Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn
Prime Minister Imran Khan frequently uses the term ‘Islamophobia’ while commenting on the relationship between European governments and their Muslim citizens. Khan has often been accused of lamenting the treatment meted out to Muslims in Europe, but remaining conspicuously silent about cases of religious discrimination in his own country.
Then there is also the case of Khan not uttering a single word about the Chinese government’s apparently atrocious treatment of the Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province.
Certain laws in European countries are sweepingly described as being ‘Islamophobic’ by Khan. When European governments retaliate by accusing Pakistan of constitutionally encouraging acts of bigotry against non-Muslim groups, the PM bemoans that Europeans do not understand the complexities of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ laws.
Yet, despite the PM repeatedly claiming to know the West like no other Pakistani does, he seems to have no clue about the complexities of European secularism.
Take France for instance. French secularism, called ‘Laïcité’ is somewhat different than the secularism of various other European countries and the US. According to the contemporary scholar of Western secularism, Charles Taylor, French secularism is required to play a more aggressive role.
In his book, A Secular Age, Taylor demonstrates that even though the source of Western secularism was common — i.e. the emergence of ‘modernity’ and its political, economic and social manifestations — secularism evolved in Europe and the US in varying degrees and of different types.
Secularism in the US remains largely impersonal towards religion. But in France and in some other European countries, it encourages the state/government to proactively discourage even certain cultural dimensions of faith in the public sphere which, it believes, have the potential of mutating into becoming political expressions.
Nevertheless, to almost all prominent philosophers of Western democracy across the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of providing freedom to practise religion is inherent in secularism, as long as this freedom is not used for any political purposes.
According to the American sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau in A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, six types of secularism have evolved. The American researcher Barry Kosmin divides secularism into two categories: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Most of Berlinerblau’s types fall in the ‘soft’ category. The hard one is ‘State Sponsored Atheism’ which looks to completely eliminate religion. This type was practised in various former communist countries and is presently exercised in China and North Korea. One can thus place Laïcité between Kosmin’s soft and hard secular types.
The existence of what is called ‘Islamophobia’ in secular Europe and the US has increasingly drawn criticism from various quarters. According to the French author Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, the term is derived from the French word ‘islamophobie’ that was first used in 1910 to describe prejudice against Muslims.
L.P. Sheridan writes in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that the term did not become widely used till 1991. According to Roland Imhoff and Julia Recker in the Journal of Political Psychology, a wariness had already been building in the West towards Muslims because of the aggressively anti-West ‘Islamic’ Revolution in Iran in 1979, and the violent backlash in some Muslim countries against the publication of the novel Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie in 1988.
Islamophobia is one of the many expressions of racism towards ‘the other’. Racisms of varying nature have for long been present in Europe and the US. Therefore Imhoff and Recker see Islamophibia as “new wine in an old bottle.” It is a relatively new term, but one that has also been criticised.
Discrimination against race, faith, ethnicity, caste, etc., is present in almost all countries. But its existence gets magnified when it is present in countries that describe themselves as liberal democracies.
Whereas Islamophobia is often understood as a phobia against Islam, there are also those who find this definition problematic. To the term’s most vehement critics, not only has it overshadowed other aspects of racism, of which there are many, it is also mostly used by ‘radical Muslims’ to curb open debate.
In a study, the University of Northampton’s Paul Jackson writes that the term should be replaced with ‘Muslimphobia’ because the racism in this context is aimed at a people and not towards the faith, as such. However, he does add that the faith too should be open for academic debate.
In an essay for the 2016 anthology The Search for Europe, Bichara Khader writes that racism against non-white migrants in Europe intensified in the 1970s because of a severe economic crisis. Khader writes that this racism was not pitched against one’s faith.
According to Khader, whereas this meant that South Asian, Arab, African and Caribbean migrants were treated as an unwanted whole based on the colour of their skin, from the 1980s onwards, the Muslims among these migrants began to prominently assert their distinctiveness. As the presence of veiled women and mosques grew, this is when the ‘migration problem’ began to be seen as a ‘Muslim problem’.
The Muslim diaspora in the West began to increasingly consolidate itself as a separate whole. Mainly through dress, Muslim migrants began to shed the identity of their original countries, creating a sort of universality of Muslimness.
But this also separated them from the non-Muslim migrant communities, who were facing racial discrimination as well. Interestingly, this imagined universality of Muslimness was also exported back to the mother countries of Muslim migrants.
Take the example of how, in Pakistan, some recent textbooks have visually depicted the dress choices of Pakistani women. They are almost exactly how some second and third generation Muslim women in the West imagine a woman should dress like.
But there was criticism within Pakistan of this depiction. The critics maintain that the present government was trying to engineer a cultural type of how women ought to dress in a country where — unlike in some other Muslim countries — veiling is neither mandatory nor banned. This has only further highlighted the fact that identity politics in this context in Pakistan is being influenced by the identity politics being flexed by certain Muslim groups in the West.
Either way, because of the fact that it is a recent phenomenon, identity politics of this nature is not organic as such, and will continue to cause problems for Muslims within and away.
