Going Beyond the Discourse on Indian Secularism

Not too long ago, AAP member and comedian Kumar Vishwas apologized to Muslims for cracking jokes offensive to them (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G15la3BNCGI) but didn’t do so for insulting Hindu deities (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0StYKzeLho). Either one ought to take a stand in favour of good humour, irrespective of the religious sentiments of people in any and every community, or one should apologize to all, but this lopsidedness reflects a travesty.

On the surface, the idea of being politically correct about an issue as raging as the rights of India’s religious minorities seems very appealing. While I would clearly not want to advocate a stand which is insensitive or hurtful, the mish-mash manner in which many armchair intellectuals react in the wake of certain communally tinged events compels one to scratch the surface and peer beneath it. At the very outset, I may clarify that I am against communal violence and communal hate-mongering under any banner (including those coloured saffron), and a religious grouping at large certainly cannot be blamed for some people trying to appease it for their electoral gains (and indeed, many political parties specifically appease several Hindu castes as well, such as the SP and RJD appeasing those from the Yadav caste) or for its extremists not getting the requisite media attention, nor does a crime more highlighted become a lesser crime than a crime less highlighted.

In fact, I must point out in this connection that I have written a book titled ‘Anti-Muslim Prejudices in the Indian Context: Addressing and Dispelling Them’ (http://www.free-ebooks.net/ebook/Anti-Muslim-Prejudices-in-the-Indian-Context-Addressing-and-Dispelling-them) and I have no hesitation in explicitly stating that I am not a fan of Narendra Modi (http://wordpress-200526-602825.cloudwaysapps.com//rebuttal-george-augustines-piece-praising-narendra-modi/), nor am I a camp-follower of the BJP (http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2012/09/a-block-on-the-parliament-whats-left-of-indian-democracy/) or any other political party for that matter. Nothing I say in this article is meant to condone or justify Hindu communalism.

Secularism is one of our cherished constitutional values and is indeed a pillar of a truly modern nation. It is supposed to imply the state having a minimal, if any, role in the affairs of the state. However, in India, the undoubtedly noble and sacrosanct cause of secularism has been appropriated by opportunistic politicians on one hand and self-styled left-liberal intellectuals on the other (including the likes of Romila Thapar, who asks whether Hindus are actually “by nature more given to killing” than other religious communities – http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2012/11/5689 – replace the word ‘Hindus’ with ‘Muslims’ and such a person would be called communal!), and unfortunately, the dissenting voice against the same has come primarily only from the Hindu right (which has relatively moderate and humanistic people in its fold as well – http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2013/01/an-open-letter-to-mr-sushil-kumar-shinde/), which has meant that the discourse around secularism in India has been extremely polarized between those labeling each other as fascists and pseudo-secularists.

Consider, for instance, the events that have played out in the last few months. We have all heard of the alleged hate speech delivered by Varun Gandhi which was indeed disgustingly vitriolic to say the least, but are we even so much as aware of the hate speech allegedly delivered by Christian political leader Sebastian Seema (Sebastian Seeman’s filthy abuse of Hindu Gods), in which he has publicly denigrated Hinduism, like suggesting the possibility of King Dashrath dying of AIDS (what of King Solomon’s multiple marriages then?) and saying that Hindus are stupid enough to create a stone idol and then say that that stone idol created them (don’t many chuches have idols of Jesus Christ)?!

Surely, the brutal murder of Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons by a Hindu extremist in the remote town of Baripada in Odisha must be condemned in the strongest terms, but how much emphasis did the media relatively give to an incident which occurred on the Diwali of 2013 in which Christian terrorists from the Garo hills of Meghalaya crossed the Meghalaya-Assam border and killed seven innocent Hindus celebrating Diwali (http://www.firstpost.com/india/assam-seven-dead-after-terrorists-attack-diwali-party-1209639.html)? And of late, Assam has been getting attention from the national media, be it in connection with a molestation incident in Guwahati or the horrendous Bodo-Muslim riots (on which we’ll talk about later in this piece). Likewise, the violence against innocent Christians in the Kandhamal district of Odisha in 2008 attracted so much attention and rightfully so, but what of the forced conversions to Christianity by secessionist insurgents in Tripura (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/717775.stm), who also issued diktats banning Durga Puja and Saraswati Puja?

