STORM IN A DRAPERY - On the significance of words and imagery

By Swapan Dasgupta

Last week, while nosing through the stacks of a library I came across a long-forgotten book, India in Ferment by Claude H. Van Tyne, an American historian and Pulitzer Prize winner. Published in 1923, it was based on his travels through India at the height of Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement.

Van Tyne was not a starry-eyed American liberal with a pathological aversion to the idea of Empire. On the contrary, he was broadly appreciative of the commitment and competence of the British administrators, particularly those of the Indian Civil Service. He also had a high regard for India’s ‘moderate’ leadership, particularly individuals such as Sir Surendranath Banerjee, Lord Sinha and Madan Mohan Malaviya. And while he was critical of the rhetorical excesses of the foot soldiers of Indian nationalism, the scale of mass adulation for Gandhi didn’t leave him unmoved.

One incident in particular left a deep impression on him. In the early days of the campaign for “Swaraj in one year”, Van Tyne was invited to a small gathering in the large house of a Bombay merchant. The drawing room had been divided into two sections: on one side sat the stalwarts of the ‘native’ mercantile community and, behind a screen, sat their wives and daughters. That the gathering was supportive of Gandhi didn’t come as a surprise to the American visitor. What did astonish him was the decision taken by the women in purdah to come out of seclusion and actually participate in the mass demonstrations. Equally significant was the fact that the husbands and fathers of the women did not get all worked up over the subversion of social institutions by politics.

Van Tyne’s account does not state how many of the women actually took to the streets and how many succumbed to orthodox counter-pressures and confined their political activism to giving emotional and financial support to the Mahatma. Other contemporary accounts suggest that India’s struggle for political independence led to large numbers of women from orthodox Hindu and Muslim families abandoning the purdah and entering public life. In short, the national movement provided an additional fillip to earlier attempts by social reformers to involve women in the public life of India. Although the impact of Gandhian politics on women’s emancipation was uneven—and complicated by the Mahatma’s own fads—its effects were revolutionary.

I was reminded of Van Tyne’s evocative description of the early manifestations of Indian feminism in the context of a strange debate raging through India over Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s use of imagery. Last week, while attacking the record of the UPA Government at a meeting in Pune, the BJP’s undeclared prime ministerial candidate asserted that in times of difficulty the Congress invariably took shelter behind the ‘burqa’ of secularism.

The use of ‘burqa’ as a euphemism for fig-leaf or cover was promptly attacked by the big guns of the secular establishment. The imagery was held to be an assault on the Muslim community and the entire Congress establishment was mobilised to inform TV viewers that Modi’s use of the language revealed a perverse mindset. In a TV programme, the Minister of Environment Jayanti Natarajan said that she wouldn’t have taken umbrage if Modi had used ‘sari’ as a euphemism for cover, but burqa was clearly unacceptable.

Whether Modi’s choice of words was spontaneous or carefully pre-meditated is not known to me. However, since the critique of India’s differentiated citizenship is by and large centred on the charges of Muslim appeasement, Modi was perhaps successful in driving home the point without any elaboration. Since the art of communication, whether literary or political, is almost exclusively dependant on using the right word at the right place and employing appropriate imagery, Modi did hit bull’s eye. No one who heard him that day in either Pune or on TV could have been left in any doubt of Modi’s contention that ‘secularism’ is the Congress’ equivalent of crying ‘wolf’.

At a political level, there is bound to be criticism of the BJP’s distinction between pukka secularism and pseudo-secularism. That debate has been raging with various degrees of intensity for the past four decades at least and, frankly speaking, there was nothing intellectually unique in Modi’s intervention to trigger a fresh debate. Consequently, his critics honed in on the use of burqa in an apparently pejorative context. Former minister Ajay Maken suggested that the burqa of secularism was preferable to ‘naked communalism’ and Shashi Tharoor proffered the view that the burqa was better than the brown shorts of those who were inspired by Italian fascism—a historical analogy that, unfortunately, was marred by sartorial inaccuracy.