Showing posts with label secularism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secularism. Show all posts
Sunday 16 May 2021
Friday 7 August 2020
Sunday 2 August 2020
The road to Ram’s temple: If Congress party believed in real secularism, Ayodhya movement would never have happened
Let Muslims join in building the temple and when it is ready let both communities come together to build a mosque on the other bank of the Saryu river writes Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express
The bhoomi pujan of Ram Temple in Ayodhya will be held on August 5. (Express file photo)
Let me make clear at the outset that I support the building of that temple in Ayodhya whose consecration takes place next week. It should have happened decades ago. It did not because of the pseudo-secularism that the Congress party has long adopted as its creed. The founding principle of this evil creed was that under the safety blanket of ‘secularism’ it was alright to abuse all secular tenets and principles if this helped win elections. It is important here to remind you that this is the second time that a shilanyas is being done of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. The first one was done by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 when he began his election campaign in Ayodhya with the promise of Ram Rajya.
Not a secular slogan at all, but considered necessary at the time because of his foolish decision to allow Muslims their own personal law based on the Shariat. This decision enraged even secular Hindus, so the promises of a Ram temple and Ram Rajya were made in the hope that Hindus would fall back into the Congress party’s ‘secular’ arms. Rajiv ended up losing the election. But this was a last-ditch attempt to show that although he had pandered to the very worst kind of Islamist Muslims in the Shah Bano matter, he was still a good Hindu. Actually, he was a Parsi because in India it is the father’s religion that counts. Had the Congress party been truly secular, it would have shown the courage to resist the pressure from the Islamists who demanded that they be allowed to use the Shariat as their personal law. Had Rajiv Gandhi stood by the principles of real secularism, he would never have interfered in the Supreme Court’s order that said divorced Muslim women had the same rights as divorced Hindu women.
If the Congress party believed in real secularism, the Ayodhya movement would never have happened. It was after it started mixing religious fundamentalism with politics that the Bharatiya Janata Party realised that this was a game that they could play much better. So it was that in 1990 Lal Krishna Advani converted a Toyota truck into ‘Ram’s chariot’ and set off from Somnath for Ayodhya with the demand that a temple be built where Ram was said to have been born. Millions of Hindus believe that this Ayodhya is the same as the Ayodhya of antiquity, and that where Babur built his mosque is the exact spot where Ram was born. So, there should never have been a dispute at all and instead of a demolition the mosque could have been respectfully moved, stone by stone, onto the other bank of the river Saryu. But, this would have deprived many political leaders of electoral gains, so it was not allowed to happen.
Political leaders were not the only culprits. Religious leaders were just as bad, and it needs to be said that Muslim religious and political leaders, who took such an implacable stand against the Ram temple, did more to harm their community than anyone else. They were obdurate, unyielding and unreasonable and many still are. The same Muslim leaders who insist that they will continue to fight for restoration of the Babri Masjid at the very spot where it once stood said not one word when the magnificent Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul was converted into a mosque just last week.
Asaduddin Owaisi has objected publicly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi going to Ayodhya to attend the shilanyas. He argues that it would be against the secular principles of the Constitution for him to attend a consecration that is specific to one religion. What intrigued me about the certainty with which he argued his case in TV debates was that he seemed to forget that Islam puts secularism in the same basket as apostates, heretics and heathens. It is only Indic religions that do not make any distinction between believers and unbelievers and only Indic religions like Buddhism and Jainism that are fundamentally atheistic.
When Congress leaders behave as if secularism was their personal gift to India, they forget that it was not an idea needed in India because the king was always not just secular but above caste. And, there has never been a Shankracharya who had his own army like the Pope once did. As a result of so much muddled thinking and a political culture that allows anything to be done for the sake of winning elections, we have now come to a pass when in these Hindutva times the supporters of Narendra Modi openly spread hatred against Islam and Muslims. The distinction between Pakistani and Muslim has been slowly erased in the past six years and the word ‘Paki’ has become a term of abuse. It is an ugly time but if our political leaders still have in them a modicum of honesty let them make the Ram temple in Ayodhya a symbol of healing.
Let Muslims join in building the temple and when it is ready let both communities come together to build a mosque on the other bank of the Saryu river. India needs a process of healing now almost more than it ever has before. Let it begin in Ayodhya next week and let the Prime Minister show us that he truly believes in his own slogan ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas’.
The bhoomi pujan of Ram Temple in Ayodhya will be held on August 5. (Express file photo)
Let me make clear at the outset that I support the building of that temple in Ayodhya whose consecration takes place next week. It should have happened decades ago. It did not because of the pseudo-secularism that the Congress party has long adopted as its creed. The founding principle of this evil creed was that under the safety blanket of ‘secularism’ it was alright to abuse all secular tenets and principles if this helped win elections. It is important here to remind you that this is the second time that a shilanyas is being done of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. The first one was done by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 when he began his election campaign in Ayodhya with the promise of Ram Rajya.
