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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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THE NEHRUVIAN FRAMEWORK |
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would be premature yet to sound an optimistic note, but I sense,
even if still vaguely, the possibility of a profound change in
Indian Muslims also. The issues involved in this formulation are
clearly too many and too complex. So, I will limit myself to a few
observations.
First, no worthwhile attempt has been made for decades to define Indian nationalism in Indian terms for the simple reason that no one has been able to accommodate the Muslim factor within the framework of Hindu civilization. Nehru talked of a Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis but one has only to refer to his address to the Aligarh Muslim University in 1948 and to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in 1950 (mentioned earlier) to know that he came to entertain serious reservations about it. Secondly. the Indian
intellectual-political elite sought to fill the void arising out of
the absence of a conscious articulation of a nationalist ideology
with the talk of secularism. This strategy worked for so long on two
counts.First, there existed, in the Congress, an organization which
could represent Hindu aspirations in the secular realm and treat
Muslims as its clients in all but name. Second, the Hindu recovery
of self-confidence and, therefore, need for self-affirmation in
civilizational terms was of an order that it could be accommodated
within the Congress framework.
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