Pratap Bhanu Mehta vs Amit Shah

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is no longer speaking to Lord Ram. He is now speaking to readers of the Indian Express. He asks-

Probing questions are being asked about the failures of secularism to get to the roots of India’s current crisis. One characteristically introspective piece in this vein was by Yogendra Yadav, ‘Secularism gave up language of religion. Ayodhya bhoomi pujan is a result of that’ (The Print, August 5). Yogendra and I agree about several things: The plutocracy of the old order, the reductive intellectual approaches of the Left that disabled any serious understanding of Indian culture. Secularism became synonymous with the politics of opportunism, setting up a dynamic of competitive victimisation.

So Mehta says the 'politics of opportunism...the dynamism of competitive victimization' failed. Did he expect it to succeed? Why speak of the end of a bad thing as causing crisis? Indeed, apart from Mehta and Yadav and a few other has-beens, nobody thinks India faces any crisis to do with the building of a Temple regarding which a Law had been enacted back in 1993- a month after the disputed structure was razed.

 India Today reported- The Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Ordinance was promulgated by then President Shankar Dayal Sharma on January 7, 1993. Later, a Bill was introduced in Parliament by then Union Home Minister SB Chavan. After being passed, the Bill came to be known as the Ayodhya Act.

The problem was that nobody could agree as to what should be built there and how it should be built. So the President referred the matter to the Supreme Court which upheld the Ayodhya Act but allowed the original dispute, featuring the original claimants, to continue to wind its way through the Courts. Once the Supreme Court gave a final judgment, the path was cleared for the construction of the Temple. The BJP has been rather deft in the manner it has managed things and, it appears, Modi has benefited politically. This may put some noses out of joint, but those noses had already been ground into the dust by repeated electoral losses. India has a public health crisis and an economic crisis. But it does not have a crisis concerning Temples or Mosques or other places of worship. 

But Yogendra also writes, “Secularism was defeated because it disavowed our languages, because it failed to connect with the language of traditions, because it refused to learn or speak the language of our religions. Specifically, secularism was defeated because it chose to mock Hinduism instead of developing a new interpretation of Hinduism suitable for our times.”

Yadav is a Hindi speaker. He notices that the Hindi press has been triumphalist in its reportage on the new Temple. Other Hindi speaking journalists have pointed out that the Leftist Hindi editors and writers kept themselves at a distance from religious language out of complacency or for fear of being labelled 'Rightists'. English language 'public intellectuals', however, where playing to a foreign gallery and attacked Hinduism with vim and vigor. This led to a backlash such that the minute Anglophile class switched allegiance to the BJP. Anyway, both the Congress and the Left had terrible leadership. There was literally no alternative- at least at the Center. 

This is a fashionable claim with surface plausibility. But, on reflection, this claim is historically problematic, philosophically dubious and culturally dangerous.

On whose reflection? Mehta's? But this is a guy who talks to God and ticks off the Deity! He thinks one should not say 'Allahu Akbar' or 'Our Lord who art in Heaven' because to do so 'diminishes' the Godhead! What 'historical' or 'philosophical' or 'cultural' danger or problematic could this cretin possibly identify? 

The Indian republic was born in the shadow of the violent catastrophe of Partition.

No. That was Independence. The Republic was born along with the Constitution. Partition was over and done with. The new Government was firmly in the saddle.  

Virtually every nationalist leader outside of the Marxist Left was crafting an idiom of politics that was suffused with religious language.

When had this not been the case? Has this man never heard of Mahatma Gandhi? What about the Khilafat movement? But going back to the time of Viceroy Landsdowne, we find that British officials were saying 'cow protection' is what gave the I.N.C grass-roots support. The Marxist Left supported the creation of Israel and Pakistan on a confessional basis. They used, and still use, a theological language to attack established religions. Anyway, India had plenty of 'Liberation Theologians' who posed as interlocutors with the Maoists. Could Mehta have forgotten Swami Agnivesh so soon?  

They were creatively trying to craft a distinct Indian modernity within an Indian vocabulary, trying to transcend tradition without making tradition despicable. But as Gandhi recognised, that project was, in one sense, a failure: It did not prevent India’s communalisation.

