As happened in the film 'Poltergeist', sub-continental intellectuals in the Nineties began to be disturbed by various horrifying apparitions and all sorts of spooky shit occurring on their TV screens. It turned out that the modern nation-state had been built upon an old Indian burial ground. Worse yet, what had been buried was the birthplaces of Hindu gods- whom everybody knows are real freaky coz they have lots of heads and arms and legs- right?
Clearly, what the country needed was a proper, scientifically trained, exorcist.
It was in this context that, back in 1995, Akeel Bilgrami, a Muslim analytical philosopher, and Ashis Nandy, a Christian psychologist, published articles for the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Shite.
SECULARISM, NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY
The deployment of the term ‘modernity’ in the rhetoric of contemporary culture is various, and variously nuanced.
No. It was lazy and stupid. The gerontocratic Left thought Secularism meant turning all the mosques and churches into museums where school children could view the instruments of torture used by the clergy on behalf of the Feudal or Capitalist class. Modernism- unless it meant Mayakovsky- was suspect. Why be more modern than Marx?
Anyway, as Stalin grasped, Nationalism might actually be quite a good defence against bourgeois modernism or, in the Fifties, Seymour Lipset's 'modernization' theory which was nothing but the American sponsored developmental state promoting Coca Cola culture and Tom & Jerry cartoons on umpteen commercial TV channels.
The source of this variety lies partly in its being what J.L. Austin once called a ‘boo/hurrah’ word, that is in its deployment both as a term of commendation and opprobrium.
You should marry traditional girl. Modern girl will take all your money and make you eat her pussy instead of cooking nice paratha.
In this paper I will look at the present tendency of certain sections of the Indian intelligentsia to see modernity as the source of our present communal troubles.
The source of those troubles was the revival of political Islam and its supplanting of the 'secular socialist' dictatorships which had taken power in many Muslim countries over the course of the Fifties and Sixties.
I will be opposing this tendency. But I will not necessarily be doing so with a view to praising ‘modernity’ so much as burying it as a category of analysis.
But 'modernization theory' was making a comeback in the Nineties and Oughties. At that time, it seemed obvious that Talibans and Boko Harams could be defeated militarily and an Ordoliberal modernity could be imposed via regime change or sanctions of various types. Incidentally, Brussel keeps pressurising Greece to put an end to the use of Sharia law in Thrace. This was because the Parliamentary Assembly had declared that Sharia was undemocratic and incompatible with human rights. In 2018, the Greeks did pass a bill to give priority to Greek law over Islamic law. In a subsequent court case, the European Court opened the door for the limited use of Sharia and other such religious laws even if, unlike in Greece, there had been no previous history of any such thing.
I will argue that there should be a moratorium on terms such as ‘modernity’ and the disputes surrounding them for they are not categories that enhance explanation and understanding of political and cultural developments in contemporary Indian politics and history.
Bilgarmi was wrong. Modernity and traditionalism are highly relevant to countries like India which genuinely have a lot of very ancient traditions.
The specific target of the recent attack on ‘modernity’ is the conception of a modern and secular state that emerged during the ideological articulations of the nationalist movement and flowered as a full-fledged vision in the years of independence under Nehru’s leadership, mostly due to his own explicit articulations and efforts at construction of a modern nation state.
Modernization theory says you first need to be wealthy before you can become a Western style democracy. Thus India could have Socialist Secular Dynasticism but not a modern, democratic, polity. Then assassination began to temper autocracy and India could not be prevented from getting richer, and therefore more modern, as well as more democratic- that is majoritarian.
...if we look around us today in the period before and after the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya, we can only judge the secular success of (Nehru's) long rule as, at best, a holding process.
I suppose Bilgrami means the long direct rule of the Dynasty which ended when Rajiv Gandhi was killed.
To describe Nehru’s success in terms of a holding process is of course to describe it as a success of a very limited sort.
It was like that of Tito... or Saddam Hussein.
So the question is: Why is it that the Nehruvian vision of a secular India failed to take hold?
It was shit. Smart people ran the fuck away.
Nandy’s answer and the general sense of the intelligentsia is that there was something deeply flawed in the vision itself.
D'uh! A guy can't claim to be a democrat if his daughter, and then his grandson, and then his great-grandson, inherits his position as the head of a supposedly National Party.
