SACW | 20 Nov. 2005 | Free Speech vs faith / Nepal repression / conversion in Pakistan/ Hindutva / Review of 'Argumentative Indians'

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 20 Nov, 2005 | Dispatch No. 2178

[1] UK: Free speech vs. toxic faith (Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and 
Salman Rushdie)
[2] Nepal: Legal Veneer for Repressing Civil Society (Press Release, 
Human Rights Watch)
[3] Pakistan: Past offers teaching to converted
[4] India: Protests against Hindu fundamentalist call to Hindus to 
produce more children
(i) AIDWA hits out at RSS call to produce more children
(ii) RSS chief call for a Dozen sons per Hindu family irrational; Insult 
to Indian Women, Minorities (John Dayal for AICC)
[5] Review: Tariq Ali on Sen's Argumentative Indians

___


[1]

[There are controversial plans to introduce legislation [in the UK] to 
curb incitement to religious hatred.
Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie consider the threat to 
free speech ]

o o o

· Extracts from essays in FREE EXPRESSION IS NO OFFENCE, published by 
English Pen and Penguin on December 1, 2005


A MORAL ONUS
Monica Ali

There is something deeply compelling about arguments that nobody should 
be persecuted for their faith. Belonging to any religious group should 
not turn you into a second-class citizen. Muslims are too often at the 
bottom of the pile, and they have lobbied hardest for this new provision.

Looking back over the decades at the evolution of laws on hate crimes, 
equal opportunity and discrimination, it seems fitting - a natural next 
step - to close the "legal loopholes" where religious affiliation is 
concerned. But though I feel passionately that certain groups in our 
society are disadvantaged and that more should be done to help them, and 
though I am instinctively drawn to anything that purports to banish 
harassment and discrimination, this draft law is anything but enlightened.

What's the problem here? I think there are many but I want to set them 
out in three broad areas. The first concerns the differences between 
race and religion as far as free speech is concerned. It is not in the 
faintest way plausible to vilify a particular race and to claim that no 
harm is intended towards members, individually or collectively, of that 
racial group.

Religions, on the other hand, are sets of ideas and beliefs. They should 
not be privileged over any other set of notions. I am not bound to 
respect the idea that I may be reincarnated as an insect or a donkey or 
that Jesus is the son of God or anything else that I regard as 
mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, if there are aspects and practices of a religion 
that conflict with my own notions and beliefs (of fairness and justice 
and so on) then the moral onus is on me to speak up against them. If I 
loathe the fact that Islam has been used to deny the right of women in 
Saudi Arabia to vote then I ought to say so.

My second area of difficulty concerns the broad sweep, vagueness and 
general impracticality of the law as it is currently written. The bill 
says that an offence will be deemed to have been committed if "having 
regard to all the likely circumstances the words, behaviour or material 
. . . are likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom they are . . 
. likely to stir up religious hatred".

Good grief! What does this mean? Who is going to decide which 
circumstances are relevant and whether or not it is "likely" that hatred 
will be "stirred up"? Going back to my previous example, if I say that I 
loathe the way Islam is practised in Saudi Arabia because it denies the 
democratic rights of women, what are the relevant circumstances of my 
utterance? Are they that I also believe that Muslims should be free from 
arbitrary arrest and detention, that the underachievement of Muslims 
within our educational system should be urgently addressed, and that the 
French were wrong to ban the wearing of the hijab within schools? Or are 
the relevant or "likely" circumstances that in Britain today hostility 
against Muslims is on the increase, that any strongly worded criticism 
is going to inflame those feelings still further and that someone who 
already has deep-seated prejudice and hatred towards Muslims is "likely" 
to have that existing hatred thus "stirred up"?

Perhaps that sounds a little far-fetched. But when I add a reminder that 
Polly Toynbee, a serious commentator and longstanding equal-rights 
campaigner, was recently labelled as Islamophobe of the Year at an award 
ceremony run by an Islamic group, it sounds nothing of the sort.

Finally, just how efficacious would the law be in bringing about 
harmony? All the evidence suggests not at all. Supporters point out that 
in 1987, Northern Ireland introduced a local law against incitement to 
religious hatred. It seems strange that they would even bring that up. 
Hate-speech laws in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands 
have not resulted in a decrease in insults directed towards Jews, 
Muslims, Turks, African immigrants or other minorities. In fact there 
has been growth in support for the extreme right in those countries.

Even if the evidence had pointed the other way, I find I could not sign 
up. For, as Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters has pointed out, it 
would not only be the artistic community paying the price. Whose voices 
will be silenced, she asks? Writers and so on, certainly, "but also the 
more vulnerable groups within religious communities, like women, who may 
find the newly strengthened group rights weaken their own position". 
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote about a rape in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara. 
Her play deals with sexual abuse within a religious community and this 
is a real issue. Less highly charged but no less real is the way women 
find they "cannot leave oppressive homes because of the stranglehold of 
culture, religion and enforced mediation by religious leaders".

The price of putting this kind of curb on freedom of expression may seem 
like loose change to some; to others it is a king's ransom. It must be 
wholeheartedly opposed.

