THE GIST of Editorial for UPSC Exams : 28 JANUARY 2019 (The Inclusive Nationalist (The Indian Express)

The Inclusive Nationalist (The Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3: Indian History
Prelims level: Lajpat Rai
Mains level: The Freedom Struggle – its various stages and important contributors /contributions from different parts of the country.

Context

•  Lajpat Rai was an advocate of an assertive Hindu politics, exemplified by his participation in the Punjab Hindu Sabha in 1909 and Hindu Mahasabha in the mid-1920s.
•  Even then, his vision of Hindu politics was very different from the exclusivist Hindu nationalism that demanded that either India’s religious minorities be forcefully assimilated into Hindu culture or be excluded from the nation.

Advocacy by Lajpat Rai

•  He proclaimed that “religious nationalism” was a “false idea”, embodying a “narrow sectarianism” which could never be “truly national”.
•  “Religion was a matter of individual faith,” he proclaimed, which “must not interfere with the common civil life of the country”. Instead, every person must transcend their religious community to realise their larger common interest as Indians.
•  Lajpat Rai had fulsome praise for the 1915 speech of the Muslim League president, Mazharul Haq, who declared that “when a question concerning the welfare of India and of justice to India arises, I am not only Indian first, but an Indian next, and an Indian to the last”.

What made the diverse people inhabiting India one common nation?

•  India’s natural geography brilliantly marked it off from the rest of the world, endowing its people with a common nationhood.
•  He pronounced that Indians whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Parsi were a common race.
•  He argued that Indian Muslims were descendants of the Aryan race who had merely converted to Islam they continued to be influenced by their ancestral Aryan-Hindu culture.
•  “The Mussulman descendants of Persian, Afghan, Turkaman, Mogul and Arab invaders have a great deal of Aryan blood in their veins and the Hindu descendants of the Aryans have a great deal of Mongolian blood,” he said.
•  But this racial heterogeneity did not disprove Indian nationhood.
•  He also argued that Indians must develop for themselves a pluralist public national culture.
•  This was evident in his claim that since “national festivals are the milestones on the road to national life.
•  Hindus and Muslims would do well to take part in each other’s festivals and religious ocaasions like Basant Panchami, Baisakhi, Dussehra, Diwali, Muharram and Shab-e-Barat” .
•  In his 1918 book, The Problem of National Education, Lajpat Rai insisted that “we modern Indians can be as well proud of a Hali, an Iqbal, a Mohani as of Tagore, Roy and Harishchandra.
•  We are proud of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan as of Ram Mohan Roy and Dayanand”.
•  Similarly, he insisted that “the educated Mussulman does not withhold his admiration from the religious, philosophic, and epic literature of India, just as the educated Hindu reckons the Taj and Fatehpur Sikri among the glories, not of Muslim but of Indian architecture”.
•  For the Lajpat Rai of these years, Akbar was a role model whose memory ought to inspire Hindus and Muslims “in building the future national edifice in such a way as to combine not just the best of the two cultures, but also the best of the new one, that has since been born in the West, from which India is drawing copiously”.

Conclusion

•  Lajpat Rai’s embrace of diversity as a crucial ingredient of national culture was evident in his strong aversion to the imposition of a homogenous culture on the Indian nation.
•  He declared: “To require India to coalesce into a nation with one religion and one tongue… would revive the medieval idea of one empire, one people, one church.”
•  Even after Lajpat Rai turned to the Hindu Mahasabha for numerous complicated reasons, he never renounced his commitment to India’s religio-cultural diversity.
•  Lajpat Rai shows that a politics sensitive to the interests of Hindus can be free of a “tyrannical” desire to impose religio-cultural homogeneity on the nation.

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1) With reference to the Lala Lajpat Rai, consider the following statements:
1. He was an active member of Arya Samaj.
2. He established Servants of People Society.
3. He organized the Indian League of America.

Which of the statements given above are correct?
(a) 1, 2 and 3
(b) 1 and 3 only
(c) 2 and 3 only
(d) 1 and 2 only

Answer: A

Mains Questions:
Q.1) Since we seem to still be wrestling with these issues, is not Lajpat Rai’s birthday an apt occasion to contemplate his complex normative vision?