Secular common sense (Interrogating India) [Jan 01, 2001] Kesavan, Mukul [1 ed.] 0143027735, 9780143027737

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S EC U LA R

COMMON

S E N S E

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SECULAR

COMMON

MukulIesavan ;;,'

(j PENGUINBOOKS

SENSE

GRAD BL.

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Penguin BooksIndia (P) Ltd., 11 Community Centre, PanchsheeJ Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Books Ltd ., 80 Strand , London WC2R ORL, UI< Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd ., Ringwood , Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd ., 10 Alcorn Avenue, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, M4V 382, Canada Penguin Books(NZ) Ltd ., Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads , Albany, Auckland , New 2.ealand First published by Penguin Books India 2001 Copyright C Mukul l(esavan 2001 All rights reserved

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For sale in India only Typeset in Times New Rom11n by SORYA, New Delhi Printed at Chaman Offset Printers , New Delhi

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To Raghu and Tar.a

Origins Indians are sometimes scolded for misunderstanding secularism. They are remindedthat secularismin its original,western sense, means a commitment to a public life fenced off from religion-not an equal pandering to all religions. This is unreasonable. It is unreasonable because Indian secularism grew out of the peculiar circumstancesof anticolonial nationalism. India isn't a Christian country where the State is trying to disentangle itself from the tentacles of a smothering, interfering church. Nor is it Ataturk's Turkey or contemporary Algeria trying to erase

monarchy and mullahs in the name of a secular modernity. India is an unlikely subcontinental state, first made by the English, then remade by their English-speaking subjects-twicemade, if you like. India was fashioned out of a process of colonial expansion and conquest that dragged on for a hundred years. The India the British made was a complicated jigsawan Austro-Hungarian empire under more ruthless management. The post-194 7 makeover of India consisted of Congress governments tidying the partitioned Raj into a Republic: for Nehru and Patel, the task of secular nationalism was to smelt a citizenry from the ore of a heterogeneous population embedded in subjecthood. Some of this smelting had been done before lndepenc,ience by the Congress, through Gandhi's huge campaigns of civil disobedience. The discontents of a poor country were harnessed in the name of the nation against the colonial State that had, ironically, consolidated the territory that this would-be nation wished to occupy. These Congress campaigns of defiance and solidarity-Noncooperation, Civil Disobedience, Quit India2

were important not only because they helped throw the British out but because they demonstrated that India's bewilderingly plural populationwas capable of pwposeful collective action. If the colonial census with its columns of Khattris, Bohras,Khojas,HussainiBrahmins and twelve different sorts of Kayasthas was a systematic unravelling of Indian society-a dissection of Mother India-the Congress's mass movements were Gandhi's great magic tricks with which he put the dismembered lady together again. Gandhi's mass movements periodically renewed the Congress's licence to speak for the nation. Admirers of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sar~ar Patel, C.R. Rajagopalachariand Subhas Chandra Bose have complained about the exaggeration of Gandhi's role in the national movement, but the truth is that from the time he led the party into the Noncooperation movement, right up to 1942, Gandhi was Merlin and the Congress was the sorcerer's apprentice. In its origins, the Congress was a selfconsciouslyrepresentativeassembly of Indians from differentparts of India. The first Congress of 1885 was inspired by the imperial 3

assemblage of 1877, a gathering hand-picked by the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, to represent India's census diversity. We know that this stage-managed imperial assembly prompted Surendranath Banerjea to plan a similar meeting, one designed to consolidate Indian public opinion, not to pledge fealty. The Congress never lost this sense that the nation was the sum of the sub-continent's species; that the more Parsis, Muslims, Dalits, Marwaris, Sikhs, and Christians it could count in its ranks, the better was its claim to represent the nation. The Congress, as its name suggests, saw itself as a cross between a party and a parliament (or at least an assembly of representative Indians). Typically, till 1939, members of the Hin~u Mahasabha and the Muslim League could be members, office-bearers, even Presidents of the Congress. For the Congress, being secular meant making different types of Indians equally welcome; secularism in this context was a way of being comprehensively nationalist. Later, as the Congress's unpopularity with Muslims became inconvenient,the party's ideological pluralism 4

became a substitute for Muslim support. In the Thirties, Nehru often claimed that the contest in India was between the British who represented imperialism and the Congress which representednationalism.In this clash of embodied isms, it was a small detail that the Congress didn't actually enjoy much Muslim support: it was secular in its pluralism so potentially, it represented everyone. The Congress emptied nationalism of its usual content: language, culture, religion, history. It put in its place an anti-imperialismbased on a sophisticated critique of the economic effects of colonial rule. If Indian nationalism was to be fuelled by the grievances of victimhood, the Congress made sure that all Indians were equally victims of economic exploitation. The leaching of India through the drain of wealth, the destruction of livelihood as a result of colonial de-industrialization,the crippling of agricultureby an extortionaterevenue regime, were hardy staples of Congress nationalist rhetoric because these arguments taken together,showedhow colonialismhad ravaged all Indians whether they were peasants or workers, craftsmen or traders, landlords or 5

indigenous capitalists. So Muslimjulahas, Jat peasants, Bohra traders and Parsi industrialists were theoretically knit together by an anticolonial grievance of one sort or another. In economic nationalism, the Congress found a non-denominationalway of being patriotic. The emotional charge of Congress nationalism came from anti-imperialism-not the myth of a suppressed identity struggling to be born. It was hard to brew a nationalist essence for India because India was not a compact country with a simple past. The moment it came into being in 1885, the Indian National Congress became a gladiator in an enormous arena because the British had assembled a subcontinental polity. Once dialogue was joined with the Raj on pan-Indianterms, the Congress was lumbered with a history too contested to be easily simplified. Gandhi didn't even try. For a sanatani Hindu, he was remarkably disinterested in Hindu mythmaking. Not for him Tilak's Ganapati festivals or celebrations of Shivaji: Gandhi's great anti-imperialist campaigns were centred on carefully universal symbols like salt. Instead of historical grievance, Gandhi sponsored constructive 6

work. A nationalist's work (when he wasn't struggling against the Raj) was sanitation and • • spmmng. The remarkable thing about Congress' nationalism was that it generally kept to the secular straight-and-narrowdespite the personal inclinations of many of its leaders. It was not anti-missionary (though Gandhi disliked conversion), it was not revivalist (though there were those associated with the Congress who favoured revivalism), it sponsored Hindustani in two scripts as India's national language when many among its leaders (including Gandhi) preferred Hindi; it censored Vande • Mataram when Muslims complained about the provenance and idiom of the song.. One reason why Congressmen generally reined in their instincts was that an all-India nationalism had to keep all Indians on board, especially when the party's claim to represent the nation was constantlychallengedby the colonial State. Far from keeping religion at arm's length, the Congress used an all-are-welcome secularism that tried to conscript every religious identity in sight to bolster its all-India credentials in the struggle against the Raj. 7

The Congress's historical difficulties with Muslims kept it honest. From its inception in 1885, the Congress found it hard to attra~t a critical mass of notable Muslims. In its first three decades, the Congress was not a mass party, nor did it wish to be. It was an annual assembly of local notables and professionals from all over India. Muslim notables,however, were hard to find. For many Indian politicians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, democratic politics empowered communities, not individuals. Faced with a politics that counted heads, men like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan did their sums and got a worrying answer: in this new politics of numbers, the Hindus had the bigger battalions. The colonial state was eager to accommodatethis numerical anxiety, the Congress was more grudging. Muslims weren't wholly absent : from Badruddin Tyabji, through M.A. Jinnah to Maulana Azad, the Congress always counted distinguished Muslims amongst its leaders, but never in sufficient numbers to give the lie to the charge of tokenism. In the Congress zoo, the Muslim enclosure was thinly populated. 8

What happened to Congress secularism after the Muslim League won Pakistan? If this home-brewed secularism had been designed to keep Muslims on board, what happened to it when most Muslims left? It frayed a little at the edges: on the language question, for example, the Congress did a quick about-tum. Instead of Hindustani written in the Nagari and Persian scripts becoming the national language (a longstanding Congress position before Partition), after Independence,the party nominated Hindi written in Devanagari. And separate electorates and reserved seats for Muslims or any minority defined by faith (which would certainly have been part of any constitution made for an undivided India) were junked, though it's hard to think of that as a loss. But Congress secularism held up well. In spite of its tendency to treat 'Hindu' as a default category for Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, and the inclusion in the Directive Principles of an exhortationurging the State to protect cattle, the Constitution that the Republic gave itself was remarkably secular. The constitutional scholar, Rajeev Dhavan, characterizes thc·new Republic's secularism well: religious freedom, celebratory neutrality and reformatory justice. 9

The need to create an equal citizenry that made the Constituent Assembly reject a proposal to limit the right to vote, inspired it to safeguard the freedom of religion in the most rigorous way, down to the right of every Indian to propagate his faith. The Congress's construction of secularism, once aimed at persuading the Raj that it spoke for all Indians, was now written into the Republic's Constitution to reassure religious minorities that they didn't live on sufferance in free India. In the years that followed, the State under Nehru ritually demonstrated its enthusiasm for all of India's faiths. It was a clumsy, patronizing secularism, always vulnerable to the resentful charge of appeasement; but at a critical moment in our history, it held the pass and helped buy time for secularism to become . an ordinary part of the Republic's furniture . It did what good political ideas do: it worked.

The Nature of Contemporary Secularism Secularism in independent India soon became patronage when it was practised by the State 10

and gallantry when it was practised by the self-consciously secular. In India today, secularism often appears to be a form of Hindu chivalry. Secularists see Muslims individually and the Muslim 'community' in general, as objects of gallantry. Muslims are seen as victims of Partition and the prejudices . . that it institutionalized. The secularist is inclined to assume that Muslims · are discriminated against in every sector of employment; that Urdu, their language (though in other contexts he will swear that Urdu is . not denominational, that it is a lingua franca, that it belongs to Hindus and Muslims alike) has been systematically denied the patronage of the State; that Muslims are unfairly asked to prove their credentials as citizens of India; that they are invariably the targets of sectarian violence rather than its instigators; that supposedly secular objectives like a common civil code are ruses to dragoon Muslims into accepting a majoritarian agenda. These assumptions are well founded but they lead to a secularist idiom that is, ironically, sectarian, because you have to be a benign Hindu for the style to fit. In this secular 11

drama, Muslims are anonymous victims in crowd scenes or silent supporting actors; they seldom have speaking roles, because chivalry can't be self-directed. Some years ago, there was an essay published surveying the condition of Indian Muslims in the early years of freedom. The essay noted the diffidence of Muslims immediately after Partition, the discrimination they sometimes faced and the constraints within which they lived. This essay was written by a Muslim academic. I was sitting in the cafeteria of a library discussing it with a friend who was a political scientist, a Hindu. She said she didn't like the article. I wondered why, because we agreed that the author's facts were right. She said that the things he had written might be true but it was unseemly for him to be saying them. She meant that these things were best said by secular non-Muslims (i.e. Hindus); when they came from a Muslim, they sounded like moaning or special pleading. Secularism in contemporary India is too often a form of 'behalfism' where sceptical Hindus act as proxies for believing Muslims. It wasn't like this before Partition. Before Partition, Muslims had regional majorities in 12

large, politically crucial provinces like Punjab and Bengal even though they were a minority in the subcontinent taken as a whole . The State was ultimately controlled by the British, so Hindus and their leaders had no reason to feel chivalrous: not having power, there was no call for secular Hindus to feel uneasy about the hegemony of a Hindu majority; not having experienced Partition's violence or the diffidence of the Muslim minority of republican India, there was no question of feeling chivalrous or guilty. In any case, it was hard to feel sorry for men like Suhrawardy, Fazlul Haq, Sikandar Hayat Khan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah or Chaudhry Khaliq,izzaman: they were canny, powerful political figures who gave no quarter and asked for none. Gandhi saw assertive Muslim Leaguers as strong, unruly younger brothers, not as damsels in distress. Nehru was secular because to him and his followers, the universality of science and reason and modernity was so obviously superior to the irrational particularity of faith and birth identity. Independence was a lunge away, and citizenship in a free, democratic Republic would fix everything. 13

Pre-Partition secularism was not better than what we have today: after all, it didn't prevent Partition. But it was a clear-cut, communicable political position. Secularism was a stance towards certain political and constitutional • arrangements: it wasn't yet a poor-things platform. Secularism was of the world, it was robust; now it is often just feel-good sentimentality, a form of alms-giving. Contemporary secularism involves no institutional cost because secularists know that their sympathy for Muslim backwardness will not be tested by demands for affirmative action or quotas in legislatures-reserved seats and separate electorates for Muslims were forever discredited by Partition. I suspect that if a 'Muslim' party pressed for Muslim quotas, secularism-as-chivalry would die a sudden death. We need a more durable and worldly understanding of a secular country than this hazy vision of Camelot where Hindu Galahads horse about protecting minority maidens. Secularism in contemporary India is often shrunk to one of its functions: minority protection. The safeguarding of minorities should be a central part of any secularist 14

agenda, but it can't be its entire programme or its reason for being. The protection of minorities should be derived from larger positions on citizenship and the rights it implies. Otherwise, secularism stops being a guide to political action. Take the Shah Bano incident where a Muslim woman sued for maintenance. The courts upheld her claim. Muslim groups agitated against the judgement, arguing it was contrary to the sharia or Islamic law. The governmentamended the constitution so that the Supreme Court judgement could be set aside. This naturally brought accusations from the Hindu right that the government was pandering to the Muslim vote. I can rememberfeeling that this was on balance the right thing to do because Muslims had a right to their religious practices; that even if they needed to be reformed, these practices needed to be reformed from within the community. But I had no secular calculus to count the cost of this position. I should have thought of the precedent this was setting: a government was amending the Constitution to set aside a verdict it didn't like. I think now of a BJP governmentdoing the same and I worry. 15

The point is not that I was wrong: the point is that I should have calculated the implications of my stand for laws and institutions that are indispensable for a secular politics. Having . done this, having used this secular ready reckoner, I would have been at liberty to support the government's position, but at least I would have known that there is a cost to taking tactical positions. Without this reckoning, my position on Shah Bano was not so much secularist as conservationist-it was based on conservationist metaphor: species and their habitats need to be protected.