Not a secular slogan at all, but considered necessary at the time because of his foolish decision to allow Muslims their own personal law based on the Shariat. This decision enraged even secular Hindus, so the promises of a Ram temple and Ram Rajya were made in the hope that Hindus would fall back into the Congress party’s ‘secular’ arms. Rajiv ended up losing the election. But this was a last-ditch attempt to show that although he had pandered to the very worst kind of Islamist Muslims in the Shah Bano matter, he was still a good Hindu. Actually, he was a Parsi because in India it is the father’s religion that counts. Had the Congress party been truly secular, it would have shown the courage to resist the pressure from the Islamists who demanded that they be allowed to use the Shariat as their personal law. Had Rajiv Gandhi stood by the principles of real secularism, he would never have interfered in the Supreme Court’s order that said divorced Muslim women had the same rights as divorced Hindu women.
If the Congress party believed in real secularism, the Ayodhya movement would never have happened. It was after it started mixing religious fundamentalism with politics that the Bharatiya Janata Party realised that this was a game that they could play much better. So it was that in 1990 Lal Krishna Advani converted a Toyota truck into ‘Ram’s chariot’ and set off from Somnath for Ayodhya with the demand that a temple be built where Ram was said to have been born. Millions of Hindus believe that this Ayodhya is the same as the Ayodhya of antiquity, and that where Babur built his mosque is the exact spot where Ram was born. So, there should never have been a dispute at all and instead of a demolition the mosque could have been respectfully moved, stone by stone, onto the other bank of the river Saryu. But, this would have deprived many political leaders of electoral gains, so it was not allowed to happen.
Political leaders were not the only culprits. Religious leaders were just as bad, and it needs to be said that Muslim religious and political leaders, who took such an implacable stand against the Ram temple, did more to harm their community than anyone else. They were obdurate, unyielding and unreasonable and many still are. The same Muslim leaders who insist that they will continue to fight for restoration of the Babri Masjid at the very spot where it once stood said not one word when the magnificent Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul was converted into a mosque just last week.
Asaduddin Owaisi has objected publicly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi going to Ayodhya to attend the shilanyas. He argues that it would be against the secular principles of the Constitution for him to attend a consecration that is specific to one religion. What intrigued me about the certainty with which he argued his case in TV debates was that he seemed to forget that Islam puts secularism in the same basket as apostates, heretics and heathens. It is only Indic religions that do not make any distinction between believers and unbelievers and only Indic religions like Buddhism and Jainism that are fundamentally atheistic.
When Congress leaders behave as if secularism was their personal gift to India, they forget that it was not an idea needed in India because the king was always not just secular but above caste. And, there has never been a Shankracharya who had his own army like the Pope once did. As a result of so much muddled thinking and a political culture that allows anything to be done for the sake of winning elections, we have now come to a pass when in these Hindutva times the supporters of Narendra Modi openly spread hatred against Islam and Muslims. The distinction between Pakistani and Muslim has been slowly erased in the past six years and the word ‘Paki’ has become a term of abuse. It is an ugly time but if our political leaders still have in them a modicum of honesty let them make the Ram temple in Ayodhya a symbol of healing.
Let Muslims join in building the temple and when it is ready let both communities come together to build a mosque on the other bank of the Saryu river. India needs a process of healing now almost more than it ever has before. Let it begin in Ayodhya next week and let the Prime Minister show us that he truly believes in his own slogan ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas’.
Tuesday 2 April 2019
Thursday 14 March 2019
Sunday 20 May 2018
Sickness in Indian Democracy did not start with Modi
Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express
Three words that I got sick of hearing as the Karnataka drama unfolded last week were: democracy, secularism and Constitution. Nearly everyone who spoke them meant only one thing, and this was that the Bharatiya Janata Party must be kept out of Karnataka at all costs. Perhaps, by the time you read this, the BJP juggernaut will have been stopped from finding a toehold in southern India, but it is important that we remember that whatever happens, it will have nothing to do with those three words.
It is important also to remember that the post-election drama in Karnataka had everything to do with the Congress party’s desperation to keep its own little toe grounded in the state they have ruled for five years. Without Karnataka, our oldest political party has only Punjab and Puducherry left, and this is very bad news. How will Rahul Gandhi continue to dream of becoming prime minister in 2019? How will there be enough funds to fight the Lok Sabha elections if one of India’s richest states slips away? So even the most humiliating compromise with a party derided by Rahul Gandhi as the B-team of the BJP is better than losing power altogether. You realise what a sham ‘secularism’ has become if you remember that during the campaign the (S) in the party’s name was mocked by Congress leaders as standing for Sangh and not secular.
Now let us talk about democracy. Even as B S Yedyurappa was taking his oath of office last Thursday, the president of the Congress party tweeted this: ‘This morning, while the BJP celebrates its hollow victory, India will mourn the defeat of democracy.’ He clearly forgot that if there was one conclusive thing that came out of the election results, it was that it was a mandate against the incumbent Congress government.
On constitutional proprieties the less said the better. They were stretched and moulded last week by most politicians and political commentators to make whichever case they wished to make. What can be said for certain is that the men who wrote our Constitution never envisaged a situation in which the verdict of governors would be challenged by violent thugs on the streets. Or that newly elected legislators would need to be locked up in fine hotels to prevent them from selling their souls for filthy lucre.
