Books

Communalism and the Congress

Mani Shankar Aiyar, Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist, Penguin/Viking, Delhi , 2004, pp xix + 290, Rs 425.

Radhika Desai, Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics, (Second Edition), Three Essays Collective, Delhi, 2004, pp xxv + 147, Rs 375 (Hb); Rs 175 (Pb).

The Indian political experience has invested certain terms with a special depth of meaning. Secularism and communalism are two such, accepted in common discourse as opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet apt on closer examination to reveal several layers of ambiguity. Conceptual clarity is not aided by the ease with which these words have lent themselves to impassioned political sloganeering. In the turbulence of political contestation, secularism is quite simply, a matter of faith.

This is a rather curious situation. “Secularism” is a word that is yet to be precisely defined in most political lexicons, and historically, there is no reasonably close analogy to the path that India has been seeking to chart as a secular state. “Secularisation” though is a process well recognised in the political and historical literature, as a key moment in the modernisation of western societies and their transition from a feudal order to capitalism. Briefly, secularisation refers to the abridgment of the powers of the established church, the erosion of its monopolies over land and other forms of property, and its subordination to the authority of the State in matters temporal. In more abstract terms, it is the process by which faith was subordinated to reason as the foundation of government, and the character of the individual’s relationship with the established political order changed. The State could once demand the unconditional allegiance of the individual as a matter of right, since it embodied the divine will. But modernity, at least in doctrine, required the State to submit itself to the will of the individual, since its power was derived ultimately, from the informed consent of the citizens it governed.

Against this conceptual background, secularism seems clearly to be a doctrine that is incompatible with any form of fundamentalism. By its derivation and usage, the latter term refers to a particularly narrow vision, which burdens the written word in classical texts with powers of guidance over modern life that it quite evidently lacks. But in its good-humoured appropriation, the term could also refer to a certain firmness of conviction, in causes which do not lose their correctness for all their unpopularity. Mani Shankar Aiyar, readied his book for publication early in 2004 in the expectation that it would be out in the market by the time the scheduled general elections to Parliament were held. In the event, the general elections were advanced by the BJP, which saw an opportunity in the disarray that the Congress had plunged into after the assembly elections debacle of November 2003. The Congress eked out a narrow numerical advantage over the BJP and in association with a mixed crowd of pre-poll and post-poll allies, formed a government in which Aiyar gained appointment as a minister. A book that should have been agitprop material for an election campaign, was thusly transformed by the accidents of political life, into ministerial orthodoxy. Aiyar throws in the necessary caveats about the book being a reflection of his personal views, rather than the government or the party he belongs to. But where his fundamentalism involves tenacity of allegiance, it is clearly to the unformed, and rather ill-defined concept of secularism that the Congress party has sought to integrate into its political practice. And where his fundamentalism engenders a denial of reality, it is towards the Congress party’s abuses of even this rather enervated definition of secularism, which in effect opened the door for the full-blown intrusion of communalism into the portals of governance.

Take Aiyar’s account of how secularism became the leitmotif of Indian governance. In the years after independence and partition, he recalls, India teetered perilously on the brink. There was a strong trend which advocated the emulation of the stigmatised “other”, impelling India in the direction of theocracy and ethnic (or religious) nationalism. But Jawaharlal Nehru, driven by unshakable convictions, made secularism the central plank of his campaign for the 1952 general elections – the first ever based on universal adult suffrage. With his resounding win, he banished the Hindu right-wing parties as also the soft Hindutva tendency within the Congress to the sidelines. From then on, in Aiyar’s arithmetic, secularism remained “virtually unchallenged” as the “basis” of Indian nationhood for no fewer than 34 years.

The variety of numerical precision that Aiyar displays is normally difficult to achieve when recounting the influence exerted by ideas and principles in the broad sweep of a nation’s history. What then is the decisive turning point when secularism began to crumble under the challenge of its malevolent rival? Aiyar has few doubts: “The national consensus on the nature of our nationhood was challenged significantly in the aftermath of the opening of the locks on the gates of the makeshift Ram Lalla temple within the precincts of the Babri Masjid complex at Ayodhya on the orders of the Faizabad district and sessions court in February 1986”.

Aiyar identifies the event that challenged a principle with great precision, not missing out on any aspect of its time and space coordinates, or the agency that inspired it. He does not name the petitioner who took up the case with the Faizabad district court, demanding the unfettered right to worship at the shrine that was constructed with stealth and subterfuge – and the connivance of the Congress administration of the time – in 1949. Nor does he quite clarify, despite the vantage point he then occupied as Joint Secretary in the office of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, what the attitude of the government and the Congress party then was. Here was an opportunity to rebut the informed conjecture that has now become established wisdom: that Rajiv Gandhi was opening up the Babri Masjid to worshipers of a different faith in order to prepare the ground for his capitulation to fundamentalism of another stripe, with the Muslim Women’s Bill. Aiyar passes the occasion by, an omission that seems all the more curious given his valiant though ultimately rather futile effort, to set right the historical record on another infamy of the Rajiv raj: the spectacularly cynical statement, in reference to the massacre of Sikhs after the murder of Indira Gandhi, that it is in the nature of things for the earth to tremble when a big tree falls.