That an election campaign will be marked by verbal spats is a given and, consequently, there is no reason to be surprised by this storm in a drapery. What, however, is fascinating is the shift in political values. In the 1920s, as Van Tyne experienced with a sense of awe, the nationalist movement decried the custom of women’s seclusion. In the West of today, overwhelmed by the hiccups of multiculturalism, modernity, progressive thought and secularism are invariably associated with attacks on the Muslim custom of burqa. In Republican France where secularism is taken a bit too far, the Government has outlawed both the hijab and the burqa from schools and public institutions; and in the United Kingdom, at least one prominent politician—former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw—stipulated that he wouldn’t deal with anyone who covered her face. In the Islamic world too, the ‘modernists’ like Kemal Attaturk of Turkey and the Shah of Iran outlawed the veil, while the ultra-radical Taliban made its usage compulsory for women in Afghanistan. The use of both the hijab and the veil are also the fault lines dividing the Muslim Brotherhood and the modernists in Egypt.

In India, the attempt to equate the burqa with Islam and Muslim identity—as opposed to seeing it as a mere social custom—was also a feature of politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Maulana Mawdudi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami wrote a tract in 1939 entitled Purdah and the Status of Women in Islam. His injunctions to women are worth recalling, not least because it explicitly spells out the philosophy of the burqa: “the real place of women is in the house and she has been exempted from outdoor duties. .. She has however been allowed to go out of the house to fulfil her genuine needs, but whilst going out she must observe complete modesty. Neither should she wear glamorous clothes and attract attention, nor should she cherish the desire to display the charms of the face and the hand, nor should she walk in a manner which may attract attention of others. Moreover, she should not speak to them without necessity, and if she has to speak she should not speak in a sweet and soft voice.”

It is a commentary on the social values of India’s aggressive secularists that the burqa and, by implication the institution of purdah, that were targeted by the social reformers of an earlier age is being projected as a symbol of Muslim identity. Who is the real communalist: a Modi who uses it as a symbol of something regressive or the cosmopolitan chic who has imbibed the wisdom of Maulana Mawdoodi?  

Televised, sound bite politics often results in a cacophony. But amid this chatter, it helps to take a step back and reflect on the significance of words and imagery. The results are unexpectedly revealing. 

The Telegraph, July 19, 2013

Victimisation bogey eroding India's peace

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is probably absolutely grotesque to even suggest that any Indian, apart from a handful of the totally demented, would derive satisfaction over the blasts in Hyderabad that killed 15 people on Wednesday evening. Yet, at the risk of sounding wilfully outrageous, I would venture the suggestion that there exists a band of people who will argue that “the country had it coming”.

Such a perverse response had, in fact, been articulated by some ultra-radical and ultra-liberal European and West Asian intellectuals after the 9/11 attacks. To them, the world was shaped by a clash between a series of Muslim grievances (that, apart from Palestine and Bosnia, also included Kashmir) and the smugness of the West-Zionist alliance. India, predictably, was lumped with the latter.

We are yet unclear as to whether the terrorist module that carried out the bombings was driven by the determination to extract revenge for the execution of convicted terrorist conspirator Afzal Guru. If the ever-smiling Home Minister’s suggestion that certain cities had been alerted to the possibility of a terrorist attack after Afzal’s hanging is true, it would seem that the likelihood of the Hyderabad attack being a tit-for-tat incident should not be entirely discounted—at least at this stage of the inquiry.

Whenever an incident like the Hyderabad bombings take place, the political class and the voluble media rush to point an accusing finger at flat-footed policemen and an over-politicised intelligence apparatus. The exasperation with the state apparatus is perfectly understandable. There is enough evidence to indicate that India’s policing priorities are horribly skewed. There is an over-emphasis, for example, on VIP security which leads to police deployment in all the wrong places. There is also a needless preoccupation with political intelligence, including election management. And finally, there is the preoccupation with using the police and intelligence agencies to settle political scores—the latest being attempts to ‘fix’ Gujarat politician Amit Shah and the bid to manufacture an imaginary phenomenon called “Hindu terror” that can be used as a stick to beat the BJP with.

