Liberal values are absolute

Rajesh Ramachandran

What is wrong in Iran cannot be right in India. Unfortunately, Indian liberals do not realise that they are at a historic crossroads — but, yet again, they fail to see what is moral, ethical and truly liberal. Had the then Congress government not enacted a law to impose the will of the regressive Muslim clergy over the Supreme Court — and thereby, the Constitution — in the Shah Bano case, the rise of the Hindutva right would have had no middle-class legitimacy. In fact, a large chunk of the middle class shifted to the right when it saw the Congress bending over backwards to help the vote-contractors among the clergy keep Muslim voters tightly under its control. Similarly, even future generations of liberals will lose their legitimacy if they do not denounce the hijab as a patriarchal object of control. The liberal values of modernity ought to be absolute and universal, not selective or communal. And, of course, these values cannot be defined by the hatred for PM Narendra Modi or the BJP.

It is vital to underscore the universality of women’s rights — they can’t be held to ransom by parents, political parties, religious organisations or even governments.

Sure, the BJP is using the hijab for its partisan political reasons, but that does not make hijab good or a matter of individual choice. The BJP had used the Shah Bano verdict, the ban on The Satanic Verses and also triple talaq to successfully polarise communities. The BJP has been successful because the so-called leftist, liberal and centrist parties were wrong. It must be understood that ‘we the people’ are not sheep, nor opportunistic politicians their Biblical shepherds. Muslim identity politics is not an antidote for Hindutva identity politics. Our liberals seem to have forgotten that Muslim identity politics harks back to the colonial ploy to defeat Indian nationalism, culminating in the two-nation theory and Partition. If the Muslim identity is bigger than the Indian identity, there is no sanctity for the idea of an inclusive, diverse, Gandhian nation. Muslim identity politics has already created Pakistan, now it can only help hasten the creation of the Hindu rashtra.

The markers of the Muslim identity politics like hijab are, of course, not essential practices of Islam, for hijab was not worn by a vast majority of Muslim women in South India before the advent of political Islam. Before Abdul Nazer Madani founded Islamic Seva Sangh in 1989 — after being banned, it got transformed into People’s Democratic Party — I had not seen a single Muslim classmate wearing a hijab or niqab or burqa in south Kerala, from kindergarten to post-graduation. But Madani’s organisation — which was an aggressive, ideological legatee of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and sort of a precursor to the now-banned Popular Front of India (PFI) — and its radical politics were successful in pushing a majority of Muslim girls behind the hijab by the late 1990s or early 2000s. This was not their choice. There were news reports explaining that the situation was similar in coastal Karnataka, from where the ongoing hijab controversy and legal case arose.

So, Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia, the learned judge of the Supreme Court, has erred in concluding that the hijab is a matter of choice. The hijab was not a ‘permit to go to school’ in a conservative family in coastal Karnataka till the Islamists decided so. Hence the choice is not that of a school-going child, nor is it that of conservative parents, but that of the followers of SIMI or Madani or, in this case, of PFI. No wonder the almighty leader of political Islam, Ayman al-Zawahiri, himself congratulated the girl who protested against the school diktat and wore the hijab, shouting Allahu Akbar. So, if the hijab is good simply because Modi or the BJP is opposing it, should it also be good because al-Zawahiri was supporting it? It is important to underscore the universality of women’s rights and liberal values — they cannot be held to ransom by conservative parents, political parties, religious organisations or even governments.

This was a case about which secular intellectuals should have made themselves heard, asking for the protection of universal, modern values by insisting on the removal of all religious symbols from the government sphere. Let there be no bhoomi pujan by prime ministers, nobody sporting a tika in uniform, no sacred threads around the wrist while attending to government work, no choti and definitely no puja of rocket models before a satellite launch. Unfortunately, our liberals have sought a pre-modern prison for Muslim women in a modern society, which is not as innocuous as a prayer room in a glittering airport. All religions are pre-modern, anachronistic and regressive — there ought to be no exceptions for any. In India, those seeking an easy entry into the power corridors flashing the religious identity card are trying to institutionalise exceptions for one community or the other, thereby triggering competitive communalism. Every Muslim child has a right to modernity, just like the members of the liberal commentariat, who would rather lose a limb than succumb to some illiterate pujari.

Modernity cannot be the sole preserve of the elite. Our learned judges should pass strictures on parents who insist on denial of education for their girl child in order to espouse the idea of turning India into an Islamic nation or to uphold the SIMI slogan of ‘India’s liberation through Islam’. Our jurisprudence cannot become a victim of radicalised parents and their political ideologies. But at the same time, our society cannot afford the BJP and the Sangh Parivar politicising and weaponising historical infirmities in Islamic personal law or contemporary insecurities in the Islamic society. The BJP government ought to make the Muslims believe that they too count in modern India. Equality in the eyes of law and rules is a statement easily made, but an idea difficult to practise when proud citizens are made to fearfully look at school uniforms as Hindu identity markers. We the people of a multi-religious, diverse country seeking to remain liberal have only one straight and narrow path towards inclusivity — the Gandhian way.

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