a

This conservationist instinct has deep roots in the Indian construction of secularism. Right through its anti-colonial phase, the Congress's claim to being a secular and nationalist party was founded on the assertion that it represented all of India's human species. If Indian secularism has a defining ingredient, it isn't centrally a commitment to civil liberty or human rights though secularists are attached to these: secularism in India basically means a commitment to plurality. This, paradoxically for people who reject inherited identities (as secularists often do since they like to think 16

that they arrive at their attachments by choice and not by default), means being accepting of other people's inherited identities. So one of the things that secular Indians value is being considerate to human species different from them; people who take their birth identities-and the behaviours that come bundled with those identities seriously. The most radical statement of this conservationist case comes from Neera Chandoke's closely argued book, Beyond Secularism. Chandoke's achievement in this book is to show lucidly, how a commitment to plurality and minority rights can be derived from the humane society's commitment to equality. The difficulties with her argument begin when she suggests that a secularism based on religious freedom and State neutrality creates only procedural equality which is not enough to safeguard the individual rights of minority citizens. She argues that individuals make sense of the world through their cultural/religious communities. Minority citizens, therefore, need to have the freedoms of these communities safeguarded; further, since their right to 17

participate equally cannot be realized if the community they function through_is in decay, the State is obliged to take positive steps to create a supportive environment in which groups can maintain and reproduce their culture. So minorities are granted a measure of differential treatment in order to preserve their basic characteristics, that is, their differences. Chandoke says explicitly that because minorities are most vulnerable in the matter of preserving their communities (which instruct them in what is valuable in human dealings), 'we will need to institutea supportive environment in the form of group rights for the minority communities alone' (italics mine). There are two or three kinds of objections to this argument. To start with, it recommends government action that is ineffective, inconsistent, and risky. Ineffective because the differential treatment Chandoke prescribes has been in fact the minority policy of the Indian State for fifty years. She suggests that the State institute a supportive environment that encourages the publication and translationof books in minority languages, extends financial assistance to 18

writers, creates special cultural sections within departments of culture to publicize minority cultures, set up public agencies to promote and protect the art of minority groups, festivals of arts, exhibitions, theatre companies and dance groups, create libraries, museums, space for minority cultures on radio and television, and establish centres for the dissemination of minority cultures. The impression given by this list is of a large apparatus of patronage run by salaried commissars. The State is incapable of doing most of these things efficiently. Our Urdu academies, Ghalib academies, the Urdu on our one-rupee notes, translations by the Sahitya Akademi and Urdu news bulletins have succeeded in mummifying and tokenizing minority cultures while helping kill them off. If this is all we're talking about, it is already happening and it has made very little difference. State patronage has made no progress in shoring up the cultural community of a minority citizen, partly because the Indian State's quasi-non-governmentalorganizations are incompetent, and partly because the machinery of the State is worked by 19

majoritarian personnel. Even if you were to agree with Chandoke's argument for affirmative action and State-sponsored community preservation, this isn't the way .to go about it. The way to do it is by institutionalizingthe sharing of power: reserved seats, mandatory quotas, separate electorates etc. There are huge historical, political and operational difficulties with such solutions but that is the direction in which Chandoke' s prescription of community rights should logically take her. Her prescriptions are inconsistent because you cannot represent majoritarianism as a kind of false consciousnessand then in the same breath use the idea of a majority community as a statutory category for denying Hindus the cultural subsidies available to others. You can't fault majoritarian nationalism for invoking a monolithic Hindu majority and simultaneously discriminate against the heads counted within that notional majority. Affirmative action or positive discrimination, anything that contravenes procedural equality, should be implemented only if the group benefited has its backwardness consensually 20

ratified as in the case of the Scheduled Castes. Imagine an Uttar Pradesh where the state systematically gives bursaries to Muslim novelists writing in Urdu but not to Hindus writing in Hindi, or Muslims writing in Hindi or Hindus writing in Urdu. In a society where all writers struggle, this would be perceived as so dreadfullyunjust that this strenuouslysecular state would be discredited. To push the logic of this argument to the point of absurdity: how would Chandoke's State deal with the demographic extinction of the Parsis-would it be by forcing Parsis to marry out of their community and by framing laws that laid down in the teeth of orthodox opposition, that their offspring be recognized as Parsi? If the responsibility of the State is to make sure that minority communities do not decay or disappear, it becomes responsible not only to Parsis in the present but to Parsi generations to come which won't exist unless the State remodels the laws of the community. For the State to take responsibility for the preservationof religious communitiesinvolves moving into prickly, explosive territory. It is arguable that the nationalization of religious 21

practice by the State as sanctioned by dozens of judicial decisions since Independence is a development to be rolled back rather than encouraged. Chandoke's prescription is actually dangerous because it would allow chauvinist or majoritarian Hindus to substantiate their otheiwise fantasticalclaim that the Indian State is perverselyprejudicedagainst India's majority community simply because it is made up of Hindus. The secularist manifesto should be more modest in its aims and the demands it makes on the State. Its aim should be procedural equality, not preferential rights based on minority status. The latter might achieve substantiveequality,but the cost would be unacceptably high. The cautionary lesson of the twentieth century was that the best is generally the enemy of the good.

The Fragility of Republican Secularism The career of secularism in independent India, its rise and decline, can't be understoodwithout placing it in the context of a larger metropolitan culture because secularism was just one 22

amongst many choices that the Indian elite made after Independence and Partition. Since the rise of the BJP around the turn of the century, it isn't uncommon to encounter concerned secularists wringing their hands about the way in which civilized middle-class people, educated folk who ought to have known better, had embraced the ideas and slogans of the Hindu right. Cousins, aunts, parents, friends, whose secular moorings we had taken for granted, turned out to be apostates and turncoats. True believers tended to see secularism as the rock on which the Indian elite had built its house. They were wrong. •

To understand why the Indian ruling class's commitment to secularism proved so fragile, we need to distinguish secularism as political ideology from secularism as personal belief. Secularism for the Congress was both strategy and conviction: a strategy to force the British to recognize the Congress's credentials to speak for India, and conviction born of political struggle, suffering and solidarity in action. The Nehruvian State was heir to the Congress's political beliefs and convictions. But the ruling class of republican India wasn't made up of 23

Congress nationalists. It was a mixed class of bureaucrats, businessmen, rich peasants, rentiers, soldiers and professionals who had served the British and now served the Republic. They were secular because the preferred ideology of the State they served was this plural secularism. Also, to be individually or personally secular in republican India was to be modem, to be untrammelledby traditional, backward-lookingbeliefs and identities. Every post-colonial ruling class yearns to be modem, and during his time as prime minister, Nehru successfully sold secularism, non-alignment and State-led industrial growth as necessary ingredients in India's recipe for post-colonial modernization. Third-world elites worry about being considered provincial. In India this anxiety was particularly acute after Independence because a native elite was looking to fill imperial shoes. This elite had to invent ways of being appropriately metropolitan. English was the language that joined this pan-Indian ruling class, it was the price of admission. At its crudest, being metropolitan and modem in India could mean sitting on sofas and wearing 24

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shoes, but the Gandhian nationalism that had forced wogs like Nehru out of suits and into khadi, made sure that mimicry wasn't enough. So after Independence, this elite set about inventing ways of being indigenously sophisticated.This did not exclude a knowledge of Nietzsche or Bergman, but such knowledge had to co-exist with an appreciation of things Indian: handicraft, Hindustani classical music, our heritage generally. It is possible to see the decades after independence as a time when a set of standards designed to reproduce peoplelike-us was informallyput in place. The canons of good taste and discrimination by which the thrusting provincial could become a knowing metropolitan were diffused in the great cities of this subcontinent. A transferable elite created a portable culture. It was a magpie, hold-all culture made up of lots of different things-what these things had in common was that they travelled well. For example, Hindustani classical music is part of the metropolitanIndian's baggage, but Carnatic music is nol. This is because words matter in Carnatic music in a way that they have long since ceased to do in the Hindustani tradition. 25

Hindustani music has been secularized over time but an appreciation of vocal Carnatic music depends on an understanding of the devotional songs of Thyagaraja or Purandaradasa. In a linguistically diverse country like India, the Hindustani classical tradition was always likely to prevail because it allowed connoisseurship without the effort of learning a language. The main patron and sponsor of metropolitan taste in India was the State. All India Radio promoted modem Indian classical music till recording companies, private sector patrons and enthusiastic NGOs like SPICMACA Y joined in. The Khadi Bhandars and the Cottage Industries Emporium subsidized craft till private companies like Fablndia and Dastkartype NGOs saw different kinds of opportunities in this sector. Classical dancers and folk singers still quarrel over government crumbs, and whatever the rights and wrongs of government patronage, it is hard to deny it helped supply India's metropolitan elite with a sophisticated and eclectic culture. Basic to this metropolitan culture was an abstract commitment to India's variousness: 26

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its languages, its religions, ·its cultures. This diverseness gave metropolitan Indians a way of being cosmopolitan within their own borders. So while a marriage between communities-say a Tamil boy and a Bengali girl-might have caused familial unhappiness for its transgression of caste and cultural boundaries, there was place for it within the ranks of this elite. It even carried a certain cachet. It was daring and modem to choose romantic love over cultural prejudice. While this elite was quite capable of stigmatizing individuals and communities (Parsis, Bengalis, Anglo-Indians) as rootless ·and 'fast', one part of it also saw the dogmatic practice of tradition as provincial and applauded its subversion. Also, celebrating diversity allowed this elite the freedom to choose from the whole repertoire of Indian tradition. Today, girls in Bangalore wear salwar-kameez, walls in Delhi wear Tanjore paintings and M.S. Subbulakshmi sings Meera bhajans. Managing India's plurality was sometimes a problem, and members of this elite responded to the difficulties of diversity in two ways. One, they secularized their lifestyles because 27

modem metropolitan life made some taboos and traditional practices impractical. Two, they took secularism on board, not necessarily as a principle they believed in, but as a desirable modem idea. Secularism, like much else in the culture of the Indian metropolis, was sponsored and endorsed by the Nehruvian State. Used to taking its cues from the State, the Republic's elite followed suit. Because Partition and the Nehruvian Congress had shown that communalism was a bad thing, this metropolitan elite decided by a kind of default that secularism was a good thing. To be sectarian or communal was provincial, vulgar and backward looking, whereas our metropolitan elite wished to be cosmopolitan, sophisticated and progressive. More often than we like to imagine, people were secular because their neighbours were secular; put another way, secularism was a h~gemonic style it was fashionable. ~d in the way that couture coerces people into buying clothes they aren't comfortable wearing, secularismas-ambience encouraged many people to pay lip service to an idea that they had learnt by rote. 28

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Secularism as practised by the Indian elite often had little to do with conviction or ideological principle; it was, instead, a marker of modernity and metropolitan good taste. It's important to understand this because it helps explain why large sections of this elite traded in their secular clothes for khaki shorts with such alacrity. The failure of the State to make India economically successful eroded its claim to be progressive and modem. And because Nehru and his daughter had twinned socialist autarky and secularism, the failure of the one discredited the other. Since the diffusion of secularism had so much to do with the sponsorship of the Nehruvian State, the decline of the Congress as a political power and the consequent withdrawal of this patronage by the BJP had the opposite effect. Contemporary secular practice has to learn from past mistakes and the main lesson is this: we smugly took people-like-us for granted because we assumed that secularism came bundled with metropolitan identity like PCs come installed with Windows. We were wrong: secularism for this elite wasn't a political stance-it was a style choice. And styles change. 29

Naming the Enemy When did being secular become passe? Why did being secular stop being a necessary part of being modem? How did it become a dated holdover from an unsuccessful past? Why did Advani 's inspired coinage, 'pseudo-secular', persuade so many Indians that secularism was a hectoring, anti-Hindu project? Secularists are, as an American might say, in denial: we need to acknowledge that Advani has done to 'secular' what Reagan did to 'liberal'-he has made the term seem a straitjacket that has crippled the potential of a great nation by suppressing its basic impulses. ·Secular people find it not just hard, but impossible to understand why so many Indians vote for the BJP. They look at Advani equivocating about his party's record on the Bahri Masjid; they watch Murli Manohar Joshi being strident in an angavastram;they listen to the hate speech of its allies, the Shiv Sena, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal; they follow as best as they can the doings of dour ancients in Nagpur and wonder: why do people we know support these sullen, resentful, intolerant men? 30

People who support the BJP never think of it as communal. The historical triumph of the Congress is that every party must now lay claim to the virtue of being secular. The meaning of secularism can be contested (truly secular/pseudo-secular), but it is a value, like democracy, that no mainstream political party can publicly repudiate. The BJP is genuinely bewildered when it is called communal. It thinks of itself as nationalist, and it is not mistaken. The actor Victor Banerjee supports the BJP because he admires its nationalism. So do many others. And if we look at the history of nationalism, particularly the nationalisms of Europe, we will find that there is warrant for this claim. The BJP is the party of Hindu chauvinism. The BJP's chauvinism, which magazines like the Economistcall Hindu nationalism, is very different from the nationalism of the freedom struggle, the nationalism born of antiimperialism. Since colonial nationalism had to prove to the Raj that the variety of India could be gathered under the umbrella of a single movement, there was a Noah's Ark quality to Congress nationalism, as it did its best to keep 31

every species of Indian on board. The chauvinism of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in the mid1920s) had very little to do with anticolonialism. The RSS was a professedly apolitical militia, dedicated to Hindu selfstrengthening.Its nationalismwas derived from European models, and it was an exclusionary nationalism that tried to create a uniform citizenry on tried and tested European nationalist principles: a shared language, an authorized history, a single religion and a common enemy. French, Greek, German and Italian nationalism differ from each other in important ways, but none of them has any interest in plurality. The uniqueness of Congress's nationalism is its near-complete freedom from mystical and mystifying notions such as blood, soil or national essence which are the stock-in-trade of narrowerpatriotisms.The Congress,whether by design or default, replaced these with colonial exploitation and economic subjection. Because we don't fully appreciate the originality of the Congress's construction of nationalism, we tend to confuse it with this 32

other, European kind. And so do many of our fellow-citizens. Since the dominant sense of nationalism the world over is derived from the European experience, when a Hindu chauvinist arguing for the primacy of Hindi asks rhetorically, 'Doesn't France have a common language?', the French example begins to seem a sound nationalist precedent for supporting Hindi. When he asks, 'Don't the English acknowledge • that their culture and morality are derived from Christian values?', this becomes a persuasive reason to support the demand that all Indians acknowledge that they are constituted by Hindutva. The proper secularist response to this is that the nationalism of Gandhi that won us our freedom as a nation state and shaped the pluralism of the Constitution has very little in common with this hectoring, homogenizing patriotism. These • derivative arguments don't apply. They're irrelevant because they aren't rooted in the experience of our freedom struggle; they don't emerge from our nationalist practice. The reason it's important to acknowledge the BJP's claim to be the party of Hindu 33

chauvinism is to understand (more clearly than we could if we saw it as simply communal) how it tries to fudge the difference between the two nationalisms to create a genealogy for itself. The BJP has huge difficulty in laying claim to the freedom struggle because the role of its ideological forbears (the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS), in the struggle was minimal. There is a certain awkwardness in its appropriation of swaraj and swadeshi because they are nationalists without a nationalist movement. The BJP's posturing about the tricolour is particularly ironic because for decades, Hindu chauvinism swore by its saffron standard, the bhagva dhvaj, since the republican tricolour so closely resembled the flag of Gandhi's Congress. When the BJP lays claim to anti-imperialist campaigns like those of Subhas Bose and Bhagat Singh, it is scavenging, feeding on an imperial carcase killed by hunting-animals. What would INA heroes like Major General Shah Nawaz Khan have had to do with Hindu zealots? This BJP-brand of majoritarian nationalism isn't uniquely Indian: there are parallels with Serb and Sinhala nationalism. Hindu 34

chauvinism is a lot like Serbian nationalism: a memory of defeat at the hands of the Turks, legends of gallantry in defeat, a memory of long Turkish dominance and atrocity. It was this mythology of grievance that Tito managed to contain for fifty years, in a secular, federal State. The similarities to North India are uncanny: the same language, in different scripts; the shared ethnicity, the different religions. Kosovo is the Serbian Kashmir. The Serb and Sinhala majorities succeeded in aligning their States with their faiths, the Orthodox Church and the Buddhist Sangha respectively. Despite the much-advertised absence of a Hindu clergy, the BJP has been doing quite handily with its bands of sadhus and vocal Shankaracharyas. This alignment of the majority community and the nation state has done nothing to resolve internal conflict or civil war. It has made the divisions worse, and in some cases, hastened a partition. Indonesia has lost East Timor, Sri Lanka has effectively lost Jaffna, the rump State of Serbia has been deprived of Kosovo. It isn't hard to see the direction in which the BJP's belligerence towards Muslims .. in particular and minorities in general, could lead 35

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us in Kashmir.The precedentthe Sangh Parivar favoursin the businessof minoritymanage1nent is China and Tibet, that old fantasy of Hindu immigration and demographic engineering. That's not going to happen, unless we want a UN-supervised partition tomorrow.

