[sacw] SACW #2 | 29 Dec. 02

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire #2 | 29 December 2002

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#1. Teaching against Communalism - Role of Social Science Pedagogy 
(Ananya Vajpeyi)

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#1.

Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay)
December 21, 2002
Perspectives

Teaching against Communalism
Role of Social Science Pedagogy

Communalism has so far been an ideology that anti-communal forces 
have tried to address in the informal sectors of pedagogy. What are 
the issues involved in building a formal syllabus for university 
students that systematically deals with communalism with a view to 
encouraging a principled rejection of its ideas and practices?

Ananya Vajpeyi

Of late, the discussion in the public sphere as regards communalism 
and education has centered around two problems. One, the 
communalisation of higher education, particularly of disciplines such 
as history and philosophy; and two, the danger of institutions of 
religious education - be they 'mathas', 'madarsas', or missions - 
becoming the proponents of political ideologies and thus the breeding 
grounds of communally-minded subjects. However, there does not seem 
to have been much attention directed towards trying to imagine how 
educational processes and institutions could be used in order 
to analyse communalism and, through such a process of analysis, 
persuade young citizens to turn away from it. Communalism has so 
far been an ideology that anti-communal forces, of both a secularist 
and an anti-secularist stripe, have tried to address in the informal 
sectors of pedagogy, namely: activism, awareness campaigns, 
documentation and theorisation; no one has sought to bring it 
squarely into the realm of social science pedagogy. This article 
attempts to identify some of the issues involved in building a 
syllabus that systematically teaches university students what 
communalism is, with a view to encouraging a principled rejection of 
its ideas and practices by them no matter what their religious 
affiliation.

I

To begin with, let it be said that the very attention to communalism 
by both activists and theorists alluded to above, has produced a vast 
literature on every aspect of the subject, in a range of media. A 
history of communalism, examining its roots in colonial 
governmentality and law, is easily presented. The role of key actors 
in the social reform, nationalist and popular movements during the 
latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries in 
furthering or hindering the discourse of communalism has been 
thoroughly examined. Historians have also shown the differences 
between inter-religious and inter-sectarian strife in south Asian 
premodernity, and communal conflict in colonial and post-colonial 
India. Similarly the sociology of communalism, revealing its 
constitutive connection with modern ideologies of caste, is now 
available to us. So also an analysis of the growth of communalism 
that attributes it to economic backwardness, class disparities, 
state-sponsored developmentalism and big science is not hard to cull. 
Since the beginning of the 1990s, traditional Marxist analyses of 
communalism have been supplemented by an examination of the effects 
of economic liberalisation and globalisation on the hardening of 
communalist positions and the funding of communal organisations, 
whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh.

Nor is there any dearth of political studies that correlate the 
demands, successes and failures of participatory democracy, 
representative government, the multiparty system and electoral 
politics with the changing fortunes of communalism. In political 
philosophy, many scholars have tried to understand the relationships 
between, on the one hand, communalism, and on the other, nationalism, 
secularism, religious belief, colonialism, fundamentalism, separatist 
movements, culture, traditions of inter-religious harmony, 
liberalism, tolerance, and so on. There is an emergent discourse on 
communalism and fascism, and one can anticipate comparative work on 
communalism and racism. In legal theory there is at least some effort 
to draw a Venn diagram demonstrating the intersection of the history 
of personal law regimes, constitutional rights pertaining to the 
freedom of religion and religious conversion, the powers and 
responsibilities of the secular state, the role of the judiciary, and 
communalism. It is also not difficult to put together a dossier of 
landmark judgments, acts and bills on matters relating to 
communalism. Similarly, some investigations of the psychology of 
communalism and communal violence are present in the literature. The 
anthropology of violence has naturally homed-in on communal riots and 
communities of riot-survivors as objects of study. In modern Indian 
languages, particularly Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and English, 
the entire genre of partition literature centres round communalism; 
more recently the riot has served as much as a source for literary 
representation as for ethnographic data. In gender studies there has 
been an attempt to triangulate women, communalism and the law; to 
show the important relationship between the construction of women's 
identity and communal identity; and to record the accounts of women 
who have been the victims of communal violence.

