Need for a national conversation
By Jawhar Sircar
(The Telegraph, 13
June,2018)
Now that Pranab Mukherjee's controversial visit to the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters at Nagpur is over, we may do well to
focus on the best takeaways from this risky gambit. He underlined again the
unique position he commands in Indian politics. No one else could ever have
swung it and all criticism only magnified the event. Statesmen rise above
politicians by skilfully converting events of their choice into landmarks in
political history - to magnify the message they seek to convey.
Whatever may have been his reasons, his two
outstanding acts are that he dared to cross the Rubicon of political
untouchability and that he reminded the lion in its den that "a dialogue
is necessary not only to balance competing interests but also to reconcile
them". He repeated that "[o]nly through a dialogue can we develop the
understanding to solve complex problems [of divergent strands] without unhealthy
strife within our polity".
Let us analyse the plea for a 'dialogue'. The last
four years have surely been the bitterest in post-Independent India - the most
strenuous one for liberals, democrats and pluralists as they watched the
jackboots of the aggressively intolerant trample all over cherished values and
institutions. Recent electoral swings against the regime have given some hope,
but it would be myopic to ignore the depth to which cancerous cells have
penetrated the body polity and to assume that future electoral victories, if
any, will blow them away. A long period of chemotherapy of the polity is
unavoidable and this calls for both periscopic vision and realistic planning.
Let us look at others equally tormented. Columbia
University's Mark Lilla pleads for an urgent "national conversation"
on "identities" in a fractured polity. In his book, The Once
and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, Lilla insists that
"identity issues are something that's been simmering below the surface for
a very long time and this flash out from the Right, very suddenly, just brings
home.... (its) incendiary nature..." Now that liberals have seen the
devastating results of their dismissal of 'identity' - the Hindu identity, in
our case - it may be time to revisit the apartheid against right-wing Hindu
fundamentalism. Else the deep divide in Indian society and politics in the
Narendra Modi era may lead to a situation too terrible to imagine.
Can we start by trying to understand if there is any
truth in the charge that liberals are actually the privileged, Western
educated, creamy layer that has dominated power, academia, media and the arts
far too long? That Left liberals have monopolized the discourse and the goodies
of State support? That they hardly ever co-opted the votaries of Hindutva and
the Right into their discourse or even permitted them to share the same table?
Left liberals, by running down anything remotely linked to Hinduism or the 'genius'
of ancient India, have actually pushed the Hindu Right towards greater
absurdities. For instance, D.D. Kosambi was marginalized by his fellow Marxists
for 'going native' and dabbling in subjects like Indian religion and folk
beliefs - even though he employed copybook methodologies of scientific
socialism. Ram Manohar Lohia was similarly dismissed as a Hindi-belt
rabble-rouser in spite of his impeccable PhD from Germany. His insistence that,
in the Indian context, caste matters more than class ultimately catapulted his
supporters to power in many states and at the Centre, but he is still shunned
by both academics and journalists.
Anything to do with worship is derided by Left
liberals as a hangover of obscurantism - without the realization that many Indians
'breathe religion' all the time. Critically dissecting the Ramayana and
the Mahabharata may demonstrate secular credentials, but it
does block out discussion on how these epics have knitted together 'the idea of
India'. Those who believe these tales are 'genuinely historical' are not, ipso
facto, irrational or 'communal' - they are often more 'secular' in their
approach than their counterparts in other religions. The tragedy is that most
liberals stay away from the religious life of India for fear of excommunication
by the intellectual elite or of being out of sync with Western academia. But
the West has already had several painful encounters with religion through the
centuries to reach its current state where religion is decoupled from daily
existence. India remains steeped in religion; when liberals ignore it, they
are, in effect, ignoring reality. And this applies to all religions: not just
Hinduism.
There is still time to slow down the relentless drift
towards a Kurukshetra where two irreconcilable 'Indias' fight it out to the
bitter end. Liberals like Shashi Tharoor and Pavan K. Varma have taken the
plunge through their books, Why I am a Hindu andAdi
Shankaracharya: Hinduism's Greatest Thinker, encouraging debate and trying
to recover Hinduism from uneducated trolls. India is, after all, created out of
a wondrous equilibrium that resulted from untiring dialogue between originally
hostile forces and ideas. It is, indeed, a metaphor for the 'management of
contradictions' that has worked through argument, accommodation and
assimilation.
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