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The BJP's identity is crucially dependent on the presence of the Muslims as the enemy Other. Christians are part of its demonology, but its historical grievance is centred on the Muslim conquest. Its nationalism is premised on Hinduism beleaguered by Islam. It is a sheepdog chauvinism where the BJP is the sheepdog, trying to keep a Hindu flock together, protecting the strays from Muslim and Christian wolves. If there were no wolves, there would be nothing for the BJP to do. It is a nationalism that like so many of its type in Europe, slips easily into chauvinist intolerance and bigotry. It isn't a coincidence that Golwalkar in the Thirties wrote in admiration of Hitler's way with Jews and the lessons to be learnt from this by Hindus faced with intransigent minorities.

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containing secession.or managing dissent, is a gift. Instead of reflexively denying the BJP,s claim to nationalism, secularists should ratify this claim enthusiastically. They should then distinguish it from the nationalism of Gandhi and the freedom struggle, and encourage an undecided public to study the self-destruction that BJP-likechauvinismswreaked on countries misguided enough to harbour them. The task of secular persuasion will be aided ·by the fact that the BJP . is unattractive in the way majoritarian parties with minority complexes always are. Bharat Mata being forced into petticoats intended for smaller Western women is not a pretty sight. And a Hindu Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian minorities is a story easier told as fiction than as real life.

Chauvinisms and Minorities lt,s useful to think about the ways in which some of India's Asian neighbours have dealt with their minorities. Comparing chauvinisms might help us understand why some Asian countries have gone further down the majoritarian road than India has and, · conversely, why the Indian State has generally 37

resisted majoritarian pressure to stand out as the protagonist of the Hindus . A comparison might also helps us assess the weight of the Sangh Parivar's claim that India's minorities, especially Muslims, have been pampered by a 'pseudo-secular' State. The complaints of Hindu chauvinists nearly all relate to Muslims. This is not unusual: chauvinism anywhere in the world is always directed against an 'alien' community that doesn't automatically 'belong' to the nation in the way that the 'host' community does. In Malaysia, the Malays consider themselves the original owners of the country and see Malaysia's Chinese citizens as outsider aliens whose citizenship is conditional on their recognition of the prior and organic claim of the Malays to Malaysia. Malays and their culture, in this view, define Malaysian nationality. The language of the Malays by its very name proclaims Malay ownership of Malaysia: it is simply called Bahasa Malaysia, just as its Indonesian counterpart is called Bahasa Indonesia. The Chinese nationals of Malaysia are pressed to acknowledge bhumiputra hegemony by taking on 38

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'indigenous' names, by incorporating a 'local' (Malay or Indonesian) partner in any ethnic Chinese enterprise, by acquiescing in their defacto exclusion from high political office despite their numbers (a third of the Malaysian population is ethnic Chinese). The idea of the bhumiputra or the son of the soil is central to the construction of national identity in these countries. Bhumiputra insecurities are fed by the success of the Chinese business community and the obvious importance of Chinese enterprise to the economic life of the nation. In Bangladesh (once East Pakistan), the substantial Hindu minority was resented as an exploiting landed elite that had for centuries oppressed the mainly Muslim peasantry. Hindus were distrusted as an urban Babu community and, after relations with India deteriorated, suspected of being Indian fifth columnists. A pattern of systematic discrimination and second class citizenship forced large parts of this Hindu population out of East Pakistan/Bangladesh. · ···· Less than a decade after Independence, the Sri Lankan State under Bandaranaike's Sri Lankan Freedom Party, moved to enthrone the majority 39

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by proclaiming Sinhala as the sole national language, and by explicitly promoting and subsidizing Buddhist institutions. When Sri Lanka became a Republic in 1972, the new constitution formally gave Buddhism 'the foremost place' in the life of the nation. Given the RSS chief's recent tirade against Christianity's foreignness, it is important to remember that Srimavo Bandaranaike's first government in the early 1960s nationalized all · private schools in Ceylon in responseto Sinhala Buddhist allegations that Christians had a strangleholdon the nation's educationalsystem. The Sri Lankan flag is a symbolic statement of Sinhala hegemony: the Sinhalese-Buddhist icon of the lion rampant dominates it, and toleratedat the margins of this Sinhala standard are two coloured stripes, orange and green, symbolizing Sri Lanka's Tamils and Muslims. Language, geography, ethnicity and religion distinguish the Sinhalese from the Tamils. The Tamils were concentrated in the north and east; they were non-Buddhists, their language was Tamil and their social origins lay in India's Tamil country. Sinhala chauvinists saw the Tamil minority as a threat well before the 40

Jaffna troubles degenerated into civil war. The heterogeneous Tamils-made up of plantation workers, subsistence peasants and a highly educated and socially mobile middle classs-were clubbed together and characterized as an encroaching elite minority with a presence in the professions and government service which, Sinhalese nationalists decided, was out of proportion to their population. When people argue that the absence of communal mayhem during the NDA's term in office proves that the apprehensions about BJP rule and the party's intentions in power were exaggerated, it's worth remembering that the political flowering of Sinhala chauvinism in the 1960s was relatively peaceful. After early violence against the Tamils in 1956 and then again in 1958, there was a long lull. It was after twenty years of majoritarian rule that the first antiTamil pogroms of the early 1980s were organized and the civil war in the north began in earnest. The Sangh Parivar's prescriptions lead us down that road. To be tolerated at the majority's pleasure is no substitute for full citizenship in modem democracies. It is a state of limbo, a chronically 41

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unstable condition. Second-class citizenship is so contrary to the basic assumptions of a democracy and such a reproach to its . functioning, that a democratic polity which cannot accept its minorities as full ci~izens moves, sooner or later, to disenfranchise them politically or to expel them physically on the grounds that despite being resident, they aren't nationals at all; that they actually belong · elsewhere-in India or China or Pakistan or Tamil Nadu or Palestine. The history of Pakistan can be read in this connection as a cautionary tale. It warns us of the intolerance that results from the idea that a country belongs to a community. Pakistan's minorities live on sufferance beleaguered by the Hudood ordinances and blasphemy laws of a nouveauIslamic state. Jinnah's early plea for equal rights for all Pakistanis came to nothingcould have come to nothing- given the logic of intolerance built into the idea of a majoritarian State . It has begun to gather pace in India, this campaign that challenges the right of minorities to be equal citizens and questions their loyalty as Indians. On 17 December, 2000, Bal 42

Thackeray was interviewed in Saamna, the Shiv Sena mouthpiece, where he was reported to have said that all political parties would become pro-Hindutva if Muslims were denied the right to vote. Newspapers debated whether Thackeray was actually advocating the disenfranchisement of Muslims . Thackeray claimed that his statement was predictive, not prescriptive . In an editorial titled 'Lunatic Fringe' on 19 December, the Indian Express noted that Thackeray may have been encouraged by Vajpayee' s recent statement that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement had been an expression of 'national sentiment'. But even as it made the connection between Thackeray's provocation and this affirmation of Hindutva by India's prime minister, the Express recommended that Thackeray be ignored to deprive him and his kind, of the 'oxygen of publicity'. You can only ignore Thackeray if you assume that his provocations are so outrageous that they put him beyond the pale . But the party he leads, the Shiv Sena-an important partner in the BJP-led ruling coalition in Delhi-has ruled Maharashtra, India's most industrialized 43

and cosmopolitan state, it is an important partner in the BJP-led ruling coalition in Delhi, and Thackeray's political beliefs are now the common sense of mainstream Indian politics (such as his understanding of Hindutva). In his interview, Thackeray was implicitly using Hindutva as a synonym for nationalism or lndianness. He was saying that if Indian parties didn't have to pander to Muslims as a vote bank, they (Indian political parties) would tum to Hindutva, i.e. an ideology that was truly Indian, properly nationalist. Now this understanding of Hindutva is shared by the BJP, the senior partner in India's ruling coalition. The then BJP spokesman, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, when asked to respond to the utterances of Thackeray (the leader of a political party allied to the BJP), refused to comment . He hadn't read Thackeray's comments and didn't know the context in which they were made. He did say that .his party didn't favour taking away the rights of any citizen. But Malhotra's party, the BJP, is partial to the idea that Hindus are natural citizens of India because their sacred sites are contained within the boundaries of the nation, while Muslims and Christ1ans have extra44

territorial loyalties. Sudarshan, the chief of the RSS, recently advised Catholics to reject the Pope and sever their links with Rome, the better to 'nationalize' the Catholic church. Thackeray sees Muslims as an obstreperous minority holding up the process of 'lndianization' as defined by Hindutva. In making this equivalence between Hindutva and lndianization, Thackeray could have cited in support the Supreme Court judgement of 1996, where the court ruled that ' ... the word ''Hindutva'' is used and understood as a synonym of ''Indianization'', i.e. development of uniform culture by obliterating the differences between all the cultures co-existing in the country.' So while Thackeray's willingness to speculate on the disenfranchisement of Muslims makes him sound like a maverick, his understanding of Hindutva as Indianization is one that he shares with India's largest political party, the BJP. His impulse to disenfranchise Muslims is rooted in this majoritarian understanding of what it means to be Indian. If Hindutva means lndianization, then some Indians, clearly, are more Indian than others. 45

It is characteristic .-of majoritarian politics (whether in Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Nazi Gern1any) that the demonized minority in every case is resented for being socially or economically more powerful than the 'indigenous' majority. So the Jews are rootless financiers responsible for the subversion of the German economy, the Tamils are guilty of monopolizing Sri Lanka's professional and bureaucratic institutions, the Chinese in South-East Asia stand accused of shutting local populations out of business through racial conspiracy (besides being guilty of being different) and Bangladeshi Hindus are stigmatized for the centuries of oppression their educated and (relatively) prosperous coreligionists unleashed upon Bengal's plebeian Muslims. The Muslim minority in India doesn't fit this pattern. Even before Partition, the much larger Muslim community of British India wasn't economically dominant anywhere in the subcontinent. Punjab was a partial exception, partial because Muslim prosperity, such as it was, was based largely on landholding; trade, commerce and urban business were dominated 46

by non-Muslims. The United Provinces (mode111Uttar Pradesh) was home to a class of influential Muslim landowners and Muslims had a larger share of education and government employment in that province than they did in the rest of the country, but it would be hard to show that they dominated politics or administration or business anywhere in north India. There was a tiny Muslim community in Bombay province, of which the visible and prosperous tip was a community of Ismaili merchants and businessmen; there was a Muslim elite in Hyderabad city parasitic on the Nizam's administration, but apart from these islands of privilege and prosperity, the Muslim community contributed more than its fair share to the ranks of India's urban and rural poor. This partly explains the other difference between India and countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh: the unwillingness of the independent Indian State to formally sponsor majoritarian demands or to systematically discriminate against its most significant minority. The independent States of Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and 47

Bangladesh succumbed to the temptation of institutionally entrenching the majority's interest partly because their minorities could be shown to be or were perceived as being more privileged, more prosperous or more powerful than the rest. In India, it was hard to sell such an idea, and not only because the Congress, the party of. anti-imperialist nationalism, was a pluralist and secular organization, though this was important. Despite the catalogue of historical and political sins attributed to predatory Muslims, there was no general sense of resentment born of envy simply because it was clear to everyone that Muslims as a community were backward rather than privileged. If the Muslim population of India was relatively backward just before Partition, its economic and social standing after Partition declined further. It was numerically weaker: the larger part of the community was lost to Pakistan and what remained was a rump, an impoverished rump, because many educated Muslims from parts of India other than the P*istan areas migrated to the new Muslim State. By every criterion used to measure 48

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development education, income, employment, life expectancy-the Muslims of independent India were a depressed community even by the low standards of a poor country. Today, more than half a century after Independence, Muslims lag behind every major religious community in India. If the UNDP's country reports on human development were to organize information in community categories, the visible gap between Muslims and other Indians would embarrass the Republic. It is in the context of this demonstrable backwardness that we need to explore the appeal of the Sangh Parivar's conviction that the Indian State has pampered minorities in general and appeased Muslims in particular.

Hindu Grievances The chauvinism of the majority in countries like Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka is directed against minority populations that are (or can be shown to be) more powerful or privileged than the majority communities that claim to be their 'hosts'. India doesn't fit this pattern because the members of the 49

country's largest minority-the Muslims are patently more backward (by any measure) than Hindus. Since any sense of injury or grievance needs plausible arguments to sustain itself, what is the nature of 'Hindu' grievance? The 'Hindu' sense of being hard done by is based on a set of related grievances: Muslim vandalism in the past; the gall of Muslims in first partitioning the country to form a Muslim State in Pakistan and then expecting to have their sensibilities respected in India; the related idea that Muslims are untrustworthy fifth columnists; the bogey of Muslim fertility and the fantasy of Hindu extinction, and finally, the contentious matter of Muslim personal law which allows Muslim men to practise polygamy decades after Hindu men lost this perk in the mid-Fifties. Each of these grievances deserves an essay, but I want to focus on the rhetorical use of Muslim personal law by sectarian Hindus. The widespread concern for the condition of Muslim women is one example of the way in which women's issues are used to score sectarian points. Boiled down, this concern often translates into a resentment that Hindu 50 .