That these distortions need urgent correction is by now well acknowledged and even appreciated by police officers, including those who grudgingly dance to the tune of the ruling dispensation for the sake of career advancement. Leader of Opposition (Rajya Sabha) Arun Jaitley made a passionate plea in Parliament last Friday of the importance that must be attached to the de-politicisation of the police, particularly the wings that are involved in counter-terrorism. It is hoped that he plays a role in incorporating the promise to professionalise the law and order machinery in the manifesto of the NDA for 2014.

A series of incidents, including terrorism, the safety of women and investigations of financial crimes, have served to place police reforms on the political agenda. However, the battle against terrorism isn’t merely about having alert beat constables, tech-savvy officers and a single-minded determination to get to the bottom of each and every terrorist crime. The term ‘roots of terrorism’ has been discredited by the inclination of do-gooders and human rights entrepreneurs to locate terrorist motivation in the imagined sense of hurt of the perpetrators. Yet, if the baggage of indignation is removed from the need to also explore the larger environment, there is a case for understanding why a city such as Hyderabad has become a breeding ground for every conceivable act of treachery.

Assume, as is being hinted, that the initial finger of suspicion points to the Indian Mujahedeen, it is important to understand that the rebellion of a small section of Muslim youth has its origins in the political mindset of separatism that is so widespread in the ghettos. The political ideology of IM that prompts it to take recourse to exploding lethal bombs to cause maximum hurt to the ‘other’ didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was an inevitable consequence of a rhetoric (and we have seen enough evidence of that in recent months) that seeks to distinguish Muslims from ‘Hindustan’. Some of it is born of plain nostalgia for a time when Moghuls and their successors ruled the state. But the poisonous element is injected by the invocation of victimhood—the preposterous claim that the Indian state is driven by a single-minded desire to beat the Muslim community into submission.

The political use that has been made of the Batla House encounter in various Muslim-dominated localities around the country is an example. Egged on by radical human rights activists and even Vice Chancellors who have donned a political mantle, this incident has been used to fuel the impression of institutionalised targeting of Muslim youth. Read with the unexpected mob fury that was witnessed in Mumbai as a reaction to the clashes in Assam, the victimhood syndrome is contributing to a steady deterioration of inter-communal harmony all over the country. Even West Bengal, which has been relatively spared of the sectarian virus for decades, witnessed belligerent attacks on Hindus in South 24 Parganas.

In the case of West Bengal, the media was forced to take note of the destruction of nearly 200 homes by a mob after social media took up the cause relentlessly. But this ostrich-like behaviour isn’t going to make the problem go away. There is a need to first sensitise Indians of a disturbing phenomenon. The ways to cope with it emerge in due course. Denial is exacerbating the problem. 

Sunday Pioneer, February 24, 2013

The rise of modern Muslim leadership

By Swapan Dasgupta

The violence in Assam’s Kokrajhar district and its unsettling reverberations in the rest of India have ignited passions and triggered a return of identity politics.  This shift and its ominous implications have already begun to be dissected in politics, the media and society. There is, however, one aspect of the recent outbreak of sectarianism that has received insufficient attention: the definite emergence of Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi as the foremost pan-Indian Muslim leader.

Even before the troubles in Assam, the leader of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) was a familiar figure. As an uncompromising defender of ‘Muslim interests’ this bi-lingual, articulate, England-educated Barrister was a great favourite of the English-language channels. Unlike, say, Badruddin Ajmal, Azam Khan and Abu Azmi who were seen to be authentic but limited, Owaisi defied familiar stereotypes. His belligerence notwithstanding, he came across as someone familiar with the modern idiom of politics.