It is not as if they need the money. The Karnataka Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reforms analysed the assets of 221 newly elected MLAs and found that 97 per cent were ‘crorepatis’. Of these, 16 had assets worth more than Rs 100 crore. You do not need me to tell you that the main reason why Indians fight and sometimes kill for a ticket to contest elections is because there is no easier way to become very rich very quickly.
This sickness in our democracy did not begin after Narendra Modi became prime minister. But, it is this storyline that has been sought to be disseminated by secular, leftist political commentators in order to disguise their loyalties to the Congress party. It is this ‘secular’ caboodle that uses words like democracy and secularism most often. Sadly, they see the weaknesses in our democracy through tinted lenses. So what happened in West Bengal’s panchayat elections last week has been almost ignored by liberal, leftist commentators. In these village elections, ballot boxes were torn out of polling booths and thrown in ponds, and gangs of armed thugs wandered about violently preventing people from voting. These events escaped the notice of ‘secular’ politicians and commentators who moan endlessly about how democracy has died in the past four years. Rahul went so far as to say in Chhattisgarh that India has become a dictatorship.
To support this ludicrous charge, the Congress president has exalted disgruntled judges who actively harmed the Supreme Court by going public with their disgruntlement. Disgruntled public intellectuals have also sided with the judges and the ‘secular’ media has done its best to provide a platform for their views.
Having lived through that time when there really was a Dictator ruling India, I can report that journalists, writers and poets were jailed for speaking out. It was also a time when disobedient judges got the sack. So the Supreme Court obsequiously went along with the Dictator’s diktat when she ordered them to suspend even the right to life. When the Dictator’s grandson now makes reckless charges, he needs to be reminded of that one period of Indian history when democracy nearly died.
Modi is no match for the powerful elite who lost their vast influence in the public square when he became prime minister. So now when he appears to have lost some of his magic, they have taken charge of the narrative and their message is clear: democracy is doomed if Modi remains in power.
Three words that I got sick of hearing as the Karnataka drama unfolded last week were: democracy, secularism and Constitution. Nearly everyone who spoke them meant only one thing, and this was that the Bharatiya Janata Party must be kept out of Karnataka at all costs. Perhaps, by the time you read this, the BJP juggernaut will have been stopped from finding a toehold in southern India, but it is important that we remember that whatever happens, it will have nothing to do with those three words.
It is important also to remember that the post-election drama in Karnataka had everything to do with the Congress party’s desperation to keep its own little toe grounded in the state they have ruled for five years. Without Karnataka, our oldest political party has only Punjab and Puducherry left, and this is very bad news. How will Rahul Gandhi continue to dream of becoming prime minister in 2019? How will there be enough funds to fight the Lok Sabha elections if one of India’s richest states slips away? So even the most humiliating compromise with a party derided by Rahul Gandhi as the B-team of the BJP is better than losing power altogether. You realise what a sham ‘secularism’ has become if you remember that during the campaign the (S) in the party’s name was mocked by Congress leaders as standing for Sangh and not secular.
Now let us talk about democracy. Even as B S Yedyurappa was taking his oath of office last Thursday, the president of the Congress party tweeted this: ‘This morning, while the BJP celebrates its hollow victory, India will mourn the defeat of democracy.’ He clearly forgot that if there was one conclusive thing that came out of the election results, it was that it was a mandate against the incumbent Congress government.
On constitutional proprieties the less said the better. They were stretched and moulded last week by most politicians and political commentators to make whichever case they wished to make. What can be said for certain is that the men who wrote our Constitution never envisaged a situation in which the verdict of governors would be challenged by violent thugs on the streets. Or that newly elected legislators would need to be locked up in fine hotels to prevent them from selling their souls for filthy lucre.
It is not as if they need the money. The Karnataka Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reforms analysed the assets of 221 newly elected MLAs and found that 97 per cent were ‘crorepatis’. Of these, 16 had assets worth more than Rs 100 crore. You do not need me to tell you that the main reason why Indians fight and sometimes kill for a ticket to contest elections is because there is no easier way to become very rich very quickly.
This sickness in our democracy did not begin after Narendra Modi became prime minister. But, it is this storyline that has been sought to be disseminated by secular, leftist political commentators in order to disguise their loyalties to the Congress party. It is this ‘secular’ caboodle that uses words like democracy and secularism most often. Sadly, they see the weaknesses in our democracy through tinted lenses. So what happened in West Bengal’s panchayat elections last week has been almost ignored by liberal, leftist commentators. In these village elections, ballot boxes were torn out of polling booths and thrown in ponds, and gangs of armed thugs wandered about violently preventing people from voting. These events escaped the notice of ‘secular’ politicians and commentators who moan endlessly about how democracy has died in the past four years. Rahul went so far as to say in Chhattisgarh that India has become a dictatorship.
To support this ludicrous charge, the Congress president has exalted disgruntled judges who actively harmed the Supreme Court by going public with their disgruntlement. Disgruntled public intellectuals have also sided with the judges and the ‘secular’ media has done its best to provide a platform for their views.