RESPONSIBLE FREE SPEECH?
Philip Hensher

The Home Officer Minister initially in charge of the religious hatred 
legislation currently proceeding through Parliament has said that 
"wordsmiths" must write and speak with "responsibility". Free speech 
must be used responsibly. Everyone must understand that. Who decides if 
speech is being used responsibly? Why, the authorities. Home Office 
ministers. The rule of law. The authorities in the United States will 
decide whether protest is a responsible use of free speech. So will the 
authorities in Iran, who have their own views on responsibility. The 
necrocracy of North Korea would find absolutely nothing to quarrel with 
in the notion that speech must be exercised responsibly. Nor would any 
Chinese regime of the past 50 years. Responsibility is in the eye of the 
government, the church, the Roi Soleil, the Spanish Inquisition and, no 
doubt, Ivan the Terrible.

Free speech, we generally accept, is subject to reasonable restriction. 
Criminal libel or racist abuse, for instance, are not generally 
permitted. The case for "responsible" exercise of free speech, however, 
is not talking about reasonable restriction; it is different from a 
parallel exercise taking place at the same time, to draw the lines of 
"reasonable restriction" more tightly. What talk of "responsibility" 
does is to insist on restrictions that are universally appropriate. A 
statement may be perfectly legal, and yet - from this point of view - 
deplorable because "irresponsible".

It is absolutely clear that, in most of these cases, the case for 
"responsible" free speech is not being made to those who use their power 
or authority to damage the speechless and the powerless. There might be 
a case for saying that a powerful newspaper, a government minister, 
ministers of the church, should not use their voices irresponsibly 
against those who have no power of response. For instance, it might 
justifiably be said that the British newspaper which published a story, 
on no evidence at all, that asylum seekers were killing and eating wild 
swans was abusing its authority.

Similarly, we might deplore, on the grounds of "responsibility", the lie 
spread, without any medical evidence, by the Roman Catholic church in 
Africa, that the use of condoms is useless against the transmission of 
HIV. Such bodies, perhaps, do have a duty to consider the weight of 
their voices, and exercise their right of free speech responsibly. But 
that is not what is meant here. In almost all cases, what is being 
addressed is the free and reckless criticism of governments, of 
religions, of authority of all kinds. The argument that individuals 
have, individually, a duty to exercise free speech "responsibly" is not, 
despite claims, a strengthening of the status of free speech. It is an 
attack on the idea itself.

The progress of free speech has been advanced over the centuries, not 
just by calm, rational argument, but by excess and irresponsibility. 
Those who, with increasing noise, are insisting that free speech can 
only be permitted when it is used "responsibly", are prescribing across 
the board a range of expression and a range of agreed opinions. That is 
not free speech at all. If we want to hang on to the free speech of 
individuals, we must personally insist on continuing the noble and long 
history of irresponsibility.

PLAYING WITH FIRE
Salman Rushdie

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion 
came after me. Religion was a part of my subject, of course; for a 
novelist from the Indian subcontinent, where the supernatural and the 
mundane coexist in the streets and are considered as being of the same 
order of reality, how could it not have been? But in my opinion I also 
had many other, larger, tastier fish to fry. Nevertheless, when the 
attack came, I had to confront what was confronting me, and to decide 
what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, 
repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was often 
difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was 
part of a broader, global assault on writers, artists and fundamental 
freedoms. The aggressors in that matter, by which I mean the novel's 
opponents, who threatened booksellers and publishers, falsified the 
contents of the text they disliked, and vilified its author, 
nevertheless presented themselves as the injured parties, and such was 
the desire to appease religious sentiment even then that in spite of the 
murder of a translator in Japan and the shooting of a publisher in 
Norway there was widespread acceptance of that topsy-turvy view. In 
spite of all the public calls for violence to be done, not a single 
person - in Britain or anywhere else - was arrested or charged with any 
offence. I revisit these bad old days with extreme reluctance, but I do 
so because now, 16 years later, religion is coming after us all, and 
even though most of us probably feel, as I once did, that we have other, 
more important concerns, we are all going to have to confront the 
challenge. If we fail, this particular fish may end up frying us.

People have always turned to religion for the answers to the two great 
questions of life: where did we come from? And how shall we live? But on 
the question of origins, all religions are simply wrong. No, the 
universe wasn't created in six days by a superforce that rested on the 
seventh. Nor was it churned into being by a sky-god with a giant churn. 
And on the social question, the simple truth is that wherever religions, 
with their narrow moralities, get into society's driving seat, tyranny 
results. The Inquisition results. Or the Taliban.

And yet religions continue to insist that they provide special access to 
ethical truths, and consequently deserve special treatment and 
protection. And they continue to emerge from the world of private life, 
where they belong, like so many other things that are acceptable when 
done in private between consenting adults but unacceptable in the town 
square, and to bid for power.

