HT, Patna 24.11.08
Time for some meditation
The mess that is Hindutva is a legacy of
ideological confusion and intellectual laziness.
AN AMUSING spectacle is unfolding on most news channels these days: the top leadership of the BJP strenuously arguing that it is wrong to speak about 'Hindu' terrorism. These are the same people who demolished the Babri mosque, coining the slogan "Garb se kaho hum Hindu hain' (Say it with pride that we are Hindus). They are the same people who encourage and incite lumpens to attack M.F. Husain's exhibitions in the name of preserving 'Hindu' culture. The same who glorified and justified the willful killing of thousands of Muslims in a premeditated, planned and systematic fashion after the Gdhra tragedy in the name of 'Hindu' pratishodh (reaction, retaliation).
Among them are also people who have invented the most hateful, diabolical and misleading formulation in recent times, arguing that 'all Muslims may not be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims'. Among these very people are individuals who have flouted every norm and tenet, every single article of faith of the Indian Constitution in the name of preserving Hindu asmita (sense of self). Among them are also people who certify Jinnah's secular credentials, but brand anyone talking about coexistence, civility and debate as pseudo-secularists.
Having said this, I agree with them that there is no 'Hindu terrorism', just as there is no 'Islamic/Muslim terrorism'. But there is something called Sangh parivar terrorism, just as there is al-Qaeda terrorism. Neither Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur nor Osama bin Laden represent their respective faiths, nor do their organizations represent the people who they claim to represent. To push aside misplaced legalism, just as the charges against the sadhvi are yet to be proved in a court of law, even Osama bin Laden has not yet been indicated by a court of law anywhere in the world.
The only difference between Osama and Pragya is that the former is unlikely to contest an election in the future and become a member of an elected body. In the case of Pragya Thakur, given the way in which criminal investigations are conducted, there is a strong possibility of her becoming a people's representative, as she would only be following a 'great' tradition. Just as Osama hides in the impregnable mountains of Afghanistan, the likes of Pragya will hide behind the fig leaf of the democratic 'will of the people'.
This is why very few people in the country speak about political, electoral and administrative reforms, and the Indian polity has been penetrated by criminal elements of both communal and secular hues. If a hundred people tell a lie and another hundred believe in it, it does not become the truth – this classical formulation has been conclusively reversed in our country.
The predicament of the Sangh parivar is akin to having a tub bath, where one only floats in one's own dirt and filth. From the 19th century onwards, apologists of Hindu nationalism have sought to portray Hinduism as a unified, seamless and monochromatic faith. The mess that is Hindutva is a result of this ideological confusion and intellectual laziness. While it argued, on the one hand, that Hinduism was a tolerant, peaceful, inward-looking, all-embracing faith; on the other hand, there was a call to all Hindus to regain their Kshatriyahood and resort to the virtues of biceps and the Bhagvad Gita.
Every proponent of Hindu nationalism encouraged and promoted the idea of retaliatory violence, be it Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo or V. Savarkar, in the name of preserving righteousness and a fictional unbroken, centuries-old Hindu tradition. All of them were ensnared by 19th century definitions of religion and attempted to mould their own faith, as they understood it, in ways that were alien to the diverse strands of 'Hinduism'.
Without exception, all Hindu nationalists from the 19th century onwards argued that religion was the core of hindu nationalism, and moreover, that it was the only core of nationalism. They further argued that if the former was true, then, nationalism was the only religion. It is this formulation that allows the likes of Vajpayee and Advani to argue, to this day, that Hindutva stands for idealism whereas nationalism is their ideology. They say so in the belief that this linguistic and rhetorical contortion will go unnoticed, and it often does.
It also manifests in contemporary times as Indian middle-class aspirations of envisioning India as an economic and military superpower. Very little time and energy are expended in discussing the constellation of values that will constitute the heart of this putative superpower. Like their 19th century predecessors, the Hindutva votaries are satisfied as long as they can vanquish their real and imagined enemies, at home and abroad, and impose their national socialist understanding of the idea of will to power.
No nation is either entirely tolerant or wholly wedded to violence. Any civilization is a composite of the pure and the tainted, and from the struggle between the two emerge values that are sublime, civilized and truly human. This struggle is neither a given, nor is it a zero-sum game, and it impels human beings to make choices. Choosing peace, tolerance, civility and truth is not a sign of weakness as the apologists of violence and retribution will make people believe, but a way of sublimating the beast within us. Buddha, Mahavir and Gandhi were not weak men. Why, then, are their spiritual children afraid to take this crucial leap? I posed this question to a Japanese writer, who also writes on questions of identity and nationalism. He paused for a moment and said : "They did not have the burden of contesting and winning elections.'
Friday, April 10, 2009
Don't keep up with those Joneses
HT, Patna 15.1.09
Don't keep up with those Joneses
It is in India's interest to practice caution lest it becomes another Pakistan.