Gandhi said to Bihari Congressmen that he knew which of them had organised pogroms of innocent Muslims. But then, his first foray into Indian mass politics occurred in Champaran at a time when the Muslims of Bihar were being attacked and forced to give up cow-slaughter by a very well organised campaign against which the British were powerless. 

But Partition was not caused by any specifically religious issue. The Muslims wanted a bigger share of power but non-Muslims rejected this. Thus, they prevailed where they were the majority and could chase away non-Muslims while the opposite happened where the non-Muslims were stronger.  

Gandhi’s example could exercise a residual moral force. But whenever religious themes were brought into politics, whether in the quotidian policies that were enacted after Congress governments were elected in 1935, or in the larger ideological project or idiom, they generated conflict. So the idea that taking religion seriously as a political matter will solve the communal problem is a historically dubious proposition. Modern religious politics is born in the crucible of democracy and nationalism, not theology.

But if so, Secularism is meaningless. Let the Courts decide who owns what. If the majority wants some particular site then Laws- like the Ayodhya act- can be enacted and the Courts will uphold them. This is what has actually happened. Stupid cretins like Mehta talking to Lord Ram and saying 'today you have been diminished' aren't doing anything 'political' at all. They are merely displaying hypocrisy or moral imbecility. The fact is God is not 'diminished' by being called 'Great' or by being worshipped in Temples or Mosques or Churches. 

The lesson in the wake of Partition was that to avoid violence, you need

to send in the police, and, if necessary, the Army to shoot rioters and put all potential troublemakers under preventive detention. That is the only thing which works. Mahatmas fasting or Prime Ministers making speeches won't cut any ice whatsoever. Look at the Nehru-Liaqat pact. It didn't stop ethnic cleansing from East Pakistan. By contrast, Modi sending in the Army stopped the further ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Gujarat dead in its tracks. 

to lower the stakes of politics by keeping religion out of it.

This is wholly irrelevant. What matters is if troublemakers know they might get shot if they run amok. 

The animating impulse of Indian secularism was to produce peace by trying not to make religion a matter of public contestation.

No. Indian politics started with caste based Associations which then learned to play nice with each other because castes were internally divided between reformers and the ultra-orthodox. The reformers saw that their own sub-caste- like Gandhi's Modh Banias, or Rajendra Prasad's Bihari Kayasthas- wouldn't give up hyperorthodox practices till they were assured that their rival castes were doing the same thing. In other words, 'Nationalist' politics broke a 'concurrency' deadlock. Prasad had wanted to 'cross the black water' like Mahatma Gandhi or Motilal Nehru. He had wanted to end 'purdah' for Bihari Kayastha women. So, once Gandhi appeared in rural Bihar, he could fully embrace Reformist 'Hindutva' Hinduism while retaining respect as a religious man whose grand-daughters would get the best grooms at the time of marriage. 

Indian Nationalism had the biggest pay-off for orthodox Hindu sub-castes because it gave them a spiritual and moral excuse to shed horrible restrictions upon their own freedom. One reason why the Hindu Mahasabha lost salience after Independence, save where there was a Muslim threat or revanchist sentiments against Muslims, was because it seemed on the side of orthodoxy. The rest of us- more particularly 'Forward Castes'- wanted all sorts of reforms to Hindu personal law. Sometimes, as Madhu Kishwar pointed out with respect to anti-Dowry law, the thing backfires. But most of us- unlike Mehta- are poor. We can't afford much dowry in the first place. We did insist that a wasteful and stupid Higher Education system come into existence so that we could say 'our daughter has education, not wealth. That is her dowry.' But, it was only after wives and daughters started earning that we ourselves could rise a little above bare, vegetarian, subsistence.

Mehta, who is from a prominent Jain family and who had a very expensive foreign education, thinks the petty clerks and munims, from whom the Hindu middle class is sprung, were concerned with theology!

And a lot of our compromises were a result of that. This was an impossible position to hold, because the reforms of the modern state require intervening in religion, to liberate individuals from oppressive and hierarchical religious hierarchies.