In today's United States, for example, it's possible for almost anyone - 
women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, 
high office. But a professed atheist wouldn't stand a popcorn's chance 
in hell. According to Jacques Delors, ex-president of the European 
Commission, "The clash between those who believe and those who don't 
believe will be a dominant aspect of relations between the US and Europe 
in the coming years." In Europe, the bombing of a railway station in 
Madrid and the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh are being 
seen as warnings that the secular principles that underlie any humanist 
democracy need to be defended and reinforced. Even before these 
atrocities occurred, the French decision to ban religious attire such as 
Islamic headscarves had the support of the entire political spectrum. 
Islamist demands for segregated classes and prayer breaks were also 
rejected. Few Europeans today call themselves religious (just 21%, 
according to a recent study); most Americans do (59%, according to the 
Pew Forum). The Enlightenment, in Europe, represented an escape from the 
power of religion to place limiting points on thought; in America, it 
represented an escape into the religious freedom of the New World - a 
move towards faith rather than away from it. Many Europeans now view the 
American combination of religion and nationalism as frightening.

The exception to European secularism can be found in Britain, or at 
least in the government of the devoutly Christian and increasingly 
authoritarian Tony Blair, which tried to steamroller Parliament into 
passing a law against "incitement to religious hatred" before the May 
2005 general election, in a cynical vote-getting attempt to placate 
British Muslim spokesmen, in whose eyes just about any critique of Islam 
is offensive. Lawyers, journalists and a long list of public figures 
warned that such a law would dramatically hinder free speech and fail to 
meet its objective - that religious disturbances would increase rather 
than diminish.

New Labour is playing with the fire of communal politics, and in 
consequence we may all be burned.


___

[2]

Human Rights Watch - Press Release

NEPAL: LEGAL VENEER FOR REPRESSING CIVIL SOCIETY
Code of Conduct for Social Organizations a Major Step Backward

(New York, November 14, 2005) - The Nepali government has instituted a 
Code of Conduct to restrict the activities of national and international 
“social organizations,” Human Rights Watch said today.

Ostensibly, the Code of Conduct regulates the activities of 
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Nepal. But in reality, it 
appears to be aimed at silencing critics of King Gyanendra and his 
government, which came to power after the king's coup on February 1.

Human Rights Watch called on the Nepali government to immediately repeal 
the Code, which it adopted on Thursday. The Code prohibits any activity 
endangering “social harmony” and bars NGO staff from having political 
affiliations, meaning that only those with no political leanings may 
work for NGOs. It also attempts to control the places NGOs can work and 
makes all staff and officials of an NGO legally responsible for the 
NGO's activities, even if an individual is not involved in that 
activity. Such provisions violate international legal protections for 
freedom of expression and freedom of association.

“The Code of Conduct is a dangerous tool in the hands of a government 
openly hostile to the idea of human rights,” said Brad Adams, Asia 
director at Human Rights Watch. “The government hopes to use this legal 
veneer to muffle the voices of those who have the courage to stand up to 
it.”

Human Rights Watch is particularly concerned that the Code of Conduct 
will be used to curtail the work of human rights workers and 
organizations that have been documenting abuses in spite of sustained 
attacks against them since the February coup.

The Code also establishes a government-appointed Social Welfare Council 
to oversee the work of NGOs with the clear intention of limiting their 
freedom of action.

Human Rights Watch also expressed concern that many provisions, such as 
the term “social harmony,” are vague and subject to arbitrary 
interpretations.

“In a country where journalists, lawyers and opposition party members 
are arbitrarily detained on a regular basis, this Code is a recipe for 
abuse,” said Adams. “The Code will make it legally dangerous for civil 
society organizations and individuals to take part in legitimate and 
peaceful activities.”

Since the king's February 1 coup, many human rights defenders have been 
detained, fled the country, gone into hiding, or stopped working 
altogether. Those who have continued to work do so at great personal 
risk and have incurred the wrath of the government.

Human Rights Watch said that the Code of Conduct is the latest in a 
series of repressive acts since the coup. In October, the king adopted a 
media ordinance that forbids any criticism of the royal family and 
prohibits FM radio stations from broadcasting any news, regardless of 
the content. The media ordinance has greatly restricted the capacity of 
the media to report freely and led directly to the closure of the 
country's largest FM radio news network, Kantipur FM.

After adoption of the Code on Conduct, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on 
human rights defenders, Hina Jalani, expressed serious alarm over the 
future of human rights workers in Nepal.

___


[3]

Financial Times
November 18 2005
FinaArts & Weekend / Sport

PAST OFFERS TEACHING TO CONVERTED

There was a new, yet partially familiar name in the Pakistan cricket 
team that secured a dramatic and unexpected victory over England in 
Multan this week, writes Rob Steen. Mohammad Yousuf, however, is not a 
newcomer to the side, having played his previous 59 Tests under his 
birth name, Yousuf Youhana.

He made just eight runs in the match and if his concentration was 
slightly below par and his shot selection less judicious than usual, the 
widespread controversy over the reason for his change of moniker may 
have been to blame.

It is not uncommon for sportspeople to change names. Those with 
burdensome ones – such as the Indian batsman Vangipurappu Venkata Sai 
Laxman, known to one and all as VVS – will act to ensure such irksome 
difficulties do not hinder their careers. Boxers, like actors, have long 
devised more billboard-friendly handles – Kid Gavilan, Fighting Harada, 
Sugar Ray Robinson and Sugar Ray Leonard – but that was not why Cassius 
Clay became Muhammad Ali of the Nation of Islam, making himself many 
enemies in the process.

