Suhas Palshikar - Disenfranchising The ‘Other’ // Ajaz Ashraf interviews Ashis Nandy on the future of India
M.G. Vaidya (‘The
price of personal law, IE, November 1) makes chilling reading. It is not easy
to believe that in a democracy, someone could seriously argue a case for
disenfranchisement of citizens. But that is exactly what Vaidya’s suggestion to
the Law Commission does. It is unlikely that Vaidya would not know or remember
the opposition by many Hindu (and Hindutva) organisations to the reform of
Hindu laws in the 1950s. So, we do not know if he would disenfranchise those
opponents retrospectively. But it is clear that his variant of the argument is
oblivious to nuance. So, he would not be interested in questions such as those
that some feminists raise over “uniformity” and application of Hindu reforms to
all communities. Nor will he find merit in the argument that the problem of
triple talaq could be separated from the larger task of bringing all personal
laws under a uniform umbrella.
However, in order to
simplify the debate, let us not get into those intricacies. Triple talaq is a
practice that certainly needs redressal — and, it must be repeated — not
because it is a Hindu-Muslim question, but because it is a question of gender
justice. It must also be stressed that reform of religious practices and
interpretations of religion is a larger, long-term, but welcome process. Having
said this, we need to turn to the larger issue. In his enthusiasm to uphold one
provision in the Constitution (Article 44), Vaidya has chosen to undermine the
larger spirit of diversity and democracy that informs the Constitution.
Disenfranchisement does not fit into that spirit.
Vaidya’s piece and his
suggestion to the Law Commission need to be read not only in terms of
overenthusiasm about Article 44 (one wishes he would be equally enthusiastic
about not just other provisions of the Constitution, but also about the spirit
of the Constitution). Though the piece smacks of contempt for Muslims, which is
not unknown to the ideological tradition he belongs to, the larger danger is
not just Muslim-baiting either. Beyond a hackneyed and partial reading of the
Constitution and beyond the well-known antipathy toward the Muslim community,
the argument makes more dangerous reading for its bold attempt to openly
canvass for a “Hindu” democracy.
Religious beliefs of
non-Hindus or customs of “so-called” (his word) Adivasis would invite
disenfranchisement — so, despite all the social engineering, Hindutva ideology
is back to emphasising that this nation belongs to mainly caste Hindus; others
may live here but would not be treated as part of the nation. Within this
framework of the Hindu nation, democracy is fine; but if one is thinking of a
diverse social context, then second rate citizenship is on offer. Critics of
Hindutva have often charged the Hindutva political forces of supporting
second-rate citizenship. Now, Vaidya’s initiative confirms those criticisms. In
the homogenised Hindu national space, “others” can only be second-grade
citizens.
There is something
more sinister to Vaidya’s suggestion. One always thought the vote is the
cardinal principle of citizenship. By recommending disenfranchisement, Vaidya’s
piece attempts to link acceptance of everything the state does to citizenship.
If you do not accept something the state does, you are no more a citizen.
Though his argument is specious about the meaning of the word “shall”, the real
point he makes is this: Legislatures are creations of the Constitution,
therefore, not agreeing with policies and decisions of legislatures invites
forfeiture of citizenship. That is, if you do not accept the UCC, you lose the
right to vote. But why the UCC alone? This logic can apply to many such
“fundamental” disagreements with legislative assemblies or the parliament.
Attempts to draft
personal laws based on uniform principles is an important challenge, but the
enthusiasm of the likes of Vaidya can only make that task more difficult
because no community would like to acquiesce with a constitutional provision
with the proverbial gun of disenfranchisement held to its head. Only recently,
a Union minister stated, “You cannot have a uniform civil code without a broad
consensus.” (Venkaiah
Naidu, IE, October 27). So, do we believe the minister or the inner voice
of Hindutva?
