How the idea of a tolerant India can lose to ISIS
The recent act of barbarism in Paris has shaken the world. While messages of condolence and support are flowing into Paris from all over the world, it is also a very testing time. President Francois Hollande’s emotional response to launch a “pitiless counter-attack” is understandable given the horrific nature of bloodshed, but not quite the most appropriate one. Barbarism can never be countered by barbarism. A more civilised response would require anything but a knee-jerk, impulsive counteroffensive. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. That the attacks were executed by the Islamic State (ISIS) has once again made the Muslims all over the world vulnerable to negative stereotyping and Islamophobia, as witnessed post the 9/11 terror attacks on the US.
France, the land of liberty, equality and fraternity, happens to be a country in Europe with a substantial percentage of Muslim population. Cultural integration of the "others” has been a cumbersome and complex issue in the whole of Europe. The project of religious diversity, in particular, has been the most challenging. Such has been the overall impact of Islamophobia, let alone the right-wing, that even the liberals have tended to look at the "others” in general and the Muslims in particular with suspicion and mistrust. This stems partly, yet significantly, from the way the idea of religion has been conceptualised and practised in the West as neatly bounded communities of believers. Different religions, therefore, emerge as independent blocks and as autonomous cubicles, and hence, the social engineering on diversity still, inadvertently, contributes towards rigidification of religious boundaries.
In comparison, the religious landscape in India and South Asia is markedly different. Here it is a remarkably fluid territory imbued with enormous criss-crossing of faiths. Religious traditions in South Asia has been more about "enmeshment" of varied traditions, rather than mechanical assemblage of independent, diverse religious traditions. Diversity still recognises the boundary, enmeshment dissolves it. While diversity can be engineered, enmeshment is more organic and mutually sustaining.
Innumerable instances of cohabitation in the religious milieu bear testimony to this. There are thousands of temples, mosques and shrines revered by people across faiths. The everydayness of religious life here is about mind-boggling exchanges and mutual participation in shared cultural spaces. The Ramlila tradition, for instance, has historically occasioned remarkable cultural interactions, and has seen people across faiths participating as actors, directors, producers and, of course, as audience. More than half of the visitors to the Sufi shrine of Khwaja Moiunuddin Chisti in Ajmer, Rajasthan happen to be non-Muslims. Many flower-sellers at the main entrance of the world famous Brahma Temple in Pushkar, Ajmer, are Muslims. Christains of Bettiah in Bihar observe two sets of marriage rituals, one according to the prescriptions of the Church and the other where the groom performs "sindoor daan" or putting vermillion on the forehead of the bride, a tradition akin to a standard Hindu practice. This is the time of Chaath Puja in Bihar and besides making the soop, winnowing tool made of bamboo and chulha, the earthen stove which are indispensable ritual items in the puja, the Muslim craftsmen also participate, in many areas, as devotees who offer prayers to the sun god. Likewise, there are Hindu villages in many parts of India that observe Moharram and the local legends around them signify the depth of porosity of religio-cultural boundaries and their common roots.
Such instances and spots dot the length and breadth of India and the subcontinent. Sadly, of late, there has been pressure on this fluid territory to metamorphose into compartments and cubicles. Ramlila committees in many places, it was reported recently, have barred Muslim actors from doing the main roles, such as Ram and Lakshman, in the name of purification. Centuries-old shared cultural spaces such as this are under threat. If India has to remain what it is - a beacon of hope and peaceful coexistence - it is upto all of us to protect what has been organically inherited by us.
There are lessons to be learnt from what is happening globally including the Paris attacks. That the French happen to be the largest segment of people from Europe to have joined the ISIS, conveys how difficult the project of diversity and integration has been for the European society in general and French in particular. In South Asia, we need to be vigilant about our shared religio-cultural heritage and like all inherited capital, it needs to be continuously added to and replenished. Treating it as inexhaustible or taking it for granted will prove costly to us. The organic space of our shared religious heritage does not need the pesticide of social engineering. Instead, it needs reaffirmation of our trust and faith towards each other. Our strength lies in the centuries-old Ganga-Jamuni sanskriti and we must not let the myopic and sectarian politics of hatred and fundamentalism destroy it.
Following the Paris attacks, a campaign titled "Don’t pray, only act” has been launched on the social media. I PRAY that we ACT to redress and not take revenge. It is also time to stand united against terror and violence in the name of religion. In the summer just gone by, a workshop organised by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in association with the Aarhus University, Denmark, on the question of religious diversity, articulated needs for more such collaboration as the concerns are increasingly becoming global, of which Paris and Patna are integral parts. As Europe prepares itself to grapple with the refugee crisis and its associated concerns related to the integration and threats of fundamentalism, more than the material domain, the ideological/cultural space is going to be of deep concern. India still remains the best model for Europe to know and learn from.