Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: September 5, 2008
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080905/jsp/opinion/story_9786993.jsp#
- The idea of India is being turned into a
permissive nightmare
Like the proverbial bad penny, secularism
has re-entered the public discourse with gusto. Concerns over the agitation
in Jammu over a land transfer to the Sri Amarnath Shrine Board, the pro-azadi
stir in the Kashmir valley, the Hindu-Christian strife in Orissa and the revelations
of an Islamist hand in the terrorist strikes in Jaipur and Ahmedabad have
coalesced to produce another outcry over India's secular future. Political
parties with a stake in minority votes, human rights activists, professional
secularists and the remnants of the once-powerful Nehruvian consensus have
once again raised the cry that secularism is in danger. On TV talk shows,
grim-faced intellectuals have debated the possible collapse of the "idea
of India".
As an aspect of the pre-general-election warm-up,
the agonizing seems a part and parcel of Indian democracy, though few would
condone the murder of an activist Hindu swami and the retaliatory attacks
on Christians and their places of worship in the old Phulbani district. Yet,
the debate on this occasion has gone well beyond the usual Amar-Akbar-Antony
homilies and appeals to keep religion and politics well and truly apart.
First, it is painfully clear that India is
witnessing an Islamist ferment that was hitherto subterranean. The cry of
azadi, for example, has been the default chant of protestors in the Kashmir
valley from 1989. What was significant about the contrived outrage against
the "transfer" of 40 hectares to the Amarnath Shrine Board for three
months each year and the imaginary economic blockade (West Bengal experienced
more disruption during the recent bout of insanity over the Tata car factory
in Singur) was the easy transition to Islamist nationalism.
Arundhati Roy's description of a Srinagar
rally in The Guardian is telling: "Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address
with a recitation from the Qur'an. He then said what he has said before, on
hundreds of occasions. The only way for the struggle to succeed, he said,
was to turn to the Qur'an for guidance. He said Islam would guide the struggle
and that it was a complete social and moral code that would govern the people
of a free Kashmir. He said Pakistan had been created as the home of Islam,
and that that goal should never be subverted. He said just as Pakistan belonged
to Kashmir, Kashmir belonged to Pakistan."
Nor was the invocation of Nizam-e-Mustafa
confined to the Kashmir valley, which the secularists believe is governed
by a unique logic, distinct from the rest of India. The details of the Islamist
terrorist conspiracy involving the Students' Islamic Movement of India and/or
Indian Mujahideen suggest that the motivation behind the assault on India
is purely theological. What is even more ominous is the evidence that these
terror networks were funded by zakat contributions, facilitated by religious
institutions and protected by gullible human rights activists and cynical
politicians. There is nothing to indicate that Islamist terrorism has any
mass community sanction but, equally, there is no real indication of community
revulsion.
Secondly, there is a common thread that binds
the successful mass agitation in Jammu and the reprehensible tribal backlash
against Christians in Kandhamal district: Hindu fury. Hitherto, political
wisdom deemed that organized Hindu response to grievances existed only in
the minds of over-zealous members of the sangh parivar. The Ayodhya movement,
the 1993 Mumbai riots and the fierce backlash in Gujarat against the arson
in Godhra did puncture this complacency. Yet secularists always nurtured the
belief that Hindu consciousness was invariably offset by caste, language and
regional pulls. Raj Thackeray's anti-outsider high-handedness in Mumbai, the
Gujjar stir in Rajasthan and the self-serving perception that the Bharatiya
Janata Party has lost its way created an environment whereby it was thought
that Hindu passivity had returned. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's insistence
on demolishing the Ram Setu and the tokenism associated with the Rajinder
Sachar Committee recommendations were a direct consequence of this misplaced
calculation.
The two-month-long Jammu stir, which witnessed
a phenomenal unity of all Hindus in the region, cutting across the political
divide, was an eye-opener to both politicians in the Kashmir valley and the
establishment in Delhi. Both had become accustomed to taking Jammu for granted.
Likewise, the fierce reaction to the murder of the venerable Swami Laxmananda
Saraswati on August 23 took everyone, not least the Orissa government, by
complete surprise.
Whether the swami was killed by Maoists or
others was not the issue. The murder became the occasion for a Hindu explosion
over an issue that is hardly ever addressed in polite circles in Delhi and
Bhubaneshwar: the conflict between the Church and indigenous faiths. The irony
is that it is this conflict that has been simmering all over central India
for some time and has thrown up a militant, non-Brahmanical Hindutva that
blends local culture with militant nationalism. Just as the Christian churches
in these remote battlegrounds are not the epitome of a benign faith based
on compassion and charity, the "little tradition" Hinduism of the
tribal communities has precious little in common with, say, the genteel Art
of Living.
Finally, the existential anguish of secularism
has brought to the fore the capitulationist streak of the secularist order.
Arundhati Roy's critique of the Amarnath yatra as "an aggressive political
statement by an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian state" may not
be widely shared, but there is little doubt that a section of the deracinated,
Barak-Obama-loving, cosmopolitan elite now share her view that India's "military
occupation" of the Kashmir valley "allows Hindu chauvinists to target
and victimise Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle
being waged by Muslims in Kashmir". Articles in the mainstream media
endorsing azadi for the Kashmir valley would have been unimaginable some years
ago. That these mingle harmoniously with assertions of the innocence of the
Simi/IM activists, demands for Afzal Guru's pardon and the rights of illegal
immigrants from Bangladesh point to the growing perversion of the inclusive
approach to nation-building.
Indeed, recent events point to the steady
drift of the Nehruvian consensus to the fringe. The principle of separate
development for minorities (reflected in separate personal laws and a "special
status" for Kashmir) was meant as an emotional facilitator. Instead,
it has reinforced emotional separatism and has been portrayed as a non-negotiable
right. In 1947, the whole body of nationalist opinion was firmly against communal
reservations. Today, the Congress in Andhra Pradesh has opened the floodgates
of Muslim reservation. In the Eighties, Indira Gandhi's opposition to terrorism
was unequivocal. Today, the Congress finds nothing odd in nurturing a lax
security apparatus on the grounds that special laws to counter terror would
alienate minorities. In private, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, praises
the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, for opening the eyes of the country
to the Simi, but he won't allow the laws that will prevent its members from
using technicalities to escape conviction. The Congress establishment has
tacitly upheld the human rights of terror suspects, but it is disdainful of
the ordinary citizen's demand for security against bombers. It is this institutionalized
priority given to sectional interests over the national good that has fuelled
a perverse mindset whose most recent manifestation was Mamata Banerjee's destructive
nihilism in Singur.
The goal-posts have been constantly shifted
by a nervous secularist establishment. From an enlightened, if somewhat romantic,
ideal, the idea of India is being transformed into a permissive nightmare.
This is bound to generate a disquiet which can easily turn into rage at the
slightest provocation.
