Secularism in Danger
Jawhar
Sircar
English translation of
Bengali article in Desh
17th March, 2020
It
would not be correct to view the recent communal riots in Delhi that claimed 50
lives as a failure of the government of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. It is actually
a major victory of this regime and the whole idea was to demonstrate what this
government is capable of inflicting on minorities and its other opponents. Let
us see if we can pick up the many messages that Modi and Shah have given us
through this riot.
The
first message lies in its deliberate
selection of the national capital for the mayhem, as the regime wanted to
demonstrate to the rest of the nation that it has graduated above the level of
riots at muffasil towns and states. It has absolutely no worries of
being castigated by the domestic media, as it has financed, inspired and
manufactured its own genre of Modi-worshipping channels and newspapers, and
effectively broken the backs of most of the others. As for adverse foreign
reactions, its standard drill is that the diplomat-turned-Sanghi foreign
minister takes his leader’s approval
and then issues an unnecessarily aggressive response, after which bhakts,
trolls and fanatic overseas Hindus pick up this ‘line’, to mercilessly attack
the foreign nation or media.
No
arrests were made even after dozens died, but when the courts and some brave
media houses forced the regime to take some action, belated steps were taken. But the most
publicised arrests relate to Muslim rioters, as the Goebbelsian narrative
insists that Hindus are victims. The fact that from the names of those killed
that it is clear that Muslims who suffered the most does not matter and this
selective bias will always remain. This is the second message that the regime
has given us. To make this discrimination legitimate, it has complained direct
to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court against a hard statement made by the
fiercely secular activist Harsh Mander, by simply ignoring thousands of other
incendiary speeches and social media made by its own rabid supporters. All
Harsh said was that he was losing faith in government and the judiciary.
This
government’s third strong message lies in its shameless refusal to arrest Kapil
Mishra whose open provocation of 23rd February made at the site of
the riot, in the presence of senior police officers, actually set northeast
Delhi on fire the very next day. This regime assures immunity or reward to its
own law-breakers and rioters, as is evident from the manner in which Sadhvi
Pragya, who was accused of terrorist activities leading to manslaughter, was
not only cleared of these very serious charges by hook and by crook and given
an instant honour thereafter. She was made an honourable member of parliament.
It will not surprise us if the chief provocateur of the Delhi riots, Kapil
Mishra, is freed of all charges and then made a Minister by this regime. After all, if the chief minister of Gujarat
during whose time the devastating riots of 2002 occurred, can get such a
promotion to the topmost post, why can others who thrive on riots?
The
mention of courts reminds us of the fourth warning that the government gave
during the riots. It was clearly directed to upright judges, like Justice
Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court who had pulled up police officers for
deliberate inaction and had taken the trouble to examine the fiercely provocative audiovisual recording of Kapil Mishra’s speech.
This fourth message is that this government can get such independent judges
transferred overnight, with the concurrence of the highest court and it will,
therefore, do more such transfers if judges take concepts like ‘justice’
seriously.
The
fifth message that we deduce is even more dangerous. It appears that the
Supreme Court is tossing around in deciding the criticality of issues before
it. The utter enthusiasm with which the court decided where the Ram Mandir
should be built is certainly not evident in deciding on the legality or
otherwise of the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution. Even six months
after the total clampdown on civil liberties in Kashmir the court has not found
time to deal with this grave issue. That protesters of Shaheen Bagh were squatting illegally on the road did not miss the eagle eye of
the Supreme Court and the ladies had to make way, but the court could not find
time to understand why harassed housewives were compelled to leave their home
and hearth to protest against a grossly inequitable Citizenship law. This means that an indulgent judiciary has
empowered Modi to thrust down on the people of India whatever he can sail
through parliament with the brute force.
The
sixth message of this regime delivered to us even before the Delhi riots is
that is there is no point in approaching any constitutional or statutory
institution for relief as Modi has swiftly and systematically destroyed the
neutrality of almost every national institution. He has packed the top slots of
national public institutions like the Election Commission, the CBI, the RBI,
the CVC, the CAG and the CIC-RTI. He has ensured that he remains unfettered to
break down the constitutional system and that no relief is available anywhere
to those who dissent.
