[sacw] SACW #2. (01 Oct. 01)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | Dispatch #2.
01 October 2001
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

------------------------------------------

#1. 'Pakistan Should be a Nation of Equal Citizens' (Ishtiaq Ahmed)
#2. Pakistan: Mohajir-Pukhtoon conflict feared
MQM rally to challenge Taliban power in Karachi (Salman Hussein)
#3. India: Mukul Kesavan in conversation with Palash Krishna Mehrotra about his
new book, Secular Common Sense

________________________

#1.

'In Review'.
Volume1, No.2

Ishtiaq Ahmed. 'Pakistan Should be a Nation of Equal Citizens'

Full Text at: http://www.southasia-inreview.com/curr_edition/default.htm

_________

#2.

The Friday Times
28 Sept- Oct. 4, 2001

Mohajir-Pukhtoon conflict feared
MQM rally to challenge Taliban power in Karachi

Salman Hussein
says the situation in Karachi could turn violent even as the 
government has decided to support the ethnic party in its bid to 
upstage the religious extremists

In an ironic twist of events, the military government has decided to 
counter the religious extremists, bitterly critical of Islamabad's 
support to the United States, with the help of mainstream political 
parties.

In Karachi and other parts of urban Sindh, this means enlisting the 
Mutahidda Quami Movement (MQM). For MQM this may come as a windfall. 
The party, hounded by the establishment since 1992, could use the 
opportunity to get a breather and reorganise itself. A further irony 
is that until recent happenings, attempt was being made by certain 
intelligence agencies to use extremist religious elements to upstage 
the MQM in Karachi.

Meanwhile, observers warn against the possibility of increased 
violence even as the MQM tries to take over the streets of Karachi. 
Sources say one of the reasons the government did not allow the party 
to hold a rally on September 26 to show solidarity with the 
international community's campaign against terrorism was that 
Islamabad feared it might result in a clash between the Mohajir and 
Pukhtoon communities.

However, the government did allow the party to hold a public meeting 
to send across the message that not everyone supports the Taliban. 
The strategy is obvious. For the past two years MQM has expressed 
concern over the growing influence in the city of jihadi outfits like 
the Deobandi Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Wahhabi Lashkar-e-Taiba, 
besides other sectarian extremists. Now the party sees an opportunity 
to upstage these elements.

For their part the religious elements were slowly but surely moving 
in to challenge the MQM. "They captured hundreds of plots of land in 
the city, took over houses in various areas including localities 
traditionally considered to be MQM strongholds and generally 
challenged the MQM authority in the city," says an insider.

According to a senior MQM leader, the mushroom growth of religious 
seminaries in strong MQM constituencies like districts central and 
east even allowed these groups to poach MQM activists already under 
pressure from the establishment.

But observers also point to the fact that this struggle could take an 
ethnic colour. Karachi saw the worst Mohajir-Pushtoon riots from 1985 
to 1987. The clashes left hundreds on both sides dead. This time it 
could get worse because the majority of Deobandi religious seminaries 
have Pukhtoon students and most of them are veterans of Afghanistan, 
who have trained and fought there.

"In the 80s the Pukhtoons were not well organised, were in a minority 
and were not religious zealots. Today, while they are still a 
minority, they have swelled in numbers, are well trained and are 
committed to the cause of Islam.All these factors can increase the 
level of potential ethnic violence exponentially," says a police 
officer.

The MQM on the other hand, once the most organised militant outfit, 
has for many years been fighting for its survival and has lost many 
of its activists to its battles with the law enforcement agencies. 
For two years at least it has also come under pressure from the 
seminarians. "This will make a difference," says an observer. For 
instance, the strike call on Friday by the Afghan Defence Council to 
protest the government's decision to support the United States 
brought out some 80,000 Pukhtoons and Afghans, mostly from the 
seminaries. MQM sources admit that the violence of September 21, 
while mild by Karachi's standards, nevertheless caused concern among 
the MQM leadership.

Interestingly, the last time the Pukhtoons took to the streets was in 
1977 during the PNA movement to protest the rigging of elections by 
then premier, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Also, it is interesting that the 
areas, which came to a virtual standstill were areas dominated by 
Pathan and Afghan populations. These included, Sohrab goth, Al-Asif 
Square, Old Sabzi Mandi, Banaras Chowk, Shershah, SITE Industrial 
Areas, Sultanabad, Qaidabad, Lasbella Chowk and the mountains of 
Hussain D'Silva town.