Outside the organised disciplines, citizens' groups have extensively 
documented communal violence and its aftermath, in text and on film, 
in the form of reports, narratives, statistics, interviews, etc. They 
have also investigated the breakdown of the law and order machinery 
during episodes of communal conflict, especially the nefarious role 
of the police, armed forces, and other state apparatuses, and made 
their findings publicly available. The Internet serves as an ideal 
site for the circulation of such information. Documentary filmmakers 
and filmmakers in parallel cinema have helped build an impressive 
body of fictional as well as non-fictional films on this theme. 
Photographers have always had a special part to play in raising the 
nation's conscience through their images of communal violence. In 
addition, more or less organised anti-communal awareness campaigns 
and protest movements routinely produce tracts, pamphlets, posters, 
songs, journals, plays and other educational materials for 
performance and distribution among the general public, especially 
students. Some groups have also, over time, organised concerts, art 
shows and other cultural expressions to promote communal harmony. 
Often times the musical or other outcomes of these events are 
commercially available. Newspaper, magazine, TV and radio reports of 
communal activities and violence, in all major Indian languages 
constitute a huge archive on their own.

In other words, there is no paucity of materials for someone seeking 
to construct an undergraduate or postgraduate syllabus about 
communalism in India today. The questions then are: How are these 
materials to be collected, organised and taught in a systematic and 
reasoned manner even as the raison d'etre of a course of this kind is 
to alert young citizens to the dangers of communalism and make them 
antipathetic towards it? What kind of training and preparation would 
the instructor herself require before she could take on the 
responsibility of such interested pedagogy? What are the ethics of 
teaching against the subject that is being taught? Is there some 
danger that anti-communal mobilisation will become domesticated once 
it is incorporated into academic syllabi, and thereby lose its 
political efficacy, its critical edge, as it were? Can those who are 
very committed to an anti-communal politics be trusted to teach in a 
rational and dispassionate manner? Conversely, can uninterested 
teachers be trusted to get across an unequivocally anti-communal 
message whilst teaching about communalism?

II

An experiment in teaching against communalism is currently being 
conducted at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), in 
Bangalore. Final year LLB as well as first and second year LLM 
students have the option of taking a seminar titled 'Casteism, 
Communalism and the Law: An Introduction' taught by this author. The 
class runs from October 2002 to January 2003, under the aegis of the 
Centre for the Study of Casteism, Communalism and the Law, a new 
entity within the school managed out of the department of sociology 
at the NLSIU. Students are aged 21-23 on average, and the class size 
is over 40, of which no less than 30 are present on any given day.1

The details - strengths or gaps - of this particular syllabus aside, 
what is the typical dynamic in a classroom of this sort? The teacher 
is forced to ask herself: Are there enough, or indeed any students 
from minority communities represented in the class? If, for example, 
there are absolutely no Muslim students enrolled, then does that 
necessarily affect the general direction of debate, and the final 
consensus that may or may not be reached? Do others take up the 
position of those who are absent? These types of questions routinely 
come up regarding Black and other minority students on American 
campuses. In India, do students speak as members of religious 
communities, or as citizens, or does their voice alternate between 
these two identities? What is the exact point when a person stops 
arguing in a rational disinterested fashion, and assumes the role of 
defender or spokesperson of the community to which she belongs? What 
topics suddenly spark an emotional response, irrupting the structure 
of an on-going discussion?

I found, for instance, that a module on 'Rama and the Ramayana in the 
Political Imagination of Modern India' elicited a heated reaction 
from my class, and helped put many of the broader themes of the 
course on the table.2 We talked about the porous - or shifting - line 
between religion and culture, the relationship between political 
mobilisation and cultural and/or religious symbols, the place of 
history versus that of mythology in identity politics, the persistent 
role of the past in the present, the difference between religious 
belief and religious ideology, or Hinduism and Hindutva, and so on. 
It might appear that this topic, of the Rama figure and the Ramayana 
narrative, is rather literary, and cannot speak much to the problem 
of communalism. But my hunch, that choosing so recognisable a 
civilisational icon would crystallise some abstract questions for 
the students, while simultaneously grounding the current communal 
conflict in deeper cultural politics, in fact turned out to be 
correct. A religious discourse would proceed along one axis of the 
'meaning' of Rama and Ramayana; social science has its own work of 
exegesis cut out for it.

