Why secularism and freedom of expression have India specific connotation

The democratic experience in India is, comparatively speaking, shallow. We have been introduced to democracy rather late, around the middle of the last century, our political structure based on a borrowed template and formally modeled more or less on the British practice. India was not a democratic country before the colonial take over by the British or even during the major part of their rule, if one leaves out the last twenty odd years. During this latter period some rudimentary democratic institutions came into being as ad hoc response from the rulers to meet the increasing self-rule demand from the articulate educated Indians belonging to some strands of the nationalist movement. These were by no means expressions of mass democracy.

Anti-British movement led by Gandhi and others in Indian National Congress was primarily a political agitation by the Indian masses geared principally to remove the colonial yoke and aimed at major changes in the political superstructure characterizing the country (or the major parts of the country). To the participants of the freedom movement and the people at large the facile assumption was proffered by the leaders that the ‘freedom’ from the colonial rule will necessarily mean democracy, especially as it was being sought to be safeguarded by a meticulously worked document like the ‘Constitution’ (some very erudite, brilliant and humane Indians of the time having authored it). And with the first countrywide general election based on universal suffrage a significant measure of democratic practice was also demonstrated on the ground.

Despite many apparent failures and limitations of and attempts at subversion on our democracy it has to be ungrudgingly accepted, however, that this aspect of our democratic freedom – the ability of the Indians across the length and the breadth of the country to more or less freely exercise their electoral choices at periodic intervals – has remained sacrosanct for all these sixty five years. Being able to throw out of office through a largely non-violent election process the particularly hated dispensation of Emergency introduced by the Congress party during mid-1970s, or the unusually long (for about 34 years) self-perpetuating mis-governance by the left front in West Bengal that almost appeared as a fait accompli bear testimony to the strength of the functioning though flawed democracy in India. In view of what had happened in terms of the shrinkage of the democratic space in many countries in India’s neighborhood and elsewhere, countries that won freedom from the colonial rule around the same time as India this is rightly considered by many as a significant achievement.

Within this basic and broad democratic framework our polity through its varied and evolving strands (roughly represented by various political parties and groups) has managed to develop its programmes projected to benefit the majority of the people and organize corresponding actions so as to best serve the cause laid down by these programmes. The latter could be addressing planning and executing economic development projects, scientific management of the natural resources, managing country’s finances, creating and organizing infrastructure for health and education for the burgeoning population, engineering social upliftment and promoting social mobility, maintaining peace and harmony among a large and widely heterogeneous population characterized by diverse ethnicity, religion, caste, language, economic conditions, etc.

It is in this context that quite early in our experiment with democracy in the post-independence India (in about twenty years or so), the Congress party which by virtue of the momentum it carried from leading the freedom movement had taken over the governance of almost whole of India, lost the absolute monopoly in deciding the form, the content and the priorities of these programmes and who the beneficiaries of these would be. Partly because of conceptual inadequacy in understanding and mediating democratic reforms in a poor, underdeveloped, predominantly agricultural country with effectively feudal land relations and partly out of plain incompetence, arrogance of power, greed and corruption, the ruling party quickly lost the moral hegemony to lord over such a vast and diverse land. Soon there were other claimants to the mantle. First they came flaunting contrasting ideological worldviews. But gradually the challengers put up the flagstaff of diverse identities – of castes, religions, regional and tribal aspirations for ‘self-determination’ - appearing to shoot their arms and articulate newfound voices through the imposed veil of suzerainty of a central government with an overarching national ethos and perspective.

Since then it has become an open season for competition for occupying the preeminent place within the political space among all manner of opportunistic coalitions of groups openly and avowedly promoting their sectional interests and agendas that could sometimes appear almost irreconcilable to each other, quite apart from working against the demands of a modern nation in the 21^st century world. An important aspect of freedom interpreted within democratic India is thus an almost infinite tolerance of the articulation of a restricted, sectional identity even if that works at cross purposes with the interest of ‘others’ (beyond the given group or section) and the ‘nation’ as a whole, if that matters any more to the promoters of identity politics in India.

