India
Needs A New Altar Of Reason, Not More Religion
By Jawed Naqvi
24 April, 2007
The Dawn
Emergin
from an inter-faith conclave in Delhi on Saturday, a former foreign
minister and a former cricket captain, both from Pakistan, looked disturbed.
"It is bad enough that we are fighting one category of mullahs
in our country. But to nurture nine different kinds of obscurantists
in the name of communal harmony must be a bigger nightmare," said
one.
My instinct is the reference
was to the Muslim clergy's counterparts in other religions that straddle
South Asia. The Buddhist and Christian zealots of Sri Lanka's majority
Sinhalese community, for example, who preach hatred of Tamils. And Tamils
of the island nation, both Hindu and Christian, who see the Sinhalese
as their enemy. Core Hindus of Nepal, generously helped by India's RSS,
deified their authoritarian king — before he was deposed by his
own less trusting
subjects — as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. The Nepalese currency
notes still bear the salutation to the government of "Sri Paanch",
a reference to the deity the king embodied.
The dishonour inflicted on
minority Hindus as also on Muslim women by mullahs in Bangladesh has
been extensively documented by rebel writer Taslima Nasrin. But a more
institutionalised form of religious and ethnic discrimination bordering
on slavery seems to have existed in Pakistan for decades. According
to a report in the Dawn last month, the Supreme Court directed the Sindh
police to ensure the recovery of a nine-member peasant family of Munnu
Bheel by April 14. Bheels are predominantly Hindu peasants who lived
in the once dense forests of northern India. This particular family
has been missing since 1998.
According to the Dawn report,
the Bheel family was abducted by an influential Muslim landlord some
nine years ago. The landlord was arrested and jailed on the intervention
of the apex court. At the last hearing, the Sindh police chief had conceded
that the centuries-old decadent culture of bonded labour in the region
was behind the disappearance.
It was in 1996 that Munnu
Bheel's family members and 71 other Hindu peasants slaving on the land
of Abdul Rehman Marri were rescued by a task force of the Human Rights
Commission of Pakistan. But on February 4, 1998, nine family members
were again kidnapped apparently by the same landlord after the family
refused to pay back a loan owed to the feudal lord. Bonded labour is
rampant in India too, but it exists along the more entrenched caste
contours, which though an aspect of
religion has a dynamic of its own. In South Asia, caste should be part
of any fair discussion on religion but that wasn't the case at the conclave
in Delhi.
There used to be a quaint
phrase to describe a platform of religious preachers like the one addressed
by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week. "Unity in obscurantism"
— that's what we called it. And obscurantism, as we all know,
works in tandem with the dominant feudal culture of the region. At the
same time, this bizarre unity of obscurantism's practitioners in South
Asia has another seamy side to it.
If you read the chilling
testimony of Maulana Maudoodi from Justice Munir's inquiry into the
anti-Qadiani riots of 1950s, and compare it with the hatred vented by
Hindutva's Guru Golwalkar in1939 against Indian Muslims in the book
"We, Our Nationhood Defined" you wouldn't find any difference
in the level of zealotry. Worse, as the case of Munnu Bheel exemplifies,
Maulana Maudoodi's prescription of treating non-Muslims as second class
citizens is still merrily practised in Pakistan despite recent measures,
like the court's intervention, to stem the rot.
As Prime Minister Singh addressed
the religious conclave in familiar clichés last week, he emphasised
the need to observe and practise communal harmony, as opposed to merely
tolerating the other's religion. He quoted Swami Vivekananda's widely
parroted lines — "As the different streams having their sources
in different places all mingle their water in the sea, sources in different
tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead
to Thee." This, however, has never worked out quite the same way
in practice. On the contrary, religion and its concomitant communalism
has become an essential feature of India's mainstream politics.
In fact, even as Dr Singh
was addressing the South Asian inter-faith conclave, the country's election
commission was hearing a petition to punish the main opposition party
for spewing hatred against Muslims in the Uttar Pradesh election campaign
currently under way. Some would see this as a sign of a healthy democracy
in which even a powerful and influential party such as the BJP could
be put out of the electoral fray if found guilty of electoral malpractice,
which spreading
communal hatred is. In reality though the idea is far-fetched. The horrible
events of Gujarat, for example, are a case in point, where terrorised
Muslims are subjected to an ongoing social boycott and daily abuse by
the BJP. That's proof enough that religious fascism cannot be fought
by pious ideas alone. If the election commission couldn't dislodge the
BJP in Gujarat, it is hardly likely to provide any relief to India's
secular idealists in the case of Uttar Pradesh.
And if it does ban the BJP
by a quirk of luck, does Dr Singh have the stomach to thwart the backlash
that would follow? Most likely not.
Under the circumstances what
can the Indian prime minister do? For starters, since secularism is
not a mere absence of communalism, he can begin by practising a more
palpable secularism in his own backyard. It is a shame that while India
can boast of a Sikh prime minister and even a Sikh army chief —
unthinkable in the aftermath of the 1984 violence against the community
— a bureaucratic subterfuge prevents the country from hiring a
Sikh bodyguard to protect the Sikh
prime minister. This is ridiculous and this is what Dr Manmohan Singh
should be addressing, instead of mouthing shibboleths on secularism
and communalism.
Do we need news agencies
to remind us that there are scarcely any Muslims working in India's
10,000-strong external intelligence agency, and neither Muslims nor
Sikhs working as bodyguards for the country's top leaders? The Outlook
magazine reported in November last year that mainly Hindu but officially
secular India has its first Sikh prime minister but his community is
not trusted enough to guard him?
Further, the magazine claimed
that India's minority Muslims were not trusted by the security apparatus
because of fears they could sympathise with the country's mainly Muslim
neighbour and long-time foe Pakistan. Is this true? Dr Singh has to
answer.
Secularism is not sermon
or a slogan to embellish some conclave of obscurantist representatives
or to win a few brownie points in a public debate. If India has to demonstrate
a healthy distance between religion and politics, which is what secularism
really is all about, the state has to provide the beacon light, and
not some ragtag alliance of clergymen. We'll wait for Dr Singh to demonstrate
his commitment to secularism by blowing the whistle on the communally-motivated
bureaucrats who have kept Sikh and Muslim bodyguards from joining his
detail.
As for Pakistan, it can do
its bit by producing Munnu Bheel's family and ensuring their safety
against future abuse of their religion and ethnicity. The Supreme Court's
deadline of April 14 has already passed.
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