We discussed not only the historicity of Rama cults and the 
traditions of performance and worship associated with this hero/deity 
all over south, south-east and east Asia, but also present-day issues 
before the Indian nation: Ram Janmabhumi, Ram mandir, and, in the 
aftermath of Gujarat 2002, the ominous reverberation of the slogan 
'Jai Shri Ram'. It does seem to be necessary to engage cultural 
artifacts - across religious traditions - head-on within the social 
scientific framework. The idea here is certainly not to invent a 
separate social science for India, as critical indigenists have 
repeatedly suggested (failing, apparently, to see the absurdity of 
such a plan). It is not even principally to explore what cultural 
texts and practices are about in and of themselves, but rather to 
understand what they come to mean in given socio-historical contexts, 
and how they are used to create, represent and mobilise communities. 
The identities of groups are more often than not grounded in acts of 
collective interpretation, and we need not only to examine the 
objects of interpretation, but also the interpretive act itself, to 
grasp better what drives the subjects of interpretation in their 
groupness.

III

In trying to comprehend why and how group identity is performed, in 
particular communal identity, surely the key is to achieve some 
insight into violence. However, violence is difficult to address in a 
pedagogic context, or so I've felt. Common sense dictates that 
violence against women has a special place in women's studies, racial 
violence in the study of racism - so also there is no getting around 
communal violence in a syllabus about communalism (or indeed caste 
violence in a syllabus about casteism). The question is how to make 
sure, on the one hand, that the entire course isn't overwhelmed by 
this single theme of violence; and, on the other hand, how to ensure 
that the discussion of violence doesn't become pornographic, 
inflammatory or in some other way ethically questionable. There is 
also the more philosophically complex problem of whether, in 
attempting to discover the meaning of a violent act, we aren't 
somehow justifying it. A semiotics of violence should not end up in a 
justification of it.

In the event of having to decide what to prescribe on a reading list 
and what to leave out without recourse, in advance, to a 
well-developed theory about positioning violence as a topic of 
pedagogy, I found myself making all sorts of pragmatic choices. I 
included sections of Valentine Daniel's Charred Lullabies: Chapters 
in an Anthropography of Violence, even though it is a difficult book 
for an undergraduate class, but excluded Appadurai's essay 'Dead 
Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalisation' [Appadurai 
1998]. I spoke to my students at length about the latter, but 
couldn't bring myself to ask them to read it for themselves. 
Television coverage and news magazine images of the Gujarat violence 
have been explicit enough, but I could not screen Gopal Menon's 
documentary 'Hey Ram! Genocide in the Land of Gandhi' for my class. I 
have to confess that these were intuitive preferences and I exercised 
nothing more or less than a teacher's prerogative in prescribing or 
proscribing materials. But in future I would like to have access to a 
philosophically robust and empirically grounded principle on the 
basis of which to determine how and how much to focus on violence. 
Right now it's not clear to me whether such a principle would come 
from a theory of education, from social scientific theory, from the 
discipline of psychology, or from some mixture of all these. The 
experiences of other teachers in dealing with the subject of violence 
in classrooms across the country would serve as a valuable input for 
comparative assessment and learning.

In the course of the semester a senior colleague at NLSIU asked me to 
help him, informally, in preparing a public lecture he was to 
deliver, on 'The Problems of Social Harmony in India'. He suggested 
that I draw on the readings in my syllabus about Casteism, 
Communalism and the Law to point him in the right direction. It was 
then it struck me that we had discussed threadbare in this class 
every aspect of social conflict, but had never really turned to the 
idea of social harmony, and the related ideas of 'national 
integration' and 'unity-in-diversity'. Have these ideas become 
non-objects in Indian social science? Or are they, as erstwhile 
slogans of the secular state, as official constructions left over 
from the Congress Party era, merely objects of ridicule for 
contemporary social scientists? Or can we perhaps see through them to 
the other side, to the philosophically complex category that is just 
as important as violence, namely, its opposite, tolerance?3

Chatterjee has theorised 'toleration' in relationship to secularism, 
but that was in the shadow of the demolition of the Babri Masjid a 
decade ago [Chatterjee 1994]. With the riots in Gujarat we seem to 
have crossed a new threshold in the widespread public acceptance as 
well as the open state sponsorship of communal, especially 
anti-Muslim, intolerance. Two of my students opted to work on Hate 
Speech as a legal concept for their research projects due at the end 
of the semester. India does not have any laws pertaining to Hate 
Speech - these young legal minds wanted to argue both the need and 
the form of future (or rather, by their lights, inevitable and 
therefore imminent) legislation in this area. It is not just the BJP 
but also the Congress that has conducted a particular kind of 
election campaign in the Gujarat poll this year, the speeches of 
candidates from all sides being equally offensive. The message of 
intolerance is being broadcast all over the land, both by those who 
are in power and by those who aspire to it. One logical reaction 
would be to prepare ourselves legally to deal with its growing 
entailments in our political practice, whether they be shockingly 
communal election speeches or other ideological propaganda materials 
full of hate and unabashedly so - posters, CDs, films, pamphlets, etc.

