The Theology of Secularism

- Dasu Krishnamoorty

India is home to many religions and the latest (half a century-old) to join the medley is secularism. Founded by Jawaharlal Nehru, it has an exclusive but ardent following consisting of self-serving politicians and journalists of the English press and is as accommodating and elastic as Hinduism. Its precepts and practices need elaboration if only to supplement the efforts of Dr Ramesh N. Rao in delineating the holier-than-thou crowd of English journalists who wear the secular badge as a token of intellectualism. Though English newspapers in India have rejected Nehru's socialism, they tightly embraced his doctrinaire secularism, which is as amorphous as mercury and as ambiguous as ambiguity alone can be. It is a travesty of what The New Webster's Dictionary of the English Language defines as "a system of beliefs which rejects all forms of religious faith and worship; the view that education and other matters of civil policy should be conducted without the introduction of a religious element."

My friend Saeed Naqvi unfolds the essence of the new religion in these words, "The word secularism, let us face it, was profaned by the Congress. The word became a trick to keep the minority vote bank in its fold." Some people thought that by choking the voice of Francios Gautier, who is a fan of Hinduism, Shekhar Gupta, editor of Indian Express, was trying to make a statement in favour of secularism. Gupta's action is inexplicable because under him Indian Express became a symbol of pluralism, accommodating a melange of viewpoints. But as Gautier had implied in his letter of protest to Gupta, internal censorship is a fact of life in the Indian media, not very different from what we have seen in the Emergency era. The only difference is that it is not imposed by an outside agency. About secularism in practice, S. Nihal Singh, former editor of the Statesman and the Indian Express, has this to say, "The Congress is primarily to blame for keeping the communal politics alive, Nehru initially giving the Muslim League in Kerala respectability at a time when it was far from certain about its future. Since then Muslim parties have proliferated and gained strength, not in resolving their followers' problems but in extracting concessions for the leaders. Since the leaders of the Muslim political parties have an interest in nurturing communal passions and grievances to retain their hold and deliver votes to other parties for a price, the cauldron of communal politics must keep on simmering."

Jawaharlal Nuehru's secularism created a niche for religion as a divisive force when the country began its republican career with homage to it by conferring special rights on the minorities on the basis of religion. Yet Kuldip Nayyar (Indian Express, 15 August 2000) has no qualms in asserting that partition, in fact, had debunked the two-nation theory. It is this tautology that is characteristic of editorial content in the English media. What prompted Indira Gandhi to incorporate this illusory excursus into the constitution through an amendment seeking to define the republic as secular (and socialist too) is a mystery, specially after her father had conferred on it a sanctity greater than the constitution enjoys. Whoever were its high priests, they always talked of communal harmony but in practice set the religious minorities against the majority community, all for a few questionable gains. In the name of secularism, they allowed ten million Bangladeshis to add to the strength of the minority community. When the Maharashtra government tried to deport just 16 Bangladeshis, the secular mafia saw in it a threat to secularism. This brand of secularism enjoyed hospitality in the English media and respectability with the left intelligentsia who put their own gloss of inanity on the new concept to mean majority-bashing. There is no country in the world where the majority community has to offer apologies to the minorities and the secular media every time it wanted to give expression to its religious identity.

A few months ago, few churches have been attacked by hooligans and stray assaults on church men and women were reported. It is natural for Christian organisations to protest but the Congress, as the founder of secularism in the country, too protested hysterically. The English media went berserk and came out with screaming headlines like "The Church under seige." The federal government itself declared that Deendar Anjuman was behind the blasts in religious institutions in Andhra Pradesh, Goa and Karnataka. But the media parivar deployed their best slueths to unearth and corroborate the claim of the All India Christian Council that the anti-Christian activities were the handiwork of the Sangh parivar and by blaming the Deendar, the government was absolving the Sangh parivar.

Spokesperson for the Congress, Ajit Jogi at that time, was not convinced and asked the government to prove the hand of the ISI behind the attacks on Christians and churches. His demand was based on the English media's conviction that the violence was authored by the Sangh parivar. A fact-finding committee comprising several Christian and other minority organisations also refused to believe the ISI theory because it absolved the Sangh parivar of culpability. The All India Christian Council said that the government was absolving the Sangh parivar by arresting the Deendar Siddiqui members. The All India Catholic Congress was "shocked" that a Christian member of the National Minorities Commission should dismiss the incidents as isolated and also denounced the allegation of the commission that there was Christian terrorism in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.Commission. Chairman of the commission Taher Mehmood said the violence was the work of criminals and individuals and a Lok Sabha member Denzil B.Atkinson ruled out the involvement of the Sangh parivar. The point, however, is the fanatic preoccupation of Nehruvian secularism with religion.

Christians or any other minority have a right to ask the government to provide security to their communities, have a right to go to court to enforce constitutional rights and if they still have no faith can approach the President. In addition, they have a whole secular phalanx of Congress and left parties, which are ready to paralyse the functioning of Parliament to protest the slightest hurt to the minorities. Without exhausting any of these avenues, some Christian organisations chose to meet President Clinton and ask him to intervene with the Indian government. How do we interpret this action? What will happen to Hindus in Pakistan if they meet Atal Behari Vajpayee and ask him to save them from the military regime? Or, what will happen to African Americans if they meet Fidel Castro and ask him to save them from the 'racist' regime at home? That nothing happened to those who met Clinton is enough evidence of a soft state and of a softer majority community. It is such betrayals that encourage international organisations to issue or deny character certificates to the Indian administration.