It was Brahmans who felt that hierarchy to be most oppressive. A few could get a full stomach by championing the old order. But the vast majority could not feed themselves in this fashion. They had perforce to become 'Niyogi'. Some did get big bungalows through the Nationalist movement. But most were just trying to have a less restricted life as petty clerks and munims. They were secretly very glad when their wives and daughters could take 'respectable' employment. Indeed, they had found that the small 'child widow' stipend, which only rich families could pay, had been hugely valuable in preventing 'respectable' families sliding into destitution. Many of the Nationalists and Reformers in Maharashtra had been helped by a sister who was a 'child widow'. Indeed, such women played a big role in the Independence movement. 

Mehta does not understand that endogamous castes compete with each other for status by placing restrictions (arising out of elite emulation) on what their people can or can't do. Those within the caste who can't follow these restrictions are in danger of being downgraded into a lower sub-caste. But, if they are very successful and gain Regional or National recognition, they become the target for Tardean imitation. Motilal Nehru heard that some in his community were muttering against his decision to 'cross the black water'. He made it known that he would prosecute any such person and render him bankrupt. This was force majeure. Indian customary law says that it creates 'Apadh dharma'- exigent circumstances- such that you can cheerfully acquiesce in what is happening. Thus Motilal was able to marry off his children very advantageously. Indeed, the youngest daughter married into one of the best Jain Merchant-Prince dynasties even though her people were 'non-veg'. By then, of course, Mahatma Gandhi's influence was at noon-tide. The Jains- Dr. Pranjivan Mehta in particular- had done a lot to ensure this outcome. No wonder, people like Mehta feel they have a proprietary interest in the subsequent trajectory of Nehru-Gandhian India. What they don't understand is why the impecunious 'bildungsburgertum' of the Forward Caste had to embrace Gandhianism so as to destroy the fabric of 'madi' type 'ritual purity rules' which were holding them back. Consider the case of a 'Brahmin' school teacher posted to a remote village. If there is no one of his sub-caste living there, the poor fellow has to cook his own food! The fate of his sister might be far worse. That is why the young gravitated first to Reform movements, then to Hindutva and, when the going was good, Gandhianism and Nehruism and even Leftist Bollocks. Only when each of these was shown to involve macro-economic imbecility were they abandoned. Once people could do well in the Private Sector, the preference was for technocratic leaders. Modi initially presented himself as a technocrat. He said he had never contested an election before becoming Gujarat's C.M. Furthermore, he said he'd give more money to any Panchayat which elected members unanimously. He projected himself as a bespectacled 'back room boy'. Now, it seems he has grown an impressive beard and looks like a holy man. But, when elections come round, we may see a reversion to 'suited booted' Modi pressing the flesh of leading Global industrialists and inking MOUs- if that is what the Indian economy needs at the time. Alternatively, he may be accoutred as a paratrooper- if that is what is required.

Sometimes this intervention was asymmetrically applied to some groups more than others.

Hindus were the majority, so Hindus got the reforms they thought they needed till they saw that only economic reform matters.  

But do these infirmities explain the legitimising of a whole-scale majoritarianism?

The British were a tiny minority. That is why they had to go. The Muslims were a more sizable minority. They still lost a substantial share of power. Many went, if they had somewhere to go to. But this also happened to certain Forward Castes. It may be happening to 'creamy layer' OBCs. Even dynastic Dalits are not safe.  

The current contest is hardly over traditional forms of religiosity; most Hindus have made their ideological peace with modernity and preserved religiosity. The current contest is over nationalism that has colonised both religion and secularism.

This had happened by 1921. There was once an Indian Liberal Party. Its moment in the Sun was the second Round Table Conference. But it failed spectacularly and became a Gandhian rump.  

Who gets to be a member of this political community, do its dominant narratives have space for its diverse histories? It is not primarily about the pieties of religion. Let us not beat around the bush over what defines the current moment. It is largely about marginalising Muslims from the Indian narrative.