Although he is second to G.M. Banatwala, the Mumbai lawyer who represented the Mallapuram district of Kerala for the Muslim League for many terms, as a parliamentarian, Owaisi has made a mark in the Lok Sabha. His short intervention in the Lok Sabha during the adjournment motion on the Assam troubles may have earned him some notoriety—he warned of a possible “third wave” of Muslim militancy—but, in the process, he came across as the most decisive voice of the Muslims in Assam. Owaisi was the only Muslim MP who spelt out the demand for the immediate abolition of the Bodo Territorial Council, a body viewed by the immigrants as the impediment to its ‘rights’ in Kokrajhar and elsewhere.

Owaisi’s clear articulation of the Muslim community’s demands in Assam, as opposed to mouthing platitudes, wasn’t surprising. Since the troubles erupted in Assam, he personally visited the relief camps where Muslims have been sheltered and, in addition, organised teams of doctors and volunteers from his constituency. Increasingly, the scope of his interventions has been growing. He may be elected from a constituency in Hyderabad which has come to be regarded as the MIM’s pocket borough, but he doesn’t seem to be content confining himself to the concerns of the congested bylanes around Charminar.

True, his father Salahuddin Owaisi also attempted a wider role during the Ayodhya years and even floated his own Babri Masjid Coordination Committee (which rivalled the better known Babri Masjid Action Committee) but the Salar-e-Millat, as he is now reverentially called, never quite managed to break the dominance of the Muslim politicians from North India.

The younger Owaisi’s quantum leap forward in stature coincides with interesting developments in the Muslim community. After 1947, the idea of a single Muslim organisation representing the political interests of the community stood discredited. The community either rallied behind the Congress or, post-1996, attached itself to other mainstream parties. A separate Muslim party remained confined to the Malabar region in Kerala and the city of Hyderabad.

In the past few years, a new trend is emerging. In Assam, the AIUDF led by perfume merchant Ajmal has emerged as the main opposition party, and is at loggerheads with Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi. In Uttar Pradesh, the Peace Party played spoiler in the Lok Sabha poll of 2009 but won four Assembly seats in 2012. Its ability to make a more decisive intervention in 2014 should not be underestimated. Certainly, a fresh wave of communal incidents in UP suggests that there are stirrings that are taking place outside the national parties. The activities of the Popular Front of India have received some attention.

The trends are still early but it would seem that a new sense of victimhood and the larger process of radicalisation in the wider Islamic world are tempting Indian Muslims into experimenting with interventions outside of the mainstream ‘secular’ parties. There is no indication, as yet, to suggest that these disparate movements will coalesce in an all-India body. However, it is certain that these different formations are seeking wider linkages that could see the emergence of a loose coordinating body that maintains the autonomy of the regional bodies and increases their electoral manoeuvrability. It is in this context that Owaisi, with his ever-growing connections and acceptability in the larger political class, assumes importance.

To see Owaisi as merely a modern face is, however, to ignore the baggage he carries. The MIM may be socio-cultural body which also dabbles in electoral politics, but its pedigree is dubious. Those familiar with history will recall that it acquired prominence after 1937 as the upholder of an Islamic state in the Nizam’s territories. Its two pre-Independence leaders, Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung and Kasim Razvi never made any secret of their desire to keep the erstwhile Hyderabad state as an Islamic outpost outside the Indian Union. Apart from the sinister terror launched by the MIM-led Razakars in the final months of the Nizam’s rule, the MIM was noted for its opposition to democracy, its contempt for non-Muslims and its belief in the innate superiority of a Moghul court culture that was preserved in Hyderabad.

Owaisi has often maintained that today’s MIM is different from the pre-1948 body. The unfurling of the Asafjahi flag in Delhi that Rajvi dreamt of is clearly an impossible mission. But has the MIM shed its social and cultural assumptions? Or, are the irredentist and supremacist assumptions of a ‘modern’ leadership going to shape the mindset of a community with an exaggerated sense of anger?

