Religious violence drives
India’s descent into deeper obscurantism
by Jawed Naqvi
(
Dawn.com, September 01, 2008)
IT took the Pope 400 years to apologise to Galileo, who was
excommunicated for inferring from his independent inquiry that it was
the Earth that went round the Sun and not the other way as the Bible
claimed. It is too early to count the decades if not centuries it will
take India to recant, if ever, from its current headlong leap into
obscurantism of diverse hues, which it is busy cultivating in a strange
mélange it advertises as secularism.
Be it the orgy of violence unleashed by the Hindu right against
Christian missionaries and their followers in Orissa --- in which both
sides want greater access to the gullible and poor Dalits and tribes
people to grant them spiritual salvation, moksha --- or be it the
transformation of a separatist agenda of Kashmiris into a Hindu-Muslim
standoff, or the ready use of Muslim ulema to canvass support against
religious terrorism perpetrated by shadowy groups, the state has
abdicated its secular responsibilities.
The fact that the ulema are leading their flock with the state’s
encouragement ignores the reality that they are responsible in the
first place for imparting hidebound religious prescriptions that
interfere with the functioning of democratic choices usually available
elsewhere to citizens of different faiths and beliefs under a secular
dispensation. Many of the maulvis who have been thrust into the
forefront of an overrated campaign to disown Muslim terrorists are
themselves guilty of keeping their followers riveted to fear and
mistrust on the basis of another citizen’s religious or other beliefs.
The state has happily indulged their mediaeval demands, significantly
notorious among them being the Shah Bano alimony case. Leaders who
denied a Muslim widow of her right to alimony are a key plank against
religious terrorism. What could be more ironical?
What is happening in Orissa has two dimensions – prejudice and poverty.
There is no doubt that Christian missionaries since colonial days have
done wonderful things for the backward people of India generically
called the tribals and the Dalits. Their motives, however, have not
always been innocent. The Dalits are at the bottom of the Indian caste
heap. And I say the Indian and not Hindu caste heap because there are
Dalits in every major religion of India but the secular state only
grants statutory affirmative action to Hindu Dalits, or what passes for
Hindu. And this is part of the problem in Orissa.
The quasi fascist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a cousin of the
mainstream BJP, is seeking to ‘reconvert’ Christian Dalits to its fold
right across India, including in Orissa. It uses an unfair law enacted
in 1950 that does not accept a non-Hindu Dalit as entitled to the
crumbs that come with affirmative action. On the other hand, tribal
converts to a non-Hindu religion, for example to Christianity, face no
such handicap.
Non-Hindu Dalits want the privileges given to Hindu Dalits and this
sets up political fault lines that are then exploited on both sides.
Christian and Muslim Dalits want the rights of Dalits they are
otherwise denied for not being Hindu. This is an aspect of the secular
state. Add to this conundrum the state’s tendency to side with the more
entrenched rightist forces, partly as a foil to liberal intervention
but also to consciously break the natural solidarity of the weakest
classes, and you have a classic profile of a state that is toying with
fascist methods of social control. The leeway that organisations such
as the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra are able to secure from the state
appears to be part of this strategy – unleash rightwing mobs in the
political arena, inject an obscurantist discourse and then negotiate
deals with the concerned sides.
What happened in Jammu has less to do with caste, but the mobilisation
over an innocuous-looking, if controversial, land transfer to a Hindu
shrine committee has its eyes equally on the arriving elections, both
in Jammu and Kashmir as also India’s general poll due by mid-2009 but
which may be held earlier. An overtly Hindu group tethered to the
obscurantist ideology of parties like the RSS has been unleashed in
Jammu out of nowhere. Their agitation may not have achieved much, but
it has successfully marginalised moderate Muslim leaders in the Valley,
including secular separatists as well as mainstream politicians.
At the same time they have enabled a rightist Muslim leader like Syed
Ali Shah Geelani to take centre-stage. The politics whipped up in Jammu
is not too different from the way the Sikh rabble-rouser Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale was created in the Punjab. He rose to torment India’s
fragile tryst with secular politics and his memory remains a serious
challenge.
Indian and Pakistani governments were dealing with the larger question
of the Kashmiri dispute according to the parameters agreed by a
Pakistani strongman with a rightwing nationalist prime minister of
India, giving the accord a clout and credibility that eludes liberal
politicians in the subcontinent. Kashmiri leaders, separatists and
nationalists alike, were beginning to travel between the two national
capitals with a degree of comfort and optimism they had not experienced
before.
Then suddenly and quite inexplicably the agenda was changed and we are
today confronting a communal polarisation in which Hindu and Muslim
crowd-pullers are having a field day at the cost of the moderates on
both sides.
A lot has been said and written about the plight of the minority
Ahmedis of Pakistan where they were declared non-Muslim. So I was
perplexed when India’s own Ahmedi or Qadiyani leaders (meeting in a
conference in New Delhi as I write) revealed that they were not allowed
to be members of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, a body of
religious leaders recognised by the government as representative of the
150 million Indian Muslims, for reasons that are similar to the ones
cited in Pakistan. In effect, the Indian government has accepted the
sectarian approach to informally exclude the Ahmedis.
Unless there is a more valid explanation for keeping the Ahmedis out of
the Muslim body where is the basis for a secular state to accept one of
the sects as non-Muslim? This can be an acceptable exigency in
Pakistan, but in India?
In a country crawling with god men and superstitions, the media has not
done any credit by encouraging rather than curbing the trend. Dozens of
TV channels have dedicated 24-hour programmes fanning the pursuit of
blind faith. I hear the channel with the highest TRP ratings has
reached there by dumbing down of its current affairs and news content
and supplanting it with dollops of faith healers, soothsayers and
specialists in tarot cards, bead readers and so forth.
Other channels are churning out newer versions of religious tales.
There is no room left, it seems, for any public debate between Galileo
and the Pope. India is hurtling into obscurantism in the illustrious
company of VHP, the ulema and Shiv Sena. The Jammu-based Shri Amarnath
Sangharsh Samiti is its latest proud interlocutor.
jawednaqvi[AT]gmail.com