On this there is a mounting consensus, and indeed I think it would be accurate to say that in the last few years there is widespread and accumulated deflation of Nehru’s stature to be found in the intellectual and political mood of the country.
That had occurred a few years before that old fool snuffed it.
...the contemporary critique of Nehru usually begins by laying down a fundamental distinction in the very idea of religion, a distinction between religions as faiths and ways of life on the one hand and as constructed ideologies on the other.
This has never been the case. Religion is about a bunch of people drawing closer together to worship God in a particular way. The assumption is this will get them to the Good Place after they die.
This is intended as a contrast between a more accommodating, non-monolithic and pluralist religious folk tradition of Hinduism and Islam on the one hand, and the Brahmanical RSS and Muslim League versions of them on the other.
In other words, this is a paranoid fantasy. The pluralist folk traditions of emaciated brown peeps involves saying 'boo to Capitalism!' and quietly starving to death rather than accepting PL480 food aid from Uncle Sam. It was a different matter that some upper class brown peeps deserved praise for emigrating to Yurop/Amrika to babble about 'enchantment' and to say nasty things about Capitalist Modernity.
The latter are said to amount to constructed religious ideologies that were intolerant of heterodoxy within themselves as well as intolerant of each other.
The RSS was tolerant of various different Indic sects though it sought to get Indians to give up casteism and embrace meritocracy. At the time Bilgrami was writing this, the RSS was making a big push to promote OBC leaders and to reach out to ST communities. On the other hand it is true that it did not tolerate Islamist militancy which was on the rise as the Taliban gained power in Afghanistan. It must be said those Islamists were intolerant of minority Islamic sects.
The critique’s target is by implication modernity itself for its claim is that it is the polity in its modern framework of nationhood and its statecraft which is the source of such ideological constructions that distort those more ‘innocent’ aspects of religion which amount to ‘ways of life’ rather than systems of thought geared to political advancement.
Gandhi's Hinduism, like Jinnah's Islam, was geared to political advancement. It wasn't innocent at all.
The critique then suggests that once one accepts the inevitability of the ideological framework of modernity, then there is nothing left to do in combating sectarian and communal sentiment and action than to formulate a secular vision which itself amounts to an oppressive nationalist and statist ideology. Thus Nehru.
If you believe Stalinism is a short cut to becoming an industrialized super-power, then, sure, you will believe that turning mosques and churches and temples into museums is the way to go. But, by the mid Seventies, it was common knowledge that neither the Soviet Union nor Mao's China had really achieved anything very much. They were inefficient despotisms which had chosen guns over butter.
As they would describe his vision, it is one of a modernist tyranny that just as surely (as the narrow communalisms) stands against the pluralist and tolerant traditions that existed in the uncontaminated traditions of religions as faiths and ways of life prior to modernity’s distortions.
This was irrelevant. What mattered was that Nehru's Socialist policies failed. India could neither feed nor defend itself.
That was Nehru’s primary contribution, then: a perversely modernist and rationalist imposition of a vision that was foreign to the natural tendencies of Hinduism and Islam in their traditional pre-modern spiritual and societal formations, a vision accompanied by all the destructive modern institutional commitment to centralized government, parliamentary democracy, not to mention heavy industry as well as metropolitan consumption and displacement of traditional ways of life.
Fuck off! Nehru's primary contribution was fucking his wife and thus having a daughter who jailed her opponents and ensured the INC would become a purely dynastic vehicle.
The echoes of Gandhi here are vivid and Ashis Nandy is explicit in describing this alternative secular vision in Gandhian terms.
Because he was a Christian. Gandhi, hypocrite that he was, posed as a Christ like figure turning the other cheek.
This critique of Nehru is careful (though perhaps not always careful enough) to be critical also of contemporary Hindu nationalism in India, as was Gandhi himself, despite his Hinduism and his traditionalism. Nandy makes great dialectical use of the fact that Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu Nationalist,
a silly fellow. Brahmins in Pune were attacked and their homes were burnt to the ground. It was the INC, not the RSS, which did ethnic cleansing of Muslims.
arguing that Gandhi’s politics and pluralist version of Hinduism posed a threat to the elitist pseudounification of Hinduism which flowered in the ideology of upper-caste Hindus and in orthodox Brahmanical culture, as represented paradigmatically in the Chitpavans, the caste to which Nathuram Godse (his assassin) belonged.