While the strike remained peaceful in other parts of the country, 
four people were killed in Karachi. A TFT survey showed that the 
Pukhtoons resented the Mohajir indifference to the US campaign 
against Afghanistan. For many observers it seems more than a 
coincident that the main leaders of the Afghan Defence Council - Qazi 
Hussian Ahmed, Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Maulana Samiul Haq - are 
either Pukhtoon or hail from the NWFP.

On Friday, the Pukhtoon Islamists, the Taliban of Pakistan, took to 
the streets. But the Mohajirs remained visibly away from the 
protests. The only Mohajir group that supported the Islamists during 
the Afghan Defence Councils meeting in Islamabad were the Haqiqis. 
But Haqiqis have no real vote-bank in Karachi and observers say will 
not be able to mobilise the Mohajir community.

Among the protestors there were also Punjabis, especially from the 
Seraiki belt in that province. That is the area where Deobandi and 
sectarian influence has grown over the last decade. "Certain forces 
have been trying to hand over the city to religious extremists and 
sectarian militants. On Friday, these forces tried to show the world 
that the city belongs to religious radicals so that no investment 
should come to Karachi," said an MQM leader.

The question is: What will happen when the MQM gets up to challenge 
the religious extremists? Most observers agree that any conflict 
between the two communities could turn violent.

______

#3.

Part 1 - Mukul Kesavan in conversation with Palash Krishna Mehrotra about his
new book, Secular Common Sense

You say that Indian secularism was born of an anti-colonial 
nationalism. It's important to understand Congress's brand of 
nationalism - emptied of nationalism's usual content and replaced 
with an anti-imperialism based on a sophisticated critique of the 
economic effects of colonial rule. Essentially, the emotional charge 
of Congress's nationalism came from an appeal to inclusivity - a 
desire to keep everyone on board - rather than a myth of a suppressed 
identity struggling to be born. So is the present clash between two 
notions of secularism ultimately the outcome of two separate notions 
of nationalism?
Well, the clash is essentially between two notions of nationalism. 
What we see as secularism today is effectively coterminous or 
identical to inclusive plural nationalism that the Congress invented 
as a strategic anti-colonial device.

The important thing about Congress nationalism is one, that it 
represents the entire species; second, the most dazzling intellectual 
part of it, is the astonishing solution it finds to the question of 
what is going to be the content of anti-colonial nationalism. The 
extraordinarily brilliant economic critique of colonialism is a 
masterly stroke. It's an act of a robust intellectual imagination; we 
insufficiently appreciate its originality. It's a rigorous critique, 
and parts might be arguable, but it is mounted with astonishing 
sophistication. And it serves -apart from the subject it critiques - 
a much larger purpose: to demonstrate to Indians that we are all 
victims. It's masterly.

All discussions about secularism will boil down to a debate about nationalisms?
Such is certainly not the case all over the world. Nationalism is not 
necessarily involved in the debates about secularism in America. In 
the specific case of India, what you have is not an argument about 
two different faces of secularism even though it might seem like 
that: positive secularism as opposed to pseudo-secularism. 
Intellectually, that's a non-issue. What is actually an issue is that 
there are two versions of nationalism, the first an inclusive 
nationalism born of the freedom struggle; the other a particular take 
on European nationalism of a particularly homogenising kind.

The 19th century variety.
True, but I think that the BJP is eclectic about time. For example, 
they are also quite at home with the chauvinism of the Nazis or the 
Fascists for that matter. Both ideologies are expressions of extreme 
nationalism. So I don't think that the century matters.

It's a useful distinction to bear in mind when you are confronting 
your own confusions. In my own mind, when you are confronting the 
past, it often seems convenient to be using the analogies of the 
West. Maybe, it's time to take this confusion seriously. From what I 
understood, what we are seeing in the case of the BJP is a notion of 
nationalism which is in many ways, globally, the default version of 
nationalism. The kind of homogenising force that binds the country or 
creates nations. What people don't understand is that not all 
nationalisms are like that. The nature of anti colonial Congress 
nationalism was that we are all of the same species.