Having lived through that time when there really was a Dictator ruling India, I can report that journalists, writers and poets were jailed for speaking out. It was also a time when disobedient judges got the sack. So the Supreme Court obsequiously went along with the Dictator’s diktat when she ordered them to suspend even the right to life. When the Dictator’s grandson now makes reckless charges, he needs to be reminded of that one period of Indian history when democracy nearly died.
Modi is no match for the powerful elite who lost their vast influence in the public square when he became prime minister. So now when he appears to have lost some of his magic, they have taken charge of the narrative and their message is clear: democracy is doomed if Modi remains in power.
Monday 29 January 2018
Sunday 15 October 2017
Why religion is here to stay and science won’t destroy it
Peter Harrison in The Wire.In
In 1966, just over 50 years ago, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’. Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularisation as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy. Then something closer to the opposite happened.
Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.
To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. The most recent census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief.
The percentage of atheists in the US now sits at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.
Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’
The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.
Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic.
As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.
The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.
In brief, global secularisation is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularisation’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularisation turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?
Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.
The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.
Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa. Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularise science.
The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularisation, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularisation theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice. Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.
So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.
Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.
In 1966, just over 50 years ago, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’. Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularisation as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy. Then something closer to the opposite happened.
Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.
To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. The most recent census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief.
The percentage of atheists in the US now sits at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.
Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’
The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.
Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic.
As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.
The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.
In brief, global secularisation is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularisation’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularisation turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?
Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.
The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.
Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa. Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularise science.
The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularisation, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularisation theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice. Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.
So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.
Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.
Saturday 26 March 2016
Jamat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood & Capitalism.
On Jamat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood & Capitalism. (Video is in Urdu)
Thursday 6 November 2014
Nehru and Indira laid down principles of secularism and nationalism that today’s politicians can’t ignore
Vinod Mehta in The Times of India
It is open season on Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. No opportunity is lost to demonise and denigrate father and daughter. Even October 31, the day the lady was assassinated, became a day-long festival for celebrating her wickedness, besides proclaiming she was no martyr but a case of self-destruction. Fortunately, we are told, a set of rulers, or shall i say ruler, is at hand, with the wisdom and vision to repair the damage.
We need to talk about Jawaharlal and Indira. That’s for sure. But we also need to keep some touch with historical veracity. For their lifelong opponents truth lies in the eye of the beholder. Consequently, 2014 onwards provides an excellent window to demolish once and for all the myth about their contribution to nation-building. What they built, so the argument goes, is their family dynasty.
Party politics can and is used to float falsehoods with the help of state power. Witness how the fable concerning our glorious Vedic past is being represented triumphantly (in which allegedly plastic surgery and stem cell research flourished) without a murmur of incredulity, or a titter of mirth. If truth is the first casualty in war, it is the second casualty in times when, as Lawrence Durrell puts it, “truth is what contradicts itself”.
The systematic and organised campaign to vilify the Nehru legacy and replace it with the more ‘muscular and patriotic’ legacy of Sardar Patel is top of the agenda. The exercise is ludicrous and an insult to the great Sardar. But let us leave that falsehood alone for the moment.
At the heart of the demolition project is the announcement that a new Idea of India, contrary to the one proposed by Nehru, is available, and in need of urgent execution. It is an abiding irony that the sole politician in the current pantheon of saffron leaders the present prime minister pays obeisance to is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who ruled the country with Nehru as his lodestar.
What is this new Idea of India? I think we should be told. Alas, its architects have provided no blueprint except to declare it exists. If i were say Mani Shankar Aiyar, i would argue it consists of one part jingoism and one part xenophobia. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration. More accurately, it rejects the legendary poet Raghupati Sahay aka Firaq Gorakhpuri’s thesis, “Sar zamiin-e hind par aqwaam-e alam ke Firaq/ Kaafile baste gae, Hindustan bantaa gayaa”. (In the sacred land of Hind, caravans of the world Firaq went on settling, and Hindustan kept on being formed.)
If one takes the short view of history, Nehru is an easy target, and Indira even easier. To compile a list of ‘sins’ the duo committed would be superfluous since the compilation has already been lovingly done by the Sangh Parivar. Many of the sins are not without basis but they are not black and white either, except the Emergency. They were committed at a specific moment in history. Happily, we have access to material which provides us with full, balanced assessments – warts and all. We are therefore neither astonished nor shocked when these transgressions are presented. No verdict on Nehru or Indira is possible without its share of criticism.
Perhaps this is the right time to ask the hunters looking for two prized scalps some questions. Where did Narayana Murthy and the entire information technology industry come from? Where did Indra Nooyi come from? Where did Warren Buffett’s financial wizard, Ajit Jain, come from? They all came from the IITs, IIMs and other world-class education centres Nehru had the foresight to set up.