At that time, these guys didn't get the difference between the Mahasabha and the RSS. The latter was founded by a Deshastha Brahmin. His successor was a Karhade Brahmin. The third leader was again Deshastha whereas the RSS chief when Bilgrami was writing this was a Tomar Rajput.
Now it should be emphasized that what is novel and interesting about this critique of Hindu nationalism is that it is
ignorant- absurdly so
intended to be part of a larger critique in two different ways. First, it is intended as part of a general diagnosis in which Hindu Nationalism is to be seen as a special instance of the more general wrong that is identified in nationalism itself, which is a modern state of mind,
No. It is ancient. In the Old Testament, 'Goyim' is translated as 'the nations'
in which the very ideal of ‘nation’ has built into it as a form of necessity the ideal of a nation-state, with its commitment to such things as development, national security, rigidly codified forms of increasingly centralized polity, and above all the habit of exclusion of some other people or nation in its very self-definition and self-understanding.
A Nation-State- e.g. England- can amalgamate with other nations- e.g. Wales and Scotland- before becoming a big Empire. But when Imperialism can no longer pay for itself, there is a reversion to Nation States even if there are more than one Nation united under a particular monarch. Thus King Charles is the King of Canada but Canada is quite separate from England.
There is apparently no separating these more general wrongs of nationalism
Countries should not defend themselves. They should surrender to any invader or insurrectionist.
from what is wrong with Hindu Nationalism, for otherwise we would have missed the more hidden explanatory conceptual sources of this particular movement.
There is no 'hidden' explanation for why Hindus in India need to be Nationalistic. The alternative is to let the place turn into a more noisome shithole where Hindus are massacred or ethnically cleansed- as had happened in Kashmir Valley a little before Bilgrami wrote this shit.
And second, the critique of Hindu Nationalism is intended to be of a piece with the critique of Nehruvian secularism.
Why stop there? Why not make this critique 'of a piece' with a critique of cats sodomizing dogs?
That is, such a communal nationalism, itself a product of modernity,
like cats sodomizing dogs- a practice which only began after the inauguration of the Westphalian sovereign state
owes its very existence to the oppositional but at the same time internal dialectical relation it bears to that other product of modernity, Nehruvian secularism.
Only in India. When an English cat sodomizes an English dog it is because of a dialectical relation to Churchillian smoking-cigar-ism.
The claim is that the latter is an alien imposition upon a people who have never wished to separate religion from politics in their every day life and thinking,
fuck off! Everybody wants to separate religion from politics, plumbing or performing fellatio. Why? Politics is about governance. It is a separate field where only those with administrative ability or leadership potential can thrive- unless their Mummy was PM just like her Daddy.
and therefore leaves that people no choice but to turn to the only religious politics allowed by modernity’s stranglehold, i.e. Hindu nationalism.
India only coheres because it is a Hindu nation. Either the Hindus hang together or they will be subjected to the salami tactics of the Muslims, the Christians and the Communists.
Thus secular tyranny
Does Bilgrami mean Indira's Emergency?
breeds Hindu nationalist resistance, which threatens with the promise of its own form of tyranny.
The BJP has been in power for ten years. Where is the tyranny?
Such are the travails that modernity has visited upon us.
Bilgrami, in America, is visited by lots of travails because India is ruled by the BJP. I have written to him suggesting that he tell any such travail which knocks on his door to fuck off. Sadly, Bilgrami feels it is his duty to hospitably perform fellatio upon such unwanted visitors. That is the reason they keep coming back.
There is something convincing about this argument but its explanatory virtues are greatly marred by its narrowing and uncritical anti-nationalism, its skewed historiography, and its traditionalist nostalgia.
Just say 'Hindus are horrible. I hate India' and leave it at that.
What is convincing in it is much more theoretical and methodological than anything that surfaces explicitly in the critique’s articulation. But before I get to that, let me first say something by way of scepticism about some of its central diagnostic claims. First of all, though there is no gainsaying the humanism inherent in Gandhi’s politics, it is also foolish and sentimental to deny the Brahmanical elements in it.
