talked of Ramrajya. He was looking for an
ideal concept for the reordering of India's public life when it
regained the freedom to engage in such an effort. In that search he
landed, inevitably on Ram, inevitably because no one else has ever
better embodied the essence of Hinduism in the public domain. Not
even Yudhishtira; for his pursuit of dharma, like those of his four
brothers, was one- dimensional uninformed as it was by a
simultaneous pursuit of kama and artha (pleasure and prosperity, in
a crude translation in the absence of exact equivalents).
Gandhiji's own life continued to be inspired and, in fact, dominated, above all, by Ram. For him, as an individual at the conscious level, politics remained an extension of his religion, not in the narrow Semitic and the equally narrow modern sense, but in the large Indian sense which admits literally of millions of paths of self realization and of reaching God. That is why Gandhiji sough Hindu-Muslim amity on the platform of essential unity of the two religions and Nehru on that of a common fight against feudalism, exploitation and poverty. Both approaches failed to produce the desired result; they had to fail. The two leaders tried to wish away the unresolved and stalemated civilizational conflict and they could not possibly succeed. The nobility of their purpose, the intensity of their conviction and the Herculean nature of their effort could not prevail against the logic of history. The alternative to partition would have been infinitely worse.
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