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men can only have one wife, while their Muslim fellows can legally have four. In the Indian context this is an argument about male entitlement rather than women's rights. This becomes even clearer when you realize that the most eloquent champions of the oppressed Muslim woman and the uniform civil code (read: monogamy for Muslim men) are militant Sangh Parivar Hindus not otherwise noted for their interest in Muslim welfare. However, as Aron Shourie has often argued, the ideological position of the critic shouldn't be used to dismiss his argument.The staunchest defenders of pluralism in this country would find it difficult to make a case for legally sanctioned polygamy, which is the right that Muslim men enjoy in India today. The Mormons in America took the same line that some Muslims take in India, namely, that polygamy for them was sanctioned by their faith and therefore outside the purview of secular law. It was an argument that was disallowed in the United States of America and it deserves the same fate here. Democracies are founded on the principle that the rights of the individual (abstracted from the society in 51

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which he or she lives) override the claims of community. A credible campaign for a common civil code would respect this principle and try to purge the law of gender bias wherever it appears. It should come as no surprise that this isn't the case in India. A little over four years ago, I was in Faizabad during the general elections. Since I was there to make sense of politics in a constituency where the Bahri Masjid had been razed by the Sangh Parivar, I made it a point to visit the district's BJP office. The office was a newly-built shop on Faizabad's main road and it was bustling with middleclass men and women. The man in charge was a school headmaster. I broached the issue of a uniform civil code and suggested that such a code would not only outlaw polygamy, it would reform anomalies in Hindu law such as the provision that the head or karta of a Hindu Undivided Family can only be a male. The headmaster shook his head benevolently. The BJP, he declared, was only against those provisions in the law that were anti-national. I was puzzled. How was polygamy anti-national? I could see that it 52

discriminated against women, but then so did the provision for the exclusively male karta. The headmaster was incredulous. Polygamy was anti-national because it led to more babies and that was against the nation's attempt to control population growth. If you allowed Muslim men to marry four times, it followed that they would produce more children than Hindu men. I tried to explain that whether a Muslim married once or four times, the total population of Muslim women remained constant. So if we made the reasonable assumption that Muslim men generally married Muslim women, the number of wombs available for bearing Muslim children remained constant. So if one Muslim acquired four wives, three other Muslim men would have to stay single, thus levelling out the fabled fertility of the polygamous Muslim. The headmaster laughed indulgently. He thought I was pulling his leg. He really believed that four wives meant four times as many children. The status of Muslim women, Muslim fertility and Muslim polygamy were such charged, high-voltage issues that when they entered his head together, . they sparked and 53

short-circuited thought. His brains fused and it became impossible for him to see through the illogic of received wisdom. The Muslim population in India has historically grown marginally faster than the populations of other communities but not because of polygamy. Polygamy doesn't explain greater fertility: the reasons for that have to be found elsewhere. The schoolmaster's confusion of issues that are distinct from each other, his arbitrary arrangement of these disparate issues into a cause-effect relationship, isn't limited to the lower echelons of the Sangh Parivar. K.R. Malkani, a senior leader of the BJP, recently wrote an article in the Hindu (28 November, 2000) on the status of Muslim women. This article is an exemplary text because the route of Malkani' s argument shows us how a social issue is turned into a sectarian grievance by Hindu ideologues. The occasion for this article was the publication of a report by the NCW (National Commission for Women) on the status of Muslim women. Malkani's tone right through the article is moderate and for the most part his persona is that of a man looking for a way of 54

emancipating the Muslim community. 'Muslim society,' he writes, 'is poorer than Hindu society-having a yearly income of Rs. 22,807 per household as against the national average of Rs. 25,653. But it has a higher birth rat~e39 per l 000 as against the Hindu rate of 32.' Then, in an interesting move, he attributes the several problems Muslims face , to their attachment to a reactionary personal law: 'There is a vicious circle of large families, poverty, little education and less employment . According to the 1991 census, Muslims are 12.12 per cent of the population . But only 4 per cent of Indians who finish school are Muslim . Only 4 per cent of Indians in government jobs are Muslim. And nobody seems to know how to break this vicious circle . To an objective observer the solution is clear enough; there must be a ban on polygamy and triple talaq' (italics mine). To press for the abolition of polygamy or arbitrary and one-sided divorce procedures is unexceptionable. But to see their abolition as an antidote to illiteracy, unemployment and high birth-rates is plainly wrong. Nor does polygamy necessarily lead to poverty-Saudi 55

princes maintain whole harems with no noticeable effect on their standard of living.

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So why does Malkani make this argument? He makes it because it is important for him to show that the backwardness of the Muslim community lies in its · Muslim-ness; in its unreasonable attachment to Muslim personal law. More importantly, it allows him to suggest that Muslim personal laws don't just hurt Muslims, they also threaten Hindus because a larger Muslim population means more political clout for Muslims in an electoral democracy. An attachment to Muslim personal law then becomes part of a political design. The fear of demographic extinction has haunted Hindu leaders ever since U.N. Mukherji's Hindus-A Dying Race was published in 1909. As the historian P.K. Datta has shown, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhai Parmanand, the leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha were all agitated by the prospect of Hindus being swamped by a burgeoning Muslim population. K.R. Malkani massages this anxiety when he writes that ' ... there are Muslim leaders who urge their flock to have more children since ''even the lame and the blind have the same one vote'' and population is power.' 56

An article that starts out as a prescription for the welfare of Muslim women quickly turns into a demonstration of how Muslim personal law damages the nation. Malkani's justification for the uniform civil code makes this explicit. Such a code needs to be implemented because otherwise '. . . the resulting Muslim backwardness in education, employment and women's rights is a serious drag on Indian society.' So now the surgeon-general has determined that an attachment to Muslim personal law is not just anti-woman, it's antinational and bad for everyone's health.

It is legitimate to be committed to a common civil code and you don't have to be a sectarian Hindu to oppose polygamy and the triple talaq. But the arbitrary conflation of polygamy and Muslim fertility, the unsourced smear about anonymous Muslim leaders urging Muslims to breed in their drive to power, the bizarre and slightly sinister argument that an economically backward community is a 'drag' on the nation (by which logic Hindus are a drag on the nation when they're compared to more advanced and 'progressive' communities such as Christians and Parsis) makes it evident that 57

despite Malkani 's solicitude for Muslim women, his article is an unpleasant but typical example of the instrumental use of social concern for political ends. Demonizing minorities by exciting the envy of the majority is bad enough; stigmatizing Muslims by using their backwardnessas a weapon is just wicked. Towards the end of his article, Malkani refers to the problems Muslims face in Gujarat according to the NCW report. One is that Muslims find it difficult to rent apartments.in Gujarat. He finds a non-sectarian reason for this in the Gujarati aversion to non-vegetarian food. I'm not opposed to Malkani giving Gujarati Hindu landlords the benefit of doubt; I just wish he could find it in his heart to extend the same generosity to others.

Bans and Reservations: Constitutionally Sacred Cows The rhetoric of Hindu ideologues grows out of the conviction that the Constitution and the post-Independence policies of the Indian State have been partial to Muslims. Muslim personal law is the stick with which they beat the 'pseudo-secular' State for this 'partiality'. Their 58

arguments are founded on the grievance that the Constitution, the State and law depart from the desirable condition of uniformity only when Muslim sensibilities are at stake, thus creating a divisive and dangerous exceptionalism. This is simply untrue. The Constitution and the law as it stands defers to Hindu sensibilities as often as it does to minority feelings. Hindus have their own personal law with special provisions for the Hindu Undivided Family, the prejudices of patriarchal Hindu religious texts are frequently inserted into personal laws when it comes to the rights of Hindu women, and special reservations such as those for the scheduled castes are only available to Hindus or those classified as Hindus for the purposes of the law. Perhaps the most glaring example of the Indian State's and the Indian Constitution's willingness to accommodate Hindu feeling is the near total ban on cow slaughter. The Indian State is directed by the directive principles of the Indian Constitution to discourage the slaughter of draught and milch cattle. This is not legally binding upon the 59

State, but like all directive principles, the State is meant to enforce this principle over time. In India, this constitutionally mandated ban has been imposed in all but two states-the exceptions being Kerala and West Bengal. Recently there hav.e been renewed calls for the prohibition of slaughter on the ground that Indian abattoirs inflict needless pain upon cattle. The accusation of cruelty has been most forcefully levelled by an animal rights group called PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) which has sponsored a global campaign against the import of Indian leather goods into Western countries. In response to this campaign, Indian government officials have promised to more stringently enforce regulations forbidding the transport of cattle from one state to another. Generally, north Indian cattle are trucked to Bengal where they are slaughtered.PETA finds the conditions of transportation appalling, because by the time they reach the abattoir, many animals are half-dead from exhaustion or injury. The cause of banning cow slaughter has influential local sponsors too. The campaign against cow slaughter in India cites animal 60

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rights, cruelty· to animals, the economic wellbeing of the rural Indian population, but it's fair to say that these reasons are red herrings . • Cow slaughter in India is taboo because of the religious sensibilities of the Hindus who worship the cow and sentimentally see female cattle as embodiments of nurture, and therefore, as mothers: gau mata. Since the late 19th century, cow slaughter has been a political issue in India. The issue has been constantly raised not just in isolated ways, but as a national problem. During the Khilafat/Non-cooperation movement, Gandhi saw the institution of the Khilafat as the 'Muslim cow'. Indeed, he specifically asked his Khilafatist comrades to urge Muslims not to sacrifice cows. So the quid pro quo for nonMuslim support for the sultan of Turkey, the so-called Khalifa, was a Muslim moratorium on the killing of cows. During the Twenties and the Thirties as communal relations soured, this reciprocal restraint reversed itself and became tit-for-tat provocation: when Hindus asserted th~ir unrestricted right to play music before mosques, Muslims held out for an unlimited right to slaughter cows. 61

The insertion of the directive principle on cow slaughter could not have happened if India had not been divided . It was a republican sop to Hindu sentiment, half-heartedly written into the Constitution. Jawaharlal Nehru, who personally opposed a ban on cow slaughter, indirectly conceded it by transferring the responsibility for imposing such a ban on state governments and not the Centre. He tried to camouflage this capitulation to Hindu sentiment by directing that should such a ban be imposed by a state government, its justification should be on 'rational' economic grounds, not on grounds of wounded religious sensibility. It is important to establish the real reason behind this particular directive principle so that we can focus on the rights and wrongs of it without being diverted into irrelevant discussion of the place of the cow in the wealth of India, the cruelty of abattoirs, the perils of red meat or the merits of vegetarianism. The substantial issues this directive principle raises are these: one, is it legitimate to restrict the rights of others to protect the sensibilities of a religious community, and two, does it become okay to 62

do so when the community constitutes the overwhelming majority of the Republic's population? To answer the first question, it is important to ask what the consistent application of this principle would entail. It would mean more prohibitions to start with. There is another directive principle which instructs the Indian State to enforce a ban on the sale and consumption of liquor-prohibition in the historical sense of the word. Yet, unlike the near total prohibition of cow slaughter, the prohibition on the sale and consumption of alcohol has been durably enforced only in Gujarat. Tamil Nadu was• a dry state for many years but is not so now, and Andhra Pradesh, having courted populist feeling by imposing prohibition, has now backtracked. If a Muslim political party or a fundamentalist Islamic organization demanded prohibition on the ground that the Constitution mandates it, as does Islam, what answer would the Indian State give them? Alcohol is bad for you, women suffer terribly at the hands of alcoholic husbands (in states like Andhra, women have 63

favoured prohibition), Islam, Gandhi and the Constitutionare against it. There's no argument that you can make for banning cow slaughter that you can't make for prohibition. To test this principle further, let's look at smoking in the context of bans. When J .S. Bhindranwale was alive and the writ of militants ran in towns like Amritsar and Patiala, newspapers reported that cigarette vendors and cigarette smokers were being terrorized into submission. A new Sikh puritanism was enforcing no-smoking zones upon Punjab's citizens. Newspaper readers were indignant. But seen in the light of our principle, smoking is a better candidate for the directive principle treatment than either cow slaughter or prohibition. It is anti-social in that non-smokers are forced to breathe in smoke and we know now that passive or secondary smoking is dangerous. It deeply offends Sikh sensibilities and given the fact that non-smokers involuntarily inhale the smoke around them, Sikhs are everywhere provoked by that which is anathema to them and their faith. Yet we all know that a generalized ban on tobacco would create a storm of protest if it were imposed to protect Sikh sensibilities. 64

Interestingly, there have been restrictions placed on smoking by the Indian State. Smoking is forbidden in nearly all public buildings and public transpqrt and in some cases, even in public parks like the Lodhi Gardens in Delhi. The prohibition is, in the main, respected. It is respected because smoking has been shown to be a global health hazard and the Indian State is seen to be acting out of concern for the well-being of the country's population, not the sensibilities of a fraction of it. Secondly, the restrictions on smoking are successful because they are restrictions, not a total ban. Smoking is controlled by designating no-smoking areas, health warnings, public education and punitive taxation. The act isn't criminalized or driven underground as has happened in Gujarat in the case of drinking. There is no significant black-marketing of cigarettes, and no tobacco mafia. Cow slaughter, on the other hand, has been criminalized. When it occurs, it occurs in a hole-and-comer way. Even abattoirs in states where it is legal, like West Bengal, are often illegally supplied with cattle from other states 65

because not only is slaughter forbidden in most states of the Indian Union, it is also illegal to transport cattle from these states to other states. This law, solely designed to thwart the trade in beef cattle, does nothing of the kind. It becomes a bludgeon in the hands of a corrupt police force that uses it to wring gratuities out of the beef trade. In response to the PET A campaign, a defensive Bharatiya Janata Party government declared that it would monitor more stringently the illegal transport of cattle. For the BJP, this is a win-win situation: the party pleases its home constituency by going after butchers and beef traders who aren't generally called Agrawal, Singh and Shanna, and the Sangh Parivar, for once, is seen to be on the same wavelength as the international community of the politically correct. We have seen this before, this twinning of humane causes and human prejudice. The pioneer in this field is that mega-starlet Brigitte Bardot who hates Arabs and loves animals and has found the perfect platform for both passions by leading a campaign to protect French cows from the ministrations of halal 66

butchers. In India, this double act will play even better to a larger, more receptive audience given the Hindu attachment to cows and constitutional sanction of the directive principles. It's clear that the ban on cow slaughter cannot be justified by an appeal to religious sensibility simply because there are several different religious sensibilities which aren't given the same consideration when it comes to their taboos and anathemas. What about the second justification, the brazen assertion that India is a Hindu country and that this overwhelming majority has a right to have its sensibilities deferred to by those who may not share its feelings? This is a bad argument simply because it is a non-constitutional one. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any warrant for treating a community as pre-eminent or its preferences as overriding . Could concerned Hindus argue that the cow is a mother for Hindus and that her murder, therefore, is matricide? Or that the cow is a goddess and therefore her slaughter pains Hindus in a way that cannot be compared to the Muslim distaste for drinking or the Sikh rejection of smoking? 67

If a Hindu were to argue this, what answer would he have to Catholics who oppose abortion because they believe it is murder? By what reckoning do Hindus rank killing adult bovines as more offensive than killing human foetuses in the womb? What kind of society is it where killing human foetuses is an undebated, taken-for-granted social good subsidized by the State, while killing cows is an evil that needs to be combated by the directive principles of the Indian Constitution and prevented at enormous expense by the police? The Indian State allows the destruction of human foetuses. It even subsidizes it. It allows foreign agencies like Marie Stopes to set up shop to perform abortions. Abortions are advertised in every street comer by doctors-qualified ones and quacks-and there is no controversy, outrage or provocation. There is a real issue at stake here, the question whether destroying the foetus means taking human life . Catholics believe it does, and consequently oppose the legalization of abortion. I believe it doesn't and support the Indian government's position. Civil society accepts State policy in the matter of abortion 68