There were none. Gandhi was a Bania given the title of Mahatma by a Kayastha who, on taking Sanyaas, promoted himself to the status of 'Swamy'. At a later point, even Ambedkar- which his two phoren PhDs- turned into a Boddhisattva by virtue of which he is now an irascible avatar of Vishnu worshipped in vast Memorial Parks built by Mayawati.
There is the plain and well-known fact that Gandhi, no less than the Chitpavan nationalist Tilak (however different their nationalist sensibilities were in other respects), encouraged the communal Hindu elements in the national movement by using Hindu symbolism to mobilize mass nationalist feeling. As is also well-known, his support of the reactionary Muslim Khilafat movement had [exactly the same motives and] the same communalist effect on the Muslim population. I won’t say a word more about this since this point is very well understood by many who have studied the national movement, even cursorily.
The deal was cow-protection in return for support for Khilafat. This was sensible because Khilafat was au fond anti-Imperialist and had to do with the fate of Turkey and its former possessions in the MENA where a lot of Indian troops were stationed. However, Gandhi got scared and surrendered unilaterally in 1922 whereas Egypt and Ireland and Afghanistan became independent.
More importantly, there is some strenuous simplification in the critique’s insistence that nationalism was the bad seed that turned a more pristine Hinduism and Islam into communal ideologies in India.
Hindutva is anti-casteist. Arguably, Hindu Scripture is meritocratic, not casteist. Political Islam did have a split between the 'wataniya' Nationalists and the Pan-Islamists. The former were willing to embrace 'Secular Socialism' so as to perpetuate dynastic dictatorships even more horrible than that of Indira's.
Both Nandy and the Hindu Nationalists he is criticizing share an assumption despite their deep differences, the assumption that nationalism is a single and transparently grasped thing.
Which is true enough. Bilgrami is as stupid as shit.
It is not a single category. It is far more omnibus and frustrating to analyze than either Nandy or the Hindu Nationalists allow and for that reason it is unlikely that it can be an explanatory concept at all.
Nonsense! Wherever you look you see only Nation States. Even Empires were a collection of Nation States.
The variety of nationalisms, indeed the variety of ingredients that go into particular nationalisms at different stages and sometimes even at the same stage, make this inevitable.
No. All we can say is that some Nations are more cohesive than others.
As we have been routinely and rightly reminded in other contexts, it would serve no purpose, for instance, to lump together, say, Palestinian Nationalism with Zionist nationalism;
It serves the purpose of creating a Palestinian state
or to lump together German Nationalism in the following four periods: before 1848, after 1918, under Bismarck, and under Nazism.
Yet in studying German Nationalism we have to look at those four periods. Before 1848, the Hapsburgs were the main obstacle in the way of getting rid of the Confederation which had replaced the Holy Roman Empire. The 1866 war enabled Bismarck to create the North German Confederation in which Catholics would have less power. After 1918, there was no reason not to do Anschluss with Austria.
Closer to our specific area of interest, it would be pointless, for instance, to integrate in any explanation, on the one hand Jinnah’s and the Muslim League’s nationalism in its first two decades with, on the other, his nationalism after several frustrated dealings with the Congress party in the twenties and his return to India after his failures in England.
Why? Jinnah and the League wanted a disproportionate share of power in the centre while retaining absolute power in Provinces where they were the majority. The Hindus told them to fuck off. They could have a moth-eaten Pakistan while Muslims in Hindu areas would become second or third class citizens.
Even just these three examples respectively show that nationalism can displace a people from their homeland
Muslims are very good at displacing non-Muslims from their homelands. Look at the Parsis.
or strive to find a state for a displaced people, it can have an intrinsic tie to social democracy, liberal democracy, autocracy, or fascism,
in which case there can be no 'intrinsic' tie.
it can work harmoniously with other communities and its representatives in an anti-imperialist struggle
but not after that struggle succeeds. The various successor states of the Hapsburg Empire had territorial claims against each other. Poland and Hungary were happy to gobble up pieces of Czechoslovakia along side Herr Hitler.
or it can be as divisive of a people in its anti-imperial struggle as the imperialism it struggles against is in the policies by which it rules over the same people.
Nationalism can be very nice. It can cause people to tenderly lick each other's ass-holes. But Nationalism can also be very nasty. It can cause people to sodomize each other in the same way that post-Westphalian cats are incessantly sodomizing dogs. This is because modernity is very evil. It has banished 'enchantment' and prevented Bilgrami from going off with the fairies.