And then, who is a religious minority in India? Aren’t the Hindus a minority too, in Kashmir and Christian-majority areas in the north-east, where many of them have been killed or forcibly displaced from and many of their places of worship destroyed, while the media goes on and on only about one Babri Masjid for decades together (I am obviously not condoning its demolition)?

While many Kashmiri Hindus have been living in relief camps for more than two decades now, our national media hardly has any time for them, nor do our ‘liberal’ intellectuals, with Bipan Chandra’s famous book India Since Independence giving their plight only a sentence of space, while discussing the Gujarat riots in several pages. And speaking of the Gujarat riots, how often does our intelligentsia even talk of the Hindus who were burnt alive in the S-16 coach of the Sabarmati Express at Godhara by Muslim extremists in 2002 (and the perpetrators were convicted as late as in 2011, just like the Hindu perpetrators of the Naroda Patiya massacre were), or equally, many of them who were killed or had to settle in relief camps during the riots that followed? The impression created is as though in the riots that erupted in Gujarat in 2002, Muslims were the only victims, and one would have to study reports of international human rights organizations or visit Gujarat to know that Gujarati Hindus also indeed considerably suffered.

To talk of the plight of the displaced Kashmiri Hindus is not fashionable, but while they are still heard of, possibly, one is not even so much as aware of the plight of the pro-India Chakma refugees from the erstwhile East Pakistan who were not awarded Indian citizenship for decades! Contrast this with hundreds of Bangladeshi Muslims entering Assam as illegal immigrants and being awarded citizens’ rights. And when a communal Muslim mob in Mumbai violently protests against the killings of Muslims (but not Bodos) in Assam and killings of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in spite of the Indian government accommodating refugees from that community (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Delhi-plays-reluctant-host-to-Myanmars-nowhere-people/articleshow/13532345.cms), social activist Teesta Setalvad praises the police for not acting against the mob (http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/08/stoking-the-fires/)!

And last but not the least, an example that is completely overlooked. While there is much talk of the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, the killings of innocent Punjabi Hindu civilians by the Khalistani terrorists are seldom brought up, even by the saffron brigade that seeks to use the complicity of Congressmen in the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 to suggest that their own hate crimes against Muslims and Christians should be condoned, though this line of argument makes no sense.

But the bias of a large section of our intelligentsia apart, there is also an agenda of various political parties to appease the minorities and give them undue benefits. To quote from an article in the newspaper ‘Mint’ (http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/NjnmAZDTjUMUyZjhETSzIL/Saving-secularism-from-the-secularists.html)-

“Uttar Pradesh, which has been run by a ‘secular’ Samajwadi Party government since 2012, has been creating Muslim-only welfare schemes. The state government has an education scheme only for Muslim girls—spare a thought for the Hindu girl denied aid because of her faith. The government has created special tribunals to expedite the hearing of cases relating to Muslim-owned property. The Akhilesh Yadav government went so far as to attempt unilaterally dropping charges against those accused of terrorism—something it had promised it would do before the 2012 assembly elections—but was restrained from doing so by the Lucknow high court. In August 2013, Yadav announced that 20% of the share in all 85 state-administered development schemes would be reserved for minorities.

Andhra Pradesh, under Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR) and the unquestionably ‘secular’ Congress party, set a new benchmark for persistence in the pursuit of minority appeasement. As Arun Shourie documented in an Indian Express article titled ‘Chasing that bank of votes again’, the Reddy government tried relentlessly to create Muslim job reservations, starting June 2004, but kept being rebuffed by the judiciary which held that such reservations were unconstitutional. The state government eventually secured religion-based reservations within the other backward classes (OBC) quota for a subset of ‘caste’ Muslims only.

The YSR government also created a special allowance for Christians to visit Bethlehem, on the lines of the Haj subsidy provided for Muslims, besides doling out taxpayer funds to Christian organizations for the refurbishment and construction of churches. YSR’s son-in-law, Christian evangelist Anil Kumar, held large-scale evangelism programmes with assistance from the state government.””West Bengal, also governed by the ‘secular’ Trinamool Congress, provisioned a monthly allowance for Muslim clerics and imams, costing a near-bankrupt state government Rs.126 crore per year. In October 2012 the Mamata Banerjee government also gave Rs.50 crore to Aliah University, a Muslim-only university, in addition to creating six Industrial Training Institutes and six polytechnic colleges exclusively for Muslims. The chief minister also gave 794 bicycles and over Rs.5 crore in loans and scholarships to Muslim students.