Appadurai (1998) has talked about 'political obscenity' in the 
context of especially cruel, indeed inhuman, acts of ethnic violence. 
But such obscenity has now spilled over from the domain of brute 
physical force into the hitherto-civil realm of language and other 
symbolic representation too. When a kar sevak en route to Ayodhya to 
build a temple over the ruins of the Babri mosque (and of our secular 
polity) sings a Ram bhajan, it is not a simple expression of his 
devotion to his god, free of the desire to taunt his Muslim 
countrymen. Gone are the days when a painting of Shivaji or a statue 
of Ambedkar could be read as the carriers of innocent meanings, like 
Marathi pride or dalit pride. Prejudice is the ugly Siamese twin of 
such pride - the two always go together. No glorification of the self 
today is untainted by the denigration of the other (if indeed it ever 
was). Hence the difficulty, faced equally by the Sangh parivar and by 
the fundamentalist ideologues across the border, in constructing a 
believable narrative for their respective nations, the Hindu rashtra 
and Pakistan, both of which, like it or not, carry the baggage of an 
already always miscegenated history. Is it not important, then, to 
address ourselves afresh to the enfeebled and attenuated notions of 
harmony and tolerance, to recharge them with a sense of purpose? Is 
there any other way to make sense of our past, to live out our 
present and to imagine our future as an irresistibly plural and 
prolific people?

Simeon (2001) has pointed out that one of the biggest analytic 
failures of Indian social science was to get taken in by the 
segmented character of communalism on the subcontinent, and to see 
instead Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and other communalisms. These have all 
along been understood as distinct, with each one having its own 
history, structure and effects upon the nation. He argues that in 
fact there is only one phenomenon, namely, Indian communalism, and 
this is really nothing other than the Indian version of fascism. We 
should look back and recognise this unitary force as the cause and 
driver of the partition (and, extrapolating from such an insight, 
also perhaps of the many wars with Pakistan since then, and the many 
communal conflagrations that have occurred within the country since 
1947). Elsewhere in the world, the basis of fascism is usually a 
'fabricated and exclusive ethnic identity'. In India there are many 
such identities, hence the misleading appearance of discrete and 
dissimilar communal discourses. In actuality communalism in India has 
a generic character, that Simeon tries to capture:

Indian fascism's ideological method defines democracy in arithmetical 
rather than institutional terms, despises democratic values; and 
accords superiority to hateful ethnic mobilisation over the 
requirements of civic order and criminal justice. It uses so-called 
traditional values to express a fear of women and hostility to gender 
equality; it also glorifies violence as a 'masculine' virtue.

Further Simeon points out that the currency of communalism - a term 
that he uses interchangeably with 'Indian fascism' - is sentiment. In 
a situation of conflict, we hear of communal 'passions' being 
inflamed, of the 'feelings' of this or that community being hurt. 
Very often the supposed provocation could be an event that occurred 
way back in history, through the agency of individuals and groups 
long dead and gone, but the reaction to this is nevertheless here and 
now. It seems that in our society there are no mechanisms whatsoever 
to process these free-floating emotions of hatred, anger, jealousy, 
fear and humiliation - hence riots, those public detonations of 
pent-up collective sentiments. But riots are just one expression of 
the politics of sentiment. Simeon alerts us that:

The most significant consequence of this trend is the justification 
that self-appointed guardians of morality have obtained for violence 
and defiance of law, for cultural policing, book burning, and the 
intimidation of artists and creative activity in general. Film 
screenings have been disrupted, writers and painters threatened and 
beaten up, academic work and speculation subjected to the promise of 
dire consequences.

It seems to me that there is an urgent need, in such a highly charged 
and oppressive environment, to develop the idea of tolerance. This 
has to be a habit of mind that regulates the behavior not only of the 
state towards its citizens, but of these citizens towards one 
another. All parties need to keep a check on the negative emotions 
and hate-filled words that have so quickly, before our very eyes, 
vitiated our public life almost beyond recognition. Ironically, we 
may have to begin thinking about tolerance in a systematic fashion 
precisely because in the absence of such thinking the discourses that 
surround us have become intolerable, certainly to anybody with the 
slightest faith in democracy.