All of these ingredients of nationalism are themselves explained by underlying economic and social forces and interests in different periods, or sometimes warring with one another in the same period. The Indian National Congress, almost throughout its long history, has provided a home for most of these ingredients of nationalism and has, not surprisingly, represented a variety of the underlying social and economic interests. We cannot therefore assume that the failures of Nehru’s secularism are going to be usefully and illuminatingly diagnosed in any terms that give a central and clear place to some transparently grasped notion of ‘nationalism’.
The INC wanted to take over British India, excluding Burma. It came to see that Muslim majority provinces would not accept INC hegemony and thus accepted partition. Sadly, it became factionalist and then wholly Dynastic. However its 'nationalism' can be transparently grasped as a claim to rule a specific territory.
There is a sort of desperate last-ditch retort of those who resist the point I am making here against Nandy’s generalized anti-nationalism. The points remember is not merely that not all nationalisms are bad, but that ‘nationalism’ is not transparently characterizable.
Yes it is. It is a claim to rule a particular territory. True, the armies of other powers may frustrate these claims yet there is a transparent characterization of nationalism in purely geographic terms.
The retort is that for all this lack of transparency, there is an undeniable defining exclusivity which unites all the many kinds of nationalism that I am insisting on.
There may have been a time when 'nationalism' was not geographical. A bunch of guys- e.g. the Franks or the Gujjars- take control of a particular territory it comes to be known by their name- e.g. France & Gujarat. Currently, this is the only type of Nationalism which exists though some countries may be powerful enough to have 'extra-territoriality' such that their citizens have superior rights in foreign countries.
The significance of this claim is highly questionable. One of the frustrating features that go into making “nationalism” the compendious and opaque notion it is, is that some of its most narrowing and tyrannical aspects are a product of it being neurotically inclusivist, (as for example in the national image of Pakistan during Zia’s regime.)
Nonsense! A nation may choose to change its constitution such that it becomes more Socialist or more Theocratic. But this is also true of an Empire or a collection of States ruled by political parties which are ideologically united.
To say, in these contexts, that nationalism is defined upon exclusivity rings false because the fact that it excludes some people or other is innocuous and academic, when compared to the fact that what is most salient about it is that it produces a tin ear for the demands of regional autonomy because of its inclusivism, (in the name of Islam, in our example).
This is nonsense. Inclusivism is perfectly compatible with 'subsidiarity' or devolution of powers. Bilgrami forgets that, in Pakistan, the 'one unit' scheme was imposed by Bogra in 1954. Yahya ended it in 1970. Bilgrami may not understand the meaning of Zia's eighth amendment which was about his power to dissolve the Assembly and dismiss the Premier. It had nothing to do with provincial autonomy.
In these contexts, that inclusivism is its defining feature, the exclusivism is peripheral.
Fuck does this mean?
Now it is possible to respond in defence of Nandy, and in a sense respond correctly, that in most cases of such inclusivism there is an underlying exclusivity having to do with the fact that a set of dominant economic interests at the centre find it necessary to exclude regional interests, particularly the interest of the regional masses, even as they insistently include them superficially into the ideal of the nation (in Pakistan’s case via an appeal to Islamist ideology).
Bilgrami is deeply troubled by the fact that restaurants are 'inclusivist' in that they welcome you to dine with them but they are also 'exclusivist' because they have an overriding economic interest in charging you money for the dishes they serve you. This is the fault of modernity. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia, restaurants were run by pixies who never charged a penny.
That is to say, the inclusivist, unifying nationalist image of an Islamist Pakistan is an ideological perpetration in order for an underlying exclusivist agenda for a dominant, centrist, Punjabi ruling-elite to maintain their hold over the bureaucracy (and the military) and thereby eventually of the investible resources of the economy and the various elements which concentrate it in their hands.
The Bhuttos weren't Punjabi. They started off rich but have gotten a hell of a lot richer.
In the erstwhile Soviet Union (to take another example) the rampant inclusivism that gave no quarter to regional demands for autonomy was also based on an exclusivism of dominant Russian interests at the centre which kept a Russian elite in control of a fantastic-sized state-capitalist apparatus.
Actually, a lot of the top leaders were Ukrainian or Georgian etc.