Mehta is beating around a particular bush which everybody across the globe knows about- viz. the rise of internationalist Jihadi ideology. There was a time in the UK and Germany and so on when crazy guys with long beards and peculiar accents could demand Sharia Courts and so forth in the name of 'multi kulti'. Those days are gone, because, as Merkel said a decade ago, Muslims must either assimilate or face the consequences. They won't get special treatment. If they blow things up and run around knifing people, they will be shot. Their home countries will be subject to drone strikes. More importantly, their bank accounts will be frozen or drained. 

The Muslim narrative, like the Nazi narrative, is not just marginalized it is actively stigmatized. Consider the fate of the anti-Zionist BDS movement. Its sponsors are now running scared. They themselves have been blacklisted or they fear this will happen. A new McCarthyism? Sure. Don't forget McCarthyism worked. Reagan and Nixon- but also Kennedy- entered politics under that rubric.  

Let us grant, as Yogendra and I always have, the political opportunism behind secular political parties.

Why not also grant the opportunism behind both Yadav and Mehta's foolish feuilletonism? What have they achieved? Absolutely nothing. They were pointing in the wrong direction in the belief that the great mass of the people were behind them. The truth is, everybody had turned their backs- if not their naked backsides- on them long ago. 

Let us grant that some communal bigots abound in any large religious community, Hindus or Muslims. Let us grant that the Left played fast and loose with historical narratives. Does this really license what we are witnessing today: The saturation and legitimation of venomous anti-Muslim prejudice?

Nobody cares about some nutters running fast and loose with narratives. Terrorists and marauding mobs concentrated minds. It is the steely determination to avenge Jihadi violence which has united the world. Look at Sri Lanka after the Easter attacks. Burqas are now banned.  

These causes that Yogendra cites, are not causes. They are, to use Edmund Burke’s phrase, pretexts. Pretexts for prejudice across the religious-non religious binary.

A man can't have a pretext he does not know about. He can have a lively hatred based on a clear and present danger which is of a global sort. It is foolish at this late hour to say that 'Orientalism' created ISIS or that some stupid Professor teaching a useless subject can contribute anything to policy making.  

To take religion seriously is to preserve the conditions of religious freedom for all, letting each person discover the law of their own Being.

No it isn't. All that matters is whether the Law and its enforcement is taken seriously. Courts don't need to take Wicca seriously. They can protect the rights of Wiccans to get up to some things- but not others.  

I tremble at the thought of a politicised public sphere taking religion seriously.

Because you are a cretin. One moment you are reproving God for having places of Worship. The next you are trembling because 'public sphere' is politicized . Fuck is wrong with you?  

It usually means someone else gets to define who you are, it usually means creating authoritative versions of religion that benchmark good or bad believers, it means sanitising religious histories of their pasts so that they become comforting narratives for people, and it means instrumentalising religion to political purposes.

So what? Provided the Rule of Law is upheld, nothing much changes. I may define Mehta as a pussy cat, but he can get a Court order preventing me from making him sit on my lap. 

We do not need another version of what it means to be a good Hindu.

Nonsense! We always need a better version of what it means to be a good person more particularly if we belong to a Religion which claims to be able to make us better people and, at the end of the day, save our immortal soul. 

Who can be presumptuous enough to define or benchmark that?

Each Sect is welcome to have its own 'buck stopped', protocol bound, juristic procedure in this regard. Some may choose not to bother. The thing may or may not be justiciable.  

What we need is a genuine commitment to freedom, with all its risks, self- doubts and fashioning and refashioning of identities.

There is no way of discriminating 'genuine' from 'fake' commitments in this regard unless there is a 'separating equilibrium' based on 'costly signals'. 

I don't think Mehta has any genuine commitment to freedom. Otherwise, he would have availed of his own constitutionally protected rights to pretend to be a pussy cat and to come and sit on my lap when I call out 'Mehta, pussykins, where are you? Come sit on my lap and we'll watch 'Aristocats' together.'  

There was a kind of reductive cultural crudeness in a lot of Left engagement with Indian culture.

But it was their economic imbecility which did for them. Marxism was supposed to be Scientific. It was supposed to lift us up into prosperity. It wasn't supposed to end in shitheads quoting Foucault.  