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because it is seen to be in the interest of women generally. If, for religious reasons, the government were to take the opposite view, it would be properly criticized for letting religion muddy its thinking. There are Catholic States like Ireland that restrict abortion, and there too, liberal and secular opinion has insisted that the State not intervene and that the matter be left to individual conscience. By the same argument, the slaughter, sale and consumption of beef should be determined by individual choice, not government prohibition. '

Hindu Reservations After India became independent, its republican Constitution abolished the reservations that the colonial State had granted to various communities. Communal reservation, especially political reservations for Muslims, was distrusted by nationalists as a successful colonial stratagem that divided Indians and prepared the ground for Partition. Given this republican allergy to communal reservations, it comes as a surprise that the Constitution has been operating a system of Hindu reservation for half a century. 69

Dalit reservation is Hindu reservation. The only Indians eligible for scheduled caste reservationsare those whom the Census records as Hindu or members of religious communities that are treated by the Constitution as Hindu by a kind of default: Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. Muslims and Christians are excluded. The reasoning behind this distinction is that untouchability(the rule of thumb used to define scheduled castes) is peculiar to the Hindu caste system. Dalits suffer disabilities because caste Hindus consign them to an existence beyond the Hindu pale. Since Dalit reservation is meant to redress this uniquely Hindu wrong, the question of Muslims and Christians sharing in this reservation does not arise. This is a deceptively simple argument. The injustice that Dalit reservations address is a history of degradationand deprivation,a denial of education and access to employment, a vicious segregation, a denial of the physical space and basic amenities that make for honourableliving. Dalit reservationsin politics, academics and employment try precisely to make up for this loss of opportunity in the secular domain: jobs, political power, and 70

education. When well-meaning upper-caste Hindus campaigned to open temples to 'untouchables' as a way of expressing their concern for them, they missed the point. Dalits wanted action that acknowledged their humanity, not their Hindu-ness. Now consider this. A Dalit, sick of uppercaste discrimination, decides, like Ambedkar, to formally renounce his Hindu identity in protest. Unlike Ambedkar, who converted to Buddhism, this hypothetical Dalit converts to Christianity. He is automatically disqualified from every kind of reservation. Why? Are we to assume that by becoming Christian he has emancipated himself materially, has sloughed off epochs of exploitation like a seasonal skin? He may not want to worship in Hindu temples any more, nor sup with Hindus, but he still needs access to education, employment and political representation. He is denied them because the Constitution does not allow Christians of Dalit origin to apply for reservation. If this denial is based on the dodgy argument that Christianity and Islam are egalitarian faiths and therefore their adherents have no need of 71

reservation, why does this not apply to mazhabi Sikhs, who belong to a faith as fiercely egalitarian as any? Because Sikhs are considered Hindus for constitutional purposes. It isn't much of an answer, but it is the only one on offer. It is based on the curious assumption that religions of 'lndic' origin are basically Hindu. The Sangh Parivar lives by this assumption. This should surprise no one. That the Constitution shares this assumption and makes it operational in the business of scheduled caste reservation should raise a few eyebrows. Seen from this point of view, scheduled caste reservations could be construed by a 'Muslim' polemicist as a gigantic inducement held out by the State to keep Dalits Hindu. But let us, for the sake of argument, accept that the reasoning behind the exclusion of Muslims and Christians from scheduled caste reservation is sound. Let us accept that scheduled caste reservation exists to compensate one set of Hindus for their historical oppression by another set of Hindus. This raises another question: why should Muslims and Christians help pay this 72

compensation? Why should they share in the costs of compensating scheduled caste Hindus when they can't share in the benefits of reservation? That they are made to share in the costs is self-evident:when, from the general pool of jobs, academic places and electoral seats, a percentage is reserved for Dalits (defined as Hindus) they become unavailable to everyone, not just upper-caste Hindus. Let me illustrate this: a teaching position, say, a readership in modem Indian history, is reserved for Dalit candidates.A Christian can't apply even though he has no responsibility for the condition of Dalits in this country. So he is made to suffer a loss of opportunity because of something one lot of Hindus did to another. That doesn't seem fair. Perhaps a 'Christian' rhetorician could argue that there should be a 'Hindu quota of opportunity' from which the Dalit share should be subtracted, given how keen the Constitution seems to be to keep Dalit reservations Hindu. Apart from discussing the injustices internal to the mechanism of reservation, I'm trying to make a larger point. ~Hindu' ideologues consistently argue that the Indian State panders 73

to minorities, pampers Muslims and generally goes out of its way to accommodate exceptions to a republican norm (such as mopogamy) when the sensibilities of minority communities are at stake. By demonstrating how, in the . matter of scheduled caste reservation, the Constitution makes exceptional arrangements for beneficiaries specifically defined as Hindu, I want to show that this stereotype of the minority-loving, Hindu-baiting State doesn't fit the reality of the Republic. I am not seriously trying to press for a Hindu quota out of which Dalit reservations ·should be subtracted: I am trying to explain that in a complex, plural and unequal society such as ours, the State can't always appear to be evenhanded, or make the assumption that one size fits all, or always apply a principle uniformly and consistently. Every attempt to make special or exceptional arrangements is vulnerable to the charge of bias or favouritism. Muslims and Christians could (as I have shown) plausibly argue that scheduled caste reservations discriminate against them or, conversely, favour Hindus. That they haven't pressed this argument is to their credit. The 74

next time you hear a muscular Hindu working himself into a lather about how soft the State is on Muslims, how it subsidizes Haj pilgrims or tolerates polygamy, you could tell him th~t:

Nationalizing Minorities Not long ago, seemingly divergent statements by leaders of the Sangh Parivar (K.S. Sudarshan of the RSS and Bangaru Laxman of the BJP) on Christians and Muslims in India, were widely interpreted as evidence that the RSS and the BJP had begun to part company on the question of minorities. This was a radical misreading of their statements. Sudarshan' s demand that Christian churches be 'nationalized' and his gratuitous advice to Indian Christians and Muslims to indigenize themselves, is consistent with Laxman's declaration that the BJP intended to recruit from amongst minorities because most Christians and Muslims were converts from a Hindu parent population. Gail Omvedt, in an interesting essay, makes the point that Sudarshan 's de1hand that Christian churches snap their links with organizations outside India on nationalist 75

grounds is odd because with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Israel and India, _the religious majorities in nearly all modem nations have their sacred sites outside their national boundaries. The strength of the nation state in Austria isn't undermined by the fact that Austrian Catholics are ecclesiastically subordinated to the Pope. Sudarshan 's insistence that churches be nationalized has nothing to do with the security or integrity of India's nation state. This urge to nationalize Christian churches is based on the Sangh Parivar's need to assert Hindu primacy by stigmatizing Christians as alien. It is a way of saying that while Hindus are effortlessly and organically citizens of India because their religion and the aboriginal culture of their nation coincide, this is not true for Christians and Muslims, whose punyabhumi lies outside their pitrbhumi. Since it is politically unacceptable to say that minorities should put up with discrimination or shut up and get out, an at.tempt is made (by leaders like Laxman) to assimilate minorities in the idiom of flesh and blood. Crudely put, the Parivar is saying that an Indian Christian's soul might be Christian, but 76

his body is Hindu, because Hindu-ness has been genetically written into desi bodies. Hinduism used in this way is a radioactive belief system that enjoys an infinitely long half-life even in a body that has disavowed it. Whatever the mind believes, the marrow remains Hindu. From the Parivar' s point of view, the religious beliefs of Indian minorities are foreign grafts on fundamentally Hindu bodies. Therefore, Indian Christians and Muslims are being perverse when they refuse to acknowledgethe Hindu substance,the Hindu flesh and blood that houses their recently acquired alien beliefs. For the Sangh Parivar, there are two ways of .disarming this dangerous alienness: I) shuddhi, which is not, strictly speaking, a conversion or a re-conversion but an exorcism, a purging of the. foreign ghost that has taken possession of the inherently Hindu body and 2) if the Christian or Muslim in question chooses to remain stubbornly Christian or Muslim, an acknowledgement from him that this identity is subordinate to the national identity which in tum is premised on Hindutva, the ideology that asserts the basically Hindu foundations of 77

India. So, minorities in an RSS-led India would have the free choice of either ceasing to be minorities, or genuflecting publicly at the altar of the Hindu State and the majoritarian culture that it sponsors. The politics that follows from this view divides India's citizens into two sorts: the country's 'natural' citizenry, Hindus, who, in tennis terms, get a bye into the main draw, and the rest-Muslims, Christians, etcwho need to play qualifying rounds. Unlike tennis, this treatment isn't based on performance; it isn't meritocratic. It is based on birth and belief and is discriminatory in the worst sense of that word. When Sudarshan and Bangaru Laxman say that minorities should join the mainstream, or be proud of their 'Indian' heritage, what they mean practically is this. Minorities should, as a token of their good faith-their lndiannesss..-use 'Indian' names, because Raju is better than Roger and Asit more Indian than Aslam. They should acknowledge the vandalism of their Christian or Muslim forbears and share in the sense of historical injury that is the Sangh Parivar's reason for being. They should accept Hindu claims to disputed sacred sites 78

partly as public atonement for the sins of their ancestors and partly because they too were victims. If only they listened to their deepest selves, to the Hindu marrow of their desi bones, their blood too would boil with remembered outrage. In effect, the proper psychological state for patriotic Muslims and Christians (as prescribed by the Parivar) is a compound of contrition and self-hatred. The Sangh Parivar's enthusiasm for this metaphor of flesh-and-blood should alert us to its intellectual pedigree. The only way in which the Parivar can assimilate minorities into its conception of a nation is by granting them a racial alibi. Bangaru Laxman's green card issued to Indian Muslims and Christians is based on the assumption that nearly all of them were converts once. Laxman, Sudarshan, the cadres of the Sangh never tire of repeating this. It follows that India's minorities were indigenous before they were converted. They are sprung, therefore, from aboriginal stock, which is, by definition, Hindu/Indian. This pseudo-biological nationalism is derived from Gobineau's long-discredited racist idea that successful nations can only spring from pure, 79

unmiscegenated Aryan communities . This idea nourished the political thought of H.S. Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler as well as that of Guru Golwalkar, the ideologue and theoretician of the RSS. It isn't surprising that Sudarshan's views on nationalized churches are inspired by the practice of China, a totalitarian State. The troubles in Israel and Palestine show us that a community-based nationalism systematically subverts the peace of a nation. Israel, a functioning democracy, has the greatest difficulty in incorporating the twenty per cent of its population that is Arab . Defined by the project of Zionist nationalism as a Jewish State, Israel's constitution makes it clear that the natural citizen of Israel is a Jew . In fact, the unqualified 'right of return' (the right of any Jew anywhere in the world to 'return' to Israel and become a citizen) gives non-Israeli Jews more rights in Israel than are possessed by its Arab citizens. The example of Israel or Sri Lanka, nations where the State has formally identified itself with a religious majority, should serve as a cautionary tale: second-class citizenship is a prescription for chronic violence and civil war. 80

The Hedgehog and .the Fox, or Why the BJP is Worse Than the Congress The June 2000 attacks on churches and missionary institutions in Goa, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka brought such concerted condemnation of the government's response to anti-Christian violence, that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was forced to hold highprofile meetings with the National Minorities Commission, consult with Christian representatives and back-pedal on his earlier stand that such incidents were routine lawand-order problems and not instances of communal violence. For those of us who have lived these twentyfive years since the Emergency as adults, where does this period of BJP-led government rank in Indian communalism's Hall of Fame? Was 1999-2000 worse than the two years of the Emergency as far as minority rights were concerned? Think of the forced sterilization of Muslims, the demolitions at Turkman Gate. Were they more awful than the dark years when Sikhs killed Hindus and the State killed Sikhs? What comparison is there between these 81

attacks on Christians and the politically directed killing of Sikhs in 1984 after Indira Gandhi's death? Was Mr Advani's revelation of foreign funding for missionaries after the Dangs attack on Christians more insensitive or less sinister than Rajiv Gandhi's grotesquely matter-offact explanation for the Sikh pogroms after his mother's death: 'When a big tree falls, the ground shakes'? Did the senior leadership of the ruling BJP include anyone as tainted by accusations of hands-on involvement in communal violence as the Delhi Congress of the Eighties? Did the army in Kashmir under the BJP government kill more people than it did during the time of the Congress? Did any BJP state government preside over killings on the scale that occurred in Bombay in 1992 when mobs directed by Hindu goons killed Muslims at will while a Congress government watched? Even in the matter of the Bahri Masjid's demolition, the gates of the mosque were unlocked under the auspices of the Congress and the mosque was razed during the prime ministership of Narasimha Rao. Can we confidently assert that the Congress was less culpable than the Sangh Parivar for the killing that followed? '

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If the answer to all these rhetorical questions is 'no' (and it arguably is), then why are we so exercised about the future of India's secular polity merely because the BJP trimmed its sails and came to power at the head of a ragtag coalition? This, I suspect, is the question that the BJP's allies the Telugu Desam, the Samata Party, the rump of the Janata Dal that joined it-pose to their critics when their secular credentials are challenged. It was the question the BJP asked when journalists pointed to the rash of anti-Christian violence and invoked the spectre of organized fascist violence against stigmatized minorities. Didn't the Congress preside over several riots in which Muslims died in greater numbers? Why didn't this add up to a fascist majoritarian plot? The answer to this is neither complicated nor novel . The Congress is regarded as a secular party that is cynically sectarian while the BJP is seen as an ideologically Hindu party that is opportunistically secular . So the Congress is given the l>enefit of the doubt but the BJP isn't . Is this fair? No. Is it, nonetheless, prudent? Yes. 83