If India has the ‘bomb’ and internationally renowned research labs, the credit must go to the same man. At a time when the republic struggled, he insisted a newly independent, backward nation be fully engaged with the contemporary first world through advanced learning and progressive thinking. Nehru ensured a society steeped in superstition, ritual, religious dogma and belief in kismet embraced a scientific temper so that the temptation to wallow in a mythical ‘glorious’ past could be resisted. The modern nation state – outward-looking, open, rational, argumentative, sceptical – armed with universal adult franchise, is the creation of Jawaharlal Nehru. Rubbish that if you like.
I yield to no one in my abhorrence for aspects of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. Because i entered journalism in 1974, i experienced the full horrors of civilian dictatorship. That she wrecked critical democratic institutions is undeniable. But we must also remember she dismembered Pakistan and made sure it could never pose a threat. There is a good Indira and a bad Indira.
Incidentally, when i read opinion polls reveal she is easily the most popular prime minister the country has produced, when i see long queues outside her Safdarjung Memorial, I wonder if our Iron Lady needs more than one yardstick (Emergency) to assess her term in office.
If Nehru’s legacy is the real obstacle holding India back, why don’t its adversaries throw it into the wastepaper basket? And govern on the majoritarian doctrine? Not a chance. When it comes to self-preservation, the new rulers are wise. They know they would soon be out of a job, if they abandoned the idea (secularism) which has held the country together.
Thursday 25 July 2013
Amartya Sen and the ayatollahs of secularism
by Minhaz Merchant in the Times of India
Dr. Amartya Sen compels me to return to a subject India should have long buried: secularism. Dr. Sen’s definition of secularism is as misty-eyed as that purveyed increasingly by secular liberals who – in the classical sense of those terms – are neither.
As I wrote in The Ayatollahs of secularism - part 2, Indians six decades ago had to make a choice between a theocratic Pakistan and a secular India: “On a cool spring day in 1950 at a California college campus, 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.’ 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.’ Bhutto walked away in a huff.”
Sixty-three years later, has India lived up to its secular promise? The short answer: yes. The larger question: why is India secular? The answer: because the majority community is intrinsically secular. If it wasn’t, India would have been, in Shashi Tharoor’s words, a “Hindu Pakistan”: the kind Bhutto would have understood.
So what is Amartya Sen’s definition of secularism?
In his 2005 book, The Argumentative Indian, Dr. Sen devoted 23 pages to explaining his views on secularism – without coming to a definitive conclusion. This is what he wrote in one passage:
“Secularism in the political – as opposed to ecclesiastical – sense requires the separation of the state from any particular religious order. This can be interpreted in at least two different ways. The first view argues that secularism demands that the state be equidistant from all religions – refusing to take sides and having a neutral attitude towards them. The second – more severe – view insists that the state must not have any relation at all with any religion. The equidistance must take the form, then, of being altogether removed from each.
“In both interpretations, secularism goes against giving any religion a privileged position in the activities of the state. In the broader interpretation (the first view), however there is no demand that the state must stay clear of any association with any religious matter whatsoever. Rather what is needed is to make sure that in so far as the state has to deal with different religions and members of different religious communities, there must be a basic symmetry of treatment.”
Symmetry of treatment is crucial: What does symmetry imply? Clearly, equality for all, special privileges on the basis of religion to none. That is not Dr. Sen’s conclusion at the end of his 23-page chapter on secularism. And it is certainly not the secularism that – for example – the Congress practises today.
In an interview with The Economic Times, on July 22, 2013, Dr. Sen said he would like a “secular person to be prime minister” and added: “I would not like to see Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister and I’m speaking as a citizen of India.”
Dr. Sen, on being probed further, clarified why not: “(He) generates concern and fear on the part of minorities.”
But surely it is parties which preach secularism but practise an insidious form of communal separateness which feed a false fear among Muslim voters?
Such “secular” parties don’t care for Muslims. They care for Muslim votes. If they had “real concern” for Muslims – a key quality in a prime minister according to Dr. Sen – Muslims would not be as poor, as deprived, as backward, as alienated and as stigmatised as they are today.
After 54 years of Congress governments, each preaching secularism but practising the opposite, the appalling state of Muslims is a telling indictment of faux secular governance.
* * *
Dr. Sen is surprisingly coy about Rahul Gandhi. When The Economic Times asked him what he thought of Rahul, Dr. Sen parried the question instead of taking it head on as would be expected of an independent mind.
Here’s what he said: “I haven’t assessed him in that way. I know him as a different figure (not a politician). I know him as a likeable young man who was a student in Trinity College (Cambridge). We have met when I was Master of Trinity. We spent a pleasant day together. I did ask him then if he was interested in politics or not. At that time he wasn’t. However, I haven’t assessed him as a politician or a potential prime minister.”
That’s an extraordinary answer. Rahul, the Congress vice-president, has been in electoral politics for over nine years and Dr. Sen, so knowledgeable and outspoken otherwise about Indian politics and economics, hasn’t “assessed him” yet as a politician or a potential prime minister? Surely, Rahul deserves more of Dr. Sen’s attention.
Dr. Sen’s kerfuffle with Professors Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University over growth vs. inclusion is meanwhile a red herring. Good governance is the real answer: both economic growth and inclusion are intrinsic to it.
