- Vincent Kundukulam
India is heading towards the general elections in the month of May, and the political parties, especially the Bhartiya Janatha Party, have begun their campaigns making all sorts of claims regarding their legacies and achievements. One of the leading claims that Mr. Narendra Modi makes is that he will take India to its past golden age, if people let BJP come back to power. The dream to construct “the golden Hindu past” is at the core of Hindutva ideology.
The Sangh Parivar forces try to convince Hindus that India was ever the land of Hindus and that India existed as a great nation from time immemorial. M.S. Golwalkar writes: “We existed when there was no necessity for any name … We built a great civilization, a great culture and a unique social order. We had brought into actual life almost everything that was beneficial to mankind. Then the rest of humanity were just bipeds” (Bunch of Thoughts, 73-74).
The Hindutva brigades claim that the territory ruled by Aryans in the past was bigger than the present India. It comprised of the present Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. The influence of India had spread as far as Vietnam and even Indonesia. Bharat at that epoch is compared to a woman whose head is Himalayas, dipping her arms at Iran in the West and at Singapore in the East, with Sri Lanka as a lotus petal offered at her sacred feet. (Bunch of Thoughts, 111). India lost its glory when the Muslims and the British conquered India, and the objective of BJP is to bring back India to her lost glory.
The Hindutva claim of golden past has economic aspects too. Swaminathan S. Anklesaria, a research fellow at Cato Institute of United States has recently published an article in the Economic and Political Weekly examining the veracity of Sangh’ claim that India was the richest country under Hindu rule, until the arrival of Muslims and Christian forces in the country. Based on Maddison’s research, Anklesaria argues that the GDP per capita income of Indians in the Hindu period was $ 450 which was half of the then existing rich countries like Italy and slightly below the world average. In fact, the GDP per capita income increased a little, up to $ 550, during the Muslim period, and it grew significantly only after the independence.
The Sangh Parivar forces point out that India’s world share of GDP was 32 % during the Hindu rule i.e. in the first millennium. Actually, this claim has to be assessed in terms of other many factors, says Anklesaria. Firstly, India had the largest share (33.3 %) of the world population in the first millennium, and labor being the foundation of production in the agriculture – centered economy, it is natural that India possesses the largest share of world GDP. To be frank, 32 % is slightly less than the world population share of 33.2 %. Secondly, the decrease in India’s world share GDP in the second millennium was partly due to the decrease in her population share which was almost halved to 1950 by 1950. Thirdly, while the industrial revolution helped the Western countries to relish a better standard of life in the second half of the second millennium, India’s lag in the field of industrial growth caused her penury in the same period.
Another factor about which the ideologues of Hindutva boast of is the population growth. They claim that Indian population was the highest (75 million) in the first millennium, because China had only 59.6 million and Western Europe, merely 25 million people then. Although this statistic is true, we must note that India’s population showed a better growth in the Muslim period (165 million) and in the post-independent India (359 million in 1950). It has grown to 1049 million in 2003 and according to the current statistics, India has around 140 crore people (Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, Narrative of the Golden Hindu Period, Economic & Political Weekly, 34-38). Thus, the narrative of Sangh regarding its golden past proves to be once again a myth they fabricate to sustain in power.
- kundu1962@gmail.com
