MARGIN SPEAK

MAY 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
10
Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a
writer and civil rights activist with the
Committee for the Protection of Democratic
Rights, Mumbai.
More Than Secularism
Anand Teltumbde
Modi or no Modi, openly
autocratic forms of rule exist
and would go on if we wear the
blinkers of secularism.
N
arendra Modis convoluted expla-
nation, in a recent interview, as
to why he did not wear a Muslim
head cap brought to the fore, once
more, the deliberation on secularism. As
though there was still a doubt about his
or his partys attitude towards Muslims,
once more the professional seculars waxed
eloquent on television screens to show
Modi what the entire world already
knew. Even Bollywood was not behind
in exhibiting its concern for secularism.
In the heat of elections, the rst-past-
the-post type that we have, all this prac-
tically amounted to favouring the Con-
gress because eventually all other par-
ties would coagulate into two camps
barring, hopefully, the communists and
the confused Aam Aadami Party
(AAP). Neither of the latter two entities
will anyway be consequential in the
post-election conguration, communists
for their historical wrongs which they
keep calling rights, and AAP, for having
squandered the peoples ire against the
rotten mode of politics so recklessly and
so soon. For many years secularism
has provided a protective shield to the
misdoings of all the so-called secular par-
ties. But everything has its limit. When
the misdoings and ineptitudes of the Con-
gress-led United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) crossed this boundary and are now
propelling the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) to power, what can one say or do?
It is not a question of secularism; this
positing of two factors throws up a
larger question of whether the Indian
people really have a choice!
Is Congress Secular?
Nobody has a precise idea as to what
secularism means beyond its common-
place antonym communalism, which
means discriminating against people on
the basis of communities. The dominant
meaning of communities is drawn from
the colonial era as Hindus and Muslims,
although there are many other commu-
nities in the country beyond this binary.
Because of BJPs genealogy in the Rash-
triya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whose
mission is to make India a Hindu Rash-
tra, it becomes a communal party. How-
soever the RSS tries to camouage its
Hindutva (Hinduness) as not being based
on the Hindu religion (the Sangh may
extend it to say there is no Hindu reli-
gion itself), all except their brainwashed
followers know that its core is Hinduism.
Having painfully realised that what
appeared as the Hindu majority in the
country is really a collective of caste
minorities, the RSS has resorted to this
kind of camouage in recent years in order
to woo other communities. Although, it
has managed to get a sprinkling of all
communities within its fold, including
Muslims, it cannot escape the commu-
nal tag. The question is whether the
Congress is secular, i e, not communal.
If one takes a hard look at the Con-
gress Partys history, one cannot escape
answering this question in a big negative.
It was this Congress which aided and
abetted the colonial powers in entrench-
ing communal politics in India that
ended with the partition of the country.
Notwithstanding the conscious strategy
of the colonialists to project India as a
bunch of communities, the Congress, as
the representative party of all Indians,
cannot be absolved of its responsibility
in playing into their hands. Basically it
is its failure to accommodate Muslim
aspirations that germinated Muslim
politics. There is no hiding the fact that
Congress projected itself as the Hindu
party in contrast to the Muslim League,
a party of Muslims. From the earliest
Lucknow Pact of 1916 between Bal
Gangadhar Tilak and Mohammed Ali
Jinnah (who was a member of both the
Congress and the Muslim League) that
inter alia established separate elector-
ates for Muslims in provincial council
elections, which would shape the Muslim
politics to culminate into Partition three
decades later, one could clearly discern
the communal ineptitude of the Con-
gress behind the tragedy that caused
the loss of millions of lives and left a
MARGIN SPEAK
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MAY 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19
11
permanent scar on the body politic of
the subcontinent.
Even after 1947, when there was no
rival for the Congress during the early
decades, it did nothing to spread secular
consciousness and instead continued
with the colonial ethos of divide and
rule. The Hindutva parties, Jan Sangh
and BJP, were a fringe force until the
communal intrigues of the Congress
gave them a boost. History stands testi-
mony that it all started with Rajiv Gan-
dhis intervention in the Shah Bano case
in 1985. He used his large parliamentary
majority to overturn a Supreme Court
verdict to appease Muslim sentiments. It
provided the requisite spark for the
Hindutva forces to light the communal
re. In a clumsy compensatory act, this
time to appease Hindus, after a few
months, Rajiv Gandhi ordered opening of
the locks of the Babri masjid in Ayodhya
and let the re turn into an inferno which
would destroy not only the Babri mosque
and lives of hundreds of people thereafter
but also catapult the BJP on to the politi-
cal centre stage. Even in the actual dem-
olition of the mosque, the tacit role the
then Congress Prime Minister Nar-
asimha Rao played is variously docu-
mented. Such instances are indeed
aplenty.