IV

Teaching against communalism necessarily means teaching for 
secularism, even though there is no simple opposition - 'Ideology +A 
v Ideology -A' - to be posited between the two.4 I was surprised at 
the extent to which there appeared to be a natural - as opposed to a 
constructed - consensus among my students that secularism as a 
concept is defunct. Some thought this was because it is an import 
from the west and from Christianity; others thought this was because 
the Constitution had never been able to define or redefine the term 
properly for India (secularism = the state's equi-distance from, 
indifference to, or equal love for, all religions?). Some thought it 
was always official ideology rather than popular conviction; others 
thought that the Congress Party had taken secularism with it to the 
grave. Some even bought into the smoke-and-mirrors doctrine of the 
Hindu right that secularism is pseudo-secularism, and religious 
nationalism is real secularism. No one seemed to think that 
secularism was successful sometimes and fails at other times; that 
even if it has lost its way it could be brought back on track; that 
some synthesis could be effected between its many senses and some 
significance recuperated from this new hybrid category. But no one 
could deny, either, that we have no real choice than to make it work, 
not in spite of or against our many religious traditions, but 
precisely in their midst. Secularism may have been reduced to an 
empty signifier today, but other than filling it once more with 
meaning - meaning and teeth - it's not at all clear what the 
political alternative might be.

As a mental exercise, I asked my students to picture a day in their 
life in the Hindu rashtra. I posed to them a series of questions, 
polemical and yet deadly earnest, in the style of Arundhati Roy. 
Which items of their regular clothing would they be willing to give 
up in the name of properly Hindu dress? Which of their beloved foods 
would they happily bid farewell to? What types of music would they 
gladly sacrifice for the cultural purity of this imaginary nation, 
which architectural monuments would they eliminate, how many arenas 
of their existence would they willingly shrink and desiccate in order 
to count as dutiful citizens of this Promised Land? How would they 
complete a single sentence in any modern Indian language with so many 
words disallowed for being of foreign origin? What would they 
remember of a past become taboo, and where would they hide their 
censored memories? The fact is that Indians have no idea what the 
fascist utopia actually entails. We mistake a nightmare for a dream 
and wish it could come true. Those of us who yearn for some such 
space, not recognising it for the dystopia it is, do so not so much 
from ideological conviction as from sheer ignorance of the real 
meaning of an exclusive, authoritarian majoritarian state for our 
small everyday pleasures and freedoms, for our assumption that we 
count, each one. Those of us who gather in the shade of our swords or 
'shakhas' know that when we step out, a constitutional sun still 
shines on us and under the rule of law we can breathe easy. Glib talk 
in the national press and media about Gujarat being the 'laboratory' 
of Hindu nationalism masks our collective inability to project 
ourselves as the dissection rats in these ghastly experiments with 
untruth.5

Who wants to live in Hindu rashtra? If some big national newspaper 
had conducted a poll, my guess even so recently as a year agom would 
have been that almost every Indian who took a moment to think about 
this question would have answered, 'Not me'. But such trust in the 
fundamentally secular character of our people begins to appear naive 
today. The citizens of Gujarat - at least those who still have left 
the freedom to vote - seem happy to choose between light and dark 
shades of saffron. They are deciding the future government of their 
state within the communal parameters set by the Hindu Right but 
ratified or acquiesced to by all major political parties. What does 
this mean? That no one wants an alternative? Or that since none seems 
forthcoming - not from the discourses of politics, not from the state 
or national leadership, and not from civil society - the people have 
resigned themselves to a more or less communal fate? How must an 
anti-communal option, one that will prevent social strife, economic 
ruin, cultural impoverishment and political destruction, be created 
and presented, not just to Gujaratis but to all Indians? More 
importantly, how must the very desire and demand for such an option 
be rekindled among ordinary folk? How are we to reject this reduction 
of us - humans and citizens - to guinea pigs in the laboratories of 
communal ideology?

Education may be a way. Many times I found some of my students 
falling in with the on-going discussion, and then suddenly becoming 
recalcitrant. At such moments, of retreating into unreflexively 
communal positions that to all appearances had already been 
discredited in the class by consensus, they often uttered phrases 
that I felt could not have entered their heads except verbatim from 
the speech of their elders. These 'sutras' of casual, everyday 
communalism, picked up in the house and school from parents and 
teachers, were reproduced unthinkingly, uncritically, at points in 
the class-room conversation that were at first surprising to me but 
later began to be predictable. Islam is rigid; Hinduism is tolerant. 
Muslims are foreign; Hindus are native. Muslims provoke; Hindus 
react. Today's broken mosques pay for yesterday's broken temples. 
There's no such thing as Hinduism. There's no such thing as a 
non-Hindu India. Hindutva is politics, Hinduism is religion; the 
latter need have no fear of the former, because the spiritual 
triumphs over the material. Muslims proliferate because they are 
polygamous; Hindus are dwindling because they do not proselytise. We 
have all heard such things said, at the dinner table, in front of the 
television, and at other sites of bourgeois domesticity. The domestic 
sphere is where adults air their frankest prejudices and children 
absorb them. Sometimes stereotyped images of self and other, folk 
theories about belonging and exclusion, solidarity and enmity, that 
would have been at hand in the privacy of the home, spilled out into 
the quasi-public space of the classroom. When a very deep chord of 
such unprocessed - primordial? - conviction was touched, some of my 
students could not filter out, either by following the dictates of 
reason or by deferring to the protocols of civility, the communal 
attitudes they had heard expressed in the family environment.