Narendra Modi interpreted his second electoral victory in 2019 as an
endorsement to set up a Muslim-mukt Hindu Rashtra. While many
Indians were surely fed up of a disunited and quarrelling opposition that could
and genuinely wanted a strong leader, this mandate is not a communal and for
eliminating Muslims. But his blind fans are not willing to admit this. People
voted for a clean and efficient government and had hoped for millions of jobs
and also for economic prosperity. In all ages, some people have a fascination
for leaders who project themselves as messiahs and it is, therefore, not a
wonder that many Indians who were tired of our inefficient democracy secretly
pined for a dictator like Modi. They are comfortable with the systematic
abrogation of rights, very much like the bird in the golden cage, who was
unmoved by the free bird’s passion for liberty. While Modi is the second
authoritarian leader at India’s national level, we must admit that in the
states, we had and have equally autocratic chief ministers who are no less
dictatorial. Though a powerful section of Modi worshippers literally worship
Modi this group does not yet possess the strength to destroy our plural
democracy. They can try to harm it and that is precisely what they do all the
time.
At the same time, we have to admit that
there has been an unprecedented swing in the attitude of many Hindus who do not
consider it indecent any more to openly blame Muslims for a lot of ills, real
or imagined. The caution that most Hindus exercised in public, even a few years
ago, during the secular decades has just disappeared with Modi’s arrival. We
are now confronted all the time with the rabid intolerance against Muslims,
which is actually proudly flaunted. The most disconcerting fact is that this
campaign of hatred is actually led by the most educated class that who spews venom. It is hard to believe that after
receiving the finest of education and even after being nurtured in a liberal,
tolerant and plural society, they could be so poisonous and nurse some much
xenophobia. Does it mean that India’s age old proud secular tradition has been
buried?
To
begin, we need to be very clear what exactly we mean by secularism, because
there exist two conflicting definitions. In the West and also in Socialist
countries the term ‘secularism’ stands for a state that follows a ‘no religion’
policy, in the sense that religion is not permitted or encouraged to impact
public policy or public affairs. In the Gandhian model, however, secularism
stands for equal treatment of and equal respect for ‘all religions’. The total
distancing of religion from public affairs in the West could emerge after
several centuries of bloody religious wars. Science and rationality could
finally win the very painful battle against the Church and this led to the Age
of Enlightenment. This spurred technological breakthroughs, large-scale
industrialisation and economic prosperity, often at the cost of exploited
colonies. Even though India did not go through centuries of historical conflict
with any Church, or against Hinduism, per se,
Nehru and his foreign-educated compatriots enshrined the Western brand of secularism in the Indian Constitution.
Nehruvians worshipped reason and science and kept a safe distance from
religion, especially Hinduism. Our problem actually begins with this very
commendable decision, because it distanced the intelligentsia from the Hindu
masses, that were soaked in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, without
necessarily being communal. Nehru led the group
that wanted Indian secularism to be free of religion Nehru was distinctly
uncomfortable with the over-religiosity of Indians and any mentions in his
autobiography that “the spectacle of what is called religion not only in India
and elsewhere, has filled me with horror” (page 373) and that religion was “narrow and intolerant of
other opinions and ideas; it is self-centred and egoistic” (page 377). Marxists
and other leftists or socialists were strong critics of Congress’s economic and
political policies, but where religion was concerned, they agreed with Nehru’s
atheism. Consequently, Western-educated ‘no-religion’ liberals, atheist
Nehruvians, hard-core leftists and even locally-bred plural-liberal streams
merged seamlessly to uphold secularism that kept an antiseptic distance from
religion.
But
Indians of all religions are so steeped in their faith and the masses cannot be
expected to understand the nuances of Nehruvian secularism. Even so, the
Nehruvian ‘no-religion’
ideology held its unchallenged sway over
post-Independence India, because what was followed in practice in governance was an ‘all-religions’ policy, which was closer to
Mahatma Gandhi’s belief
in ‘all religions’. His deliberate use of the Hindu idiom in politics
is well known and Gandhi accepted the deep religiosity of the Indian people,
whether Hindu or Muslim. He used bhajans; invoked characters from the
epics; invoked Ram Rahim or Allah and frequently
used terms like Ram Rajya to convey his political and nationalist
message. In reality, the Indian State followed Gandhi’s ‘all religions’ policy
and celebrated the major religious festivals of every religion by declaring
them as compulsory holidays. But, even during the heydays of ‘secular’ rule, no
effort was taken in to explain or understand the significance and beliefs of
‘other religions’ nor their customs. Thus, the required emotional bonding
between religions did not take place. For a long, long time, therefore, Ram was
a part of the secular mainstream but it is only when theoretical Nehruvian
secularists distanced themselves from him, was Ram appropriated by Hindu
communalists and made their chief weapon. To understand when Ram was taken
over, we need to visit 1989, and then discover that it was full 25 years after
aggressive Hindu politics began that year, could we produce a Prime Minister
like Narendra Modi. In other words, we had full quarter of a century with us
but could not utilise it to stem the communal tide.
