BOOKS

A Pioneering Endeavour nside every little book is a larger book struggling to come out. Mukul Kesavan’s little jewel is no exception. But Penguin would make a mistake in commissioning him to write it. This format of 136 pages in an attractive pocket edition at Rs. 150 a throw is ideal for taking the argument to thinking indigent Indians. What we need is a whole series of companion volumes that expand and deepen beyond Kesavan’s pioneering endeavour the meaning and implications of Indian secularism, a continuing task to which one prays Mukul Kesavan will continue contributing the brilliance of his mind and the reverberation of his idiom. ----- M.S.A

Secularism - Essence of Indian Reality

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Mukul Kesavan (Secular Commensense by Mukul Kesavan, Penguin) begins with an unforgivable bloomer. He says Rajiv Gandhi amended the Constitution to undo the Shah Bano Judgement. He did not. He rammed through a reluctant and unconvinced Parliament the Muslim Women (Compensation on Divorce) Act, 1986. In the very month that Mukul Kesavan’s book has been published, the Supreme Court has, one, confirmed the Constitutional validity of the legislation; two, specifically reaffirmed that Muslim Personal law is untouched by Sections 125 and 127 of the Criminal Procedure Code; and, three, explicitly brought Muslim Personal law within the ambit of Parliamentary legislation and judicial scrutiny.

These were the three precise objectives that informed Rajiv Gandhi’s much misunderstood legislative initiative. It was an exceptionally courageous initiative for, as he told Jyoti Basu at a largely-attended meeting in the Calcutta Raj Bhavan a few months later, he did so knowing he had alienated large sections of majority opinion in the country and possibly substantial sections of Muslim women, so where did the question of a vote-bank arise? He had done it to assuage a disturbed minority whose identity and self-respect had been needlessly assaulted by Chief Justice Chandrachud’s judgement which contained offensive aspersions against Islam. He had done it to reaffirm, whatever the political cost, that India was a secular country in which the Constitutional guarantees extended to the minorities were sacrosanct and safe from legislative or judicial misinterpretation.

Mukul Kesavan disapproves such patronising secularism. He stresses that the Constitution contains no warrant “for treating a community as pre-eminent or its preferences as overriding.” He also sees such discriminatory secularism as provoking a majoritarian backlash. Not state patronage but community empowerment, says Kesavan, is what secularism should be about. He adds, “The way to do it is by institutionalising the sharing of power : mandatory quotas, separate electorates, etc.”

And having made this bold suggestion, Kesvan then abandons it. Participatory secularism, not patronising secularism, would be the hallmark of a truly secular polity. But, as Kesavan is the first to point out, with separate electorates having led to Partition, that is a historical hurdle we would have to overcome to go the Kesavan way. An intriguing thought. And as Kesavan is not a practising politician, one looks to him to show us the practical road to this goal. Alas, he gets distracted by his polemic against Hindutva to the exclusion of pursuing this innovative way forward.

On the polemic, Kesavan is hard to match in either his force of argument or elegance of style. He traces contemporary Indian secularism to the need for an “all-India nationalism” to challenge the Imperial power and the imperative necessity, therefore, “to keep all Indians on board”, an “all-are-welcome secularism that tried to conscript every religious identity to bolster its all-India credentials”. I doubt the point has ever been better put. Kesavan then contrasts this with the nationalism of the Hindutvists, “a nationalism derived from European models (and based) on tried and tested nationalist principles : a shared language, an authorized history, a single religion and a common enemy”. Such chauvinist nationalism, says Kesavan, works - at least for a while - where the “demonised minority” is economically or otherwise dominant, as, for example, with the Jews in Nazi Germany. The argument never really worked in India, not even after Muslim separation led to Partition, because the minorities, far from being a domineering minority became, especially after Partition, a cowering minority in independent India.

But, of course, that precisely is why the essence of the secular programme has been accented on protecting minority rights and promoting minority interests through discriminatory affirmative action. Such patronising secularism may be, as Kesavan regrets, a second-class kind of secularism but it is the only available secularism to put into practice when the minorities continue - with reason - to feel even after half a century of freedom that their identity is under assault, their physical safety endangered and that they are living on the sufferance of a majority which does not in its heart regard the minorities as one of themselves.

Kesavan does not approve of this. He sees our post-Independence secularism as a slight bogus Nehruvian construct based on the dodgy premise that since Partition had shown communalism to be “a bad thing, the metropolitan elite decided by a kind of default that secularism was a good thing”. Such secularism “had little to do with conviction or ideological principle”. It was more “a hegemonic style - it was fashionable”, a “marker of modernity and metropolitan good taste”. And at bottom, therefore, hollow, ersatz.

The line of thought is engaging, amusing, even thought-provoking, but unconvincing for it neither explains the battles fought by Nehru to keep the Congress and India secular when, in the dark days of 1950-51, the challenge came from Congress right-wing which won the Congress presidential election at Nasik, followed by Nehru’s ex-minister Syama Prasad Mookerjee founding the Bhartiya Jana Sangh to draw the post-Independence battle-lines between secularism and Hindutva, nor the definitive prevailing of Nehruvian secularism over saffron communalism for all of three long decades through to the Ayodhya movement. Nor, indeed, the way even the communalists have been scurrying for cover since December 6, 1992 when the vast majority of the majority community turned away in disgust from majoritarianism dressed up as minority-bashing. Hindu, yes, anti-Muslim, no.

“The historical triumph of the Congress”, observes Kesavan, “is that every party must now lay claim to the virtue of being secular”. As a Congressman and Nehruvian fundamentalist, I am tempted to take a bow. But I believe the truth lies less in the Congress achievement than in Congress having reflected more accurately than its political rivals the essence of the Indian reality, which is a core secularism that cannot - except momentarily - be suborned. The BJP’s “nationalism” is unforgettably described by Kesavan as “Bharat Mata being forced into petticoats intended for smaller western women”. It is precisely because Congress secularism is indigenous, genuinely Indian, while Hindutva nationalism is an alien graft which has failed to take, that secularism has so triumphed in post-independence India as to drive communal agendas to the back-burner. India is secular not because Gandhi or Nehru told us to be secular but because where secularism is, there India is. That is what Rajiv Gandhi meant when he described secularism as the “bedrock of India’s nationhood”.