Yousuf has also attracted some enmity by making the same religious 
switch as Ali, but has won many more friends in his own country. Until 
recently the only Christian in the Pakistan XI, and just the fourth 
since Partition, he announced his conversion to Islam last month, 
reinventing himself as Mohammad Yousuf.

It was a move that appeared to risk nothing but excessive adulation from 
most Pakistanis. This, after all, is a land where Christians are 
confined to small, largely impoverished ghettos. When Yousuf made his 
Test debut, his parents did not possess a television set. Persecution of 
Christians by the state is regularly condemned by human rights groups.

This is hardly the first time religious preferences have infected sport. 
In Glasgow, until the early 1980s, footballers were signed by Rangers or 
Celtic according to which side of the Protestant-Catholic divide they 
fell. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, German objections led to two Jews 
being dropped from the American 4x100m relay squad. In India nearly a 
century ago, Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit (“untouchable”) spin bowler, had 
to penetrate caste barriers to earn selection for “The Hindus”.

Now there is concern that Danish Kaneria, the spinner who played such a 
large part in England’s demise in Multan on Wednesday and the lone Hindu 
in an XI dominated by ardent Muslims, may throw his lot in with India. 
Members of England’s Asian community fear Bilal Shafayat’s decision to 
pray with his Pakistan opponents during an Under-19 tour has diminished 
his Test prospects.

As Pakistan rebuild under the guidance of another outsider, the English 
coach Bob Woolmer, Yousuf is one of their few dependables. In 60 Tests 
he has amassed 4,293 runs and 13 centuries, averaging more than 47. 
Crucially, and unlike so many of his flamboyant team-mates, orthodoxy, 
patience and composure come easily.

Some argue that his ambition to succeed Inzamam-ul-Haq as captain left 
him no choice but to jettison his faith. Indeed, his replacement as 
vice-captain by Younis Khan earlier this year may well have been the 
tipping point. While Inzamam retained his position despite a numbing 
series of defeats in Australia, Yousuf, in effect, was made the scapegoat.

In May, furthermore, he was sent home from the Caribbean after an 
alleged altercation with other senior players. Publicly, it was stated 
that his father was ailing, though the latter was never taken to 
hospital. Shortly after Yousuf’s return, at his home in one of the 
posher parts of Lahore, his Mercedes car was stoned.

“There’s enough evidence,” wrote Agha Akbar, a Pakistani reporter, in 
the Indian magazine Outlook, “to suggest that Youhana was more or less a 
pariah in the dressing room who would eat and drink separately.” On 
tour, the other players’ wives bonded and offered each other mutual 
support but Tania Youhana was excluded.

The conversion angered Yousuf’s parents – “I don’t want to give [him] my 
name after what he has done,” his mother was quoted as saying – as well 
as the Christian community.

The name of Saeed Anwar is often mentioned in this. Following the death 
of his daughter in 2002, the now-retired Test opener came under the 
influence of the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary group. His 
presence in the dressing room triggered a culture change as Pakistani 
players – many seeking a sprucer image after the national team had, with 
other sides, been embroiled in cricket’s match-fixing allegations – 
turned to Islam with renewed vigour, further isolating Yousuf.

Scepticism abounds. Dismissing Yousuf’s claims that he had converted 
three months earlier and was only now going public, an official from 
Pakistan’s National Council of Churches wondered why, as recently as the 
West Indies tour, he was still crossing himself upon reaching 50 or 100. 
I. A. Rehman, director of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, said: 
“It seems to me that Youhana was finding it difficult to keep his place 
in the side. Everyone is free to change one’s religion but to my mind 
there is apparently an element of coercion here.”

Yousuf’s riposte was terse: “I will rather quit cricket if that is the 
allegation.”

Whatever his motives for converting, it is difficult not to sympathise 
with the player, and hope that discussion will quickly return to his run 
rate rather than his religion.


___


[4] PROTESTS AGAINST HINDU FUNDAMENTALIST CALL TO HINDUS TO PRODUCE MORE 
CHILDREN

(i)

The Hindu
Nov 19, 2005

AIDWA HITS OUT AT RSS CALL TO PRODUCE MORE CHILDREN

Special Correspondent

Women cannot be seen as reproductive machines serving Hindu nationalist 
agenda

# Reproductive choice is a matter of right
# Mischievous propaganda will fan hatred
# Size of family is not determined by community

NEW DELHI: The All-India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) on 
Friday criticised Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh chief K.S. Sudarshan's 
call to Hindus to produce more children and reject the two-child norm.

Referring to Mr. Sudarshan's statement that the 2001 census data showed 
a decline in Hindu population in certain States including in the 
northeast and his call to "perform the sacred duty of contributing to 
the cause of maintaining a Hindu majority in the country", the AIDWA 
said he was totally regardless of the fact that reproductive choice had 
to do with a woman's right over her body, well-being and health and 
economic capacity to provide for her children.