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/uniform-civil-code-muslim-personal-law-board-triple-talaq-3734252/
Ajaz Ashraf interviews Ashis Nandy on the future of India
In
1916, the Congress and the Muslim League signed the Lucknow Pact, stoking hopes
that they would bridge the chasm dividing them and mount together a ferocious
campaign against the British colonial rule. This hope was soon to be belied. The
gulf between the two parties, as also between Hindus and Muslims, widened even
further, ultimately leading to Partition. Indeed, what we jubilate over today
can lead to sorrow and tragedy tomorrow. And the worries and problems of the
present can fire us to create a new India a century later. In
2016, India marches towards what is recognised as the new dawn of economic
prosperity and political power. In this interview to Outlook, renown political
psychologist Ashis Nandy speaks on
the future of India, based on his reading of its past and present. Excerpts:
The opening lines of your
book, Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of
Despair, are: “These essays are about an India that is no longer the
country on which I have written for something like four decades. Many things
have changed drastically in recent years…” What do these changes presage for
India’s future?
Let
me take a broad sweep of things. First of all, India no longer has a vision of
its own. Its vision is the vision of many developing societies around the
world. It is a homogenized, predictable
future which has been sold to us as a universal cure for poverty, indignity and
backwardness in general. In other words, our own futures have been stolen.
All
developing societies, including China, have now accepted that they are
backward. Our future is exactly the same as the future of all standardized
nation-states. It is a new vision for them as well, except that their vision is
300 years. We have now joined the bandwagon. India, therefore, doesn’t have a
distinctive future.
When you talk of India
having accepted the universal vision, are you referring to what you call “urban-industrial
vision”?
Yes.
It is an acceptance that is not even a critical acceptance. In fact, it is an
unqualified acceptance. Mind you, this was not the creation of the Bharatiya
Janata Party. India had already changed before it came to power.
Perhaps the BJP’s rise is a
result of India having changed.
That’s
right. They can deliver the urban-industrial vision more ruthlessly, or at least
seem to do so. To repeat, the vision of all ambitious, so-called Southern
countries – Brazil, India, China, etc – is exactly the same. Our
hero is (Singapore’s first prime minister) Lee Kuan Yew. He’s so popular that
one is afraid of saying he was one of the last despots, the last votary of
“developmental authoritarianism”. Take the East Asian Tigers. I have argued
that they were not only tigers but also man-eaters. All of them had despotic
regimes. If you want spectacular development, then be prepared for a
high-degree of authoritarianism.
Is India headed that way?
In
India, this movement began with Mrs. Indira Gandhi in the mid-Seventies. But
what we did by default – not because we had thought through it – we do now (by
design). When CN Annadurai (one of the architects of the Dravidian movement and
former chief minister) declared that Tamil Nadu wanted to be a separate
country, nobody called him a traitor or attacked him in Parliament or organized
countrywide protests. Not even the Jan Sangh (the BJP’s earlier incarnate).
They knew that when people are angry, in distress, they say things which must be
ignored.
The
same thing happened with Mrs. Gandhi, who ultimately had to sign an agreement
with Laldenga. He died when he was Mizoram’s chief minister. He was given a
state funeral. One who used to call himself Gen Laldenga and led a rebel army
became Patriotic Laldenga. These
defaults are no longer available to us, because someone or the other is going
to take a political advantage of it. My second point is that not only our visions
have been stolen, the range of politics in India has narrowed drastically.
Will it get even narrower,
say, by 2050 or 2100?
It
can’t get narrower than this.
Is it because there are no
alternative visions available to us?
That
is right. Whatever alternative visions there are, these are confined to the
margins. In one sense, people like Medha Patkar or Claude Alvares or Vandana
Shiva don’t feel defeated because they are powerful men and women who hold on
to their visions. But apart from a fringe element, nobody thinks of them as
visionaries. Nor does anyone think of them as politically relevant.
Are we then trapped in a peculiar
circumstance in which we don’t have choices, but only the chance to examine the
consequences of having a homogenized vision?
Choices?
Well, I often say that if a person in India and China dies after living a
virtuous life, he doesn’t go to heaven – he goes to New York. We
can’t even talk, as we used to earlier, of many of the environmental problems
we encounter. We don’t have the courage to admit that most of our mega-dams
have not delivered. Only four of the eight dams planned under India’s first
multipurpose dam project, the Damodar Valley Corporation, were built. It costs
us more to maintain the DVC than what it delivers. Take Bihar, where without
dams, only 15 per cent of it would get flooded every year. With dams, the
percentage has grown to more than 30 per cent.