The real issue is entitlement vs. empowerment. Profs Bhagwati and Panagariya rightly argue that economic growth, allied with welfare schemes which build productive capital assets (rather than the NAC-Sen-Dreze formula of handouts which create dependencies) is the most efficient development model for India.
Who can best create that model? Certainly not those who advocate a policy of entitlement with its attendant fiscal profligacy that has so severely damaged India’s economy.
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Earlier article
On a cool spring day over 60 years ago in California, 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.”
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 after independence. Bhutto went on to become Pakistan’s youngest Cabinet Minister, at 30, in 1958. My parents returned to India after four years at Berkeley and got married. My father took charge of the family’s petrochemicals business which, thankfully, he was later liberal enough never to coerce me to join.
The difference between Pakistan and India today is the story of how a great religion, Islam, has been distorted by those entrusted to protect its liberal ethos. Pakistan and several countries in the Middle-East have used Islam not to liberate but imprison their people. But it is in “secular” India that the damage has been most insidious.
Jawaharlal Nehru was a secular man. He would have been mortified at what passes off as secularism in modern India. In its purest, most classical sense, secularism requires treating religion as a private matter. It must not enter the public domain. Pray in public or pray in private. But keep your faith at home.
Politicians who have little to offer by way of development – 24-hour electricity, water, housing, sanitation, roads, infrastructure, jobs – will use religion to divert the attention of the common man. According to the latest National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), over 60% of Indians consume less than Rs. 66 a day in cities and less than Rs. 25 a day in villages.
These form the poor whose grandparents were promised Garibi Hatao by Indira Gandhi during her victorious 1971 Lok Sabha election campaign. It should shame the Congress that, 41 years later, the constituency Feroze Gandhi – Indira’s husband – first entered the Lok Sabha from in 1952, Rae Bareli, and from where succeeding generations of Gandhis, including Indira and Sonia, have been elected, is one of the most backward in India. Over 70% of children below the age of 5 in Rae Bareli, for example, are moderately or severely stunted due to malnutrition (The Ayatollahs of secularism – part 1).
But secularism, not development, has been an article of faith for the Gandhis. The poor and the Muslims – the Muslims in particular – have been entrapped into a fear psychosis that warns them: vote for “the other” and you will not be safe.
The riots in Gujarat on February 28, March 1 and March 2, 2002 following the burning of kar sevaks on February 27, 2002, have come especially handy in deepening this paranoia.
Muslims from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, from Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, are in effect given this false choice: do you want to be with a “secular” party like the Congress that can guarantee your physical safety but not one square meal a day? Or do you want to be with a party where you must forever live in fear though you will have 24-hour electricity, good housing, roads, jobs and a reasonable standard of living?
Rich electoral dividends have flowed from such fear mongering. In the process, over the decades, regional parties have grasped the fraudulent secular baton from the Congress: the Samajwadi Party (SP) may be the most notorious of these but others like the Telegu Desam Party (TDP) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) have all dealt the duplicitous Muslim card.
Just as they eagerly copied Indira Gandhi’s destructive dynastic politics to enrich their future generations while impoverishing India’s, regional parties have effortlessly morphed into “secular” family firms engaged in exploiting Muslims by cocooning them.
* * *
My daughter, a budding designer, often visits areas in Mumbai to source raw materials for her work and commission artisans. Most of these artisans are Muslims. Most are very poor. Most live in buildings which could collapse any moment. She asked me: “Why doesn’t the Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra, which wins elections based on votes from poor Muslims, do anything to improve their lives?”
The answer: because poor Muslims who have no time to think beyond the next meal will not have time to think of governance and development and how both have been sacrificed at the altar of secularism.
But then of course this isn’t secularism. It’s communalism, masquerading as secularism. What really can be more communal than keeping nearly an entire community of 175 million people in poverty for over six decades?
Theocratic countries like Pakistan have more liberal laws for their Muslim citizens than India has for its Muslims. Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia have also reformed medieval Islamic canons.
Why not India? Because the Congress and its regional copycats fear the true liberation of the Muslim mind. That liberation could set off unintended consequences.
Electoral defeat haunts the Congress and its allies more than issues of governance and development – or even justice. That is why it has moved glacially to deliver justice to the victims of the 1984 Sikh pogrom in which over 3,000 Sikhs were killed by Congress-led hooligan-politicians.
At the same time, po-faced, it uses the 750-plus Muslims killed in Gujarat in 2002 in a riot (not a one-sided pogrom), where over 250 of the dead were Hindus, to extract cynical political advantage with the help of its NGO cottage industry.
Muslim leaders have been willing accomplices in this tragedy. Mullahs issue regressive fatwas against Muslim women and edicts against sensible civil laws. Instead of condemning such fatwas, the government maintains a studied silence, tacitly encouraging extremism and keeping ordinary Muslims stuck in a time warp.
The two real enemies of the Muslim – communal politicians masquerading as secular politicians to win votes and Mullahs deliberately misinterpreting the holy book to retain power over their flock – form a natural alliance. Together they have enriched themselves but impoverished India’s Muslims, materially and intellectually, in the name of secularism. These are the Ayatollahs of secularism.