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, August 24, 2012 

Assam will never be same again

By Swapan Dasgupta

If I was a Bodo in Assam and listening to last Wednesday’s adjournment motion in the Lok Sabha , would I be mistaken in coming to the grim conclusion that the political establishment either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about what happens in Kokrajhar? Would I be wrong in also concluding that the niceties of democratic politics are unlikely to save the community from complete marginalisation, even in the so-called Bodo ‘homeland’?

These are subversive thoughts and I hope that in the coming years I am proved completely wrong. However, judging from the complete denial of Bodo grievances by the ruling coalition and its many friends in the Opposition, some unpalatable home truths are in order.

The most important of these is the realisation that the immigrants from eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh) who began the colonisation of Assam sometime in the 1900s, are on the verge of a total and unqualified political victory. From the position of captive vote banks of cynical politicians such as Moinul Huq Choudhury, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and that great buffoon Dev Kanta Barooah—all important functionaries in Indira Gandhi’s dispensation—the illegals have now acquired independent clout. They can still do with all the support they get from the misplaced secularism of the mainstream parties. But the more intelligent of their leaders—and the AIDUF leader Badruddin Ajmal, MP for Dhubri is just one of them—know that far from being a valuable stakeholder in the Ali-Coolie-Bangali coalition, it is they who are on the verge of calling the shots.

The process may yet take another decade to fully fructify. However, if as many in the know suggest, anything between 11 and 13 of the 27 districts of Assam are now Muslim majority, it is only a matter of time before the political consequences of this monumental demographic change begin to be felt. No wonder some of Sharad Yadav’s pointed questions to the government regarding the demographic composition of those in the refugee camps went unanswered.

This is a demographic upheaval that neither Assam nor the rest of India have begun to appreciate. Parties supportive of the Bodos continue to invoke the Assam Accord of 1985 and press for detection, disenfranchisement and deportation of all those who entered Assam from Bangladesh after March 1971. They don’t seem to realise that these demands are now horribly dated. Apart from the fact that 41 years have lapsed since the cut-off date, the demographic shift has made it impossible for any government machinery to conduct citizenship tests on the ground. Even the register of citizens that former Assam Governor Lt-Gen S.K. Sinha proposed in the late-1990s is certain to be flawed. Evidence from the Census operations clearly show that a disproportionate number of people tell the enumerators that they were born locally.

The likes of Ajmal know that the threats of detection and deportation are empty. This is why he has no inhibition about directing his fire power at the remaining pockets of indigenous resistance. If Kokrajhar falls and the Bodo Territorial Council becomes history, the march into Lower Assam and even the Barak Valley will be relatively effortless.

There is another facet of Ajmal that warrants attention, even admiration: the deftness with which he has enlarged the cause of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh into an all-India Muslim cause. Confronted by one of the weakest Congress-led governments at the Centre, this approach is yielding returns.

One of the most spirited interventions in the Lok Sabha came from Asaduddin Owaisi the MIM representative from Hyderabad. Apart from suggesting that the abnormal rise in Assam’s population over the years was a consequence of Hindu migration from East Pakistan and Bangladesh, Owaisi proffered the threat of Muslim militancy in the event of the community’s grievances not being addressed.

Owaisi was not alone. The aftermath of the July riots has seen the organised and unpublicised conducted tours of Muslim politicians cutting across parties to camps where the Muslim dispossessed have taken shelter. It is this group that has mounted pressure on the Congress High Command for action against Chief Minister Gogoi. It was a desire to placate Muslim sentiments in West Bengal that also propelled Mamata Banerjee to announce that the state would happily provide sanctuary to those unsettled by the violence. In Parliament, Trinamool Congress minister Sougata Roy even stated that his party disagreed with the Supreme Court judgment striking down the Illegal Migrants Detection Tribunal.