So the plurality of the country forced it to go in for a certain kind 
of nationalism.
That, as well as the fact that the British are a presence when you 
put this nationalism together. As your colonial masters, they are 
going to challenge any representative role that you choose for 
yourself. You have to find a way of demonstrating your credentials. 
In the early days of nationalism you are not going to do this by 
demonstrating your ability to mobilize. You are urban and upper 
middleclass; what you can actually do to prove your nationalist 
credentials is to demonstrate that you are representative in an 
emblematic way. I am talking about people like Ferozeshah Mehta. And 
not just religions, but also regions. The Congress is very much like 
a museum of national types which interrogates the audience; a 
two-pronged audience consisting of British rulers and desis.

How is secularism, the way we understand in India, different from the 
way it is understood in the West? Is it to do with the distance from 
religion? Instead of keeping religion at arm's length, Indian 
secularism has, at least traditionally, welcomed all religions.
Yes and no. It's obviously true that the practice of Indian 
secularism does not necessarily mean holding a community of faith at 
arm's length. But what I am suggesting is that this polarity is not 
much of an issue in the context of India. The issue is not holding 
religion at arm's length; the issue is embracing religion as 
constitutive of community. The issue in the West was to not allow 
religious edicts from determining State policy. There, it is really 
an issue of keeping two domains separate. Here, the intimacy between 
State and religion is not an intimacy between State and faith but a 
celebration of community. It's simply to state that the State is 
inclusive of all communities. This doesn't mean that the State pays 
the slightest attention to the religious ideas of any community 
because it's never a debate between secular policy versus religious 
precepts here. It's more a question of making the State equally 
credible to all communities by - not necessarily keeping it 
equidistant from all communities - having everybody on board. What 
you do is to represent the country as a zoo and you say: it has every 
species here, and they represent their fellows. You are not 
necessarily interested in the beliefs of the animals. What you are 
saying is that they are all there. And the zoo-keeper is, in a sense, 
in an equal relationship with all of them.

How would this be different from multiculturalism practiced in 
western liberal democracies?
That's a good question. The ideas of secularism and multiculturalism 
are genetically related. Only the notion of multiculturalism in 
Europe comes out of an experience of immigration into a homogeneous 
society. One fanatically multicultural country is Canada, which 
throws money at anything that isn't white. That multiculturalism is a 
learnt reflex. You self-consciously try and make cultural room for 
yourself when you come in. It's completely different here. You are 
not dealing with a changing circumstance, what you are dealing with a 
given - what you were given when you became a nation in the first 
place. Which is why Indian secularism needed to avoid the excesses of 
multiculturalism.

Minorities shouldn't automatically be objects of affirmative 
patronage simply because you come out of a complicated history where 
not only are you plural, but you've also experienced Partition. You 
also have a fully-fledged rampaging chauvinist movement which claims 
to speak on behalf of the majority. The moment you decide, as 
multiculturalists do, that minorities are exceptionally deprived 
creatures who need preferential treatment by the State, you are using 
a model which is completely inapposite and positively dangerous. You 
need to keep your distance from that. If the State were to create a 
statutory category of 'minority', you would, by default, create a 
statutory category of a majority. This is dangerous because the 
imagined grievance of chauvinist leaders is that being a Hindu in 
India is a problem - a completely fantastical claim. If you then 
acted on these statutes and patronised minorities in a way in which 
you didn't patronise the majority, then Hindus would actually have a 
substantial reason to say: here we have a government that classifies 
you formally then discriminates against you as a majority. That would 
be a bad idea.

You write of the 'clumsy, patronising secularism' practiced in 
post-Independence India' which actually 'worked'. Why was it clumsy?
It's clumsy and patronizing because built into this notion of 
secularism, certainly after Independence, is this real and true 
recognition that Muslims after Partition are a beleaguered lot, a 
community that works within clear limits. Inevitably, the State's 
attitude to a community is chivalry, and where there is chivalry 
there is an element of patronage involved. It's a relationship 
between unequal entities. It's clumsy because very often it is done 
in an obvious and tacky way. Like a Hindu politician wearing a 
skullcap before entering a mosque.