In January 2013, Banerjee complained that she could only allow job reservations for Muslims under the OBC quota and not directly because ‘the Constitution does not allow it’, citing the experience of the ‘secular’ YSR government in Andhra Pradesh. On 12 September 2013, the state public prosecutor told the courts that cases against rioters who ran amok in Kolkata in 2007 and attacked writer Taslima Nasrin should be dropped.

This was a riot in which the army had to be called in to control the violence and arson, and in which the president of the All-India Minority Forum, Idris Ali, who demanded that the writer be deported, had been chargesheeted. Ali was in the news again in December 2013, when he managed to get a TV serial written by Nasrin banned with Banerjee’s help.

Where was the army of self-described secular-liberal intellectuals and activists when a state government dropped charges against arsonists and rioters to appease religious bigots?

Most recently, the West Bengal chief minister declined to meet the US ambassador out of fear of antagonizing the minorities—she immediately received plaudits from the powerful shahi imam of the Tipu Sultan Mosque, who said ‘she will get the results in the general election’ and ‘secure maximum votes’ from minorities. More recently, the imam has also endorsed Banerjee as ‘prime minister material’.

Karnataka, which used to be governed by the ‘communal’ BJP till May 2013, has also turned suitably ‘secular’ since the Congress government led by Siddaramaiah took office. Within two months of taking office, the chief minister announced a housing scheme for homeless minorities, financial assistance of Rs.50,000 each for marriage of minority-community girls, and minority-only education scholarships too. The state Congress chief G. Parameshwara said in October 2013 that it didn’t matter if minorities did not repay loans to the government and ‘it was part of the development process’.

By maintaining a studied silence in the face of all these episodes, India’s secularists have helped discredit the ideal of secularism—and this stems from their flawed conception of what secularism actually is. Secularism should mean the state treating all citizens equally irrespective of their religious identity.”

Speaking of the reference to the RTE Act, surprisingly, even the Supreme Court passed a ridiculous ruling that amounted to minority appeasement, and I have written a critique of the same – http://spontaneousorder.in/should-minority-schools-be-exempted-from-the-right-to-education-rte-act-norms/.

Then, even in the field of higher education, a Muslim writer, Ajaz Ashraf, has pointed out, in an article (http://tehelka.com/the-vice-of-appointing-non-academician-vcs/?singlepage=1), the Indian state’s 1981 amendment that has given regressive clerics control over Muslim universities, like AMU, leading even to discrimination against academicians who are not practising Sunni men for the appointment of vice chancellor, which he strongly condemns. Two passages from the article are worth quoting –

“Worryingly, this process has turned AMU into a playground of community leaders who are Sunnis, often illiberal, having foggy ideas of modern education. Thus, for the post of VC, count out Hindu professors, as also those Shia, however brilliant, Leftists and atheists. Women? Stop joking. Indeed, AMU’s emphatic turn to Islamic Right has been in the years following the 1981 amendment.”

 and

“…their plight is directly linked to that idea of secularism which empowers community leaders whose notions of education lack the imagination befitting the 21st century. Muslims should not want this sort of secularism, good neither for their education nor for India.”

Some politicians have used look-alikes of Osama and Saddam to woo rural Muslim voters, not to forget the polarizing remarks by Muslim politicians like the Owaisi brothers, Azam Khan and Shazia Ilmi.

This article by an Indian Muslim gentleman is also worth a read – http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/The-secular-Jaziyah-tax-Contemporary-India-continues-to-entrap-Muslims-in-the-politics-of-fear/articleshow/33404770.cms.

To conclude, I would just state that I cannot but endorse a model of secularism, which advocates a uniform civil code cutting across religious lines (as mandated by Article 44 of our constitution), an end to pilgrimage subsidies (be it for the Haj, the Mansarovar Yatra or a pilgrimage to Bethlehem), a definition of communal violence that includes killing of members of the majority community in a state by members of a minority community and not only vice versa (unlike the Communal Violence Bill being pushed by the UPA) and no question of religion-based reservations, except in minority educational institutions. But no, what I am advocating is just communal and fascist propaganda, right?

I would like to thank my friend Devaditya Chakravarti for his inputs.