The
ecological sensitivity was built into our lives over centuries. Nobody talked
of ecology or environment, but the traditional fear of it, the magicality
attributed to Nature, protected us. All these have been declared as mere superstitions
– and shelved. We
no longer have the concept of future generations. We are now like that American
wit who said, “Why should I think of the future. What has the future done for
me?” Every Indian wants to have his or her life – whether your car guzzles
petrol or releases particulate matter, it doesn’t matter. The superior courts
are taking a position. They have some vision. But everyone else thinks of how
to beat the laws and find loopholes in them.
One of the consequences of
mega-dams has been the displacement of tribals. Do you think the India of 2100
will go the way of the United States, where indigenous Indians have been packed
off to reserves?
We
are waiting to do that. Actually, wherever they are not concentrated in
numbers, as in Nagaland and Mizoram, we will just finish them. One-third of all
tribes in India are tribes only by name. They have been dispersed, atomized,
and individualized. They have joined the proletariat. In fact, the programme of
proletarianization of tribals, directly or indirectly, is built into the
manifesto of every party, including the Left. They want equality for the
tribes, not separate existence. They want justice – but what is their concept
of justice is very different from that of the tribals.
One
of the results of this is the Naxalite movement. The second Naxalite movement,
unlike the first one, is not an urban phenomenon. It is the rebellion of
tribals, only some urban youths have joined them.
Do you think by 2100, India
will be more like America than India?
By
2100, India will be more like an American slum to the nth degree, a poor man’s
America. Even to become that, we will have to pay a price in terms of shrinkage
of our liberties.
In what sense?
Even
in universities you are now facing difficulties in saying what you want to. It
is becoming difficult to deviate from the developmental vision even in
newspaper columns. It has become difficult to articulate radical diversities,
for which India was known.
Even
our traditions are diverse. For instance, there are millions in Tamil Nadu and North
Bengal who are Ravana-worshippers and who observe Ramnavami as a day of
mourning. What is wrong about it? In Sri Lanka, Ravana’s brother, Vibhishana, is
worshipped. Himachal Pradesh has temples to Duryodhana, the villain of
Mahabharata. Nobody took offence. But
we are now being homogenized in the manner of Protestant Christianity – (that
is akin to saying) “let us have a religion”. We didn’t have a religion. We had dharmic
traditions.
That reminds me of what you
once wrote, “Hindutva is an attack on Hinduism, that Hindutva is an ideology
for those whose Hinduism has worn off, and that Hindutva’s triumph will mark
the end of Hinduism.” Are we headed in that direction?
Yes,
Hinduism that we see around us is not 2000 or 4000 years old. It is just 150
years old. It was born in urban India, under the new political economy that the
British Raj introduced. The reference point was Protestant Christianity, not
Catholicism, which is relatively more open. I come from a Protestant family. I
know today’s Hinduism is that.
The
first-generation of RSS pracharaks – men like (Hindu Mahasabha leader) BS Munje
and (RSS founder KB) Hegdewar – took their inspiration from the Ramakrishna
Mission (which was influenced by Christianity). Swami Vivekananda (Ramakrishna
Mission’s founder) was himself a very different person. He did not speak of
Islam and Muslims as villains.
What are the basic
attributes of this new Hinduism? A homogenized religion?
Once
you endorse nationalism (typically, one country, one religion, one language)
you don’t even have to discuss it (religion). I think it was (Ernest) Gellner
who said you don’t have to read the texts of nationalism because all
nationalisms are the same. (Veer) Savarkar recognised it. He did not believe in
anything (religious). He refused to give a Hindu funeral to his own wife and
said that there was nothing sacred about the cow. He also made fun of (RSS’s
second sarsanghchalak) Golwalkar’s fondness for rituals. Savarkar is the real father of the emerging India.
Gandhi is now the step-father.
Getting back to your essay,
do you think Hinduism will fight its battle with Hindutva?
Yes.
