Are all Indians Hindus?
A simple statement by Francis D’Souza, Dy Chief Minister of Goa asserting that he considered himself a Christian Hindu has expectedly become the subject of a controversy which is unlikely to end in the near future “ India is a Hindu country. It is Hindustan. All Indians in Hindustan are Hindus including I—I am a Christian Hindu ”D’Souza said..The fat was truly in the fire when RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat said on 17 Aug 2014 that “All those who live here in Hindusthan are Hindus. Our style of worshipping may differ, some may not even worship at all, we may speak different languages, we may belong to various parts of this land, our eating habits may differ, yet we all are ONE…..if inhabitants of England are English, Germany are Germans and USA are Americans then why all inhabitants of Hindustan are not known as Hindus?” Speaking at another function Bhagwat said “The cultural identity of all Indians is Hindutva and the present inhabitants of the country are descendants of this great culture,” The Minister for Minority Affairs Najma Heptullah agreed initially but retracted later to say that she had actually meant “Hindis” instead of Hindus.
D Souza is by no means the first non-Hindu to claim a Hindu identity. More than one hundred years ago, in an essay—“Atma Parichay,” written in 1912, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore said “Do I then claim that I remain a Hindu even if I become a Christian? Certainly I do, and to me this is quite beyond dispute. No matter what the orthodox Hindus may say about it, Kali Charan Banerjee was a Hindu Christian, and so was Jnanendra Mohan Tagore before him and Krishna Mohan Banerjee as well. These men were Hindu by nation and Christian in faith. Christianity was their complexion, but in substance they were nothing but Hindus. ….. “Hindu” is a term for the consummation of the Indian nation… In that word is contained all that we are in our bodies and our souls. From this deep flowing stream no one is cast aside simply by virtue of his having become a Christian – neither a Kali Charan Banerjee nor a Jnanendra Mohan Tagore.”
Bhagwat’s statement was met with a chorus of protests from the representatives of the Christian-Islamist-Marxist-Nehruvian Secularist front which had been controlling the national discourse in India right from 1947 onwards ,with INC’s Manish Tiwari,and Digvijay Singh, BSP supremo Mayawati, Marxist leader Sitaram Yechuri, JDU’s Sharad Yadav etc in the leading role. The padres were quick to slam D’Souza.
Many of Bhagwat’s opponents have argued that the country they inhabit is not Hindustan but India that is Bharat as described in the Constitution of India. This is plainly a superficial argument. Merely because the name Hindustan was not mentioned in the constitution makes no difference to the common Indian’s belief in the interchangeability of the names of our country between the traditional Hindustan on one hand and the constitutionally sanctified India and Bharat on the other. To give just one example, many of our important public and private sector enterprises (e.g. Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, ) which took birth in independent India proudly flaunt Hindustan in their names.
Among the most vociferous critics of Bhagwat and D’Souza are those who have built their constituencies on alien ideologies or ideologies denigrating Hinduism. The question that they must be required to answer is –whether India that is Bharat came into being only on 15 Aug 1947? Did the geographical tract of land which came to be defined as India on that date have any inhabitants already living there, and if so, did they have any ancestry, culture and civilization, and if so, how far back into history did their ancestry, culture and civilization go, and was there anything about their ancestry, culture and civilization of which the present generations of Indians could be proud? The pioneering achievements of the ancient inhabitants of this country in almost every field of human endeavour at the time when the rest of the world was only learning the rudiments of civilized living and which evoked glowing tributes from such eminent non-Hindu western philosophers, historians, scientists etc like Will Durant, Mark Twain, Schopenhauer, Einstein, Arnold Toynbee and Voltaire and many others is undeniably a part of the Hindu heritage to which all Indians ,including those whose ancestors adopted other religions for various reasons, could lay a rightful claim.
Still Bhagwat and D’Souza may not be entirely right. Only those Indians/ Bharateeyas/Hindustanis can be rightfully called cultural Hindus who, on being fully aware of the country’s magnificent cultural heritage, believe that they are equal inheritors of that great tradition. Those, however, who while living in this country consciously choose to be uncompromising followers of belief systems disowning, denying or aiming to destroy that tradition must be excluded from the family of cultural Hindus.