But let us get real. The Left may have the commanding heights of maybe half a dozen universities; but most universities were vernacularised in the Seventies. V D Mahajan was probably more widely read as a textbook than JNU historians. Doordarshan could rightly telecast Ramayana and Mahabharata, Delhi University’s obtuseness over including them in its syllabus notwithstanding. In short, the cultural prestige and importance of the Left in shaping Indian culture has been hugely exaggerated. They played conformist academic politics. But the idea that Hindus have been culturally marginalised is a trope that feeds into the convenient victimology of some Hindus, more than it describes a reality.

The reason the Left's 'long march through the Institutions' was tolerated was because it was reasonable to believe- more especially in 2004- that they had a big electoral following.  There was bound to be a backlash against 'globalisation' and we all thought the Left would cash in on it. Even with Shaheen Bagh we thought- 'aha! this marks the turning point'. But there was no turning point. Just further decline. The Muslims roundly abused the Left . They and Congress were wiped out in the Assembly elections. Kejriwal's triumph over Yadav was complete. Now it looks like the Bench has lost patience with Prashant Bhushan. Mehta and his ilk are now a laughing stock. 

Yogendra is right that in North India there is a peculiar politics of resentment generated over the status of Hindi.

This was the case. But the 'angrezi hatao' crowd sent their sons and daughters to Western Universities. The fact is over half of MPs speak Hindi as their first 'Indic' language. Patnaik is a Hindi speaker who promised to learn Oriya when he became CM there 20 years ago. Then he discovered his voters didn't care how he spoke. Language is not the issue it once way. Only Money matters. We want more of it. Governance must improve for this to happen.  

But there is an implication here that secularists somehow disavowed Indian languages. This is odd because it seems to map secularism onto English. Every Indian language crafted a new vernacular version of secularism. The Hindi sphere had, for example, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Dharamvir Bharati, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Kunwar Narain and others. They constituted the sphere of religiously engaged but modernist public criticism. They were not sidelined by English but by the Hindiwallahs.

The problem with these guys is that they were complacent and insular. There was a time when Hindi journalists were breaking big stories. Then their editors lost interest. They just translated the English of their sister publications into Hindi while complacently feathering their own nest. But what else could they do? The BJP was winning hearts and minds. Its rivals were creating glamorous uber-rich dynasties. But there were diminishing returns to patrimonialism. 

The active secular, culturally nuanced Hindi public sphere was bowdlerised by the new generation of vernacular newspaper owners. The crisis is internal to Hindi and again feeds on the convenient trope the BJP uses that somehow a small cabal of metropolitan intellectuals is to blame for India’s woes.

That small cabal is to blame for the woes it itself discovers and hypocritically weeps over. As a Socioproctologist, I took responsibility- not all of it, but the main part of it- for the terrible explosion in Beirut. The fact is I should have invited the Lebanese officials responsible to turn into cats and to come sit on my lap. Only a deeper commitment to a culturally nuanced Socioproctology can save Lebanon now. 

In a post-mortem of secularism, we are hand wringing over religion, not because we lost the key there, but because there seems to be light there.

No. You are hand wringing because you have hands and think you are important. You should turn into a cat and come sit on my lap. If you try wringing your paws I will gently but firmly say 'bad kitty! No!'  

The deeper question is not these ideological debates; after all, differences are inevitable and can be managed. It is the growing tolerance for prejudice and the unleashing of a ferocious darkness. Let us name the beast for what it is and not hide behind the pieties of secularism or religion.

Modi is Hitler. OMG, Gestapo is coming for me!  

Recovering the project will not mean a return to religion, but a confidence in the promise of a new freedom struggle

against whom? Mehta's previous essay spoke of Hinduism as being colonized. Being born into a Jain family, he may well feel that he should conquer Hinduism and 'liberate' it from subjugation by Hindus. The problem is Amit Shah too is a Jain. He seems to have no such agenda. Moreover he is a lot smarter than Mehta.  

to salvage individual dignity and rights, not continually play out resentments against the Other.

Mehta's alterity is Amit Shah. Mehta is deeply resentful. But he has no 'individual dignity' left to salvage. So we must expect more such embarrassing articles from him which the Indian Express will publish just to remind readers that though things are bad now, they could be so much worse if Congress and its durbari intellectuals ever returns to power.