The damage secularists do

The interesting question about Narendra Modi’s victory is not why he won, but why the secularists lost. By secularists I don’t mean the Congress but the vociferous tribe of official secularists who have converted Sangh Parivar bashing into an art form. I am all for bashing the Parivar for the right reasons, but to believe that they are the only communalists in town is simply not credible.

My own reading of the Gujarat election is not that Modi won hands down, but that the secularists lost it fair and square. The people of Gujarat took one look at their phony secularism and discovered that a straight-talking Modi was better. This is why the Tehelka sting had practically no impact on anybody’s vote. The Muslims knew what happened in 2002; so did the Hindus. But nobody had the honesty — least of all the secular mafia — to diagnose why Hindus and Muslims were at each others’ throats.

India has two kinds of secularists. One lot tries honestly to bring the two communities into a dialogue. These are the people (mohalla committees, etc) who hold the peace during times of tension. They speak the same language whether they are talking about Hindus and Muslims. They don’t pretend that Hindus are somehow more vile than Muslims when it comes to stoking communal violence. They are faceless do-gooders when it comes to media profile.

The other type is the jholawala, the leftist, the ‘official’ secularist. This secularist is merely interested in sticking the ‘communal’ label on others and feeling smug about it. Just as the Muslim is ‘the other’ for the Sangh Parivar, for secularists, the Parivar is ‘the evil other’. Many of them are understandably politicians fighting for vote share (the Congress, the entire Left tribe, the Karunanidhis, Lalus and Mulayams of the world). But many more of them are media people with shallow ideas about what makes people communal. They would like to see Hindu communalism in black and white but maintain silence on Muslim communalism.

Till some time ago, this was an argument only the Sangh Parivar was seen to be making; but today few people doubt the truth of this allegation. I believe that the golden era of genuine communal amity will begin in India once we shed our phony secularism. The right place to start is by accepting that both Hindus and Muslims are affected by deep insecurities —some inherited from history, others

resulting from the threatening winds of globalisation and market forces. Politicians and phony secularists add to this sense of insecurity by fanning the flames and making loud statements of condemnation of one kind of communalism — Hindu communalism. The Parivar retaliates by painting Muslims in the worst possible terms. If condemnation alone would make someone change his ways, I would be the first to give our loud mouths a Nobel prize for peace. But anybody who has even an elementary understanding of human nature should know that harsh criticism only makes things worse.

Sudhir Kakar, India’s best-known psychoanalyst, who has studied Hindu-Muslim animosities in the context of communal violence, believes multiculturalism is the way forward.

He sees no reason why Hindus should not carve out their cultural space just as Muslims do. Our secularists have made a mess of Hindu-Muslim relationships by first talking about ‘composite culture’ and then blaming one side unfairly for forgetting it.

They should read Kakar’s The Colours Of Violence. He demolishes the idea that communalism means only Hindu communalism and concludes: “…the solution is to build a state which protects the equal rights of Hindus and Muslims to be different.”

In Modi’s Gujarat, Muslims are expected to lie low to protect the peace. It won’t work. But the secularists are doing the opposite — trying to target Hindu cultural consolidation. They won’t succeed either. My conclusion: Secularists have done as much damage to multi-culturalism as the Sangh Parivar.

Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net