For the moment, the trends in Muslim politics are mixed. In most areas where the community is in a minority, the trend is to support and participate in the mainstream parties, particularly the Congress. However, in areas where the community is numerically strong, there is the emergence of Muslim parties. The Muslim League in Malabar, the MIM in Hyderabad, the AIDUF in Assam and the Peace Party in parts of Uttar Pradesh could suggest an emerging pattern. If this trend is reinforced and replicated in West Bengal and Bihar, we may see a shift in the pattern of national politics.

The Congress is aware of dangers arising from a Muslim electoral breakaway. This may be why there is every possibility of the Bodo cry for help falling on deaf ears. For the moment, one community has quite effectively exercised its veto in national affairs—to the detriment of the national interest.

Assam will never be the same again.


Sunday Pioneer, August 12, 2012

TWIST IN THE TALE - Secular politics is harming the Bodo minority in Assam

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is an undeniable fact that in the hierarchy of what passes off as ‘national’ news, North-eastern India occupies the lowest rung. While periodic lip-service is paid to the need to rectify matters and bring this much-neglected part of India into the ‘mainstream’ discourse, the bewildering complexity of the region and its relative inaccessibility has ensured that the North-east remains an afterthought, a sort of Fourth World in the Third World.

So it was with last week’s violent clashes in Kokrajhar and Dhubri districts of Assam that left more than 50 people being killed and an estimated four lakh people being uprooted from their homes. A ‘humanitarian crisis’—the newest coinage of mediaspeak—of this magnitude should have led to a furore in the chat shows, with sundry human rights bodies joining the race for competitive indignation. After all, a far lesser crisis in the Kandhamal district of Orissa in 2009 had attracted far greater attention, not to speak of the Gujarat riots of 2002 which continue to dominate media space.

To argue, as has often been done, that the editorial classes are naturally callous and prefer to focus on a relatively small protest in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar is only part of the story. The reality is that the media loves simple categories—as, for example, Hindu ‘fanatics’ versus helpless Christians in Kandhamal and the ‘mass murderer’ Narendra Modi versus beleaguered Muslims in Gujarat. The situation in the northern bank of the Brahmaputra, unfortunately, was too complex to present as a clash between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Was it, as many insisted, a ‘communal’ clash involving Hindu Bodos and Muslim settlers who had arrived from what is now Bangladesh? Alternatively, was it an ethnic clash involving the indigenous Bodos and Bengal-speaking immigrants? The underlying presumption was that while a ‘communal’ clash was unacceptable, an ‘ethnic’ conflict was nominally less damning.

Then there were the invariable sub-plots that excite the TV channels. Was the Assam Government too slow to respond? Why did the Tarun Gogoi Government not take pre-emptive measures after the murder in Kokrajhar of , first, two Muslims on July 6 and the retaliatory violence that led to the killing of four Bodo activists on July 20? Was there any basis to Chief Minister Gogoi’s assertion at a press conference last week that the Army had refused to act until it got a sanction from Defence Minister A.K. Antony—a process that took two days? Is there any basis to the allegation by the Bodo Tribal Council chief Hagrama Mahilary that armed Bangladeshis from across the international border had incited the violence?

The answers to most of these questions will remain unanswered, even after the official inquiry committee eventually submits its report. However, what is clear is that in trying to slot the violence into pre-determined compartments and exploring the vexed question of administrative culpability, the media and the political class are taking evasive action. There is an uncomfortable dimension to this ethnic-communal flare-up in Kokrajhar and Dhubri that decision-makers would rather not address, not least because they have no answers to offer.

That the origins of the violence lie in demographic upheaval Assam has been witnessing for the past 100 years is undeniable. Thanks to waves of immigration from the region that is now Bangladesh, the population of Assam increased from 3.29 million in 1901 to 14.6 million in 1971, a 343.7 per cent increase compared to the all-India increase of nearly 150 per cent in the same period. Public intellectuals in Assam have stressed that the increase of the Muslim population has been disproportionate. In an unusual intervention last week, Election Commissioner M.S. Brahma suggested that the details of the 2011 Census may reveal that 11 of the 27 districts of Assam now have a Muslim majority.