A DISCONNECTED elite living in heavily guarded villas or speeding down high ways in gleaming Pajeros with tinted glass in the front and gunmen at the back. An elite that has contempt for elected politicians and instead worships the army. Beautiful women writing escapist sex and fashion columns by day and by night arguing for bombing the enemy. And almost next door to the fortified villas and Pajeros: another world. A world where the desperately poor blow themselves up either as suicide bombers or as foot soldiers of ideology, insane with aspiration, without any stake in the ruling system, hopeful only of the five-star lifestyle available in jannat.
This is not just a description of Pakistan. It's a description of what India could become if we don't keep our democratic institutions safe.
In the aftermath of 26/11 India's case against Pakistan has rested on its identity as a superior liberal democracy, as a rising economy, a responsible nuclear power. India is the successful democratic experiment, Pakistan is the failed State, goes our conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom, for the moment, is not false. Pakistan, as its noted lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan once described it, is a "bonsai democracy", a stunted artificial plant set out as window dressing for its Western sponsors. The civilian government headed by Asif Ali Zardari is revealing its catastrophic lack of control over the country every day. Notwithstanding the peacemaking missions of American diplomats and India's diplomatic offensive to get the world to recognize Pakistan as a rogue State and to get Pakistan to act on the 26/11 dossier of evidence, there are now reports that the LeT has now emerged under a new name – the Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Qibla Awal – and has just held a protest rally in Lahore.
Yet the Pakistani ruling class continues to insist that the war on terror is being waged. Indeed the predicament of the Pakistani elite is an example of what could happen if the rich and educated withdraw into their own private fortresses, if politicians are not held accountable by a watchdog media and if civilian government becomes so weak that there are no options but martial rule. The sacking of the Pakistani National Security Adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani, simply because he acknowledged that Kasab was a Pakistani, shows the extent to which the fight against terrorism for Pakistan, in the case of 26/11, is really just a game of political shadow boxing and one-upmanship with India, a game which the politicians play umpired by the Pakistani army. The weakness and helplessness of Pakistani politicians stem from the fact that none of them is a genuine mass leader.
Most Pakistani politicians are feudals or highly privileged. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani comes from an influential family of Multan. Information Minister Shehrbano 'Sherry' Rahman cmes from a highly educated elite family. The Cambridge-educated Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who still speaks English like Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady, also comes from another wealthy feudal family and is a graduate of the elite Aitchison College. In the absence of landreforms, a dynamic party system or genuine democratization, the Pakistani political class is not as rooted in the soil as Indian politicians are.
The upsurge of middle-class activism that occurred when lawyers protstd on the streets against the sacking of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary by Pervez Musharraf seems to have petered out. After decades of martial rule, in the absence of a Mayawati or a Lalu or even a Mamta Banerjee, Pakistan remains a glaring example of how civilian power and social dynamism have been destroyed by the army. There is little scope for the poor and backward to fight their way up Pakistan's political system. Democracy is practiced by those born into privilege rather than those who claw their way up from the dirt. As long as the Pakistani political elite remains restricted to the rich feudal class, they will always be emasculated and always be at the mercy of the army and the ISI. Pakistan needs a Lalu Prasad to sit in his baniyan on a verandah and roar out to the army: "Yeh sab nahi chalega."
Which is why it is important to recognize that India's politicians may be by and large a nasty undesirable lot but they keep alive an important dream and they are crucial safety valves in a society fast becoming marked by savage differences between rich and poor. Our political system, (however terribly flawed it may be) makes disconnection or deracination impossible beyond a point. A Kapil Sibal will have to share his space with a Ramvilas Paswan, an Arun Jaitley, whether he likes it or not, will have to perhaps one day sit at the table with Mayawati, the intellectual Manmohan Singh relies on the political support of the wrestler Mulayam Singh Yadav. I the US, the current Senate majority leader was born in a shack and his mother did the laundry for local brothels. Similarly, the social depth of our democracy is our greatest resource. The social co-existence which our politics forces upon is what keeps our country somewhat sane and stops us from producing armies of suicide bombers. If terrorism and suicide bombing are seen as the last desperate resource of the destitute and disfranchised, the Mayawatis, Paswans and Mulayams, however annoying their ways, remain examples of how our political system still delivers patchy services to the very poor.
It is this organic democracy that we must zealously guard. As differences between rich and poor widen, India's rich too are tending to remain imprisoned in their villas and Pajeros, pouring scorn on politicians and espousing anti-democratic values like warlike postures, hatred of the media and wholesale adoration of military power and efficiency.
But after 26/11 it is more crucial than ever that we remember the ideals of that other 26th – the 26th of January, and hold those values close. A country that upholds mass-based politics, that respects the law, that understands the need for a free Press, which above all upholds the right of the poorest of the poor to gain access to the citadels of power. It is social openness, social co-existence, delivering power to the people that will keep our country from becoming an armed cantonment surrounded by terrorists and bombers. Citizens of India, throw open, the windows of the Pajeros and villas and let the winds of democracy blow.
Don't keep up with those Joneses
It is in India's interest to practice caution lest it becomes another Pakistan.