This incidentally seems to be consistent with the common interpretation of secularism as defined in our constitution. Within the scope of this interpretation, the Indian state (governments both at the center and in the states) can not just be neutral about all religions, they will have to actually bend over backwards to publicly support disparate agendas of followers of each religion, which effectively translates to supporting the religious organizations, parties and those ambitious elites leading them. Religion in India is not something of a cultural value system or worldview practiced by individual followers in private, without demonstrably occupying public space or grabbing public attention or demanding expenditure of public money (or the state’s indulgence or munificence in any way).

That is why shifting or demolishing (even under court order) temples or mosques whether these are of older or recent origins on busy public roads causing clear inconvenience to the flow of traffic in a modern Indian city can be an emotive and law and order issue. In the same vein the financial support by the government for the Haj pilgrimage is expected to be a time honored and therefore compulsory gesture that no decent government hoping not to antagonize a religious group can withdraw. Nor can the government afford to show itself to be fatally insensitive by proposing to control the noise levels in the residential areas and townships in modern cities and towns contributed by the quotidian calls to the faithful and blaring of religious sermons and functions over loudspeakers. And to speak of being wary of regimentation and proliferation of very archaic, ultraconservative ideas and mores among the co-believers in such congregations will be construed as sacrilegious.

That is why a literary work like fiction, essay or a poem or a work of art like painting, a cartoon or a film or play in contemporary India can and does routinely run afoul with the sensitivities of the one or the other among the myriad affiliates of religious allegiances. And the secular government respecting the fundamental rights (to preach and practice a religion) of the aggrieved, enshrined under constitution, is expected to assuage the hurt feelings (due to a perceived affront) by promptly stopping a painting exhibition, live performance or a theatre show, denying censorship certificate to a movie and banning the publication and sale of a book. In addition, most often by an unwritten convention, the state has to remain a passive spectator of the active vandalism and destruction of properties by the mortified activists exercising their freedom in dispensing vigilante justice on the perceived infringement of ‘their’ fundamental rights. Curiously, though, the minor matter about protecting the freedom of expression of the artists and writers and filmmakers under the same article of the constitution never arrests the attention of the government.  

It is true that religion happens to be a common enough trigger for backlash on the freedom of expression. However, freedom to preach and practice rabid regionalism, ethno-linguistic chauvinism, to promote caste-based reservation in jobs and promotion, to demand self-determination for a dwindling tribal identity are all very sacrosanct in India. And every Indian worth his salt should clearly know that his freedom to express any rational view on any of these matters is naturally secondary to the primary freedom of a host of other Indians of sensing a hurt in their identity and ideology.   

Interestingly, recent experiences also show that the way governments – both at the center and in the states – respond to an alleged infringement of freedom of belief (in a religion, a cultural practice, a certain ideology etc.) is highly variable. A leader of a political outfit can employ a language in his speech what, for all practical purposes, appears extremely abusive to an average Indian audience in describing or interpreting an action of a political opponent or a group, generally without inviting a rap from the law enforcing authorities.  In the cases of clear hate speech by some politicians against the believers of a rival religion the police have to be literally coaxed and pressured by the superior courts and mounting public opinion to even initiate some tardy actions. But when an anonymous netizen draws a cartoon of a politician and another shares the same over the cyberspace or a non-political challenger like Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal (in the days before the Aam Aadmi Party was born) or Kiran Bedi lampoons a politician these would galvanize privilege motions in the parliament or immediate police actions by cyber-sleuths and arrests (preferably without bail) under tough provisions of the Information Technology Act. When a movie situates a budding terrorist in an in-your-face realistic cultural, religious and social setting, the filmmaker is hauled over coals for religious stereotyping of terrorism and movie theatres vandalized in whipped up public freenzy.     