While the issue of ‘illegal immigration’ from Bangladesh has formed an important part of the public discourse of the Assamese-speaking Hindus of the Brahmaputra Valley, it has become a paramount issue for the Bodo-speaking minority living in the areas that constituted the undivided Goalpara district. The Bodo-speaking minority which accounts for only five per cent of the population perceives a dual threat to their existence: a cultural challenge from the Assamese-speaking majority and a physical challenge from Bangladeshi Muslims who constitute the majority in Dhubri and whose presence is increasingly being felt in the Bodo heartland of Kokrajhar district.

The emergence of militant Bodo sub-nationalism in the 1990s was an attempt to cope with these twin challenges and led to the formation of the semi-autonomous Bodo Territorial Council in 1993. However, much of the political gains from militant identity politics have been offset by the growing assertiveness of the Muslim community. The rise of the All India United Democratic Front led by Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, the All Assam Minority Students Union and the Asom Mia Parishad has triggered a frontal Bodo-Muslim confrontation. Tensions have further risen following the AIUDF demand that the BTC be abolished because Bodos no longer constitute a majority in large areas governed by it. In an astute move, Ajmal has taken care to develop links with major Muslim organisations throughout India to ensure that the concerns of his social base are easily translated into ‘national’ Muslim concerns.

Confronted with this seemingly intractable situation, both Delhi and Dispur have fallen back on homilies. Following his tour of the relief camps earlier this week, (then) Home Minister P. Chidambaram took recourse to pious platitudes: “There are people from a variety of communities living in Assam now. Ultimately, people of all communities would have to learn to live together in peace.”  There was not a word about border fencing or possible modifications to the farcical Illegal Migrants Detection Tribunal Act. Dependant on Bodo support in Dispur but equally concerned with Muslim support at an all-India level, the Congress has very little space to manoeuvre. It can merely hope that any future conflict can be averted by more efficient administrative measures. Meanwhile, ground reports suggest an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing. Bodos in Dhubri are moving to Kokrajhar, and dispossessed Muslim of Kokrajhar are moving to Dhubri. Some may even find their way into West Bengal.

In the past, India’s liberal intelligentsia has been very vocal on the so-called ‘communal’ question, particularly the harassment of minorities. Yet, the usual suspects have been strangely quiet over this monumental upheaval that has shaken Assam. The reasons are obvious. The familiar stereotypes centred on brutish majoritarianism and vulnerable minorities don’t quite fit the bill in Dhubri and Kokrajhar. What we have instead is a very vulnerable indigenous tribal minority being squeezed from all sides, but particularly by the communal assertiveness of another minority that can leverage its national clout for local advantage.

In 2004, when the religious demography of the 2001 Census showed some strange results for Assam, the intelligentsia buried its head in the sand and ensured that all meaningful discussions on the subject were guillotined. The same process is once again at work over recent events in Assam.

In 1947, the Muslim community was a frightened minority, unsure of its position in an India that never took too kindly to the painful Partition in two wings. In 2012, Indian secularism is deeply entrenched and has ensured both dignity and political empowerment to religious minorities, sometimes by way of exceptional consideration. A problem, however, is likely to arise if the empowerment of minorities becomes a byword for injustice to others. For the Bodo minority of Assam, the practice of secular politics is coming to imply the possible extinction of their very identity.


The Telegraph, August 3, 2012 

A victory for intolerance

By Swapan Dasgupta

Those writers who indulged in a bout of needless grandstanding by reading out passages from Salman Rushdie’s contentious The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival last Friday did the cause they were ostensibly espousing very little good.

On the contrary, their symbolic defiance of the 1988 ban on the book merely served to confirm in the eyes of those baying for Rushdie’s blood that the main purpose behind the invitation to the British-Indian author was to resurrect a controversy that, mercifully, has passed its sell by date. The sundry clerics and ghetto politicians who clamoured for Rushdie’s permanent exclusion from India can now feel vindicated that they managed to contain a sinister assault on the fundamental tenets of Islam.

