How the liberal, secular Hindu’s angst is misdirected
In his finely calibrated speech at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D), Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan said "debate and dissent are critical for India's economic progress".
He concluded his address by quoting Mahatma Gandhi: "The golden rule of conduct is mutual toleration, seeing that we will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different points of vision."
Tolerance is the essence of democracy. Dissent is inviolate. The only restriction to free speech, as I said on a recent TV debate, is this: "Your freedom ends where my nose begins." By that standard, as I said on the same show, the Shiv Sena's act of inking Sudheendra Kulkarni's face qualified as criminal assault.
And yet, tolerance has nuances. Raghuram Rajan himself showed subtle intellectual intolerance to others' views by delaying interest rate cuts for far too long against colleagues' wishes, damaging India's economic growth impetus and the revival of investment by corporates weighed down by high-interest debt. Tolerance cuts both ways as the RBI governor knows.
The debate over intolerance in India has, in recent weeks, taken on an unfortunate if predictable communal colour. Fringe elements on the Left and Right have captured the middle ground. They must be forced to vacate it. The middle ground in a democracy welcomes dissent and tolerance for views from both sides of the ideological spectrum.
Religion, however, has long been misused in India to score political points. Shah Bano began the modern descent into communal politics thirty years ago. Babri Masjid intensified it. The cycle of religious violence and counter-violence has continued.
Over decades, the appeasement of Muslims has - ironically - angered both Hindus and Muslims. From the Shah Bano case in 1985 to today, Muslims have been treated as "objects" to be patronised: by politicians for votes, by liberal Hindus out a sense of noblesse oblige.
Outcome: Muslims remain economically backward and socially straitjacketed, seeking empowerment but receiving only appeasement. Meanwhile, the average Hindu resents the preferential treatment given to Muslims, even though it amounts only to tokenism. As this resentment builds up, communal polarisation sets in. A vicious cycle begins. Genuine secularism is the victim.
In an article titled The Ayatollahs of Secularism, this is what I wrote:
On a cool spring day on a Californian university campus in 1950, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a tall, angular man of 22, was in a garrulous mood.
He told my father: "Ah, Pakistan. See what we will do with my wonderful new country. Join Habib Bank. You'll be chairman one day. How many Berkeley MBAs does Pakistan have?"
My father, like young Bhutto, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, was unimpressed. "A country founded on theocracy," he told Bhutto, "will never work." My mother, among the first Indian women-students on the Berkeley campus, agreed. Bhutto walked away in a huff.
Those were heady days following independence. After graduating from Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in political science, Bhutto went on to Oxford University to study law. He became Pakistan's youngest cabinet minister, at 30, in 1958. My parents returned to India after four years of graduate study at Berkeley and got married. My father took charge of the family's chemicals business which, thankfully, he was later liberal enough never to coerce me to join.
The secular veil
Cut to today. My daughter, a designer, often visits areas in Mumbai to source raw material for her work with artisans. Most of these artisans are Muslims. Most are very poor. Most live in buildings which could collapse any moment. She asked me a few years ago: "Why hasn't the government in Maharashtra, which wins elections based on votes from poor Muslims, done anything to improve their lives?"
The answer: because poor Muslims, who have no time to think beyond the next meal, are deliberately fed a false narrative of secularism - which really is communalism masquerading as secularism. What can be more communal than keeping, through wilful economic neglect, nearly an entire community of 180 million people in poverty for over six decades?
That brings us to the third angle in this infamous triangle: the liberal, secular Hindu. Where does he stand in all this? He is naturally secular in the truest sense of the word: religion is a private matter, he rightly believes. It has no place in politics.
But he is also swayed by the plight of many of his fellow-Indians who happen to be Muslims: impoverished, illiterate, ghettoised and discriminated against. For every Azim Premji and Aamir Khan, there are millions of weavers in Uttar Pradesh and spot boys in Mumbai who have no place in corporate India's organised labour force.
Liberal, well-meaning Hindus ask: Why? And the answer they come up with is: communal discrimination. Yet the liberal Hindu doesn't dig deeper. The more politicians sequester Muslims into vote silos, the more the average Hindu (not the liberal, well-meaning, Stephanian Hindu) resents them. Discrimination, petty or large, mounts. So does anger.
The real culprits - communal politicians dressed up as upholders of secularism - get away scot free in this narrative. The liberal, secular Hindu's angst over anti-Muslim communalism is therefore misdirected - far away from these real culprits.
Influential sections of the media are part of this great fraud played on India's poor Muslims: communalism dressed up as secularism. The token Muslim is lionised - from business to literature - but the common Muslim languishes in his 68-year-old ghetto. It is from such ghettos that raw recruits to Indian Mujaheedin (IM) are most easily found.
Cycle of religious violence
When the Modi government took office in May 2014, the defeated opposition predicted "riot after riot". When riots did not break out as prophesised, church attacks were manufactured. When those were proved bogus, the beef controversy came in handy. Though murders over cow slaughter have occurred with shocking regularity in India since independence, the horrific murder of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, UP, became a rallying cry for the opposition.
The NDA government handled the Dadri murder badly. Its mid-rung leaders made inflammatory statements, playing right into the hands of the sophisticated and ruthlessly determined "secularate" - the coalition of those who use Muslims, beef, Christians and churches as fodder for their politics.
Journalists used to monthly cash envelopes, foreign junkets and unfettered access to South Block are especially incensed these days. So are out-of-power lawyers, corrupt bureaucrats and disenfranchised opposition leaders. They have banded together to restore the status quo ante. For them, Bihar is the beacon of hope. Victory there, they believe, will open the gates to the comfortable and lucrative world they lost where everything, pre-2014, had a price.
Their weapon of choice to bludgeon the Modi government? The charge of "growing intolerance". The aim: defame, demonise, discredit and delegitimise the government.
In a week marking 31 years to the day when Congress-led mobs butchered over 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi alone, following former prime minister Indira Gandhi's assassination, the irony of Congress leaders marching to Rashtrapati Bhavan will not be lost on President Pranab Mukherjee.
He was on the flight back from Calcutta to Delhi along with Rajiv Gandhi and other Congress leaders when news of Mrs. Gandhi's death was confirmed. A qualified pilot, Rajiv was sitting in the aircraft's cockpit when he first received confirmation of his mother's death on BBC radio. He informed Pranab Mukherjee who remained silent through the rest of the flight to Delhi.
I later interviewed Mukherjee for my biography of Rajiv. I asked him: "As the senior Congress leader, did you expect to be made prime minister after Indiraji's assassination?"
An enigmatic smile flickered over his face but was replaced almost instantly with his trademark poker expression. "No, I didn't," he replied softly.
Congress leaders have always been tolerant of dynasty. When Sonia Gandhi meets him at Rashtrapati Bhavan to complain about "growing intolerance" in the country under the Modi government, he might recall that flight from Calcutta to Delhi with 40-year-old Rajiv and how he had to cede the prime ministership to him.