I don’t wish to quarrel with this interpretation of the inclusivity in nationalism that I was pointing to, as harbouring a deeper and underlying exclusivity in the agenda of ruling elites (in our examples, a Punjabi-dominated or a Russian-dominated ruling elite).
That example fails. Plenty of members of the Pakistani or Soviet elite did not come from the numerically largest linguistic group.
But notice that if we grant its essential correctness,
we are being stupid
we are granting something that takes the burden of the exclusivism away from nationalism to one or other set of economic interests, that is to say from nationalism to an elite-dominated capitalism in its less and more statist forms.
Capitalism is not 'statist'. By definition, Capitalism is a system where investible resources are allocated through financial markets- not the State.
This shift in emphasis however is a concession to my overall criticism that the real work here is not being done by nationalism in the way Nandy requires, but by the quite different categories by which exciusivism is now being explicated.
but Bilgrami's 'categories' cash out as constituent elements of a nation. I am a Tamil Indian because my ancestors come from a place inside India's borders. This does not mean I can speak all the languages of India or that I greatly care about which party is ruling some State I have no connection to. I suppose you can say I am 'included' in the category 'Indian' but excluded from the category which defines the single largest 'mother tongue' linguistic community- viz. Hindi speakers.
If that’s what is doing the real work, it makes no distinctive point to say that it is nationalism that is the bad seed that accounts for the failure of Nehru’s secularism.
Nehru's secularism was inherited from the Raj's secularism. It didn't fail. Modi runs the country in a perfectly secular manner. It is a different matter that his proud Hindu identity is attractive to the vast majority of Indians. Still, if he appointed people on the basis of their piety rather than their ability, then governance would worsen and voters would give him the order of the boot.
With such exclusivism, we have come such a distance from Nandy’s critique that we cannot recognize it as his position any more. I don’t doubt that Nandy has it in mind to integrate capitalism too with statism, nationalism, modernity, and secularism in a single apocalyptic diagnosis.
why not also mention cats sodomising dogs?
But this does not mean that this interpretation of an exclusivist element in nationalism can be assimilated to his critique.
Sure it can. Nandy is a Bengali Christian. He thinks the fucking Marwaris and Jains and Gujju Banias are running everything while the poor Bengali just keeps getting more and more PhDs.
Even if there is no denying the fact that the regional elite economic interests surrounding capital which gave rise to the exclusivism in our examples are distinctly interests of the modern period, and even if they are often accompanied by secular postures, the weight of analysis in Nandy’s integrated diagnosis is not on these interests but on very different elements. As a result this interpretation which stresses these interests need not in any way be implicated in his overall critique of modernity and secularism at all.
Nandy was merely saying that the Lutyen's elite had become deracinated and disrespectful of the religious traditions of the country. Thus, they would be disintermediated.
So I will return to his position proper rather than this defence of his position, which is no defence at all, but its abandonment.
Bilgrami can't understand what Nandy is saying. Admittedly, Nandy wasn't actually saying anything at all. But, that is generally the case with buddhijivis.
These remarks about the bootlessness of using ‘nationalism’ to explain anything only begin to uncover the misidentifications in Nandy’s diagnosis of the failure of Nehruvian secularism.
Nandy merely pointed out that 'secular' politicians used caste and creed to establish vote-banks. They would also organize communal violence if it suited their interests. Thus babbling about 'secularism' was deeply silly.
Lying behind the uncritical anti-nationalism is a specific sort of naiveté in the critique’s historiography. As I said, Nandy makes much of the idea that religions as tolerant ways of life in the sense that Gandhi embraced and promoted were undermined by the ideological religious constructions and institutions of modernity.
Modernity means the world as it is now. In ancient times there were plenty of fairies and pixies and Muslims cuddling with Hindus. Then the times became modern and ideas about fairies and pixies faded away. 'Ideology', which is a Sciencey word, replaced mythology. Fairies disappeared and it turned out Muslims kept cutting kaffir throats whenever it was safe for them to do so.
In the case of Hinduism, it is the Brabmanical ideological constructions which distracted from the pluralist and quotidian religious habits of ordinary people.
In which case, the thing happened three thousand years ago.
But such a historiography, with its crude periodisation in such categories as ‘modernity’, hides the fact that all the basic elements in the construction of Brahmanism (especially in North India) were in place well before the deliverances of modernity. This should give us general pause about the somewhat glib tendency to say that communalism like nationalism is a purely ‘modem’ phenomenon.