"She cannot be seen as a reproductive machine serving the Hindu 
nationalist agenda. At the same time, Mr. Sudarshan has deliberately 
confused the rate of population growth with population strength to 
promote communal paranoia in the psyche of the Hindu majority fanning 
the fear of being swamped by religious minorities in the coming years," 
AIDWA president Subhashini Ali said in a statement here.

"False arithmetic"

For quite some time now the false arithmetic about Muslims producing 
more children because they had the legal sanction to marry more than 
once was flaunted by the likes of Mr. Sudarshan, in spite of the 
statistically established fact that the percentage of polygamous Hindus 
was slightly higher than the percentage of polygamous Muslims. "This 
mischievous propaganda will not only help to fan communal hatred but 
[also] Hindu women not able to produce the desired number of children 
will be seen as not having fulfilled her duty towards her community."

Further, which Hindus was Mr. Sudarshan talking about? Was it about 
urban affluent Hindus who accepted the small family norm? Did he not 
know that the size of the family was determined by comparative 
affluence, access to education and other basic civil rights and not by 
the community one belonged to? "If he was at all talking about the 
millions of economically deprived, caste-oppressed, hunger-ridden 
'Hindus' who have no access to the basic necessities of life and are no 
different from the poor of other communities in that respect, he would 
not be raising the slogan of bigger families but [be] talking about the 
need to provide them with the basic necessities of life."

o o o

PRESS STATEMENT

November 19, 2005

RSS CHIEF SUDERSHAN'S CALL FOR A DOZEN SONS PER HINDU FAMILY IRRATIONAL; 
INSULT TO INDIAN WOMEN, MINORITIES

[The Following is the Text of the Press Statement by National 
Integration Council Member Dr. John Dayal, President, AICU and Secretary 
general, All India Christian Council.]

Over the years, the nation has come to expect the most bizarre and 
dangerous statements from the hyper-nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sewak 
Sangh and its leadership - ranging from demands for eradicating 
neighboring countries to a sustained diatribe against Muslim and 
Christian religious minorities who are citizens of India. RSS views on 
the status of women, their contempt for the Constitution of India and 
their infinite capacity to attempt to overwhelm Indian plurality and the 
identity of Tribals, ethnic and linguistic minorities have alarmed Civil 
society for undermining the democratic norms that sustain the unity and 
integrity of India.

But the septuagenarian and bachelor RSS chief Kupahalli Sudershan's call 
that Hindu couples produce more than three children - indeed advocating 
11 or a dozen sons per family - to sustain their religious majority in 
India goes beyond the bizarre and the irrational. It is a racist 
statement soiled by foul religious bigotry and harks back to an era of 
eugenics and population manipulations that died out with the end of 
Hitler's "pure race" concepts. Similar ethnic logic in certain pockets 
in Europe and Africa led to genocidal cleansing within living memory.

As callous and terrible is the implied super-patriarchal attitude Mr. 
Sudershan and the RSS have of the Indian woman - victim of child rape in 
the guise of traditional marriage, and now presented as a political womb 
at the service of a maniacal ideology and its demonic hatred towards 
other communities. The Indian woman is now being asked to produce enough 
children to correct fancied and imagined imbalances in the population of 
one religion. The poor woman would be dead long before she achieves the 
target set for her by Mr. Sudershan.

The RSS demographic thesis has been given the veneer of academic 
exactitude by the highly suspect work of another frontal organization, 
the Chennai based Centre for Policy Studies. This work was brought out 
soon after the 2001 Census with a foreword by the then Deputy Prime 
minister Lal Krishan Advani. The entire purpose of the voluminous tome, 
bought by many government departments at the then BJP-led government's 
insistence, was to raise a bogey of a Muslim population explosion, and 
fears of terrorism in a so called Christian-majority North east.

The statistical data presented was even then exposed to be false 
extrapolation. The arguments were against the scientific and official 
data produced by the People of India Project of the Government under the 
directorship of the redoubtable scholar Dr K S Singh. That series had in 
fact even established that polygamy is more common in several non-Muslim 
groups than in Muslim groups, which is the standard falsehood and pet 
RSS grouse.

On Christians, the 2001 census once again established that the 
percentage of the Christian population in India is steadily going down 
because of the norm of one or two children per family, even among the 
poor and in rural areas. The myth of a Christian conspiracy in the 
northeast based on population and conversion was also conclusively 
exposed to be false, highly motivated and mischievous and meant entirely 
to defame an entire community.

It is for senior BJP leaders such as Mr. LK Advani, former Prime 
Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the women leaders of the group to 
answer Mr. Sudershan.