There is always a tacit force in Hinduism which rebels against this kind of
disjunctive imposition. Civilization never bends down, it always incorporate
and digests (what is sought to be imposed on it). Civilization can destroy a
state without saying a word. It must be remembered that the Indic civilization
is different from the Indian nation-state, which is a European concoction just
300 years old.
I
have this confidence that it is just not possible to mobilize India into a
homogenized nation. Tagore said there is no nation in India. That is why he
wrote the English word nation in Bengali. But he had 12 to 15 Bengali words for
patriotism. Indians are patriotic. But patriotism is often confused with
nationalism.
The
nation is a demand for homogenizing the people, leaving the individual
face-to-face with the state. There is no interface – no community, no religion,
no sect, no caste, no trade union, simply no intermediary structures. There is
just the individual and the state in the ideal nation-state system. I don’t
think Indians will go for this beyond a point.
So you feel a challenge to
this idea of nation-state will emerge from Hinduism itself.
Yes.
Do you think caste could be
fighting Hinduism’s battle?
Caste
has been so discredited and so heavily politicized that you shouldn’t be
talking of how caste is influencing politics, but how politics is influencing
caste. But caste does resist Hindutva. That is why Hindutva-wallahs are against
caste also. But a wider vision, an alternative vision, will come through sects
and diversified belief systems.
Do you see signs of it now?
Every
believing Indian is a sign of that. Hindutva has flouted some of the
fundamental canons of Hinduism. For instance, each person has private gods and
goddesses, his family has its gods and goddesses, his community has its gods
and goddesses, his village has its gods and goddesses, his sect has its gods and
goddesses.
In
addition, they have their personal preferences – and though they may not
worship some gods and goddesses, they don’t wish to antagonize them. Whether
they identify with them or not, whether they believe in them or not is
irrelevant. For instance, Hindus like to go to dargahs and the Golden Temple.
This Hindutva can’t stop. This is a completely different game.
If Gandhi were to come to
India in 2050 or 2100, what would he be like?
Major
philosophical positions don’t simply die out. They automatically emerge in some
situations. Do not forget that the major heroes of the post World War II world
have been Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama
– they are the people who approximated, directly or indirectly, to the image of
Gandhi. They did not read Gandhi to take the position they did. Nor did Polish
trade union leader Lech Walesa, whom the Poles called, “Our Gandhi.”
You
can’t efface or kill the Gandhian strand. It will continue as a minority stand.
Perhaps a catastrophe will produce…
Gandhi?
Not
Gandhi, but hundreds of variations of him. Then only it can become a mass
movement. You will not have to wait till 2100. It will come earlier. This is
because we have entered the last cycle of climate change. Some kind of limits
to human greed and consumption will have to be put in place. Once I tried to
count the number of shades of lipstick available. I stopped after counting till
1200, I just couldn’t handle it. I don’t think our retina is capable of even
registering 1200 shades. Yet we continue to produce more shades.
Personally,
I don’t think we can return to a pastoral way of life. But the limits of
urban-industrial vision have been crossed. It is not reversible. It is as bad
as that. When the crunch comes, you will have to impose limits on using the
resources of Earth for the survival of at least your children and
grandchildren, even if you are not thinking of the future.
In 2100, what would Ambedkar
be like?
Unfortunately,
even though Ambedkar opted for a religion that has tremendous congruence with the
Gandhian past, he was a very modern man. He definitely wanted some version of
urban-industrial vision. He certainly did not look beyond it.
You wrote an essay on
Happiness. Will Indians in 2050 be happy?
It
will be demanded of them to not be unhappy.
So how happy India will be
in 2100?
Right
now, Indians are mostly happy. Poorer countries generally are. Bangladesh was
quite high on the list of happy countries, so was Nigeria. Indians are on the
higher side too. The current figures will not change so easily. Therefore, there
will be a public demand to be happy. So if you are unhappy, you are a traitor.
If you are unhappy, you will become a class enemy, as it happened in the Soviet
Union. Unhappy people there were sent to psychiatrists.
Are we headed that way?
I
am afraid there are efforts to push India in that direction.