You categorically deny that pre-Partition secularism was not better 
than what we have today. But you also call it robust compared to 
present day practice. Doesn't that make it better? Why do you shy 
away from saying that it was better?
I think what happens is that after '47 secularism becomes an 
absolute, not necessarily a political program, but a protective 
attitude, a form of chivalry. The Muslim community's place has become 
anomalous after Partition; it is a way of reassuring this community. 
This partly is a result of electoral politics, partly a result of the 
feeling that the community needs to be protected. It reflexively 
becomes a way for the State or secular people to speak on behalf of 
the community.

This situation is very different from the one existing during 
pre-Partition; the Muslims are not a beleaguered community yet, there 
is a colonial State which is the proprietor of the Indian empire and 
there are various contending claimants to this State's territory. 
Before '47, the Congress sees secular politics as part of a political 
program: Perhaps we don't want separate electorates. Perhaps we don't 
want the Muslim League to be identified as the sole representative of 
the Muslims - it's never a wholly logical position, not least because 
the Congress is, above all, a pragmatic animal. And it tries to find 
ways of - unsuccessfully as it turns out - arriving at some kind of 
modus vivendi.

After 1947, because there is no third colonial party which runs this 
country, because the Muslims are a rump community substantially 
lessened by Partition, this well-meant attitude of chivalry and 
patronage begins to take root. Also, unthinkingly, and because of the 
long period when Nehruvian assumptions are not challenged, it becomes 
conservationist. It doesn't necessarily calculate the costs of 
specific acts of patronage. That's the sense in which I make the 
distinction. Before 1947, your secular positions are a part of an 
ongoing political negotiation, they are strategic. There is a sense 
in which you are thinking if I do this what follows? In contrast, in 
the period of Nehruvian hegemony, we forget to ask what follows.

You speak of secularism in post-independence India having degenerated 
into behalfism. The Hindu right could say that that notion of 
nationalism and secularism, as practised by the Congress, was useful 
for the time, but we need a different concept now? What would be a 
liberal-secular response to that?
The chance of the BJP saying that Congress' brand of secularism is 
defunct just doesn't arise because the ideological risk is much too 
great. What the BJP is much more likely to say is that had we not had 
this perverse pluralism we would have had a unified India, that 
essentially Partition is a part of the process of appeasement.

On the issue of what is going to be the nature of secularism now, we 
know what it is to be in a - if you want to be a legalist - strictly 
statutory, legal way. We have a Constitution; it's not by any means a 
Constitution that is perfect. Yet, it is a remarkably secular 
document. I think from a secular position, what we need to defend is 
the embodiment of anti-colonial secularism, which is in fact embodied 
within the confines of the Constitution. The reason why I wrote this 
book is that we are not talking about a lost cause. We are, in fact, 
talking about a substantially achieved cause that is threatened. 
There is a real distinction. The State that the BJP administers is, 
despite its ideology, a substantively secular State. It is a secular 
State that is capable of extraordinary deviations from the secular 
norm, and enormous cruelty in the name of nation, but it is still 
constitutionally a secular State and is, for the most part, in 
practice a secular State. We only have to look at our neighbours to 
see what an ideologically non-secular State looks like, whether it's 
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia or Malaysia. It's our 
State structure that we should be grateful for. And I think the main 
object of this State structure, has always been the liberal bourgeois 
object of making the State credible. That's the object of any secular 
policy - the yardstick against which any action of the State or any 
act of civil society is measured.

Secularism, you say, was a fashion choice for India's elite; it 
wasn't a political choice but a style choice. Also, the twinning with 
socialism: when socialism failed to deliver the goods, secularism's 
status also came under question. What happens here?
What I am saying is that all newly independent nation states have 
projects of modernisation, that's how the 20th century has unfolded. 
Post-colonial states, regardless of what else they want, do want to 
modernise. The content of this modernisation is a matter of dispute. 
It's given various forms and various kinds of content. In the case of 
Nehru, the three most important items were in the realm of foreign 
policy: non-alignment; in the realm of economic development: State 
capitalism or socialism; and, of course, secularism.