Thus it is not always important as to what is being said, but rather who is saying that. Freedom is enshrined for a privileged section of the Indians to take offence on the slightest pretext and hurt others by word or action with impunity, but it will be jail for other lesser mortals in the country who dare emulate similar behavior or aspire for the same privileges.

Rise of the middle India

Though middle classes usually have been perceived by the political establishment to have only marginal importance based on its numerical sparseness vis-à-vis the electoral politics, the centerpiece of a mass democracy like India, they have always played a significant role in shaping the public opinion on a number of issues that affect Indian society, politics and economy.

Till recently, political parties, leaders and their apparatchicks, sympathasiers, apologists in the media generally believed that no matter how much vocal the educated, city-bred critics from among the middle classes appear to be, neither the party ruling the government nor the major opposition parties (harboring an intention to topple it and come to power after the next election) have anything to fear from these agitators because of their own strong ‘mass base’ which in the Indian political lexicon is sometimes pejoratively termed as the ‘vote bank’.

The twin advantages that the political parties had derived (and continue to do so) by sticking to their comfort zone are (a) the numerical preponderance of their support base and (b) the awareness about the lowest common denominator that binds and cements this base, namely, narrow sectional, sectarian, regional, religious interests in the context of winning the electoral battle (which, sadly, has become the be all and end all of the Indian democracy). Indian parties have by and large, over these last sixty five years since independence, found in the issues related to reservation of caste-based job and education quota (with further religion-based sub-quota being attempted recently) much more emotive appeal for the mass electorate they identify as their major constituency, and therefore put their weights behind such slogans and political actions, rather than enlightened measures for bringing corruption under control or to usher gender equality or dignity and justice for women. Also over the years the mainstream parties, often solely governed by populist tailism (not to forget the calculation of the eventual accrual of the electoral benefits) have unwittingly pandered to pressure groups fighting for the recognition of the various regional (even sub-regional or tribal) aspirations and ethnic identities. So much so that today there is a genuine fear of marginalisation of the so-called ‘national’ parties and their increasing irrelevance in major states and regions of this sub-continental nation.

However, over the last decade or so a wind of change has become slowly but surely emerging in various parts of the country, especially in major cities and towns which, somewhat awkwardly, may be described as an awakening of a liberal conscience of an under-performing democracy and it is the middle classes that are taking the lead. Broadly there were four notable developments that could be said to provide a backdrop to the new assertions to reclaim democracy in this country from being hostage to petty party politics.

The landmark public protests by large sections of concerned citizens in respect of the travesty of justice in the Jessica Lal murder case (and the Priyadarshini Mattoo rape and murder case in almost contemporaneous time frame) brought about a new non-political space where students, youth, women, senior citizens, activists, NGOs could publicly articulate their anguish and dismay at the apparent miscarriage of justice. Though limited in scope the successful outcome of these protests in creating enough public pressure to cause revisiting these cases at the higher courts and eventual sentencing of the accused suggested a template for the citizenry to articulate their justified grievances against the non-performance of the machinery of the state. More pertinently, the activists on the streets and their silent supporters in homes and offices saw that money, political connections, muscle power need not invariably tilt the scale of justice in favor of those who flaunt them and ordinary people could get justice from the judicial system which otherwise looked inefficient and ineffective.

Demonisation of the ‘others’

The alchemy of begetting violent outcome from the passion play of identity politics is, to my mind, a poorly understood phenomenon, a dark secret so to speak. That a community of perfectly sane people can be persuaded to sleepwalk into the abyss of intolerance with regard to the another community of people sharing geographically contiguous space and broadly similar cultural values (differing in details that so far were largely ignored), speaking the same language, belonging to more or less similar economic strata, just because of a sudden emphasis on the difference in, say, a religious or ethnic identity is a common enough experience in both pre- and post-independence India. It is also more or less well understood that it is the political class (drawn from most political parties) with the help of the lumpen fringe of the mainly urban poor and professional criminal gangs (this include terrorists, militants of all hues) create these coloured perceptions, set up misunderstandings and eventually inflame passions that often lead to actual violent riots. We have at least two instances of pogroms (anti-Sikh, Delhi, 1984 and anti-Muslim, Gujarat, 2002) where ruling parties either at the center or at the state were widely believed to be complicit.