First and most simply, it would be unwise to judge a party by its actions alone when its words remain so explicitly sectarian. Neither the RSS nor its affiliated organiz.ationshave ever disavowed the frightening National Socialist view that Guru Golwalkar took of the place of minorities in a free India. Contrast· this with Sonia Gandhi apologizing to the Sikh community for the violence inflicted on them by the Congress. While the Congress apology is transparently meant to win Sikh votes, at least it indicatesa political willingness to admit •mistakes. But the world view enunciatedby vatic Nagpur is beyond criticism. The BJP remains committed to Hindutva, to building a temple on the site of a mosque that its supporters razed, to supporting a party (the Shiv Sena) that stands accused of visiting the most horrific violence on Muslims in the wake of that vandalism. It is also a party that came to power on a groundswell of majoritarian self-assertionwhich its sponsorshipof the Ram Janmabhoomi movement helped to create, which L.K. Advani with his Rath Yatras consolidated into a political constituency. The BJP's public image is defined by its consistent hostility towards minorities. This is 84

its USP, its reason for being. To put it more respectably, the BJP stands for the _rights of the majority ( Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain). Since Murli Manohar Joshi, L.K. Advani and Aron Shourie are such committed defenders · of the faith, such alert sniffers-out of minority mischief, the party and the government to which they belong will always be seen to be hostile to non-Hindus. Its supporters will approve of this hostility because they want to sec 'pampered' minorities get their • comeuppance and its critics will see it as creeping fascism, but in neither case will the record of the BJP in office .over the last three years make much difference to their perceptions. The BJP itself makes it impossible to suggest that its record in office belies its sectarian reputation. Its 'moderation' in government, cited by its supporters to argue that this majoritarian party had evolved in office into the equivalent of the Christian Democratic Union in Germany and not the Nazi bogey beloved of secularists, was undermined by its own spokesmen who regularly declared that the party remained committed ·to its maximalist 85

agenda in the long term and was merely constrained by coalition government from giving free play to its political instincts. When the leopard itself tells everyone who will listen that it doesn't intend to change its spots, its good behaviour becomes sinister instead of • reassunng. Ideologically organized parties move positionally and plan for the long term. The RSS hived off the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (the BJP before it changed its name) in 1951. That child came to political maturity over fifty years. The senior partnership in a rag-tag coalition is scarcely the prize for which this long apprenticeship was served. We've been down this road before: during the Janata experiment, the Jan Sangh merged formally into the Janata Party but re-emerged, ideology intact, as the Bharatiya Janata Party . The reason it broke with the Janata Party is revealing: it was over the issue of dual membership-onetime Jan Sanghis wanted to remain members of both the Janata Party and the RSS. Under Vajpayee's brief period of primacy in the early Eighties, the BJP even put on Gandhian motley before deciding that it was miscast and 86

reverting to type under Advani and the Rath Yatra. It was that avatar which brought the BJP-via the demolition of the Bahri Masjidto power. Why would it change a winning formula? To hold its agenda in abeyance for expedient reasons is perfectly logical. The Bolsheviks stole the slogan of the Social Revolutionaries-, land to the peasant' -when they needed political support during the confusion of 1917, but it didn't stop Stalin from collectivizing agriculture and destroying the peasantry as a class fifteen years later. The National Socialists entered electoral alliances and political coalitions during the Weimar Republic for strategic reasons without compromising their hideous anti-Semitism. The BJP may surprise us yet by becoming the Indian equivalent of Germany's Christian • Democratic Union-a democratic, right wing, mildly .Hindu-centric party committed to republican decencies, but nothing it has done or said over the past three years in power encourages that conclusion. It has elaborated its minority-bashing menu by offering a new, Christian entree. L.K. Advani, the BJP's home 87

minister, not only connived at the demonizing of Christians by the VHP and the Bajrang Dal by strategically releasing information about the foreign dollars received by Christian organizations, he categorically affirmed the BJP's commitment to the RSS at the same time as its chief, Sudarshan, suggested that churches be nationalized. Besides parading with the RSS in Agra, Advani suggested that the BJP's relationship with the RSS paralleled the Congress's relationship with Gandhi. We shall know what the BJP's political instincts are when it rules this country without the restraints imposed by coalition government or when it is in opposition, trying to make its way back to power. Till then, it is sensible to believe the party's spokesmen, to take them at their word, when they say that the party's agenda has been put on the back-burner, not abandoned. Baldly, the BJP in office will always be suspected of prejudice because it does not~ cannot-dissemble about its raison d'etre. The Congress, on the othet hand, has from its beginnings tried to be all things to all men, and dissembling is second nature to it. Nehru in a Sikh turban, Nehru in a skullcap and 88

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Nehru in a Naga shawl was low-grade pluralist theatre, but it worked for the Congress because representing diversity was its business. Isaiah Berlin, in a marvellous essay compari.ng Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, described the first as a hedgehog and the second as a fox. All thinkers, according to Berlin, were either hedgehogs or foxes. The hedgehog had one big idea with which he ordered the world while the fox had a series of insights that explained it. If -the Congress is the fox, promiscuously plural, rhetorically socialist, piously non-aligned, spottily secular, the BJP is a hedgehog, possessed by a single idea (Hindutva), and a single goal (Hindu hegemony). Mr Vajpayee can wear all the costumes he wants, but he will never be the sunny quick-change artist that Nehru was. It is not in the BJP's nature to be a fox: in good times and in bad, for enemies and for friends, it will always be the prickly Hindu hedgehog.

Historical Inadequacy as Political Theory The BJP's dislike of Muslims and Islam is well documented. The Muslim community in 89

South Asia is the Sangh Parivar's reason for being. Still, Muslims comprise only one of India's many minorities, and it is instructive to see how the Parivar deals with the others. The second half of May 2000 supplies us with several 'Hindu' encounters with Sikhs, NeoBuddhists and Christians. The one that got the most newspaper space was an RSS . front organization, the Sikh Sangathan, manned by pro-Parivar Sikhs. There was controversy about the Sikh Sangathan because the RSS chief, Sudarshan, argued that Sikhism was distinct from Hinduism but not separate from it. This provoked some Sikhs to demand that the Akali Dal distance itself from the BJP, or at least distance itself from Sudarshan's position. The .Akali Dal, currently in alliance with the BJP, tried to stay clear of the controversy. Sudarshan's position was consistent with the RSS's long-time stance of seeing 'lndic' religions-Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism-as Hindu emanations still joined to the parent faith. Thus, the Sikh community was the sword arm of an otherwise vanquished Hinduism during the dark times of Muslim rule. 90 •

Sudarshan reportedly cited the Dasam Granth, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, to support his position. Hostile Sikhs questioned the authenticity of the attribution; Sikh historians argued that scriptural arguments apart, the Sikh community had, in the course of the twentieth century, steadily evolved away from Hinduism, especially after the control of gurudwaras was legally wrested from Hindu mahants in 1925. Sudarshan's position seemed part of a larger Sangh Parivar plan to co-opt the Sikhs. The RSS, a newspaper report claimed recently, would ask Hindus in the Punjab to put down Punjabi, not Hindi, as their mother tongue during the current census . This was interesting, because the RSS had actively mobilized Punjabi Hindus in the Sixties to do the opposite (claim their mother tongue was Hindi) in an attempt to carve a Hindu, Hindi-speaking state out of the Punjab-namely, Haryana. This change of stance would affect Haryana's chances in the disputed Fazilka and Abohar districts, but the RSS had decided, clearly, that integrating Sikhs into a larger Hindutva coalition was worth a few disgruntled Haryanvis. 91

Also, while the Sangh Parivar was naturally opposed to Sikh militancy and separatism during the bad old days, it was the Congress that was in power then and had to take the decisions to violently suppress Sikh terrorism. So the Congress was the villain of the piece· for most Sikhs while the Sangh Parivar, having kept its nose creditably clean during the murderous Sikh pogroms of 1984,had political credibility and some room to manoeuvre. The front organization established by the Parivar to woo Neo-Buddhist Dalits represents an even more intriguing move. The RSS knows that it has an upper-caste profile; it knows that the upper-caste Hindu who it has traditionally represented is the enemy of the Dalit movement, and it also knows that Ambedkar tried to lead Dalits into self-esteem by leading them out of Hinduism. That a Hindu organization should be trying to bring NeoBuddhistsinto its fold and devoting its energies to the cause of co-opting Ambedkar, the sworn enemy of Hindu hegemony, seems odd and doomed to failure. Why should Dalits be persuaded by this move? Whether it works or not, there is logic in the RSS move. Remember that Ambedkar led 92

Dalits into Buddhism after much looking around. He considered Islam and rejected it because it would provoke too much hostility; besides, Ambedkar just didn't like Islam. Making Dalits Muslims would certainly spite upper-caste Hindus but it would also destroy Dalit identity because becoming a Muslim in India in the aftennath of Partition (remember, this was the Fifties), was such a charged business that Dalits would stop being Dalits and simply become Muslims. Christianity was not a plausible option because, rightly or wrongly, Christianity was associated with colonialism and India had just become independent. Buddhism seemed a suitable faith because it had been sidelined by mainstream Hinduism in much the same way as Dalits had been marginalized by Hindus. Nearly fifty years after the event, the RSS is ready to enfold Ambedkar and Buddhism. This poses no psychological difficulty because the ordinary Hindu thinks of the Buddha in a vaguely proprietorial way: as one of the ten avatars of Vishnu, the Buddha is comfortably part of his eclectic pantheon. The RSS is equally comfortable with the idea of Sikhism 93

and Buddhism as junior members of the Hindu joint family, cadet branches of a broadly Hindu lineage. Christians and Muslims are a different matter because they are the fruit of alien trees. Their citizenship is conditional on good behaviour which basically means a willing subordination .• of their cultural preferences to a 'national' culture and history defined by Hindutva. The only way the Sangh Parivar can deal with Muslims and Christians is either as hostile aliens or converts of Hindu stock awaiting purification. On 3 June 2000, newspapers carried a story about Christian families reconverting to Hinduism in Orissa, in the area where the Reverend Staines was murdered. The chief guest at the re-conversion was the Shankaracharya of Puri who declared that all conversions after Independence were illegal, and that all such converts would be reclaimed to Hinduism with 'love'. Since Buddhismis quasi-Hinduin the Parivar's view, no guarantees of good behaviour are needed. If the cost of buying into an important political constituency (the Dalits) means taking on board a minor prophet like Ambedkar, 94

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that's all right. Hinduism recruited the Buddha Himself-why strain at a gnat having swallowed the camel? The approach towards the Sikhs is more emollient still. They are, Sudarshan tells us, keshdhari Hindus, the sword arm of the community. There is a certain pathos to this. The Parivar wants Hindus to coalesce into a virile, disciplined, armed nation; its metaphor for a fighting Hindu is a Sikh. The Sikhs have everything that Parivar Hindus aspire to: a martial past spent fighting Muslims, a martial race certificate from the Brits when they ruled us, a strong sense of community discipline, a centralized religious organization under the Gurudwara Act, confidence, swagger and an absence of timorousness. The Sangh Parivar is so unmanned by the spectre of Hindu subordination in the past that when it calls Sikhs keshdhari Hindus, what it is really trying to say is that Hindus are tonsured Sikhs, pupal sardars. The RSS drills because it believes mass PT, uniforms and discipline will restore to the community its lost manhood. Hindus in this view are the Khalsa in embryo. 95

These encounters with Sikhism, Buddhism and Christianity are instances of a politics founded on a sense of historical inadequacy and the corresponding need to assert a Hindu primacy in the present. But a nation is not (nor should it be) a proving ground for the virility of dominant communities. Germans, Serbs, Sinhalas have all discovered this to their cost. A democratic republic has a limited task: the creation of the necessary conditions for free citizenship . A notion of lndianness founded on a sense of aboriginal injury is an odd prescription for citizenship. More than that, a Hindu identity that finds reassurance in appropriating the religious identities of others does Hindus no favours. To want a Muslim or a Christian to see a Hindu reflection when he stares into his looking glass and then to see a Sikh when you look into your own, is fine if you 're in a fairground giggling through its hall of mirrors, but it isn't a stable foundation for a rational view of the world . •

Shorts in the Secretariat It isn't often that newspaper headlines give citizens reason to be unreservedly happy. One 96

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such happy event was the withdrawal of the Anti-Defamation Bill in the Eighties. The failure of Rajiv Gandhi's attempt to muzzle the press was a triumph for every Indian. Similarly, the blustering retreat of the Sangh Parivar in the face of the public condemnation of the circular issued by the BJP government in Gujarat allowing civil servants in that state to become members of the RSS, was a victory for democratic propriety. The Gujarat government was forced to swallow its circular: in these ecological times, it was good to see paper being recycled. The BJP looks set to make the running in Indian politics for a while yet, so it is reasonable to assume that we haven't heard the last of this-the party will continue to work for the day when its many supporters in the civil services are allowed to take their shorts out of their closets and try them on for size in public. While the withdrawal of the circular was a defeat for the Sangh Parivar, it was also a dress rehearsal. After a decent interval, the saffron brotherhood will take the issue to the country with every argument it can stitch together: quasi-legal red herrings 97

('after all, the RSS isn't a banned organization'), plausible analogies ('if civil servants can be members of the Rotary Club, then ... ') and plain brazenness ('the chief secretary in my state has been drilling in shakhas for years'). People will nod and be swayed by these arguments because the image of men in uniform doing PT (which is how many of us imagine the RSS) doesn't necessarily conjure up visions of a sinister paramilitary force; it has benign, reassuring associations too. I can imagine the 'average voter' being persuaded to think of the RSS as an outfit not dissimilar to the Home Guards, the Territorial Anny, the NCC (National Cadet Corps), a dedicated Seva Dal or even a troop of ageing boy scouts. The Sangh Parivar's favourite justification for allowing the RSS to infiltrate the bureaucracy is the alleged packing of West Bengal's bureaucracy with card-carrying communists. If the redshirts can do it without pseudosecularists getting themselves into a lather, what's wrong with giving the khaki shorts brigade the same latitude? Charitably, this is the wrong question. Less charitably, it is 98

cynically misleading. Government seivants are not allowed to be members of the CPM or CPI because there is a blanket ban on the membership of any political party. It is very likely that many card-carrying communists are, despite the ban, civil seivants in the same way that thousands of babus and government school teachers in Gujarat and UP are members of the RSS. But their membership of forbidden organizations is covert and unofficial. This is crucial: a friendly Left Front government might connive at a bureaucrat's membership of the CPM and its front organizations, but it can't formally recognize this connection. If a Left Front government were to issue a circular formally allowing bureaucrats to flaunt their communist affiliations, it would deserve the same condemnation that the RSS circular received. When the controversy erupted, Vajpayee declared that the RSS was a cultural organization, unconnected to politics. If the RSS and its vigilante fronts-the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad-are apolitical, then the Ku Klux Klan is a band of social workers working for Caucasian emancipation. 99

The RSS is founded on the idea of historic Hindu grievance, and it is committed to the transfonnation of the Republic into a Hindu Rashtra. The RSS salutes a saffron flag (the Bhagwa Dhva1),which is the Sangh's emblem for the Hindu State-in-the-making. Its most revered sarsanghachalak, Guruji Golwalkar, wrote a tract called We, Or Our Nation Defined, in which he argued that Muslims living in Bharat should be secondclass citizens living on Hindu sufferance, with no rights of any kind : 'From this standpoint sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations, the non-Hindu people in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of the Hindu Nation, i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ingratitude towards this land and its age-long traditions, but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead; in one word, they must cease to be 100

foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing , deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizens rights .' Guruji also admired Hitler's way with the Jews and thought Indians needed to learn from his example in dealing with intransigent minorities : .'German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races-the Jews . National pride at its highest has been manifested here . Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.' All this is well known, or should be, but it is worth repeating if only to graphically contrast the narrow sectarianism of the RSS and its front organizations with the generous pluralism 101

of India's constitution. To allow government employees to become members of the RSS or any organization like it would be to declare that the secular Indian State doesn't mind its civil servants publicly endorsing the idea of a Hindu Rashtra, an idea that subverts the constitutional foundations of the Republic which they have sworn to serve. Apart from the message that it would send to the general public, such a move would encourage civil servants to ingratiate themselves with their swayamsevak superiors by joining shakhas too. We know how corporate climbers learn golf to network. Had this circular gone through, Hindu callisthenics would have become the fast track to prefemient . Conceive of the morale of a civil service where one half feels that the others are getting ahead because of their ideological affinities with their superior or the government of the day. To argue that the RSS is not a banned organization and should therefore be open to civil servants is to miss the point: the Ku Klux Klan isn't banned in parts of the US, but no black defendant would want his trial judge to 102

be a Klansman. Freemasonry is legal in Britain and yet there was a commission appointed to study the penetration of that country's police force by Freemasons. There were concerns that promotion into the upper echelons of the British police was impossible unless the office belonged to the brotherhood of Freemasons.