What middle class elites expect from a nation-state is success. What 
our nation-state does not deliver in any obvious way is economic 
success. This is not to say that the republic has not moved on 
economically, but clearly it's not enough in terms of self-esteem. 
You find this in newspaper columns and ordinary conversation. A 
failure to attain parity with States like Malaysia and Indonesia that 
were regularly patronised by the Nehruvian elite. In the sixties, 
they were bywords for corruption and being American puppets. What I 
am suggesting is that for the middle class elite, which is not 
necessarily ideologically secular, there was a project of 
modernisation, which was given the aforementioned objects.

I don't want to rubbish non-alignment because there is a great deal 
that is valuable there. For various reasons it didn't get us what we 
wanted - a seat at the top table. State capitalism was seen neither 
to deliver on the radical promise of literacy and subsistence, nor 
upon the liberal-bourgeois promise of productivity or growth. In the 
middle of this you had secularism. All of this is part of a single 
project, and I think it's obvious, even inevitable, that the failure 
of the central element in this - turning India around into a modern 
developing nation -leads to the whole project getting tarnished.

It is not a coincidence that the Bhartiya Jan Sangh and its political 
avtar, the BJP, could distance themselves from this project. They 
represented small capital and the desire to open India internally up; 
they opposed foreign capital. There is a sense in which the BJP can 
instinctively distance itself from the Congress project; it doesn't 
carry this baggage. It's entirely possible, and I think it happened 
here, that people decided that the whole thing is part of one 
cul-de-sac, that we need to find another road since Nehruvian 
modernisation just didn't work. If you were going to trade autarchy 
in for globalisation, if you were going to trade non-alignment in for 
alignment, conceivably the whole thing needed to be turned around.
You point out that the good thing about Congress's secularism 
is that now no political party can repudiate its value. So what 
you're saying is: lip service is better than nothing. What's with the 
symbolism? Isn't it hypocrisy?
Of course. That's the first lesson we were taught by the destruction 
of Weimar Germany: the great mistake the communists made was to club 
the Social Democrats and the Nazis together as bourgeois parties. 
That's a species of madness because you must learn to distinguish 
opportunistic parties that pay lip service to secularism and honest 
ideological parties that are committed to a Fascist agenda. It's a 
very important distinction. Hypocrisy is a great servant of political 
virtue. The point is that so long as you have a line, regardless of 
how often it is crossed, you can still do something - if there is 
political will - that will hold people to that line.

The Hindu Right's contribution to the freedom struggle was marginal. 
Ironically, their notion of nationalism is borrowed from the 
'outside', from the small, homogeneous 19th century nation states of 
Europe. The Congress's was more home-grown in the sense it was a 
strategic response to local needs, demands and pressures. So how has 
the BJP managed to establish its 'patriotic' credentials? It's also 
ironic, that when Musharraf visited Gandhi's samadhi, Shiv Sena 
activists washed the area to purify it. But it was the Sena's 
ideological ally, which murdered the man and then celebrated. Does 
the Hindu Right have no internal logic; are they just brazen 
opportunists?
I think what we are seeing is an attempt by the Hindu Right to find a 
branch where they can graft their notion of nationalism so that the 
joint does not show. It's possible for the graft to take place 
because as I said there were tendencies within what we describe as 
Congress nationalism, that were sympathetic to what the Right 
believes now, though never as programmatically as they did. What we 
are seeing is a clever gardener attempting a kind of graft. The point 
is the point of the joint. There is no question that it does not 
belong to the parent stem.

You write that instead of reflexively denying the BJP's claim to 
nationalism, secularists should ratify this claim enthusiastically. 
What do you mean by that?
If you want to understand the BJP's project in India, of course it's 
communal. That will remain a characterisation of it regardless of 
what other terms we use. It's useful to try and think of it as a kind 
of sectarian chauvinism because it does have a fully articulated 
notion of nationalism. It has an idea of the nation-state. The only 
rhetorical function that it serves is that then you can compare it 
with right-minded parties in other countries. And point to what it 
achieved and failed to achieve.

