When society is held hostage to fundamentalism

Neera Chandhoke
Political Scientist

The claim that India is distinguished by pluralism and tolerance has now achieved the dubious status of a platitude — a statement that is repeated so often that it has lost meaning and become insipid. The proposition that India is constituted as a plural society does not lead to the proposition that the ruling class values pluralism. From the late 1980s to the 1990s, literature on the need to respect multiculturalism came to us from largely immigrant societies — Canada, the US and Australia. India has been historically constituted as a plural society, but the literature gained traction in academia.

Towards the end of the 1990s, a number of political theorists recognised that it is not enough to posit multiculturalism, for minority cultures will always be at risk in a society dominated by one community, its language, its vision of what is good and its goals. The notion of multiculturalism, or the idea that one political community contains within its boundaries a number of different faiths, was thereon buttressed by the idea of minority rights.

The theoretical exercise was redundant for India, where the notion of minority rights had been incorporated into the vision of the leaders of the freedom struggle, and the authors of our Constitution. The moment the Hindutva movement began to consolidate around the objective of destroying the Babri Masjid, the issue of the rights of minorities came in the forefront of academic agendas. At the same time, it was submerged by the rush of majoritarianism.

We learnt that plural societies are often divided societies. The division is not only between different conceptions of the good. They get divided when communities/political parties disagree on the norms that can arbitrate/regulate different conceptions of the good. Secularism provides one such norm: in the public sphere, no religion shall be advantaged and no religion shall be disadvantaged. But we live in strange times. Right-wingers believe that the majority religion should dominate the lives of all religious communities.

The vocal supporters of Hindutva fail to recognise the distinction between religion as a faith and religion as a form of power politics. Hinduism is a complex creed. It has nothing to do with Hindutva, which has reduced a sophisticated system of faith to garish temples and rituals. I wish worship at temples and genuflections before the Brahmanical caste could wipe out hunger and want, eradicate inequality, teach its devotees respect for other religions, and, thus, deliver to all people a secure life led with dignity. But sadly, this has not happened in history. So, we have to look for other ways to hold a multi-religious community together.

One such way, perhaps, is to recreate a political discourse that is neutral to different notions of the good. A political discourse is always public, and public discourses are based upon shared understandings. A democratic political discourse has to ensure that all interests are accommodated: the right to freedom of conscience, the right to practise one’s religion, and, above all, the obligation to allow others to do so.

A political discourse that foregrounds the interests of the majority and denigrates as well as demeans the minorities on the basis of religion forgets that religion escapes any attempt to use it instrumentally as a means of retaining power.

Why, after all these years, has the bogey of Khalistan resurfaced in the political arena? Why is it that, once again, this ‘failed project’ poses a potent threat to the unity of the country? Is it because the politics of Hindutva has legitimised the subordination of politics to religion?

Our rulers fail to recognise that the instrumental use of religious violence is invariably replicated in different forms. Have they learnt nothing from the processes of competitive religious mobilisation that led to the partition of India? And have citizens not understood that religious violence does not hurt the powerful who barricade themselves with iron fences? It does not harm politicians protected by cavalcades against the ravages generated by their cynical politics. Religious violence harms ordinary people, they die in bomb blasts on buses and trains, they die because they are lynched by mobs and they die because of political mobilisation anchored in the most vulgarised forms of religion.

Statesmen learn to hold their plural society together through political inventiveness and compassion for the people who have elected them to power. Politicians who possess inferior sensibilities divide us — we, who have learnt to live together, speak the same language, worship at dargahs of Sufi saints, share folk music and rituals, and who collectively dream of better futures for our children. Our future is at stake when once again the Indian society is held hostage to fundamentalism of any kind, whether by the merchants of Hindutva or those of Khalistan.

For too long we have been spectators of violence against our own people by our own people. It is time to reflect on what violence has done to us, and what we have done to encourage it. In 1867, defender of freedom John Stuart Mill had said in his inaugural address at the University of St Andrews: “He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows a wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not take the trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” This is exactly what is happening in India.