Author: Gautam Siddharth
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: December 15, 2002
It would be a pointless exercise
to bash the forces of Hindutva without adequately concentrating our gaze
on Islam in India. Part of the "communal" problem today in the country
is a result of the increasing perception in a growing section of the Hindu
urban and rural populace of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Over
the last decade, the Indian society has been under a sustained assault
by Islamic radicals, the most powerful images of which are being provided
by the continuing bloodshed in Jammu & Kashmir, the December 13, 2001,
attack on Parliament and then by the massacres at Akshardham and Raghunath
temples. Islam is increasingly being identified with a kind of dangerous
radicalism.
Strangely, while no opportunity
is spared to castigate the Hindu right, the moribund state of Islam in
India is not considered a sufficient enough problem, or who or what is
responsible for the backwardness of India's Muslims. And how this backwardness
feeds the Hindu right. What we witness instead is a pitched intra-Hindu
battle on secularism. This internal squabble, it needs to be said, is not
going to take the country anywhere and a more meaningful dialogue than
one dominated by abuses is necessary between the Hindu right and the secularists
if the country is to be saved from the greater problem of communal polarisation.
There is thus an urgent need to locate the middle ground between a "neanderthal"
Mr Modi and his outraged opponents wearing the garb of insulated modernity.
Things willy nilly boil down to
the parallel streams of political ideologies that the Congress and the
BJP represent. The point of departure between the two begins with the fact
that while the first is led by a westernised elite that grew around the
personas of the Nehru-Gandhis, the second is sourced from a hard boiled
definition of Hindutva whose leading proponent today is Mr LK Advani. There
is a jarring clash between the two streams: while one takes a liberal view
of India's internal reality, the other understands such a view as something
that disconnects India from Bharat. It isn't for nothing that differences
between the two leading political actors begin with their nomenclatures:
"Indian" National Congress and "Bharatiya" Janata Party.
The struggle between the two poles
is thus a struggle between "Indianness" and "Bharatiyata", and while it
is necessary for us to understand what are the elements that separate the
two and which are the ones that conjoin them, the single point on which
there seems the maximum disagreement is on the issue of communalism. The
Congress calls itself secular while the BJP rejects its rival's version
of secularism. This is primarily because secular Congress governments at
the Centre and the states have, over the decades, failed to create a social
situation that inspires Islam in India to change. With the party's politics
of vote-bank, all that the Congress has done is pander to Muslim clerics,
allowing them their sway over Muslim society. This support has come in
handy: The Muslims for decades voted en bloc for the Congress, till it
was established that they had an electoral "veto".
While this "veto" ensured Congress's
dominance over the polity, it left the Muslims educationally and economically
backward, ghettoised and separate from the mainstream. While the majority
progressed, the minority remained mired in apathy and neglect. Which is
why the term "appeasement" of the minorities is so completely misplaced:
It was the "appeasement" of the mullahs that took place as a result of
the Congress's "neanderthal" policies. After all it is no secret that the
Indian Muslims' industrial and business infrastructure has been targeted
during communal riots ever since the Fifties. The Muslim disenchantment
with the Congress climaxed with the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
The Hindu right wing is under attack
by the liberals for the threat its ideology poses to India's syncretic
culture. However, isn't it true that the "composite culture" that we take
such voluble pride in, is not exactly built on Islamic tolerance? If some
of the most magnificent and lasting monuments (not just of the brick and
mortar variety) were built following a grand interaction between the two
faiths, this was possible only because the larger religion was Hinduism.
Does anybody talk about "composite culture" among the Jews and Muslims?
Or among Christians and Muslims or Buddhists or any other religionists
and Muslims? The Hindu right is therefore correct in saying that it doesn't
need sermons on secularism. For the Hindu way of life, its ethos, is inherently
secular, which says: "Truth is one; the wise call it by different names."
Radical Islam is opposed to such
pluralism. There is a need, therefore, to ponder why the line dividing
the Muslims from radicalism appears to be so thin at times. The obvious
reason that comes to mind is that there has been no reformation in Islam
like there has been in other religious traditions. Islam hasn't grown or
changed with the times because its unenlightened clergy has been able to
exert control over the moral choices that a Muslim makes. Change is anathema
to the Islamic clergy, and unless and until the Muslims, most notably their
liberals, do not speak out against the absolutist clerical power, their
collective destiny is unlikely to improve. Sadly, it is not being realised
that the clerical way does not allow the Muslims to be perceived as part
of the whole, and it is this appropriation of a great faith by the clerics
that needs to be questioned.
The need is therefore to go beyond
the secular and pseudo secular war of words and address the real cause
of the problem, which is the educational and economic backwardness of Indian
Muslims. Unless their living conditions change, they will continue to remain
under the malefic influence of the mullahs. Which, as mentioned earlier,
will continue to feed the Hindu right. After all, who else can the Indian
Muslims turn to when there is nobody to listen to their side of the story?
The Congress and the BJP may abuse each other for a hundred years, but
the grim social situation of communal polarisation and unrest will only
get worse.