But the bottom line is that ordinary people could be manipulated, their minds could be poisoned just with a few rumours, a few staged incidents of beatings, killing or rape or desecration of a place of religious worship, or a whipped up misinformation campaign about a bogey (like land holdings coming under occupation by illegal immigrants thereby depriving the indigenous population of their rights in their own land) which had a degree of plausibility. People’s propensity to believe any rumour, dark deeds of ‘others’ (people belonging to the other antithetical community) has been a constant over these sixty-five years since the partition riots. A recent example is the spectacular exodus of people of Northeast Indian origin from the West and South India based on some rumour about a potential plan for attack on these people after a certain date in August 2012 (post the Muharram) as a reprisal for anti-Muslim violence by Bodos in Kokrajhar district of Assam and the adjoining areas (July 2012). Of a same piece is the rumour-mongering based on the doctored (morphed) MMS clippings of anti-Muslim violence in Assam and the Northeast circulating in early August leading to the Azad Maidan violence in Mumbai as well as sporadic violent attacks on the students and workers from North East in Pune and Bangalore. It is just that the new technologies have been harnessed to make the spread of the rumour orders of magnitude faster, lend the rumours a false photographic authenticity giving plain lies a bite of believability and immediacy.   

Vital economic interests, underlying business related rivalry, deep-seated jealousy about the prosperity and economic security could sometime explain this predilection for demonisation of ‘others’. For example, there is this widespread belief among some sections of the Assamese people that the illegal migrants from Bangladesh are occupying lands meant or even reserved for the indigenous tribal population like Bodos and hence are the ‘enemies’ – with the evil intent of occupying and cultivating lands that do not belong to them. Once declared as enemies, any negative image of them or their deed becomes believable. There are definitely many cases of such illegal immigrants, thereby bolstering the plausibility of generalizing this phenomenon as an axiomatic truth. However, what the purveyors of persistent half-truth conveniently forget about Assam’s history for the last hundred odd years is that migration of Bengali Muslim peasants from the erstwhile Pakistan to Assam (both being parts of the then India) happened in many stages, with or without state connivance. Many of them having come and settled in undivided Assam for years could have migrated from one area to another for economic reasons, looking for better or more fertile land (they being basically agriculturists). Their descendants, just because of their religion or language (Bengali) or because they have a penchant for agricultural activity and hence a certain degree of lust for land, should not necessarily acquire the tag of ‘illegal’ Bangladeshi migrant population. These re-settled migrant Bengali Muslim peasants should be differentiated from those migrants crossing over from Bangladesh after 1947 and especially after 1971 (even the Assam accord, 1985, had put 1971 as the cut off date). Moreover, population data (Census) over the last three decades of the last century do not unequivocally show a spectacular swelling of the Muslim population that can only be explained by illegal migration from Bangladesh. But the high priests of identity politics, political elites and intellectuals with vested interests and agenda have no use for such fine distinctions and uncomfortabale details. Having created an atmosphere of hatred for an abhorrent entity called ‘illegal immigrants’ (and thus having demonised them) that is poised to take away people’s livelihood, the land, they would activate the killing fields by staging strategic killings and similar gratuitous violence.

The economic argument, when the context such as above admits it, is a clearly understandable one available for misuse in the demonisation game. Rumour mongering is likely to thrive among the poor who live on the edge and are generally apprehensive about the potential fall out, on their tenuous hold on the fringes of life, of broad economic and/or political policies mooted and executed by the political elite.