Not even the pressure, implicit in the very nature of the 
power-imbalance between teacher and student, to conform to what could 
be construed as my position, nor the embarrassment at being 
immediately contradicted by more politically-correct classmates, 
helped contain these communal articulations from time to time. So 
21-year olds pronounced wisely on Nehru's failures, Indira Gandhi's 
wiles, Rajiv Gandhi's blunders, and V P Singh's mistakes. Their 
interpretations of the recent past of our nation were remarkably 
assured. They seemed to remember the partition, the emergency, the 
anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the anti-Mandal agitation, Babri Masjid, 
Pokharan, and Godhra, not merely as members of a TV-watching, 
movie-going generation, but as though they had been there. I was 
grateful that this kind of visceral identification with a given 
community did not extend into the remote past. For that would have 
made these young minds feverishly relive centuries of war, invasion, 
genocide, desecration, and thus experience, as if first-hand, the 
agonies of a history imagined, anachronistically, to be riven by 
communal strife.

A syllabus is easily constructed; a literature review smoothly 
conducted. The problem here is of trying to communicate a set of 
values through a self-reflexive, self-critical, ethical and yet 
interventionist pedagogy. It is hard to open anyone's mind. But the 
young are receptive, ready to revise their views - which as we have 
seen, are often really the undigested views of their parents - if 
persuaded by rational means. Teaching against communalism may be a 
way prevent the fearful dream of a Hindu rashtra from becoming a 
reality that no one, let's face it, could possibly want to trade for 
a life in secular democratic India.

Notes

1 The part of the course that focuses on casteism is not discussed in 
this article. For a copy of her taught syllabus on 'Casteism, 
Communalism and the Law', readers may write to the author.
2 The title for this module was suggested by Sheldon Pollock, 
Pollock, Sheldon (1993): 'Ramayana and Political Imagination in 
India' in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 52, No 2, May, 261-97.
3 Let us grant that no one in our public sphere even half-heartedly 
invokes the literal contrastive of violence, viz, non-violence, any 
more. At this point in our history as a nation, from no end of the 
political spectrum, along any axis, of caste, community, class or 
ideology, do we hear any invocation whatsoever of Gandhi's ahimsa as 
a principle of personal ethics or civic life.
4 Being secular does not merely mean being anti-communal!
5 The other word besides 'laboratory' that I find problematic in the 
media's frequent use of it to describe Gujarat, is 'showcase' - that 
unfortunate state is simultaneously a laboratory and a showcase for 
the ideological and practical workings of Hindutva. What does the 
experiment here consist in? Communalising minds and dividing people? 
What are the new products of this experimentation that get proudly 
displayed to the rest of the nation? Better ways to rape and kill 
humans, to burn and loot property, to make a mockery of the 
institutions of law and order? The Sangh parivar may be using such 
vocabulary in their internal publications - why do the national press 
and TV channels repeat these words and give them general currency? We 
have to be vigilant lest even seemingly innocent acts of reference 
become acts of validation. The semantics of communalism can permeate 
and infect our very language to the point that we find ourselves 
saying things we do not mean, complicit, willy-nilly, in an ideology 
we do not subscribe to.

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1998): 'Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era 
of Globalisation' in Public Culture, Vol 10, No 2 (Winter); 225-47.
Chatterjee, Partha (1994): 'Secularism and Toleration' in Economic 
and Political Weekly, July 9, 1768-77.
Simeon, Dilip (2001): 'A Finer Balance - An Essay on the Possibility 
of Reconciliation', unpublished manuscript of a lecture presented at 
the Documenta 11 'Symposium on Truth, Justice and Reconciliation', 
New Delhi, May 9.
Valentine, Daniel E, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography 
of Violence, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

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