[It is the unequal, hierarchical, exclusive and undemocratic India that has asserted itself with a majoritarian vengeance in the most recent re-election of the BJP. The short-lived attempt to transform India into a liberal, plural, and secular polity has failed with the thin top-dressing, an epiphenomenon courtesy of the Raj and its education of the leading personalities in the struggle for independence, being finally washed away for good.]
By Anjum Altaf
The overwhelming triumph of the BJP in the
recent elections is being interpreted by many as the death of a liberal, plural
and secular India. This is a misreading of history.
Two distinctions are relevant. First, while
post-1947 India was indeed characterised by the ideas of liberalism, pluralism
and secularism, these were ideals towards which Nehru wanted to move the
country forward, not necessarily what India was actually like. Second, the long sweep
of social history being unaffected by arbitrary dates on the calendar, there is
no compelling reason to base our understanding of India solely on what
transpired after 1947.
Pakistanis should have no difficulty grasping
the first point if they recall Jinnah’s much-celebrated 1947 address in which
he said: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to
do with the business of the state.” Clearly, he wished Pakistan to be
democratic and secular. That hope died with him and the country moved instead
in opposite direction. It was only the longevity of Nehru and his family that
kept the hope alive much longer in India.
Setting aside the ideas of India that marked
the times of Ashoka or Akbar, in the decades leading up to 1947 there were at
least three other ideas of India in competition with Nehru’s. As articulated by
Sunil Khilnani in his excellent book The Idea of India, the oldest among these
was Savarkar’s Hindutva conceived as far back as 1923. Then there was Gandhi’s
idea of a village-based, anti-industrial society and Patel’s idea that
preferred market capitalism to Nehru’s Fabian socialism.
While Gandhi’s idea was swept aside as
utopian, and Patel’s early death left his vision without a champion, it was
Nehru’s pre-eminent position in the negotiations for Independence that enabled
him to introduce his vision on a Congress whose underlying sympathies were
actually more attuned to Savarkar. It is a fact that liberalism, pluralism and
secularism resonated very little with the mass of the Indian population.
Nehru’s was really an elite project, launched without any consultation with the
population and over the sentiments of the rank and file of the Congress party.
As Khilnani summed it up succinctly, “Most people in India had no idea of what
exactly they had been given.”
The second distinction, that of the
continuity of social history, was reflected most clearly in the prophetic words
of Ambedkar articulated in 1949: “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on
an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” Ambedkar was referring to
the India that had existed for centuries, an India not only undemocratic but
deeply hierarchical and unequal, characterised by a social exclusiveness almost
unparalleled in human experience.
To turn this unequal society, whose very
basis was found on exclusiveness, into an inclusive one was an outlandish
ambition. Dr Ambedkar knew that well when he made the profound observation that
“democracy was not a form of government: it was essentially a form of society”
and warned: “How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and
economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by
putting our political democracy in peril.”
Sunil Khilnani has noted that the social
structure in India was even impervious to urbanisation: “Unlike in Europe,
where city air was expected to loosen the stifling social bonds of traditional
community and to create a society of free individuals, the cities organised by
the Raj’s policies reinforced contrary tendencies in Indian society. Hindus,
Muslims, Sikhs, caste groups, paradoxically began to emerge as collective
actors and to conflict with one another in the city itself, the putative arena
of modernity.”
This India of exclusive, hierarchical and
unequal groups was not necessarily violent or conflictual; there were rules of
engagement that, in general, allowed for a live-and-let-live coexistence. But,
at the same time, the existence of group identities was continuously vulnerable
to political manipulation. In recent history, such manipulation was starkly
manifest in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the attack on the Babri mosque in
1992, and the Gujarat violence in 2002. (India, in this context, refers to the
subcontinent — the 1953 Anti-Ahmadi riots in Lahore and the 1971 aggression in
East Pakistan fall in the same category.)
It is the unequal, hierarchical, exclusive
and undemocratic India that has asserted itself with a majoritarian vengeance
in the most recent re-election of the BJP. The short-lived attempt to transform
India into a liberal, plural, and secular polity has failed with the thin
top-dressing, an epiphenomenon courtesy of the Raj and its education of the
leading personalities in the struggle for independence, being finally washed
away for good.
Any re-emergence, however, is prone to its
own dangers. In unsettled times, the nostalgia for a ‘glorious’ past has much
more appeal than an invitation to an uncertain future. And, in appealing to the
past, whoever can stir up the most emotions is likely to score the highest.
Modi, in stoking an injured psyche, generated a powerful wave on the myth of a
past marked by amazing feats of plastic surgery and intergalactic travel that
was ruptured by evil and marauding invaders who were now to be made to pay
penance for their transgressions. (In this framework, Pakistanis are just as
susceptible to visions of the golden period of Islam which they have been
allegedly denied by various external enemies.)
The social structures of the subcontinent,
where there has been no social revolution of the kind Ambedkar identified, are
reasserting themselves as the effects of the British interregnum fade away. One
has to credit the late poet Fahmida Riaz for being among the first to
understand these realities when she told Indians almost 40 years ago that they
were no different from Pakistanis — tum to bilkul ham jaise nikley / ab tak
kahan chuppe they bhai. In hindsight, this should have been no surprise since
social history is not altered by artificial lines in the sand.
The writer is the author of Transgressions:
Poems Inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
@ Dwan