Unfortunately, identity politics often enough whip up very deep-seated insecurities among people harking back to historical misdeeds and wrong doing vis-à-vis their identity as a community with a single dominant characteristic like race, ethnicity, language or religion. Demons from the past history are conjured up and morphed (in a conceptual sense) on to the present leaders and members of the other community. It would be interesting to study (I do not know if such studies already exist) the mass psychology of specific communities as regards their implicit belief in the dark ‘deeds’ and ‘character/capability’ of those belonging to the ‘other’ community. What is the long term effect, for instance, of the ‘unspeakable’ partition experience on the Hindu and Muslim (Bengali and Punjabi) families in terms of forming such a subterranean well of mutual mistrust and insecurity passed on from one generation to the future in the form of orally transmitted and restricted access family secrets despite superficial attempts and pretences to forgive and forget.

The last point to touch is the apparent empirical observation made by Ashutosh Varshney in his book “Ethnic conflict and civic life’ which is that the Hindu-Muslim communal strife in India had been much less in those cities and urban centers (he also claims these are essentially urban phenomena) where communal lives of different groups have many linkages, especially economic and professional ones, the rumour mongering and, as a corollary, demonisation having found significantly less takers. Need to revisit the issue.

Who killed Kader Mia ?

In the last chapter (‘Freedom to think’) of his book ‘ Identity and violence’, Amartya Sen dwelt on his personal experience as an eleven year old child in Dhaka (at the time part of the undivided India) of a nasty act of communal violence during the Hindu-Muslim riots of late nineteen forties. Kader Mia, a Muslim day labourer, happened on that day to stray into a predominantly Hindu neighbourhood of the city (where Sen’s family lived at the time) in search of work for a tiny wage to provide for his impoverished family. Hindu thugs, who did not, in all likelihood, even know him nor met him before, knifed him simply because of his religious identity.  

While expressing his bewilderment even sixty years after this incident Sen correctly rationalised it within his conceptual framework of the solitarist view of an individual’s identity – in this case the identity of Kader Mia just as a Muslim. Those who engineered his death, including those who actually executed the action, did not stop to consider his other obvious identity as one belonging to the working class (proletariat), as a poor daily wage earning odd-job workman (having to face, probably, much the same economic hardships as some among the mob of killers) or as a fellow Bengali-speaking countryman sharing the same cultural practices of the rural Bengal, a good normal human being who cared for his family.

What perplexed Sen the most, and justifiably so, is why and how “political instigators who urged the killing … managed to persuade many otherwise peaceable people of both communities to turn into dedicated thugs … made to think of themselves only as Hindus or only as Muslims (who must unleash vengeance on ‘the other community’) and as absolutely nothing else : not Indians, not sub-continentals, not Asians, not members of  shared human race” (Sen, Identity and Violence, Allen Lane, 2006, p 172). Continuing in this vein Sen made an inspired guess about who could be participating in this macabre dance of death. Though a large number of ordinary people were entrapped by the demagoguery of those preaching identity politics it is the savage fringe “often at the troubled ends of each community who were induced to kill ‘the enemies who kill us’”.

But this is the closest Sen had come to analyzing the art of fostering communal violence. In the end he came back to effectively restating his two formal propositions made in this book (see my earlier blog “Roots of communal violence – solitarist view of identity”) and rested his case. However, it is clear from above that Sen was looking for not just a formal answer to his question as to why, if violence is not the norm with an average human being but only an aberration, it has always been relatively easy for the architects of carnages and pogroms to successfully bring out the beast in men.

I suspect a rationale for ethno-communal violence may not be found in a purely rational, however confused or obdurately narrow and one-sided, view of identity that has presented the intellectual armor Sen had assiduously tried to demolish in this monograph. There is an irrational side to our mind that probably carries layers of unresolved existential insecurities men have accumulated over centuries, imbibed under hostile environment of fierce competition among racially or ethnically identifiable groups or communities. In this scenario sense of belonging and bonding among the communally homogeneous is valued and the perceived ‘otherness’ of any entity that is exogenous by way of food habits, dresses, look, conduct of daily life activities, is a potential threat and hence the subject of a deep-seated antipathy. In the modern world the perspective for above black and white distinction (singular identity) may present itself in a more ambiguous manner but is still socially perpetuated by uncritical consumption through the family values, religious practices, folklore and wider cultural behaviour patterns.