___


[5]

The Nation
December 5, 2005 issue

MYSTIC RIVER
by Tariq Ali

The sage of Bengal has pronounced. Pluralism, we are informed, has
an ancient pedigree in Indian history. It is embedded in the oldest
known texts of Hinduism and, like a river, has flowed through Indian
history (including the Mughal period, when the country was under
Muslim rule) till the arrival of the British in the eighteenth
century. It is this cultural heritage, ignored and misinterpreted by
colonialists and religious fanatics alike, that shapes Indian culture
and goes a long way toward explaining the attachment of all social
classes to modern democracy. The argumentative tradition "has helped
to make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India," exerting a
profound influence on the country's politics, democracy and "the
emergence of its secular priorities." This view informs most of the
thought-provoking essays in Amartya Sen's new book, a set of
reflections on India written in a very different register from his
other books on moral philosophy and poverty. It is
designed not so much for the academy but as a public intervention
in the country of his birth, to which he remains firmly attached
despite the Nobel Prize and his latest posting at Harvard as a Boston
Brahman.

Although the essays in The Argumentative Indian were composed at
different times, they have been successfully welded into a single
volume. There is much to agree with here. Sen's lofty worldview
remains staunchly secular and rationalist, as befits a scholar whose
intellectual formation took place in Nehru's India, a historical time
zone under constant attack today from Hindu nationalists on the one
side and some of the more fashionable Indian luminaries of the US
branch of the subaltern school of historians on the other. Unlike
fellow Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, Sen does not see the entry of
Islam into India as a dagger thrust in the heart of Indian
civilization. On the contrary, he argues that the effect of Mughal
rule was beneficial. This was undoubtedly the case on the dietary
front: The historian Irfan Habib has shown how the average Indian
peasant ate better and more often in this period than under the British.

Given the title of Sen's book, it would be churlish to prove him
wrong by simply nodding in approval, as is so often the case in our
wonderful subcontinent. What follows, then, from this argumentative
Pakistani is the expression of a few doubts concerning his central
thesis and the odd complaint with regard to some omissions.

Can the lineages of modern Indian democracy be traced back to the
holy texts, as Sen suggests? And does the affection of ordinary
citizens for democracy have any material (as opposed to mystical)
links to the arguments once heard by Buddha or King Ashoka (273-232
B.C.), let alone the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605)?

It's true that disputes abound in the ancient Sanskrit epics.
Their multiple tales are, as Sen puts it, "engagingly full of
dialogues, dilemmas and alternative perspectives," such as that of
Javali, the notorious skeptic of the Ramayana, who explains in detail
how "the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts and
penance have been laid down in the sastras [scriptures] by clever
people, just to rule over [other] people." In codifying the rules for
debate in the Buddhist councils, Ashoka demanded mutual respect among
the various sects. While the Inquisition was sowing terror in Europe,
Akbar, himself a Muslim, ruled that "anyone is to be allowed to go
over to a religion that pleases him." The interreligious debates he
organized in Agra included Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees,
Jains, Jews and the atheists of the Carvaka school, who argued that
Brahmans had established ceremonies for the dead only "as a means of
livelihood" for themselves. Even the Vedic Song of
Creation on the origins of the universe ends in radical doubt: "Who
really knows? Whence this creation has arisen--perhaps it formed
itself, or perhaps it did not--the one who looks down on it, in the
highest heaven, only he knows--or perhaps he does not know."

Yet the skepticism voiced by some rulers and reflected in ancient
texts was usually, if not always, confined to the priestly elites.
The model for the debates among scholars from different religions and
sects that were organized by Akbar's court was little different from
similar discussions a few centuries earlier in the camp of Mongol
leader Genghis Khan (1162-1227). With this exception: Mongol soldiers
were permitted to both listen and participate in the arguments. The
Mughal courts in India were sealed off from public view: The
courtiers listened and, no doubt, nodded when the emperor smiled
appreciatively as a point was scored, but they did not speak. Only
the emperor and a few of his close advisers posed questions. The
tyranny of the few over the many--exercised through a ritual
combination of coercion and religion--was never seriously challenged
in India until the advent of capitalist colonization. Nobody spoke
for the subalterns.

Unlike ancient Greece, there were no city-based institutions where
important issues could be debated, and the overglorified village
panchayats, or councils, were the domain of the privileged where the
poor could only appear as supplicants. Ancient India produced an ugly
caste system that led to early divisions and splits, but neither
Brahmanism proper nor its wilder offshoots--Buddhism and Jainism--
came even close to producing a political philosophy that could lay
the basis for a popular or semipopular assembly like those in ancient
Greece, whose formal decrees always began with the invocation: "The
demos has decided." The assemblies in Athens were barred to slaves,
but they did include peasant proprietors and even some peasants who
worked for others. Hence the debates between rich and poor; hence the
fear of the multitude evinced by the wealthy; hence Solon's New Deal-
ish boast: "I stood covering both [rich and poor] with a strong
shield, permitting neither to triumph unjustly
over the other." But even these traditions, while never forgotten,
disappeared completely. The idea of democracy re-emerged in the
debates that followed the English Revolution and found institutional
form only after the American and French revolutions.

Ancient India produced great poets, philosophers and playwrights,
along with art forms, gods and goddesses to match anything on offer
in Athens, but it did not give birth to an Aristotle. And nothing
remotely resembling the Assembly in Athens or the Senate in Rome
arose on the subcontinent. Surely this must reflect some deficiency.
Despite arguments within the elite and some wonderful expressions of
skepticism cited by Sen, the demos was kept under strict control
throughout Indian history. Uprisings threatening the status quo were
brutally crushed by Hindu and Muslim ruler alike. Superstition and
irrationality were institutionalized via a network of priestly
domination.