However, if there is one thing that is clear about last fortnight’s kerfuffle, it is that the fuss was only tangentially connected to the Satanic Verses — a book that is not openly sold in India. Since he re-established his right to visit India in 1998, courtesy the NDA Government, and then wisely procured a PIO card that assures him visa-less travel for life, Rushdie has been in India on more than six occasions and maybe more. He has delivered lectures, graced literary festivals and celebrity parties and even reclaimed his grandfather’s house in Solan. On each occasion some fringe group or other has issued statements opposing the visit and on each occasion the Government chose to ignore them. On his part, Rushdie has done nothing to either resurrect the Satanic Verses issue in India or trigger any new controversy. His behaviour in India has been careful and restrained. After all, he, more than anyone else, is aware of the huge personal costs of living undercover for at least a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his death sentence through a fatwa.

So, what was so different this time? The difference lies not so much in the fact that the Deoband seminary asked for his visa to be cancelled and that some shadowy organisation promised to reward anyone who threw a slipper at Rushdie with a prize of Rs 1 lakh. There are some bodies that exist to take sectarian positions on matters and routinely proclaim that Islam is in danger. They do it when a US President comes visiting, when Indo-Israeli ties improve, when Taslima Nasreen asks for the right of residence in India and they do it at the whiff of Rushdie. The best way for the Government to have reacted was by ignoring them. Indeed, it seemed that was precisely what was going to happen until Rushdie tweeted and the Rajasthan Government stepped into the fray.

It is difficult to accept the Rajasthan Government’s plea that it would have a hard time guaranteeing Rushdie’s safety. Equally, it is impossible to respond to the Centre’s plea that either the outlawed SIMI or a section of the Mumbai underworld was plotting to send an assassin to accomplish what Ayatollah Khomeini had desired 24 years earlier, with a straight face. What gave the game away was the fact that no one in the Government and the Congress (with the honourable exception of Manish Tewari) deemed it necessary to express a single word of condemnation for those who wanted the ban on Satanic Verses to be coupled with a ban on Rushdie the person.  Notables in India are fond of tirelessly repeating that “we will not be cowed down by terrorism”. But isn’t that what precisely happened in the case of Rushdie?

The forces of intolerance scored a famous victory last week. They won because the match was fixed in their favour by the UPA Government and the Congress. And the outcome was pre-determined because with the Uttar Pradesh election round the corner, the Congress wanted to show a gesture of goodwill towards those who claim to influence the vote-banks. Rushdie lost out because the Congress was loath to have any influential Muslim body point an accusing finger at it. Those who felt offended and let down by Rushdie’s absence from Jaipur were regarded as inconsequential members of the non-voting classes. Their protests could safely be disregarded.

The monotonous regularity with which the bar of artistic freedom is being lowered should alarm all Indians. Yet, under the guise of secularism and the principle of equal respect for all religions, it has become possible for all groups with an imaginary grievance to exercise a veto power. This is a travesty but what compounds the offence is the fact that retrograde decisions are being routinely taken by people who know better, are not personally narrow-minded and pay lip service to India as an argumentative society.

The argument that compromises with democracy have to be made for the larger interests of democracy is specious. Over the years, intolerance is fast turning into the new normal with every group and religious denomination jumping into the fray. From a historical work on Shivaji, the title of a film and the morality of women to theological disputations, the agenda is being set by those resourceful enough to command a mob.

The ‘sab chalta hai’ attitude is no answer. Nor does it do to shower the barbarians with disdain and feign a sense of superiority. What is required is for a plural culture and mindset to take deep roots in society. Moral relativism has become an excuse to relegate decency to the backburner. As a state, India has eschewed dharma.

Sunday Pioneer, January 22, 2012