There's a sense in which we can look around ourselves and compare 
what happens when a sectarian party aligns the State to a particular 
ethnicity or culture or religion. If you look at Sri Lanka you can 
see - sure it's a smaller country which is surprisingly plural for 
its size but not a much as India - that we are somewhere short of 
where Sri Lanka got to in the early sixties. In the early sixties, 
there is this party which captures the State in Sri Lanka and makes 
it Sri Lanka - it was Ceylon till then - and actually puts in a 
statutory claim for the State on behalf of the Sinhala majority, 
which says that the foremost place belongs to the Sinhalese people. 
The context in which I mention this is that it is not at all 
necessary that such a transition, as epochal as it is, needs 
necessarily be violent. It's peaceful in the sense that it is not 
attended by large-scale riots. Nonetheless, it is transformative. And 
the transformation leaves no need for negotiation, which is very 
obvious in Sri Lanka from the early eighties onwards.

Do you see the BJP becoming a moderate republican outfit like the 
Christian Democratic Union in Germany? Does it depend on how much it 
can push for in a public forum - if you take the recent defeat of the 
Tories in the UK, you can clearly trace it to a party that is out of 
sync with public opinion: xenophobia and an isolationist policy seem 
to have been major factors in its decline. So public opinion might 
change in India and - wishful thinking this - force a change in the 
policy of the BJP.
I would be delighted if the BJP becomes a Hindu-centric, democratic 
party without making any prognosis; I'm not in that business. All I'm 
saying is that at every juncture where its ideological purity is 
challenged, the BJP reiterates its commitment to its agenda pending a 
more suitable majority. I think we need to attend to what they are 
saying. This could be explained away as a necessary strategic ploy 
that any ideological party that's moving towards the centre needs to 
make to keep its lunatic fringe happy. That's an argument that we 
shall attend to. The important thing is to imagine what the BJP would 
do if it came to power on its own or with a plurality -not a majority 
- large enough to set its own agenda. That lies in the future.

The second thing we need to look at now is its response to its core 
agitational agenda, which is the Ram Mandir. Or Christian conversion. 
Or any of these agendas where it is identified as a guardian of Hindu 
interests. I for one can't see any abatement of its position here. 
There seem to be circumstances where I would, for the sake of public 
relations, expect the BJP to keep its mouth shut on certain issues. 
Responsible members of the BJP go out of their way to make 
ideologically pure statements. I think I mention this somewhere about 
the attacks on Christians and Advani going on to release a list of 
donors to missionary institutions. The PM also repeated something to 
the same effect. I do think that ideological positions matter. The 
frequency with which that rhetoric is invoked tells us something 
about the anxieties of the party in terms of its base and its anxiety 
to mobilise.

In the end, my sense of things is that this a party that was founded 
fifty years ago by the RSS, as its political wing, and which took 
half a century coming to power. I can't see that this arrangement is 
what it served fifty years in the wilderness for. Of course, one can 
pray that the benevolently corrupting influence of power will blunt 
the ideological edge of this party but particularly because of its 
peculiar undefined relationship with both the lunatic fringe, and a 
sternly ideological cadre core, it becomes very difficult to see any 
substantial shift in its ideology because of its period in office or 
because of its susceptibility to electoral pressure.

Most chauvinisms in the world have been directed by a 'host' 
community against an 'alien' community, especially where the 'aliens' 
have managed to become powerful and are seen as exploitative. India 
is different. The accusation that 'Muslims are 'a pampered lot' has 
to be seen in the context of their backwardness and poverty.
Why does the rhetoric exist? Not because of economics but because of 
Partition. There is an irredentist political party, which thinks that 
they got theirs, why shouldn't we get ours now. When it comes to the 
direction this rhetoric takes when it comes to appeasement, the 
issues are usually symbolic. Majoratarians and chauvinists tend to 
use symbolic acts by the State to try and show that they represent a 
deviation from desirable norms of uniformity when a minority 
community is involved. The State bends over backwards to include the 
minority community's cultural and religious, if not economic, agenda.

What I try and suggest is that both the Nehruvian State and the 
Indian Constitution are idealist entities that are also deeply 
pragmatic ones. Time and time again the Constitution realises the 
need for differential treatment. Dalits are only the most outstanding 
example of this. But all communities have laws, and this is part of 
our colonial heritage: you have personal laws that apply only to you. 
The large grievance of the BJP is that the State intervened to iron 
out Hindu law but not Muslim law; this represents a kind of bias 
towards certain communities. It's completely wrong to say that the 
State departs from the norm only to accommodate minorities. I try and 
provide examples - the whole issue of reservations being one. I try 
and show that the Indian State defers to different communities at 
different times in a pragmatic way. There is no thesis that you can 
establish that the State only bends back in one direction alone.