The resilience of Brahman traditions lay not in encouraging debate
but in the power of the iniquitous caste system that survives to this
day and pervades the spirit of Indian democracy. One wishes that Sen,
a longstanding critic of economic inequality, had given us his views
on whether globalization tends to weaken or strengthen caste
chauvinism in India. When in the third decade of the past century,
the "untouchable" leader Dr. Ambedkar insisted that his caste not be
considered Hindu so that they, like the Muslims, could demand
separate electorates from the British rulers, he was sweetly rebuffed
by Mahatma Gandhi, no doubt for the noblest of reasons. Hard-core
confessional elements in the leadership of the ruling Congress Party
were only too aware that without the "low castes" being counted as
Hindus their overall weight in the population would be drastically
reduced.

What of India's Muslims? The Mughal conquest of India created a
strong centralized state, but there was not even an embryonic
consciousness of democracy, even in its most primitive, patrician
form. The emperor was supreme. His subjects could plead for justice
in his presence once a week, and if they were lucky they could be
rewarded with a few coins and kind words. Interestingly enough, while
all the existing texts of classical Greece and Rome were translated
into Arabic during the eighth and ninth centuries, and while Islamic
schools of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and medicine flourished
in Córdoba, Palermo and Baghdad, the one genuine innovation of the
Greeks--the idea of democracy--did not travel. The caliph was both
the spiritual and the temporal ruler, and any notion of an assembly
of equals would have been seen as a godless challenge to Allah's vice
regent. The Mughal order in India was based on an alliance of the
wealthy and the creation of a strong central
bureaucracy with rights over large tracts of land.

Sen is correct to stress the tolerance of the Mughals,
particularly Akbar, toward the non-Muslim majority. The reasons for
this policy, however, were not simply altruistic. The Muslim
conquerors, like the British after them, knew that stable rule was
dependent on securing the consent of crucial layers of the indigenous
elites. This they did successfully, and even the last of the great
Mughal emperors, the devout and narrow-minded Aurangzeb, presided
over an imperial army led by an equal mix of Hindu and Muslim
generals. When the British East India Company's army secured Bengal
as a bridgehead in 1757 and made Calcutta the first capital of
British India, it did so with a very small number of British
officers, European weaponry and local recruits on a monthly wage.
Like its Mughal predecessor, the company was desperate for allies and
often bought them in the marketplace. The Bengali Renaissance that
produced Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore,
filmmaker Satyajit
Ray, the Sens and numerous others was the result of a unique
synthesis between local tradition and imperial modernity, based on a
capitalist economy. Without capitalism there was no Indian modernity.
Democracy in British India (as in Britain itself) came a century and
a half later as a result of pressure from below on the part of a
growing middle-class intelligentsia in Calcutta. "What Bengal thinks
today," declared the reformer Ram Mohun Roy, "India thinks tomorrow."

That is why imperial ideologues as well as colonial apologists
like Rudyard Kipling came to despise Bengal. The Bengalis, in their
estimation, were effete intellectuals ill equipped to fight, unlike
the "martial races" of the Punjab and North-West Frontier. Kipling's
fiction is filled with crude stereotypes of the dark-skinned Bengali
babu (clerk) as contrasted with the noble and fair-skinned Pathan or
the Rajput warrior. Better they were kept illiterate lest they become
uppity like the Bengalis.

Even supposing there was a strong "argumentative" tradition in
India 3,000 years ago, was this the frail aqueduct through which the
democratic stream finally moved? Such is the argument of Sen and (in
a more fashionable formulation) of postcolonial scholars who
scornfully dismiss the suggestion that the British presence had
anything to do with the spread of democratic ideas and the rise of
Indian democracy. This is, in my view, a form of mysticism. We may
not like it, but there is no denying the impact of 150 years of
British rule in India, which brought capitalism to the country and
overwhelmingly determined the nature and character of Indian
institutions.
Sen accepts uncritically the historian Partha Chatterjee's
argument that, in Chatterjee's words, the emergence of nationalism
created
its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well
before its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by
dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two
domains--the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain
of the "outside," of the economy...of science and technology...where
the West has proved its superiority.... The spiritual, on the other
hand, is an "inner" domain bearing the "essential" marks of cultural
identity. The greater one's success in imitating Western skills in
the material domain...the greater the need to preserve the
distinctiveness of one's spiritual culture.
Here one discerns a retreat from the secular definition of
nationhood espoused by Nehru and a slide into the murky domain of
Hindu nationalism, albeit in an ultra-civilized fashion. In rejecting
the heritage of Nehruvian socialism for its statism and affiliation
with the urban middle class, "left-wing" postcolonial historians like
Chatterjee have eerily converged in their arguments with right-wing
Hindu politicians, who insist that the content of Indian nationalism
has always been spiritual, i.e., religious, thus excluding India's
large Muslim minority from the national community. (When the Hindu
nationalist brigade in the United States mounted a disgraceful
campaign two years ago against the Library of Congress decision to
award a research fellowship to Romila Thapar, one of the most
distinguished secular historians of ancient India, a majority of
Indian historians on American campuses remained silent.) What is
"one's spiritual culture" and "cultural identity" if not religion,
even if lightly disguised as the Cow Protection League or the
National Fund to Rebuild Mosques? Was it possible for nationalism to
move in a more cosmopolitan than spiritual direction?