To
trace the critical developments in 1989, we need to go a little back to 1986,
when the ‘consciousness’ that led to ‘aggression’ was stoked. The same Congress
that had shattered electoral records to win the Lok Sabha elections of November
1984, received a battering and started displaying panic once Rajiv Gandhi was
accused of bribery in the Bofors gun deal. This is when Rajiv passed the
retrograde the Muslim Women (Protection on Divorce) Act, to appease Muslim hard
liners. He was severely criticised for
this Act that nullified the progressive orders of the High Court and Supreme
Court in the Shah Bano case, declared that divorced Muslim women must be
maintained by their ex-husbands. The ‘secular’ Congress’s reversion of this
order is among the many irritants that rankle Hindus, which the BJP soon
capitalised. In late 1986, Rajiv Gandhi’s minister in charge of information and broadcasting,
Ajit Kumar Panja, approved the commissioning of a religious serial, Ramayan,
on state-controlled television, Doordarshan. This violated the age-old policy
of the secular state not to glorify one religion. The serial started its
telecast from January 1987 and went on till July 1988 and we all know how
tremendous popular it was among the people. In playing to the gallery, the
television version of this epic and the next one, Mahabharat, that
followed it from October 1988 to July 1990, did not or could not reflect India’s argumentative and intensely tolerant culture. As we know, popular television serials harp more on
emotions and reduce everything to ‘lowest
common cultural denominators’. The
remarkable fact is, however, that the magic of this new wonder called colour TV
actually brought Ram, Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman to ‘real life’ before the
common Hindu, as never before. It metamorphosed distant bookish characters,
whose tales were confined earlier to monotonous recitals by pundits and old people,
into vibrant, real-life, close-to-touch ‘deities’. The fact that Doordarshan
inadvertently helped the Sangh parivar jump on the backs of the new wave of
popular religious enthusiasm has hardly engaged the attention of Indian
scholars. Several foreign academics like Christophe Jaffrelot, Barbara Stoler
Miller, James Hegarty, David Ludden, Victoria Farmer and Philip Lutgendorf
have, however, hinted at or examined the relation between this decision of the
secular Congress and the outburst of communalism in India.
1989
was the landmark year when a new nine-year old party, the BJP and its
associate, the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad, utilised the
legend of Ram to the hilt. They brought the small, dusty down of Ayodhya, where
Ram was believed to have been born, into national focus.
To understand how the party increased its number of Lok Sabha seats from just 2
to 85 by the end of the 1989, let us start with January. The VHP announced that
its determination to set up a Ram Mandir at the disputed site in Ayodhya and
that it would hold its sacred shilanyas ceremony in November. The All
India Babri Masjid Action Committee, in turn, set up ‘defence squads’, but the
Hindu programme received even more strength from millions gathered at the
Prayag Kumbh Mela immediately thereafter, and from the Sant Sammelan that lent
full support. The Sangh strategy was to arouse all Hindus by painting them as
victims, not only under Muslim and British rule, but also under the ‘pro-Muslim
Congress’. They insisted that only the Sangh parivar could retrieve Bhagawan
Ram’s birthplace from the
clutches of ‘Muslim
invaders’. The
year-long campaign turned belligerent and the secular forces were completely on
their back foot, as they failed to gauge how much the masses had been mesmerised
by the Ramayan serial. Having kept an antiseptic distance from the Hindu
epics and Puranas, Left liberals just could not understand how a mythical
character could re-define and kindle so much Hindu fervour. Doordarshan,
incidentally, kept running the Mahabharat serial throughout 1989 and
well into 1990, infusing weekly shots of holy adrenalin into Hindus. The Sangh parivar’s unique and imaginative campaign of requesting every Hindu or group to subscribe to
just one brick for the temple, worked wonders, despite the scorn of secular
forces.
