Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: August 24, 2008
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Columnists/S_Dasgupta_Monumental_folly/articleshow/3397881.cms
The past few weeks have seen the most vile
assaults on Indian nationhood. In the Kashmir Valley, emboldened separatists
have desecrated the Indian tricolour with glee. The hitherto ambivalent slogan
of azadi has become a defiant, full-throated acceptance of Pakistan. "We
are Pakistanis and Pakistan is us because we are tied with the country through
Islam," the Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani told a mass rally in
Srinagar on August 18, adding, "Hum Pakistani hain, Pakistan hamara hai."
Simultaneously, the assumptions on which Indian democracy rests have been
challenged by a Taliban-like advocacy of Nizam-e-Mustafa (state based on divine
law).
Police investigations in another part of India
have revealed the murderous conspiracy of a group calling itself the Indian
Mujahedeen. Made up of educated, lower-middle class Muslims, these ideologically-driven
fanatics have made it their life's mission to wage a bloody jihad against
non-believers. They too, have openly debunked the principles on which the
Indian political order rests. According to the boastful email the IM sent
minutes before the Ahmedabad blasts on July 26, "The terms democracy,
secularism, equality, integrity, peace, freedom, voting, elections are yet
another fraud with us." The group has also directed its ire at the "faithless
infidels and their hypocrite allies from amongst the so-called Muslims...who
have bartered their faith in return of just one seat in the Parliament."
A striking feature of these threats is the
resulting disarray in the liberal establishment. While the more weak-kneed
and cosmopolitan intellectuals have advocated total surrender, others have
fallen back on denial. The ruling Congress Party, for example, has equated
demonstrators waving the national tricolour with those flaunting the Pakistan
flag. Cabinet ministers have defended the terrorist SIMI and new-found allies
of the UPA have rushed to console the family of the man the police believes
was responsible for the murder of some 150 innocent Indians. Most important,
homilies apart, there has been no meaningful intervention by those who felt
that the Nehruvian ideal was the last word in India's political evolution.
This disoriented silence is understandable.
The Nehruvian project rested on the assumption that the emotional foundations
of India would become unshakeable if the Muslim minority were allowed a generous
measure of separateness and firewalled from the intrusions of both the secular
state and civil society. Nehru believed that "temporary provisions"
giving a special status to J&K in the form of Article 370 would reconcile
Kashmiri sub-nationalism with Indian nationhood. A common civil code was also
put on hold because he felt that in time Muslims would voluntarily accept
the idea of non-religious personal laws.
While Nehru viewed separateness as a temporary
balm on the scars of Partition, his successors elevated it to a non-negotiable
tenet of Indian secularism. The results have been hideous. Far from nurturing
a Amar-Akbar-Anthony form of multi-culturalism, separateness nurtured both
ghettoisation and separatism. The perverse mindset of SIMI and IM activists,
for example, is almost entirely a creation of the ghetto and centred on an
abstract ummah that takes precedence over actual neighbours. The similarities
between the IM mindset and the radical Islamism of the Pakistani ghettos in
Britain are striking. And the problem in both countries has been encouraged
by an intelligentsia that equates liberty with licence and turns every complaint
into victimhood.
Likewise, the dispute over 40 hectares of
land was rapidly politicised and projected as a conflict between Kashmir and
India. The transformation was possible because Article 370 had created the
emotional space for separatism. Nowhere else in India have laws for the protection
of 'locals' become a ruse for open secessionism.
Nehru's multicultural brainwave was opposed
by many nationalists at the time. To them, emotional separatism was the precursor
to actual separation as happened in 1947. They were right. Today, India is
paying the price of Nehru's monumental folly.
