What it is to be outnumbered
ARE people belonging to the minorities self-conscious? Do they live on sufferance, not just in India but anywhere? We are not discussing apocalyptic scenarios like the Jews in Germany during the evil times of the Nazis. A member of a minority stands out because of his attire, food habits, customs, beliefs and his prayer book. And there are different hells and different heavens, all fake. If you are an especially miniscule minority, you face curiosity, the insides of a fire temple and the towers where you leave your dead.
A centralised polity is hardly an answer to our multifarious people with different creeds, languages, gods and beliefs. Is Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan the solution to our problems?
Since democracy is being reduced to a game of numbers in India, with mass defections (if you have the right kind of money), disqualifications of opponents (if you have the right Speaker) and if you can manufacture a ‘cause’ and latch on to a slogan, you are in government. There is a stampede for plum posts, and you have to decide which pair of buttocks will fit which chair, a tough task. Once that is done, and charges and counter-charges have died down, you have the time to survey the battlefield, possibly count the dead (men, principles, spurious ideologies) and come back to reality for a moment, and settle for a cup of coffee. South Asia is shaky, with Sri Lanka breaking down, Myanmar in the hands of a brutal army and Pakistan having overthrown Imran Khan. He didn’t bowl his in-swingers well as Prime Minister. Bangladesh and India seem to be the only stable countries, though we have had an unheard of beheading in our country.
Behind all this is the nudge of language, warped as it is by politicians, demagogues, people who think that ruling over others is an exclusive right given to them, whether they belong to a political dynasty or no. Language itself is a tool given to them. LK Advani brought ‘appeasement’ into the boxing ring. His fear was that Nehru and his daughter would throw all the goodies to the Muslims. This is the closest you can come to paranoia. But the well-founded danger of appeasement came down to our generation from the opponents of pre-war British PM Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement of the Nazis. ‘Peace in our times,’ he said, and his umbrella became the plaything of cartoonists. This happened at the Munich Conference (1938) when some part of Czechoslovakia was carved out and given to Germany. Winston Churchill said: ‘Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.’ Prophetic words from a die-hard Tory. We are told that the word appeasement appeared in a letter to the London Times from Henry Kerr which objected to ‘a limitation of armaments by political appeasement’.
We are a heterogeneous society, with numerous tribals, beliefs, bitter fights over sacred and profane, and sanctimonious leaders (some of them good at oratory, smoke emerging from their nostrils). And we have sudden interruptions, a cheroot-smoking Kali will burst on the scene and thousands will pretend that their religious sensibilities are hurt. Those sensibilities are never hurt when they clobber people of a different faith.
Group identities are strong and they are not easily wished away. A centralised polity is hardly an answer to our multifarious people with different creeds, languages, gods and beliefs. Is Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan the right answer to our problems? Is the Indian polity going the wrong way? Is the so-called Hindutva ideology, which is driving the state, going against the tide of history? It was Protestantism that left the Church in Europe with the first burgeoning of secularisation and modernism. Martin Luther, as he nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the church door of Wittenberg, had a lasting effect on the future of Christianity. Slowly it was clear that the Church had to play a secondary role to the State. To quote Neera Chandhoke: ‘If secularisation requires one chronological precondition, it is that the power of the Church be truncated and limited.’ The issue of State versus Church in Europe is now in the background. Cardinals and Pope are not steeped in politics. Over the last eight years in India, the presence of leaders at religious places is flaunted, some meditation cave near Kedarnath, a passage to some temple in Varanasi being cleared, and all shown on television for hours. The State’s tilt is not hidden, otherwise the spokesperson of the party in power would not have dared to make pronouncements against the Prophet of Islam. And she has just been suspended, not thrown out of the party still.
Minorities and their psychology need to be better understood. Leaders must understand how a member of a minority sees the world and his own vulnerabilities, real or imagined. Minorityism is also a state of mind, with victimhood hidden in the margins. Minorities are not a block, a tray of ice cubes. Nation-building does not mean downsizing minority and tribal concerns. The Indian people are too enlightened to fall for tokenism. We are proud that a person with a tribal background is our President. We hope her personality has an impact on the polity.
We need to realise that people in the margins are people still. And Muslims with a population of 15 crores at the minimum are the largest ‘minority’ in the world. They don’t even have a single BJP member in Parliament! Efforts are underway to turn secularism into almost a smear word, even though secularism encompasses plurality. We must understand that minorities are not here on sufferance. They are present in their own right.
Are we going to find much solace in religious bodies? Secularism militates against a State religion, opposing any privileges for adherents of a particular religious body. To safeguard a secular ethos amidst a set of religious bodies is no easy task and judiciary needs to be very watchful. In the pre-Independence era, we had a better record — we were faced with Muslim nationalism — one state, one religion. We opposed Jinnah with secularism, not with a State that pledges loyalty to a Hindutva slogan.