Bogey of Secularism
Indeed, no party in India in the present
milieu can really be called secular. Every
party intensely activates its communal
calculus in elections. Secularism is not
conned only to Islam or Muslims; it
encompasses all communities and must
necessarily include castes, the staple of
our politicians. But surprisingly castes
never gure even remotely in the discus-
sions on secularism. As I had argued in
one of my books Hindutva and Dalits, the
roots of communalism are to be found in
casteism. The contemporary hatred of
the Hindutva forces for Muslims and
Christians is not because they follow
some alien faith but basically because of
the deep-rooted memory that a vast
majority of these communities come
from the stock of the lower castes. They
still hate them as unclean, uncultured,
and backward as they do dalits. But far
from such nuanced understanding, it
has become fashionable among the left-
liberal secularists to cry hoarse at any
communal conict identied exclusively
with Hindus and Muslims and maintain
their unholy silence over the daily occur-
rence of caste violence. With a weird
logic the concern for communal conicts
is considered progressive but the concern
for caste atrocities is taken as casteist.
The bogey of secularism has only
helped the BJP consolidate its constitu-
ency on the one hand and the Congress
to continue its anti-people comprador
policies on the other. A case of the Com-
munist Party of India (Marxist)s [CPI(M)]
outside support to the previous UPA-1
government could well illustrate the
point. It was well known that the gov-
ernment would not shun its neo-liberal
agenda. But still a hodgepodge of a com-
mon minimum programme was created
to get CPI(M) support. On the issue of the
Indo-US Nuclear Pact, when the dis-
agreement surfaced, the CPI(M) could have
withdrawn support and jeopardised the
government as well as the Pact. But it
clumsily carried on, supposedly thwart-
ing the communal forces and gave time
to the Congress to make an alternate
arrangement. When it actually with-
drew support, nothing happened either
to the government or to the Pact. Rather
the hackneyed alibi of secularism failed
to convince people. Secularism often
weighed heavier than the livelihood
concerns of people!
Mistaken Concerns
Strictly speaking, secularism concerns
the state and not the parties. It is rather
premised on the fact that society and its
organs will follow and propagate their
respective religions, but the governance
of such a society should be completely
neutral in matters of religion, treating all
citizens equally, regardless of their reli-
gion, and banning state functionaries
from following any religious custom or
ritual while on duty. The BJP pro pagating
Hindutva ideology or some party oppos-
ing it should be perfectly permissible so
long as they do not cause a law and
order problem. The states neutrality is
meant rather to ensure this. However, it
is a commonplace sight to see pictures
of the Hindu gods adorning government
ofces, and Hindu customs and rituals
being followed in state functions. This is
the issue that craved for secularist chal-
lenge but nobody even mentioned it.
When someone took it up, no one
joined him/her. On 1 May 2010, a foun-
dation laying ceremony (bhoomi pujan)
for a high-court building was performed
by the governor of Gujarat in the pres-
ence of judges of the high court and the
Supreme Court. The ceremony was per-
formed entirely according to Hindu rituals
with a priest performing a havan. A
noted dalit activist Rajesh Solanki led a
petition against it before the high court.
On 17 January 2011, the Judge Jayant Patel
dismissed the petition calling it perverse
and imposed a ne of Rs 20,000 on
Solanki. He appealed to the Supreme
Court but for want of resources it got
summarily dismissed. This case could
have become a touchstone for secular-
ism as it questioned the religious behav-
iour of the state. But no secularist, no
media, no political party ever took a
note of it.
What If Modi Comes to Power
There is no doubt that Modi as prime
minister will be far more jingoist than
any of his predecessors. Now that it is so
much in the realm of possibility, one
could assess the worst that can happen
rather than sulk over it. It is clear that the
Modi regime will be most favourable to
the big corporations whose CEOs have
openly backed his campaign. But has the
Congress government been any less
favourable to them? A BJP-led govern-
ment will surely saffronise our educa-
tional institutions as it happened during
the previous National Democratic Alli-
ance (NDA) government. The fact remains
that the subsequent decade of the Con-
gress rule has not de-saffronised and
sanitised these infested campuses/insti-
tutions. It is apprehended that it would
spread fascist terror against peoples
movements and civil rights activists. The
question arises, considering the present
state of state terror against peoples
movements, whether there is scope to
add to the repressive apparatus that is
already in place. Such extension in a
clandestine manner is possible if we con-
tinue to wear the blinkers of secularism.