* * *
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 his fellow-Indians who happen to be Muslims: impoverished, illiterate, ghettoized, discriminated against. For every Azim Premji and Aamir Khan there are millions of weavers in UP and spot boys in Mumbai who have no place in corporate India’s organized 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 middle-class Hindu (not the liberal, well-meaning, Stephanian Hindu) resents them. Discrimination, petty or large, mounts.
The real culprits – communal politicians dressed up as secular politicians – get away scot-free in this narrative. The liberal, secular Hindu’s anger against anti-Muslim communalism is therefore misdirected – far away from these real culprits.
The liberal, secular Hindu meanwhile points to “Hindutva” as the real fount of communalism. Is he right? This is how the Supreme Court defined Hindutva when specifically asked to do so in December 1995:
Considering the terms Hinduism or Hindutva per se as depicting hostility, enmity or intolerance towards other religious faiths or professing communalism, proceeds from an improper appreciation and perception of the true meaning of these expressions. These terms (Hinduism or Hindutva) are indicative more of a way of life of the Indian people and are not confined merely to describe persons practicing the Hindu religion as a faith.”
* * *
Today it costs a candidate between Rs. 10 crore and Rs. 50 crore to fight a Lok Sabha election. Over the next 18 months, political parties will need to raise over Rs. 20,000 crore to contest 543 Lok Sabha seats. The potential from future scams has shrunk. Corporate cash donations have been hit – ironically – by the government’s own economic paralysis. Team Anna's decision to fight elections has introduced a new political calculus.
For "secular" parties, 2014 is an election in which they will now have to rely more than ever on raising a fear psychosis against leaders like Narendra Modi who threaten their hold on power – and the financial pipeline that accompanies it but never finds its way into developmental projects, especially for Muslims. After all, they matter only once every five years.
* * *
Influential sections of especially the electronic media, suffused with hearts bleeding from the wrong ventricle, are part of this great fraud played on India’s poor Muslims: communalism dressed up as secularism. The token Muslim is lionized – from business to literature – but the common Muslim languishes in his 65-year-old ghetto. It is from such ghettos that raw recruits to SIMI and IM are most easily found.
Sixty years ago on that Berkeley campus my father told Zulfikar Ali Bhutto why Pakistan would fail as a state. Today, my daughter, as she visits Muslim-dominated ghettos for sourcing her raw materials, sees how Muslim India too has failed. The single biggest cause: communalism – but in quite the opposite way the Congress, SP and other “secular” parties define it.
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Earlier Article
Indira Gandhi introduced the term secularism in the preamble to the Constitution with the 42nd Constitution Amendment Act, 1976, during the draconian Emergency.
Twenty-six years earlier, in 1950, the framers of our Constitution, led by Babasaheb Ambedkar, had not felt it necessary to include the word – despite the recent horrors of communal riots following Partition.
Ever since, the Congress has used secularism and socialism (a term also introduced into the Constitution by Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency) to define itself as the party of the aam admi.
So how has the aam admi fared in over 53 years of Congress governments, 36 of them under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and their appointed CEO-Prime Ministers, P.V.Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh?
Badly. Poverty remains endemic. India is placed 134th on the Human Development Index (HDI). Over 14,000 farmers across India commited suicide in 2011. Malnutrition persists. The Naandi Foundation released a report in January this year – at the hands of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – on widespread child malnutrition (http://www.naandi.org/)
In an edit page piece in The Economic Times (Rich MPs, Poor Voters), I wrote how, even as children and farmers die, politicians have become ever-wealthier.
Who is to blame? Obviously, the Congress. It has run India for roughly 81% of independent India’s history. The Opposition, especially in the states, must share some responsibility for the Congress’ failure. But make no mistake: the responsibility for the poverty and malnutrition India suffers from 65 years after independence lies squarely at the doorstep of the Congress.
It has misused the term socialism to enshrine poverty, not eradicate it. The poorer the voter, the easier it is to win his vote without bothering about real development issues.
The second Emergency-origin term the Congress has misused is secularism. The word for “secular” in Hindi is panthnirpeksha. In 1977, when Mrs. Gandhi’s government was voted out soon after the Emergency was revoked, the new Janata Party government introduced a Constitutional Amendment Bill. The word “secular” was sought to be defined in the Constitution as “equal respect for all religions”.
The Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha where the Janata Party held a majority. But it was defeated in the Rajya Sabha where the Congress had a majority. Why did the Congress reject 35 years ago the 1977-79 Lok Sabha’s definition of secularism – “equal respect for all religions”?
Consider now what UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi said during a lecture at the Nexus Institute in the Hague on June 9, 2007: “India is a secular country. The term means equal respect for all religions.”
How does Sonia’s definition of secularism differ from Narendra Modi’s? Who is really more secular? Modi? Or Sonia? Or Nitish, Digvijay, Lalu, Paswan, Mulayam, Karunanidhi, Omar Abdullah and Owaisi?
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