This raises the Gandhi question. Was it necessary for the Mahatma
to use spiritual (Hindu) imagery and language to rouse the majority
of the countryside from their torpor? Nehru and Tagore did not think
so and argued heatedly with the old fox, but on this Gandhi would not
budge. It was they who gave up, Tagore in despair and Nehru in the
half-hope that the damage was reparable. But it wasn't, and it led
ultimately to the fatal breach with secular Muslims, including
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. That there were other
straws in the nationalist breeze was revealed time and time again in
the wave of strikes that paralyzed the country in late 1945 and then
again in 1946, when Muslim, Hindu and Sikh naval ratings united
against the British and seized the ships, raising the banner of
revolution. This was the most significant mutiny in the history of
the British Empire. On the advice of Jinnah and Gandhi, the sailors
surrendered "to India not the British."

The attachment to the "distinctiveness of one's spiritual culture"
undoubtedly helped provoke the bloody partition of the subcontinent,
but the institutions that provided the spinal cord of the new states
owed little to spiritual traditions. They were British creations, and
Parliament was not the only one. It certainly helped to unite India,
but in neighboring Pakistan it is the army and, to a lesser extent,
the civil service, both creations of the Raj, that have ruled the
country. What happened to the "argumentative" tradition here? Taxila
(near Islamabad) was, after all, the site of one of the world's first
large (Buddhist) universities centuries before the Christian Era. It
is not that most Pakistanis did or do not like democracy. A new
imperial power decreed that the army was the most reliable guarantor
of stability and order in the new country. Here Washington has been
consistent. Only this year Condoleezza Rice, on a visit to Islamabad,
praised Gen.Pervez Musharraf and his
regime--apparently secular and autocratic--as the model for the
Muslim world. (Including Iraq?)

In India democracy has become embedded as the only acceptable form
of rule largely because of geography. If Pakistan split into two
after an eleven-year military dictatorship from 1958 to '69, what
would an attempt to impose a military regime in India have done to
that country? Created a three-way split? Or even more fragments? The
regional elites realized that this would be an economic disaster, and
the unity of India under a democratic umbrella became the common
sense of the country. It is this and mass hostility to autocracy that
explains the longevity of the democratic system, but one should not
underestimate the power of turbo-propelled capitalism to weaken
democracy in India just as it is doing in its heartlands. Indians may
want democracy, but it is hardly a prerequisite for a dynamic
capitalism. Europe demonstrated this during the first 300 years of
capitalism; China does so today.

The essay on the giant of Bengali letters, Tagore (1861-1941), who
died six years before India and his beloved Bengal was partitioned,
is studded with gems. Sen knows Tagore's work well, and his
grandfather, a distinguished historian of Hinduism, worked with the
great poet in Santiniketan, a progressive educational academy that
provided the inspiration for Dartington Hall in England. Tagore's
standing in the West has been subject to many fluctuations. His
mystic-spiritual side appealed to many Westerners, including Ludwig
Wittgenstein, but as Sen explains, this was only one side of the man.
In Bengal and India he was the voice of reason, a cosmopolitan who
encouraged the self-emancipation of the people and urged them to free
themselves from the Brahman and the British and break the chains of
caste and poverty. The dangers he saw for India were structural, not
spiritual. As he wrote in 1939: "It does not need a defeatist to feel
deeply anxious about the future of millions who, with
all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions, are being
simultaneously subjected to hunger, disease, exploitations foreign
and indigenous, and the seething discontents of communalism."

Sen's reflections on Tagore, however, would have benefited from
comparison with another great Indian poet: Muhammad Iqbal
(1877-1938), who wrote in Urdu and Persian. Iqbal, too, was given to
mysticism, but of the Sufi variety. Younger than Tagore, he was
greatly influenced by Hegel and the German philosophical tradition
and was a great favorite of both Nehru and Jinnah. Iqbal, too, died
before partition. Tragically, he was immediately mummified by the new
state of Pakistan, his message so distorted that he is seen by many
in that country as a revivalist, which is far from the truth. Like
Tagore, he loathed priest and mullah alike and celebrated reason and
knowledge, as in this verse dividing God from Man:
You created Night, I the Lamp
You the earth, I the bowls
You created wilderness, mountains and ravines
I the flower beds, gardens and groves
I make mirrors from stone
I find antidotes in poison.
Both Tagore and Iqbal would have been mortified at the direction
taken by the modern leaders of the old subcontinent. Like Sen, both
would have been alarmed by the nuclear turn and missiles with
confessional names targeted by each side against the other. Even
those who disagree with Sen or see him as a tame and toothless Bengal
tiger will be compelled to engage with his arguments. That alone is
sufficient reason to welcome the publication of this book.

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
SACW archive is available at: bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.