Excitement and tension ran high throughout the year and incidentally,
the two major events of November 1989 are terribly inter-twined. The Sangh
parivar organised its long-awaited Ram Shila Pujan to demonstrate its
serious commitment to building the Ram Mandir and the BJP sailed through the
Lok Sabha elections that very month — bagging a whooping number of 85 seats.
Ram had indeed blessed them. The party emerged as the indispensable ally of VP
Singh whose minority government (December 1989 to November 1990) depended on
the large chunk of BJP seats, that went on expanding its base during the ‘sunny
days’ a government they had popped up. We will not get into greater details of
how Singh was arm-twisted by the BJP for this support and how he retaliated by
splitting the Hindu votes, by shrewdly accepting the Mandal Commission Report
in August of 1990 and reserving 27 percent in education and jobs for ‘Other
Backward Castes’ (OBCs). The cornered BJP responded by riding the Ram-Ayodhya
wave and its President, Lal Krishna Advani, criss-crossed the country in
September-October of 1990 with his war chariot, the Ram Ratha Yatra. This
whipped up war-like passions and mass hysteria and led to several police firings,
communal riots and hundreds dead. But, the BJP had finally managed to shake the
monopoly of the secular-democratic narrative after more than four decades. It
is needless to recall the destruction of the masjid on 6th December
1992, which led to large scale riots and counter riots and terrorism, like the
serial explosions in Mumbai. These broke down Hindu Muslim relations in secular
India, but history will not forget the shamelessly abdication of
responsibilities by Narasimha Rao‘s ‘secular’ Congress government. Only the two
Yadav governments of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh girded their loins to combat the
outburst of communalism, while secular intellectuals only protested and
published ineffective booklets.
We have
just raced through these facts to explain that we had 25 long years to fight
the communalism of the Sangh parivar, but we failed. In at quarter of a century
between 1989 and 2014, secular parties had held power for most of the time and
even the six years of Atal Behari Vajpayee’s rule was more liberal than
poisonously communal. But neither they nor the Left intelligentsia, that was
outsourced the task of scripting what was to be taught in educational
institutions, could construct any
appropriate response. The deliberate distancing of the Left liberal forces from
religion left the field wide open to the Hindu Right, and all they did was to
exploit the secular syllabi of schools and colleges that portrays Muslims as
invaders. No concerted attempt was made to explain that all our Indian Muslims
are definitely sons of the soil over several generations and the vast majority
are converts. We failed to drive home the fact that India has had countless
other foreign invasions and incursions and that these have merged into our
culture, enriching it. We have brushed under the carpet since Nehru’s time the real story of how Brahmanism has defeated
Buddhism, not always peacefully or fairly, but this recounting would have
explained that, like all religions, Hinduism too had
its history of aggressive behaviour. We were not
told why the greatest architecture of the pre-Islamic India, namely, the
wondrous Buddhist edifices at Amarawati, Taxila, Ajanta, Sarnath, Sanchi,
Bharhut and Bodh Gaya had all been lost, destroyed and erased from our
historical memory. These had to be discovered painstakingly, one by one, in the
nineteenth century by British archaeologists. Hindus have never been explained
why Hindu history had completely obliterated their existence, mentally and
physically, and why it had injected complete amnesia about the great Ashoka.
Had James Prinsep not reestablished his very existence in 1837, we would not
know how Hindu India had wiped him off, just because he was a Buddhist. If we
could set aside and forget the unpleasant history of Hindu-Buddhist acrimony
and physical destruction, why cannot we accept the Muslim invasion, as after
all, they are totally ‘Indian’ and the vast majority are indigenous converts ?
It is already too late. We have to first admit that we too have a role
in the unchecked rise of communalism in India. Secularists had assumed that
their philosophy would be prevailing for ever and ever. So, we must begin the
counter-struggle by admitting our own mistakes, that we have just done in this
piece. Only after that can we come up with our war strategy but we need to stop
this habitual criticism of fundamentalists and their depredations as it does
not help. Our battle is for us to plan and fight for every inch we can regain,
but friends, the journey ahead is long, dangerous and really toilsome.