Balbir Punj writes (Indian Express 7 July 2000) "Since the British Empire and the church were hand in glove, the church could afford to be arrogant. It attacked the Indian traditions viciously, as a part of its evangelisation drive. However, in an independent India, missionary activities could not have continued in their brazen style. The church has since changed its tactics; it has now two faces. The public face of the church is human and reasonable. It is for the benefit of the Indian elite. English media mainly comes from this class and judges the church on its face value." Beginning with the Eucharistic Congress in the sixties to the latest visit of the Pope, the English media showed it had not abjured the colonial mindset, which religiously played up Pope's Christmas and the Queen's New Year messages year after year. The centenary of a Christian educational organisation edges out in the English media the centenary of, say, Sri Kanyaka Parameswari Vissamsetti Venkataratnam Hindu High School. Restrictions on Hindu girls to wear the bindi in Christian schools does not offend secularism but insistence on the singing of Vandemataram becomes an issue in the English media.

Now the film media. from one visionary to another, everyone claims a birth right to hurt the religious sensibilities of the majority community and any opposition to such liberties is an assault on artist's freedom of expression. Mahesh Bhatt's Zakhm has 1992-93 Bombay riots as its background and deals with the illicit relationship of a Hindu with a Muslim woman. But the film also shows policemen helping riotous mobs wearing saffron headbands. This part was cut by the censors and media wolves pounced on the censor board. But why did Bhatt shoot the scene in the first place knowing it would provoke the minorities into suicidal fracas? Grant Bhatt his fancy regardless of a few lives, mostly of the minority community, that resultant communal riots would claim? English media deliver sermons to their readers on how important an artist's freedom is and it matters little what price society pays for this freedom.

There is Buddhadeb Dasgupta's film Uttara. The film shows a padri baba running a mission to serve leprosy victims. Some fundamentalists (you know who they are) tie him to the church altar and set him and the church on fire. Reviewing it in The Week, Tapash Ganguly says that the film will be remembered for its unequivocal protest against fundamentalism. Indian Express carries a rave preview of the film, which refers to Dasgupta as 'the high priest of parallel cinema'. Dasgupta says that "far from highlighting intolerance and brutality, it is more a story of innocence and simplicity." It is indeed a very innocent film showing some Hindu fundamentalists setting out to exterminate the padree baba. In fact, it is a re-enactment of the Staines murder in Orissa. I am sure that whatever Dasgupta's intentions, such films end up in widening the communal gap. They are made to satiate the irresistible urge to show how secular are some communities and how fundamentalist certain others are.

Every English newspaper and magazine went to town with Kamala Das' conversion to Islam, chuckling that it served to show the inadequacies of the ruling religion of the Indian people. Her distinction lay, as evident from media coverage, in writing unreservedly about her own sexuality. She embraced Islam at the age of 65, implying that it took more than six decades for her to discover the deficiencies of her own religion and the merits of Islam which she embraced amid great trumpeteering by the English media. She began wearing burqa saying it offered her protection though there has never been an instance of any non-Muslim attacking her. But every day, several hundred Hindus are seduced to other religions and they do not declare their conversion from housetops. She calls herself Kamala Surayya and claims that she has converted Krishna to Islam and calls him Mohammed. Secularism of the English media variety expects the Hindu society not to respond to such blasphemy. All this seems very 'unconventional' to India Today's correspondent M. G. Radhakrishnan. A retired professor Nafeesa Ummal challenges Kamala Surayya to write "My Story" (which she wrote when she was a Hindu) now and wonders if she will not meet the same fate as Taslima Nazrin who wrote "Lajja" had met and had to flee Bangladesh.

A few months later, another Kerala poet Balachandra Chullikkad embraced Buddhism, much to the delight of the media parivar, saying it was an act of desperation. The anger that followed Kamala Das' incarnation as Kamala Surayya pained him. He said he had not been practising Hinduism ever since he became an adult. Nothing very special about it because several million Hindus have done it and do it now also. Such desertions from the Hindu fold as Chullikkad's are reported and published by the English media with unsuppressed glee. This writer has spent his entire career in the English press, the greater part in the capital's dissident press, and feels sad that he has to flaunt his credentials to save himself from the labelling games the media play.

The English media deliberately overlook simple facts of every day life, which demonstrate the liberalism of the majority community. After the partition carnage, there has been no exodus of minorities to other countries despite the so-called fundamentalism of the majority community. Since then, Muslims have become chief ministers of large states like Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Bihar and Assam where they were a minority and where they could never become chief ministers without the goodwill of the majority community. In contrast, there has never been a non-Muslim chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Muslims have captained Indian sides several times both in hockey and cricket. From Madhubala, Dilip Kumar to the Khans of today, Muslim heroes and heroines enjoyed great audience following, predominantly Hindu. Same is true of great Muslim musicians like Abdul Karim Khan or Ustad Amir Khan or Bade Ghulam Ali Khan or Roshan Ara Begum or the contemporary pantheon consisting of Amjad Ali Khan, Zakir Hussain and others.

The kind of intolerance the Congress or the secular media parivar attribute to the majority community should have made such things impossible. The sooner the secular parivar drop such abusive words as Hindutva and saffronisation, the greater is the understanding they will create between different communities in the country. Secularism in its present form and in its Nehruvian purity is the worst form of communalism which will continue to generate communal violence and its worst victims would be the minority communities, wards of the so-called secular parties and press.

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