To claim,' as Vajpayee and Advani did, that the circular was a purely provincial matter, subject to the decorum of centre-state relations, is disingenuous. It is hard to believe that they had no inkling of what the Gujarat government was likely to do on a matter as crucial as this, given that the circular was issued by a BJP state government. This becomes even harder to believe when you consider that Advani and Vajpayee defended the circular enthusiastically when it first appeared. Advani even indicated • that he was thinking of extending the permission granted by the Gujarat circular to central government employees before backtracking on the issue. The BJP spokesman, Venkaiah Naidu, listed the many virtues of the RSS-its patriotism, its discipline, its social work-in justification of the Gujarat government's decision. To take 103

the last of its virtues first, every organization that helps in times of floods, fires or famine, deserves the gratitude of the nation, but the RSS's good works are no~ the issue here. It is the RSS 's construction of patriotism that is the problem. What Naidu and the RSS mean by patriotism is an exclusive chauvinism based on the claims of the majority community. Hindus consolidated are the national community; Hindutva is the culture that must define this nation, and the Hindu Rashtra is shorthand for the kind of State that the saffron brotherhood would like to see in place. Their vaunted discipline is their way of trying to make all this happen, so it is hard to see why Naidu expects people outside the RSS, especially those who admire the Indian Constitution, to see this as a virtue at all. During the controversy, L.K. Advani affinned that he owed everything he was to the RSS. Advani, more than any one else, helped create (through his Rath Yatras and his sponsorship of the shi/anyas) the Ramjanmabhoomi movement that culminated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the BJP's rise to power. So when he declares that the RSS 104

made him, we should take him at his word. L.K. Advani intended his statement as reassurance; we would be wise to read it as a warning. On this evidence, leaders spawned and shaped by the RSS deal politically in a narrow and dangerous chauvinism. All the more reason to see the defeat of the BJP in this matter as a victory for every citizen. The Opposition was vigilant enough (for once) to see that a provincial circular threatened to subvert the nature of the Republic. But in one form or another, that circular will come round· again-we need to keep watch.

Against Conspiracy But keeping watch doesn't mean that secularists go squint-eyed scanning the horizon for conspiracies. Pogroms and riots are often organized, the destruction of the Bahri Masjid was planned and slanted policies like the one intended to let civil servants join the RSS are clearly framed with forethought. But not all violence or prejudice against minorities is scripted. To accept this is not to argue that such violence is 'spontaneous'. It is simply to recognize that there are patterns of social 105

activity that don't need to be controlled by a central node. If secularists want to understand the working of communalism or chauvinism in a nuanced way they have to work at historical explanations for the ebb and flow of prejudice. So what should newspaper readers make of reports of anti-Christian violence? Recently, a journalist friend said he was sceptical of this reportage because it was disproportionate: too much attention was being paid to tiny incidents that were often, upon inquiry, shown to have no sectarian basis. The rape of a nun in Jhabua of which so much was made, .was upon investigation apparently committed by a Christian, and similarly, the attacks on padres in UP were shown to have non-sectarian motives: robbery or anger about school admissions. The same disproportion, according to my journalist friend, marred the reportage of the violence in Dangs because the violence had resulted in no deaths and the destruction only of a couple of makeshift chapels. The killing of Staines, he argued, had been similarly twisted by a secularist dogmatism. There was a perverse insistence on denying 106

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the tension that conversionhad created amongst tribal communities and an unreasonable insistence that everyone acknowledge Dara Singh as being a Bajrang Dal activist without any evidence. The National Minorities Commission attacked the Justice Wadhwa Report for emphasizing the tension created by conversion. The killing of Staines, the NMC (National Minorities Commission) said, was an act of sectarian murder which had nothing to do with anti-conversion unrest. My friend was puzzled: Justice Wadhwa had not denied the Hindu fundamentalist nature of Dara Singh's activities; he had taken note of his goonery in the cause of gau raksha and his attacks upon Muslim butchers and their herds, and he had praised Gladys Staines for her generosity in forgiving her husband's murderers. Why were his credentials being questioned by the NMC? Only because his unwillingness to certify that Dara was a member of the Bajrang Dal seemed to support Advani's categorical denial that the Bajrang Dal had anythingto do with the Staines murder. This, according to my sceptical friend, was a case of secularist prejudice swamping balance and objectivity. 107

So have secularists and sections of the media gone overboard and distorted everyday occurrences by classifying them as sectarian_ when, in fact, they spring from a variety of motives? Has their eagerness to put the practice of a chauvinist majoritarian party under scrutiny during its first extended period in office, led them into error? Have they become paranoid, seeing patterns where none exist, reading political conspiracy into the normal tensions of civil society? I don't think so. There is nothing unnatural about the media being hyper-alert in the matter of communal relations during the incumbency of a party that has a long record of hostility towards minorities. Jorge Haider's Freedom Party is part of an Austrian coalition government, and the European press will subject the behaviour of the leaders and workers of that party to intense scrutiny because Haider has been public about his sympathy for Fascism and his antisemitism. This is as it should be, because one of the tasks of a free press is to look for straws in the wind. To treat Austrian politics or Indian politics as business as usual at times like this would be irresponsible. 108

On the other hand, if a newspaper investigating the rape of a nun has implied that there was a communal motive behind the crime and later finds that this was not the case, the paper has made a dreadful mistake and should bend over backwards to publish a correction. The mistake is dreadfulbecause it has aggravatedcommunal distrust, imputed political motive unjustly and created an unwarranted sense of siege and insecurity amongst Christians. The press needs to be careful as much as it needs to be alert. The question still remains: do these attacks on Christians add up to something or are they a set of discrete events unconnected by ideology, communal feeling or politics? My sense is that together these attacks representsomethingmore than a bunch of random occurrences and something less than an organized political attack on a vulnerable minority. The election of a stable coalition government organized and dominated by the BJP was a signal to supporters of Hindu politics that their party was in power. Hindutva-hearties, half-pant Hindustanis, knicker-nationalists decided that with their government installed, it was time to test the waters for what was permissible in the new dispensation. Perhaps 109

the best way to understand what happened is by analogy . In 1937, the Congress fonned governments in eight Indian provinces for the frrst time. The new colonial Constitution of 1935 had extended the right to vote and, more importantly, had replaced dyarchy where the important portfolios were held by British officials with something like responsible cabinet government at the provincial level . Congress supporters were euphoric. Disconcertingly for the Congress~ there was a rash of sectarian incidents that disturbed the peace in the provinces it ruled, -largely initiated by Hindus. These were disputes centred on issues such as the right to play music before mosques, unrestricted routes for Holi processions, the right to perfonn Rath Yatras etc. Hindu processionists were trying to establish their 'right' to do all these things and they hoped that 'their' government would recognize this 'right' unlike the colonial State which had always, in these matters, invoked precedent . There was no evidence to suggest that the Congress provincial leadership or their 110

administrations sanctioned or patronized such violence. On the contrary, they were deeply embarrassed by it. However, when the hostile Urdu press or the Muslim League accused Congress governments of complicity, these governmentsand the party reacted defensively. The accusations were canards, the violence was local; the real reason was a land dispute or ancient enmity and the district magistrate or the superintendent of police had taken prompt action. This sounds familiar; we've heard the BJP and its supporters parroting these phrases or phrases generically like them every time a 'Christian' incident occurred. As in 1937, the central leadership of the BJP is unlikely to be behind these incidents. Vajpayee would have to be mad to want to launch a campaign against Christians at a time when the BJP's debut on the national stage is under the microscope. At the provincial or local level, though, the Sangh Parivar is likely to be much less worried about national consequences. In 1937,some Rath Yatras were led by local Congressmenand some belligerent Ram Lila committees were chaired by men who were simultaneously leaders of that district's Congress party. Congress ministers 111 •

like PurshottamdasTandon and Sampumanand, who were well-known Hindiwalas hostile to Urdu and close to organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha, helped by their words and actions, to create the impression that the Congress (deficient as it was in Muslim MLAs) was a Hindu party. The BJP is a Hindu party, or at least a party that affirms Hindutva, an inclusive ideology which grants Muslims and Christians the right to be Hindus in India. When it came to power, the BJP's constituency in civil society had reason to believe that this was a good time to put converts and missionaries in their place. The BJP is a party that has made a political career out of minority-bashing; it achieved power by explicitly campaigning for the destruction of the Bahri Masjid and then tacitly endorsing it. It has virtually no Muslim or Christian faces in its ranks or in its leadership. If the election of a party as anxiously secular as the Congress in 1937 could set off a wave of majoritarian self-assertion, it is more than likely that groups that wished to settle scores with Christian communities or organizations felt encouraged by the instatement of the openly-Hindu BJP. 112

It is a feeling that the reactions of the prime minister and home minister in the aftermath of the violence in Dangs would have done nothing to discourage. Advani, apropos of nothing, released a list adding up the millions of dollars sent to India by foreign Christianorganiz.ations. The list dido 't specify what these funds were meant to achieve, but the implication was clear: this was hard currency for harvesting Hindu souls. The prime minister called for a national debate on conversion; thus the two most important functionaries of the Indian Sta:e suggested not so subtly, that Christians, throughtheir missionary activities,had brought vio:ence upon themselves. The sporadic violence against Christians isn't a conspiracy orchestrated by the BJP, but · nether is it a figment of the journalistic inugination. It ·is a symptom of the 'Hindu' as,ertiveness encouraged by an incrementally m1joritarianState.

~cular Strategies What is the best way of countering this ;reeping majoritarianism? 113

One answer has been a political coalition of the oppressed. This is the political strategy favoured by Yadav & Yadav, more historically, the Mandal platform. In this plan, a political coalition unites Dalits, Muslims and Other Backward Castes and denies electoral majorities to coalitions dominated by uppercaste or savarna parties. This strategy has seen some success in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar at the expense of the Congress model, which yoked together Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits. It has also seen much failure because the residual category of upper-caste Hindus or the savarna castes that it creates is not just economically but also numerically powerful, and able to co-opt plebeian groups tribals, Kurmis, other members of the so-called Backward Classes. For example, Arun Kati!ar of the Bajrang Dal, is a Kurmi; Kalyan Singh, till recently the Bharatiya Janata Party's chief minister in Uttar Pradesh, is a Backward Clss politician as is Uma Bharti, a minister in tie central government. The southern or Tamil example of a lowercaste coalition was similar but alsc fundamentally different. Its enemy was not a coalition of upper castes: south Indian society 114

generally doesn't confonn to varna typology. The enemy was more narrowly defined: Brahmins. The enemy was numerically weaker and given the rules of democratic politics, easier to overcome. A se~ular politics wasn't an object of Dravidian anti-Brahminism; it was a by-product . Dravida Ka7-agham politics was anti-Brahmin rather than secular, though this might seem a patronizing way of describing the deeply felt atheism and rationalism that originally marked the Dravidian project. At the national level, the Dravidian model is not a good blueprint for a secular combination because the social context that nourished it . doesn't exist elsewhere. Also, times change, and anti-Brahminism isn't the cause it was once . In Tamil Nadu itself, the success of the Dravidian project has led to the subversion of the ideology that powered it. With the Brahmins cut down to size, it is possible for a non-Brahmin Tamil to be Hindu without discomfort. Even DMK cadr~s participate in Hindu ritual with impunity; this would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. One of the largest publicly celebrated festivals in Tamil Nadu is Vinayaka Chaturthi and it is 115

a sign of the times that the processions organized during the festival are mainly led by the Hindu Munnani, Tamil Nadu's answer to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. It was the Hindu Munnani that transformed Vinayaka Chaturthi from a domestic puja into a public demonstration of Hindu strength in Tamil Nadu in the Eighties, and the participation of large numbers of plebeian Hindu men in Vinayaka Chaturthi processions (the same men who used to be the mainstay of Dravida fan clubs) testifies to the decline of the anti-Hindu populism that once dominated Tamil politics. An anti-sarvarnacoalition of the Yadav sort is a likelier political strategy in the Hindi .heartland but it faces large obstacles on the road to, power. It creates, by the nature of its politics, a large, powerful enemy. Also, rainbow coalitions are hard to hold together because their constituents often represent rival interests in rural society. There is no natural conjunction between, say, Yadavs and Pasis; more often, there is a .durable history of hostility. In the case of Uttar Pradesh, this hostility finds clear party-political expression: the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) takes the Dalit 116

vote while the Samajwadi Party is supported by intermediatelandholdingcastes. Both parties compete for the Muslim vote. As Eugene Genovese, the historian of American slavery has pointed out, rainbow coalitions force the most oppressed (Blacks there, Dalits here) to denature or deny a uniquely harrowing history of exploitation in order to express solidarity with other plebeians. A secular politics shouldn't be built by fudging a common experience of oppression. Plebeian solidarity as a stable foundation for secularism in this country is a well-meant but optimistic idea. Secular coalitions should be inclusive, not excluding. Secularism isn't going to be built by rhetorically nominating high-caste Hindus as the enemy. Secularism is not a radical/leftwi ng project. Nehru's Fabianism, the commitment of Indian Communist parties and Marxisantintellectualsto secularismhave given the idea a pinkness, a vaguely socialist air. This is misleading. Historically, secularism in India has been the keystone of bourgeois or middle-class politics. Before Independence, secularism began life as a way of assembling an inclusive nationalism which could credibly 117

challenge British imperialism on a subcontinental scale. After Independence, the secularist project became a bourgeoisdemocratic attempt to establish restraining norms that allow the State, this Leviathan, to work credibly for all its constituents. Secularism is to the State and politics what the Monopoly and Restrictive Trade Practices Act is to companies and commerce. It is a set of fair play norms that prevents any one religious group, regardless of its size or competence or power, from monopolizing the culture and politics of a nation and its institutions. In an ideal world, deviation from secular practice by the government, public sector undertakings, industry and educational institutions would be monitored by a statutory watchdog body, in exactly the same way as the Environment Protection Agency in the US monitors compliance with rules designed to sustain the environment. Consider a contemporary analogy. The US government's Department of Justice is trying to restrain Microsoft from monopolizing computer operation. Windows users are to desktops what Hindus are to India. They 118

dominate the computer environment and most software is directed at them. This in itself is not a bad or culpable thing; natural majorities can't help themselves. Things become problematic only when Microsoft begins to parley this numerical strength into an oppressive dominance by using its control of the operating system to rig the market against other software companies thus stifling competition and innovation and denying users choice. The fact that Hindus are an overwhelming majority in India is not a problem . Nor is it their fault that advertisers, TV programmes, magazines, greetings cards manufacturers, shopkeepers and movie-makers tend to take their sensibilities into account more than those of Muslims, Christians or Sikhs. How many Hindi film heroes have you seen wearing turbans and beards? The market often looks at volumes: that's why Hindi movies are likely to stage a Hindu wedding more often than a Muslim nikah (though -there was a movie by that name that did well at the box office). It needs to be said, though, that the business generated by a religious occasion isn't always 119

limited by the size of the community that celebrates it. Christmas drums up more business than Indian Christians alone could account for. But my point is that even if the market always tended towards the presumed tastes of the Hindu majority, secularists would have no cause for complaint. But if a company like the Sangh Parivar Pvt. Ltd. used its hypothetical control of Hindus and its real control of the State to insist that no one distributed Bibles or sold beef, that would be rigging the market. It would be unfair and unjust, and some Depart111ent of Justice would be right to intervene.