A DISCONNECTED elite living in heavily guarded villas or speeding down high ways in gleaming Pajeros with tinted glass in the front and gunmen at the back. An elite that has contempt for elected politicians and instead worships the army. Beautiful women writing escapist sex and fashion columns by day and by night arguing for bombing the enemy. And almost next door to the fortified villas and Pajeros: another world. A world where the desperately poor blow themselves up either as suicide bombers or as foot soldiers of ideology, insane with aspiration, without any stake in the ruling system, hopeful only of the five-star lifestyle available in jannat.
This is not just a description of Pakistan. It's a description of what India could become if we don't keep our democratic institutions safe.
In the aftermath of 26/11 India's case against Pakistan has rested on its identity as a superior liberal democracy, as a rising economy, a responsible nuclear power. India is the successful democratic experiment, Pakistan is the failed State, goes our conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom, for the moment, is not false. Pakistan, as its noted lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan once described it, is a "bonsai democracy", a stunted artificial plant set out as window dressing for its Western sponsors. The civilian government headed by Asif Ali Zardari is revealing its catastrophic lack of control over the country every day. Notwithstanding the peacemaking missions of American diplomats and India's diplomatic offensive to get the world to recognize Pakistan as a rogue State and to get Pakistan to act on the 26/11 dossier of evidence, there are now reports that the LeT has now emerged under a new name – the Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Qibla Awal – and has just held a protest rally in Lahore.
Yet the Pakistani ruling class continues to insist that the war on terror is being waged. Indeed the predicament of the Pakistani elite is an example of what could happen if the rich and educated withdraw into their own private fortresses, if politicians are not held accountable by a watchdog media and if civilian government becomes so weak that there are no options but martial rule. The sacking of the Pakistani National Security Adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani, simply because he acknowledged that Kasab was a Pakistani, shows the extent to which the fight against terrorism for Pakistan, in the case of 26/11, is really just a game of political shadow boxing and one-upmanship with India, a game which the politicians play umpired by the Pakistani army. The weakness and helplessness of Pakistani politicians stem from the fact that none of them is a genuine mass leader.
Most Pakistani politicians are feudals or highly privileged. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani comes from an influential family of Multan. Information Minister Shehrbano 'Sherry' Rahman cmes from a highly educated elite family. The Cambridge-educated Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who still speaks English like Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady, also comes from another wealthy feudal family and is a graduate of the elite Aitchison College. In the absence of landreforms, a dynamic party system or genuine democratization, the Pakistani political class is not as rooted in the soil as Indian politicians are.
The upsurge of middle-class activism that occurred when lawyers protstd on the streets against the sacking of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary by Pervez Musharraf seems to have petered out. After decades of martial rule, in the absence of a Mayawati or a Lalu or even a Mamta Banerjee, Pakistan remains a glaring example of how civilian power and social dynamism have been destroyed by the army. There is little scope for the poor and backward to fight their way up Pakistan's political system. Democracy is practiced by those born into privilege rather than those who claw their way up from the dirt. As long as the Pakistani political elite remains restricted to the rich feudal class, they will always be emasculated and always be at the mercy of the army and the ISI. Pakistan needs a Lalu Prasad to sit in his baniyan on a verandah and roar out to the army: "Yeh sab nahi chalega."
Which is why it is important to recognize that India's politicians may be by and large a nasty undesirable lot but they keep alive an important dream and they are crucial safety valves in a society fast becoming marked by savage differences between rich and poor. Our political system, (however terribly flawed it may be) makes disconnection or deracination impossible beyond a point. A Kapil Sibal will have to share his space with a Ramvilas Paswan, an Arun Jaitley, whether he likes it or not, will have to perhaps one day sit at the table with Mayawati, the intellectual Manmohan Singh relies on the political support of the wrestler Mulayam Singh Yadav. I the US, the current Senate majority leader was born in a shack and his mother did the laundry for local brothels. Similarly, the social depth of our democracy is our greatest resource. The social co-existence which our politics forces upon is what keeps our country somewhat sane and stops us from producing armies of suicide bombers. If terrorism and suicide bombing are seen as the last desperate resource of the destitute and disfranchised, the Mayawatis, Paswans and Mulayams, however annoying their ways, remain examples of how our political system still delivers patchy services to the very poor.
It is this organic democracy that we must zealously guard. As differences between rich and poor widen, India's rich too are tending to remain imprisoned in their villas and Pajeros, pouring scorn on politicians and espousing anti-democratic values like warlike postures, hatred of the media and wholesale adoration of military power and efficiency.
But after 26/11 it is more crucial than ever that we remember the ideals of that other 26th – the 26th of January, and hold those values close. A country that upholds mass-based politics, that respects the law, that understands the need for a free Press, which above all upholds the right of the poorest of the poor to gain access to the citadels of power. It is social openness, social co-existence, delivering power to the people that will keep our country from becoming an armed cantonment surrounded by terrorists and bombers. Citizens of India, throw open, the windows of the Pajeros and villas and let the winds of democracy blow.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)