The point is, if a nikarwadi says that a Muslim shouldn't have four 
wives, the secular response doesn't necessarily have to be that they 
should have four wives. There are perfectly legitimate positions on 
both sides of it. You can argue from different points of view about 
the issue of polygamy. What we need to recognize more largely is that 
the Indian State has always, in several instances, treated different 
communities differently from other communities. That potentially 
everybody has a grievance. The idea that the majority is 
short-changed in some ways is a fantasy. But the point is that it's a 
fantasy which is so widely believed that we actually need to go out 
and make detailed arguments and demonstrate where the contrary is 
true. Maybe show that this is a pattern of State action. It's a large 
country, it's struggled with the business of plurality, it's not 
always come up with great answers, but that this is part of an 
ongoing project which applies to every community.

Would you say that a uniform civil code is necessary for a true democracy?
Not at all. We already have a true functioning democracy. I don't 
think a rigorous uniform civil code is necessary to the functioning 
of a democracy. Whether its desirable is something we can argue 
about. If you ask me whether I'm in favour of polygamy or against it, 
I would say that I am against it simply because, for me, it 
contravenes the rights of women. On the other hand, Partha Chatterjee 
has written a very eloquent essay saying that as long as Muslims 
arrive at consensual decisions about their personal law in a way that 
is transparently democratic, they do not have to submit their laws to 
the rationality of the modern State. I am not saying that I agree 
with him. But I would say that if I were to arrive at a consensus 
that a uniform civil code is optimal and desirable, then we need to 
ask: on what principle is the civil code going to be built. Is it 
going to be built on a principle of secular liberal reason? If so, 
there is a great deal which is non-Muslim that will have to be ironed 
out as well. The idea of the Hindu Undivided Family, the idea of a 
male karta, the idea of patriarchy which informs every law in this 
country, will have to be redone.

So polygamy for you really boils down to being a question of women's 
rights? How does the State decide whether the individual belongs to 
the community of women or to a religious community?
Obviously, in the happiest of all circumstances the State will listen 
to the representations of an individual and fully ignore the claims 
of community. That is a dogmatically liberal position, which refuses 
to acknowledge the claims of community. But that's clearly not going 
to happen. It's not happened in the course of Indian nationalism; 
it's something that the Indian State has dealt with differently from 
other countries. I would suggest though that one of the things that 
the State should do - and one of the things that hasn't actually ever 
happened - is that it should involve itself less and less in matters 
of community. To take an example, there have been a series of 
judgements allowing Hindu temple trusts to be run by government 
representatives. This is done with the noblest intentions: mahants 
are corrupt, these places are dens of inequity, the rational State 
will take it over and sort it out. But if you use a secular calculus, 
the cost of this is that people turn around and say: why just a Hindu 
trust, why don't you run the SGPC, every Waqf board? - to be fair 
there are government reps on Waqf boards.

One of the lessons this holds for us is that, in so far as is 
possible, the State should move away from the administration of 
religious institutions. The latter should be seen as a function of 
civil society and not the State. The State is incapable of doing this 
balancing act to everyone's satisfaction. Everybody will always say 
that one of the balls fell out. So it's something the State needs to 
step away from. And if you were to ask me if the State should look at 
communitarian assertions with scepticism or alacrity, I would say 
scepticism. The function of the post-colonial Indian State is to 
remain credible with every community, not to cosy up to anyone. If 
the liberal principle of a minimal State is going to be invoked 
anywhere, it should be invoked in the business of community 
management.

[ continued in SACW Dispatch #3 | Oct 1, 2001]

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

SACW is an informal, independent & non-profit citizens wire service run by
South Asia Citizens Web (http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since 1996. Dispatch
archive from 1998 can be accessed at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/act/messages/ . To subscribe send a blank
message to: <act-subscribe@yahoogroups.com> / To unsubscribe send a blank
message to: <act-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com>
________________________________________
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.

-- 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]