Many of the Right’s pet
issues today, from “reconversion” to the cementing of an aggressive Hindu
political identity were initially championed by Malaviya in British India
The Bharat Ratna has always been a political award and this
year was no different. The Modi government has conferred India’s highest
civilian award on Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Madan Mohan Malaviya. Vajpayee was,
of course, the first prime minster from the BJP and easily the party’s tallest
leader. Born more than 150 years ago, Malaviya’s link with the BJP and its ideology
is somewhat less know.
Madan Mohan Malaviya was born in Allahabad in a Brahmin
family highly respected for its learning and knowledge of Hindu scriptures. Financial
circumstances forced him to take up a job as an English teacher in a local
school after graduating from his BA. From these humble beginnings, Malaviya was
able to branch out into a somewhat bewildering number of fields and leave his
mark on them.
He started his political career in 1886 with a widely
appreciated address to the Indian National Congress session in Calcutta. Malaviya
would go on to become one of the most powerful political leaders of his time,
managing to be chosen Congress President on four occasions. Impressed by
Malaviya’s 1886 address, an Awadh taluqadar,
Raja Rampal Singh, offered the editorship of his Hindi newspaper, Hindustani to Malaviya. Later on,
Malaviya would go on to rescue the Hindustan
Times from financial ruin and launch its Hindi edition. He would serve as
the Hindustan Times’ chairman for
more than 20 years, building it up to be the foremost nationalist newspaper of
its time.
Linguistic Politics
In spite of his achievements in politics and journalism,
maybe Malaviya’s greatest impact lies in the sphere of language. The late 1800s
saw mobilisation around the issue of Hindi and Urdu—till then, the courts and
bureaucracy of the Raj used Urdu written in the Persian script as the official
language. Malaviya submitted his famous Memorandum (“Court Character and
Primary Education in North-Western Provinces and Oudh”) to the Lt Governor of
what is now Uttar Pradesh. The Memorandum was masterfully framed and was one of
the principal arguments which convinced the British Raj to pass an order in
1900 which permitted the use of Nagari characters alongside Persian in the
courts of the North-Western Provinces.
While his overall achievements are obviously a factor, the
primary reason this BJP government feels the need to honour Malaviya is of
course his contribution to the Hindu nationalist cause. Malaviya was a staunch
conservative both socially and politically. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (Independent
India’s first woman cabinet minister) writes that Malaviya
“would never take food or drink from the hands of anybody other than a Brahmin
of his own caste”. He set up a Hindu university in Banaras which along with
“Aligarh Moslem University” would produce men “true
to their God, their King and their country”. As the reference to the King
shows, politically, Malaviya believed in constitutionalism and was one of the
few major Congress leaders to oppose Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. Carrying
on with this strand of thought, the party Malaviya founded, the Hindu Mahasabha
did not participate in the Quit India movement of 1942.
Malaviya’s position on the integration of Dalits in order to
prevent their conversion to other religions, formed the basis of how the Hindu
Right saw this issue and is played out till today in instances like the Shivpuri
conversions and the fact that the Indian state takes away “scheduled caste”
status from any person who converts away from Hinduism. Malaviya also played an
important role in introducing
the concept of “reconversion” to Hinduism, an issue which seems to be on the
top of the Sangh Parivar’s agenda today. A fear of reduced Hindu numbers—a pet peeve
of today’s Hindu Right—drove his thinking on “reconversion”. Presiding over a Hindu Mahasabha convention
in 1932, Malaviya argued:
“When now we are so badly treated with a numerical strength of 22 crores, what
would be our condition in future with a much reduced Hindu population, if we
allow this rate of conversion from Hinduism and do not allow reconversion into
Hinduism?”
Muscular Hinduism
Malaviya also championed a muscular Hindu identity which often
jostled violently for space with urban India’s Muslim minority. In Allahabad,
the annual Ram Lila procession was organised by the Malaviya family. In the fractious
politics of North India, this procession would often trigger
off communal violence, the immediate catalyst being music being played outside
mosques. When the British demanded that the procession stop playing music whenever
it passed outside a mosque, Malaviya refused, arguing
that this would make it a “mourning procession, not a Ram Dal”. As a result,
the British banned the Ram Lila procession in Allahabad and it was only
resurrected in 1937 when a Congress government came to power in UP under the
1935 Government of India Act.
Organisationally, Malaviya also had a seminal role to play
in the Hindu nationalist movement. He set up the Hindu Samaj in 1880 in
reaction to what he thought were Christian missionary attempts to stop the
annual Magh Mela. But of course, his biggest contribution was the setting up of
the Hindu Mahasabha along with Lala Lajpat Rai in 1915. The Mahasabha was the
largest Hindu nationalist party in British India. Mahasabha leaders such as Savarkar
played a key role in crystallising Hindu nationalist thought and one of the party’s
tallest leaders, Syama Prasad Mookerjee would go on to found the Bharatiya Jana
Sangh, the predecessor of the ruling BJP today.
Given how Malaviya contributed, both ideologically and
organisationally, to the Hindu nationalist cause, it is not surprising that the
BJP now seeks to honour him with a Bharat Ratna.
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