These oversights are not accidental; they are rather, integral to the Congress vision of secularism. Equal respect for all religions as declared State policy, only sets the stage for a competitive clamour from the most reactionary elements in every community for the handouts that strengthen their authority. From the standpoint of the political authority, it all too often degenerates into competitive appeasement. This is especially the case in a context of class polarisation, where social differences are often turned to advantage by a political order intent on remaining unfettered by the scrutiny of the working class.

This is not to deny that Aiyar makes a brave effort to explore doctrinal areas that the Congress has traditionally been reluctant to venture into. In his journeys through history, he owns up to the Congress’ complicity in squandering perhaps the last serious opportunity for communal reconciliation offered by Jinnah’s Delhi declaration of 1927. But he rather unfairly places the entire burden of blame for the subsequent course of events on religious extremists on either side – tarring Jinnah and Savarkar with the same brush. He avoids a serious engagement with the rather shoddy record of the Congress governments that took office in the provinces after the 1936 elections, preferring to avert his gaze from the policies of social reaction and communal provocation that drove a deep wedge between Hindu and Muslim. Indeed, he leaps across decades of historical time to define two moments when the Congress unfortunately gave excessive latitude to the soft Hindutva tendency within: after the failure of the Delhi declaration, the next occasion he identifies is the Gujarat assembly election of 2002, when the party failed to pose any kind of a political alternative to the BJP!

Aiyar does show a degree of sensitivity to certain nuances. He makes a useful distinction between communalism and communitarianism for instance, the one that seeks to assert one kind of identity while obliterating all others, the other which seeks to defend a threatened social identity against this external threat. The BJP and its affiliates belong to one tendency, while the Muslim League (at least in its more moderate manifestations) is illustrative of the other. But he does miss some of the subtleties of the interaction between caste, community and class in the turbulence of electoral contestation. Inconvenient facts about the Congress’ historical role as the embodiment of Indian secularism and then its most ambivalent face are brushed aside: either ascribed to economic factors which the party had little control over, or the opportunism of other parties, or simply institutional failures and excesses of Indian democracy. In all this, it is hard to miss the hard-edged partisanship that is his trademark and his loyalty to the dynastic order within the Congress that many believe has completely eroded its responsiveness to popular democratic aspirations.

The deep communal polarisation in Gujarat and the virulent outbreak of savagery of 2002 are put down by Aiyar to narrow economic causes. In this respect, the unsubtlety of his approach stands in marked contrast to Radhika Desai’s richly textured understanding. The poison in Gujarat , Desai points out, has been long in brewing. Aside from the economic crisis of the demise of the organised textile industry, there has been a vigorous churning of the social cauldron, with coalitions emerging to challenge established orders and claim for their constituents the privileges earlier reserved for a narrow group. Hindutva then provided the ideological rubric under which privileges could be reclaimed for those threatened with their loss, and a stigmatised and alien community created within, which would bear the burden of all the exclusions of an unjust social order. Desai’s book was written in the mood of disquiet engendered by the BJP victory in Gujarat in December 2002, and the second edition came in the equally unpropitious circumstance of the party’s triumph in the November 2003 round of assembly elections. She is understandably gloomy in her prognoses: “The stability of the BJP-led governments in New Delhi seems assured, despite occasional and inevitable controversies. Communalism has now become one with caste violence in the rural areas, and they are now not very distant from the burgeoning towns which dot the countryside and mark the socio-economic advance of its elites”.

Desai may have been off target with her estimation that the BJP raj would continue into the indefinite future. But her reading that the “corrosion of India ’s political and cultural institutions has proceeded apace”, despite the pretence that it was the “NDA” coalition rather than Hindutva that reigned, is surely consistent with what has come since in the shape of the Congress-led government. Those who were expecting radical departures from the idiom have been disappointed. Where the working class, the poor and the underprivileged are concerned, there is more of the same cynicism, though relatively muted; and where the rich are concerned, there is the same unabashed pampering. Perhaps this provides the context in which to assess the true value of Desai’s book, which seeks to trace the continuities rather than the disjunctions between the Congress idiom of governance and the growth of Hindutva. The political journey from the Congress to Hindutva, Desai argues, brings to the foreground several questions: “How do caste, class and Hindutva intersect? Why has Hindutva a varied regional hold? Given the salience of caste in Indian politics, and the widespread assumption that caste politics is antithetical to support for Hindutva (mirroring, ironically, Hindutva’s own, false, claim to be above caste), what is the relationship between the politics of caste and those of Hindutva? And what about the expectation of the early 1990s that the politics of the regional parties could be harnessed to a democratic and secular politics?”

Desai’s book examines this complex of questions with impressive rigour and thoroughness. There are occasions when her polemic might seem misdirected, but there is little question that she lays out a fairly convincing prospectus of where Indian politics is heading. And in signposting the need for a vigorous challenge from the Left, premised upon the understanding that “like fascism before it, Hindutva is part of a broader international resurgence of right-wing forces”, Desai lays out clear directions for political practice. Her book remains, over a year since the second edition was issued, a valuable resource for Left politics.