The alchemists of the partition violence in Bengal (politicians, businessmen and other vested interests and finally, the ‘troubled ends’ of the community, the criminals, lumpen elements) first engineered strategic provocative acts of desecration (of symbols and places of mass reverence), arson, rape and murder, spreading exaggerated lies and tendentious rumours about the same events. In this atmosphere of purported hostility by ‘others’ (sporting a specific selected religious identity and painted as the ‘enemies who kill us’) Kader Mia’s killers, despite sharing with him plural identities as noted earlier could be manipulated to a confused and raging state of mind whereupon they lost their ‘freedom to think’ and reacted from an instinctive fear and hatred of the ‘other’ (as a mere Muslim man) rather than reason. This reminds me of the inherent irrationality of men in the context of the partition riots to which Saadat Hasan Manto hinted (see my earlier blog “Communal riots : The heart of darkness”). In that blog  it was noted that the similarity of certain aspects of the current ethno-communal violence in Bodoland, Assam (July 2012 onward) with the partition riots was uncanny.  

Roots of communal violence – solitarist view of identity

In his book ‘Identity and violence’, Amartya Sen has argued, I think more or less convincingly, that world over there is a growing retrograde tendency to take a deliberately restricted view of a human being’s obvious and naturally occurring spectrum of associations, loyalties or identities and choose to tag him or her with a particular identity, say a racial or religious or even a so-called civilisational one (a la’ Samuel Huntington). He has also argued that a natural corollary of ‘boxing’ an individual to an exclusive identity, such as belonging to a religious or a racial community, is the potential for communal or racial violence.

The arguments for the first proposition, remaining largely at an abstract schematic level, perhaps sound believable. There appears to be no dearth of empirical evidence from the umpteen carnages in India and the world in the last century (just think of post Babri Masjid riots and especially the 2002 Gujarat pogrom in the recent memory, massacre of Sikhs in 1984, periodic and serial bloodbath in Assam through the last quarters of that century, not to forget the latest one during July this year) that stand testimony to the tremendous persuasive power of the identity politics leading people to violence. Hence his second proposition also seems to acquire an indirect validation.

But whether a solitarist view of the identity by itself should invariably or always presage violence may require careful re-look at the empirical evidence gleaned from more elaborate or detailed analysis of sequence of events as a prelude to several large-scale communal or racial violence in different parts of the world than was possible in this book. This kind of conceptual moorings could possibly be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for much of the violence. The point is that race, religion, ethnicity, language may appeal, sometimes quite strongly, to any or all of us as an abstract idea of identity, but as Sen has argued, we have several other associations or loyalties as well, simultaneously, at any given time. Why and how some of us come to be persuaded to choose to be designated with one of these singular identities, for all practical purposes, in exclusion to any of our other loyalties and in an apparent disregard for the commitments or duties that those other identities might enjoin us to do or not do, may not have a simple causality as Sen’s book might tend to suggest.        

At various points within the book Sen happened to mention the savage Hindu-Muslim riot during the first partition of the Indian subcontinent during 1947 and held this event as a sad, perhaps avoidable, example of the fall out of the confusion created among the people belonging to both religions about the primacy of their religious identity. The final chapter of the book (“Freedom to think”) begins with a poignant personal anecdote from Sen’s childhood days where he became exposed to a brutal murder happening under communal passion during the partition riot apparently close to his house in Dhaka where he lived with his father who taught at the Dhaka University. I will have more to say about Sen’s description and comments about this incident in relation to his second proposition. Suffice it to record here that it is in these final pages of the book we notice Sen’s sincere but unsuccessful struggle to find a rationale to the raw communal violence, that he witnessed as a child and which he possibly never could forget, in terms of a virulent brand of identity politics. This was as far as he went in constructing a theory of communal riots – a conceptual basis was provided. But it still begged the question : how was it successfully engineered on such a large scale ?