The Supreme Court and Hindutva That departrnent of justice in India 'is the Supreme Court, the guardian of the Republic's Constitution, and its final court of appeal. Despite their adoption of Westminster-style democracy, the members of India's Constituent Assembly chose to borrow the institution of the Supreme Court from American democracy because like the US, the Indian Republic was established as a constitutional democracy. So 120 J

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when the Sangh Parivar hails a set of Supreme Court verdicts as an endorsement of its view of India, those judgements become a cause for concern. Judically, 1996 was a critical year when the Supreme Court handed down a set of related judgements quashing High Court verdicts that had annulled the election victories of leaders of the BJP and the Shiv Sena on grounds of corrupt electoral practice. The 1996 verdicts of the Supreme Court were important for the Sangh Parivar and its ideological ally, the Shiv Sena, as well as every concerned citizen in the country because these judgements set out the apex court's understanding of that contentious term, 'Hindutva'. The Supreme Court was drawn into issues related to the definition of Hindutva for the limited purpose of considering whether the invocation of this term was an appeal to religion within the meaning of the electoral law. The Bombay High Court had ruled that the elections of certain Shiv Sena and BJP leaders (the two parties being allied) stood cancelled because they had indulged in the corrupt practice of soliciting votes in the name of religion. India's election law forbids appeals 121

to religion, community and religious symbols, or attempts to promote feelings of enmity amongst communities in the course of electioneering. While hearing the appeals against the High Court judgements, the Supreme Court had to decide whether the lower court was right in concluding that the politicians in question had made an appeal to religion and community. In arriving at its conclusions, the Supreme Court set aside a great deal of 'evidence' on procedural and technical grounds because annulling an election is a grave matter and the most stringentstandardsand proceduresneeded to be applied. More substantive issues of interpretation (such as Hindutva and its meaning)became important because in these cases, one of the charges against the candidates was that they belonged to parties that had based their campaigns on the plank of Hindutva and the High Court had equated Hindutva with the Hindu religion. The Supreme Court, while striking down the High Court judgement (Manohar Joshi v. N.B. Patil) observed that ' ... the word ''Hindutva'' by itself does not invariably mean Hindu 122

religion and it is the context and the manner of its use which is material for deciding the meaning of the word ''Hindutva'' in a particular text. It cannot be held that in the abstract the mere word ''Hindutva'' by itself invariably must mean Hindu religion.' The court went on to observe that the ideological plank of the political party could be used to establish the context in which an election speech was made but was not in itself sufficient to prove that a particular candidate was guilty of corrupt practice merely because he belonged to a party that subscribed to that ideology. While the court's distinction between Hindutva and the Hindu religion is not self-evident (given that the term is commonly understood to mean the religious and cultural practice of Hindus), it is possible to argue that the apex court, in its anxiety to establish strict standards for annulling elections, was trying to rule out the promiscuous use of large ideological positions as a reason for disqualification. The court's reasoning becomes harder to follow when, in the course of the same judgement, it deals with the allegation that the respondent, in his capacity as a candidate fighting an 123

election, had stated in a meeting at Shivaji Park that '. . . the first Hindu State will be established in Maharashtra.' The bench ruled that 'In our opinion, a mere statement that the first Hindu State will be established in Maharashtra is by itself not an appeal for votes on the ground of his religion but the expression, at best, of such a hope. However despicable be such a statement, it cannot be said to amount to an appeal for votes on the ground of his religion.' A conventional reading of the phrase 'the first Hindu State will be established in Maharashtra' would normally conclude that it was an assertion of intent, not an expression of anything as tentative as a hope, unless the speaker had qualified it by adding '/ hope the first Hindu State etc ... ' or by substituting the tentative 'might' for the categorical 'will'. When a statement as unequivocal as the one quoted in the judgement is made in the course of an election campaign, it is reasonable to infer that a Hindu candidate is promising a Hindu State in return for Hindu support. On the other hand, perhaps it is possible to argue that in a matter as grave as the annulment of 124

an election, the court discounts inference and demands explicit proof that the candidate is using religion as political currency. Such rationalization becomes more difficult when the Supreme Court in another judgement in 1996 (Dr Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo v. Prabhakar K. Kunte) tries to establish that Hindutva is normally understood as a synonym for Indianization. Instead of paraphrasing this vital section of the judgement, I quote it in full: 'Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and it is not to be equated with or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism. In Indian MuslimThe Need for a Positive Outlook by Maulana Wahiuddin Khan (1994) it is said (at p.19): ''The strategy worked out to solve the minorities problem was, although differently worded, that of Hindutva or Indianization. This strategy, briefly stated, aims at developing a uniform culture by obliterating differences between all of the cultures coexisting 125

in the country. This was felt to be the way to communal harmony and national unity. It was thought that this would put an end once and for all to the minorities problem.'' The above opinion indicates that the word ''Hindutva'' is used and understood as a synonym of ''lndianization'', i.e. development of uniform culture by obliterating the differences between all the cultures coexisting in the country.' The troubling thing about the Supreme Court's position here is that in trying to show that Hindutva has nothing to do with Hindu fundamentalism or sectarianism, it quotes a . Muslim theologian and takes his description of a political strategy for an endorsementof it. A little later in the same essay, Maulana Wahiuddin Khan makes his opposition to the imposition of a uniform culture clear: 'If we insist on uniculture, the results will be disastrous.' A few pages afterwards he argues for . the '. . . general acceptance of pluralism. But 126

upholders of this principle have frrst to contend with the problem-nay, threat--,of ''cultural nationalism''. The proponents of this latter movement insist that India's composite culture must be moulded into a uni-Indian culture, being of the view that it is only through such endeavour that social harmony can be produced. Serious-minded people regard this movement as a genuine threat to the integrity of the country.' And again: '. . . where uni-culture smacks of narrow-mindedness, multiculture stands for broadmindedness. I cannot believe that my countrymen would be so foolish as to prefer to be narrowminded.' The court comes to the conclusion that the word 'Hindutva' is used and understood as a synonym of 'Indianization' on the strength of one paragraph from an essay written by a Muslim theologian who makes it clear in that same essay, that he sees the uniform culture advocated by Hindutva as disastrous, a potential threat to pluralism and a threat to the integrity of the nation. Even if we could find 127

a Muslim theologian who believed with the conviction of a Savarkar or a Golwalkar that Hindutva equals Indianization, it would be hard to argue that his example proved that this was the received sense of the word or that this was what Hindutva meant in common usage. I can't think of any Muslims, Christians or Sikhs who believe that Hindutva is synonymous with Indianization. On the contrary, our newspapers are full of stories about minority groups vigorously contesting ~is equivalence. The Sangh Parivar recently tried to have the Guru Granth Sahib read in mandirs in the Punjab as part of their ongoing campaign to represent Hindus and Sikhs as parts of one greater Hindu community. The Akalis and the Akal Takht reacted so sharply to what they saw as a blasphemous attempt to incorporate their central religious text into Hindu practice, that the Sangh Parivar quickly backed away from the idea. The demand of the RSS that the Catholic church 'Indianize' itself by severing its links with the Pope was rejected by Catholics precisely because they saw in the demand an attempt to call their lndianness into question by insinuating extra128

territorial loyalty. They didn't see it as a neutral proposal to Indianize the church; they saw it as Hindu chauvinist .1ischief. If Hindutva is at all understood as a way of life, it is understood as a Hindu way of life. The proposed obliteration of difference and the development of a uniform culture is to be effected by making minorities sacrifice their own identities at the altar of Hindutva, that is, the religious and cultural practice of the majority community-the Hindus. This isn't a hostile definition of Hindutva. It is how the protagonists of Hindutva themselves see their project. Hindutva is used and understood as a synonym of 'lndianization' only by those for whom Hindu is a synonym for the ideal Indian. Surely such a majoritarian construction of the nation and citizenship is contrary to the plural secularism mandated by the Constitution? At • the very least, Hindutva is a controversial and contested term; the Supreme Court's implication that it is generally construed as 'Indianization' assumes a consensus that does not exist. That a judgement by the Republic's apex court should, even inadvertently, give 129

legitimacy to a narrow and divisive view of the Republic's identity should make all Indians anxious. The annulment or upholding of individual elections is a small matter; for public life in India, it is crucial that the Supreme Court find a way of reviewing its current reading of Hindutva.

A Coup in Slow Motion Just as your neighbourhood teaching shop (St Something Convent) needs 'Government Recognized' printed prominently under its name, so also do the sponsors of Hindutva need the seal of legitimacy conferred by sarkari approval. The Supreme Court judgements of 1996 have gone some way towards making the majoritarian politics of the Sangh Parivar respectable. Hindutva, it can now be argued, isn't chauvinism or communalism. It is, instead, a state of mind, a way of life, a synonym for 'lndianization'. Hindutva, thus, is established as politically kosher, constitutionally halal. Similarly, the Sangh Parivar wants to have the destruction of the Bahri Masjid and its replacement by a Ram mandir accepted by public opinion and the State, as a fait accompli. 130

Once it is estabijshed in the public mind as a stable, irreversible fact, it becomes easier to jostle the State into acknowledging and ratifying this 'reality'. L.K. Advani's testimony to the Liberhan Commission (the commission charged with investigating the destruction of the Bahri Masjid) brought the Bahri Masjid-Ram Mandir controversy back to the front pages where it belongs. Predictably, Advani denied inciting the demolition, regretted the way in which the Bahri 'structure' was brought down and described it as one of the sadder days in his life. He simultaneously characterized the political movement that led to the demolition as nationalist, reiterated the old Sangh Parivar position that there had been a functioning temple within the Bahri structure even before the demolition, and pointed out that the makeshift shrine rigged up after the demolition was in fact, the Ram Mandir of Hindu aspiration. He was saying that the manner in which the present 'temple' was brought into being was unfortunate, but its reality was irreversible. Building an elaborate superstructure was a matter of time, but the deed was done. 131

In this way, Advani wished to take the credit for the makeshift Ram Mandir while avoiding any liability for the illegal destruction of the Bahri Masjid or for the violence that followed. As further insurance, Advani declared that the Ram Janmabhoomi issue was not one that the courts could resolve: this could only be done through negotiation or legislation. Before him, Vajpayee had announced that the Ram Mandir could be built either through agreement or a favourable judgement, blithely assuming that no other outcome was possible. There is, in fact, nothing before the courts that will swing the issue one way or the other but by marking time on the issue while it remains short of a parliamentary majority, the BJP hopes that the noise made by the other branches of the Sangh Parivar will make the inevitability of an elaborate Ram Mandir the common sense of Indian public opinion. Already the VHP has urged the government to allow the installation of prefabricated parts of the temple all round the site of the razed mosque. The Ram Mandir cause has always been advanced by furtively and illegally changing the facts on the ground from the installation of the idols in 132

1949 to the destruction of the mosque in 1992. The status quo has only ever moved in one direction: the Hindutva way. I sense Bahri Masjid fatigue, even amongst Muslims. In private conversations, I have heard Muslims argue that since the mosque is gone, since it wasn't being prayed in even when it did exist, if they can trade this past-tense mosque for a promise of good behaviour in the future, why risk more Muslim lives in a hopeless cause? I don't presume to advise Muslims on matters where they have more to lose than I do, but as a citizen this seems a bad and dangerous position. Apart from the impossibility of finding a representative Hindu party or institution that could give Muslims such a binding guarantee specially given the artful discordance of the Sangh Parivar-this concession would formally acknowledge the rightness of the destruction of the mosque, the defeat of the rule of law and the immunity of Hindutva from any republican restraint. It would amount to building the Ram Mandir on Raisina Hill. So long as the temple remains a makeshift affair, the victory of Hindutva, which entails 133

the explicit recognition by the State of the legitimacy of the endeavour, remains incomplete. Once the great temple of Sangh fant.asists is actually built, it will become a monument to the Hindu nation in the same way that St Paul's cathedral is a living celebration of British imperialism, crammed with memorials to men killed in colonial wars . The Ram Temple will be less a religious shrine than a symbol of the Hindu ownership of the Indian nation. Its walls will be inscribed with the names of Hindu martyrs who died in the struggle and Ayodhya will be the capital of Kalyug's Ramrajya. The nationalism of the freedom struggle was deliberately pluralist and inclusive because the Congress needed to persuade both Indians and the Raj that it spoke for the nation. It dido 't wholly ~ucceed in this effort and Partition bears witness to that failure. But despite Partition, the inclusiveness of the Congress' anti-colonial nationalism gave India a secular Constitution. This secularism had one object: it wanted to make the Republic credible to all its constituents. Put another way , Indian secularism, which grew out of the nationalism 134

of the freedom struggle, tried to establish a set of norms that prevented any one religious group, regardless of its size, competence or power, from monopolizing the culture and politics of the nation and its institutions. The campaign for the Ram Mandir was ( and is) a concerted attempt to rig the Republic's politics in a monopolist way. Hindutva is a bid to take over the State in the name of the Hindu majority. It is a coup in slow motion. More hinges upon the Bahri Masjid dispute and its resolution than the fate of a .mosque or even the fate of other mosques like those at Mathura and Banaras. The real estate in dispute is not the site on which the Bahri Masjid once stood but the constitutional ground on which our Republic is built. This is an argument about India. When Chamberlain connived at the German annexation of Sudetenland to buy peace, he mistook a preliminary to worldcoi:iquest for a border dispute. We shouldn't make the same mistake. Every time Advani and his cohorts represent the Ram Mandir as a fait accompli we need to argue back because unanswered assertions have a way of becoming public opinion. To remain 135

silent, or worse, to accept their claims in Ayodhya, is to accept that Hindu grievance takes precedence over the Republic's laws and its institutions. To be reasonableabout locating the Ram Mandir at the site of the Bahri Masjid would be fatal; we need to be dogmatic in our opposition to this idea. Political evil is seldo~ spectacular; the demolition of the Bahri Masjid (and it~ attendant horror) was exceptional . The construction of the Ram Mandir where the Sangh Parivar wants it built won't lead to apocalypse. The world will look the same the morning after, but the common sense of the Republic will have shifted. It will begin to seem reasonable to us and our children that those counted in the majority have a right to have their sensibilities respected, to have their beliefs deferred to by others. Invisibly, we shall have become some other country .

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Acknowledgements These arguments were first aired in the Telegraph, Calcutta, and I'm grateful to Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Bhaswati Chakravorty for their generosity. Mukund Padmanabhan, Sanjeev Saith, Hari Sen and Ram Guba read drafts and told me what they thought of them which was a huge help. Dr Rajeev Dhavan gave me invaluable advice on the law, though he isn't responsible for any errors that remain. Kamini Mahadevan at Penguin thought up the idea and saw it through with great patience.

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