More particularly because Muslims and Christians have massacred plenty of Hindus centuries ago.
The idea of a monolithic, majoritarian, pseudo-unifying Hinduism is, as we tend to say today, a “construct”. This is indeed what Nandy says about it.
Because his ancestors converted to Christianity.
But as construction often will, the process goes back a long way into the recesses of Indian history and has helped to perpetuate the most remarkably resilient inegalitarian social formation in the world.
It isn't inegalitarian at all. You are welcome to work hard and become rich. You can always pay a Brahmin or a Shraman to elevate your social status. If the local priests won't oblige, bring in some from a distant part of India and they will be happy to magnify your status. Within a couple of generations your sept will be known to be descended from the Sun and the Moon.
It is the product of a sustained effort over centuries on the part of the upper castes to sustain their hold not only on the bases of political power but on the Hindu psyche.
By getting hold of money and power. If you have both, you can pay to become not just upper caste but a veritable God in human form- unless you would prefer to be a mermaid or a unicorn.
Brahmanical ascendancy had its ancient origins in a priesthood
Brahmins are priests. So what Bilgrami is saying is priesthood has its origins in priesthood.
which made its alliances with kings and their officials as well as with the landed gentry. Through the control of religious ritual and the language of ritual—Sanskrit—and with the force of the Kshatriyas (the predominantly military caste) behind them it gradually created a nation-wide hegemony for the upper castes.
This is silly. Sanskrit was spread by Buddhism and Jainism (which were founded by Kshatriyas) as well as by Brahmins. It is likely that Saivite and Vaishnavite and other devotional lineages focused on local deities opted for, or were elevated, to Brahmin status over the centuries. But plenty of 'Kshatriya' lineages were elevated in a similar manner. There was an 'upper caste' but its composition changed for economic and military reasons.
Under both the feudal rulers during the period of Muslim rule and later in the colonial state, upper caste Hindus flourished in the state apparatus.
Or those who flourished became upper caste. Consider the Kayastha 'writer' caste. It is high status whatever its origins might have been.
And in the colonial period this abiding hold over the centres of power, aided by the codifications of language and custom in the Orientalist discursive space, allowed this Brahminical ideological tradition to co-opt all efforts at the reform of Hinduism, from the Arya Samaj movement in the north to the BrahmoSarnaj movement in Bengal;
both were started by Brahmins. How could they be 'co-opted'? It is true that the leaders of these movements could be Khattri (like Swamy Shraddanand) or Kayastha (like Keshab Chandra Sen or Vivekananda) but nobody greatly cared because Godmen or Godwomen can be of any class or region.
even intellectual and social movements which started with the avowed intention to raise the status and the political consciousness of the lower-castes deteriorated into either elitist or anti-Muslim organizations.
is Bilgrami taking a dig at Ambedkarites?
I say all this to stress that the construction began to take shape much before the onset of modernity. And it does no favours to historical understanding to let the periodization inherent in the very category of ‘modernity’ and its opposites (however we describe them, whether as ‘pre-Enlightenment’ or ‘post-modern’) shape from the outside how we must diagnose and explain particular social phenomena.
To diagnose and explain stuff you need to be smart. Bilgrami is as stupid as shit. Nandy may have written nonsense but he was Bengali so that was alright.
When any such political or social phenomenon (such as Brahmanism, which is central to Nandy’s identification of the modern source of communalism)
even though communalism does not exist in some states where there is Brahmanism- e.g. Tamil Nadu- and does exist in places where Brahmins are either missing or else politically impotent- e.g Punjab.
has a deep and longstanding antecedent strain, it is better to adopt a historiography that places upon it, particular and different historical explanations for why the phenomenon with some abiding core characteristics shifts its saliencies or takes on new complexions or why it increase its levels and thresholds of urgency in different historical periods.
Why bother? The plain fact is 'communalism' in India exists because Muslims are violent to kaffirs. So are Christians if they have numbers on their side. There can also be a Sikh communalism which thinks it great fun to shoot Hindus. The trouble is, Hindus can give as good as they get, if they are the majority.
To take an example of the latter: despite the long history of the Brahmanical construction, the particularly frenzied communal passion of the Hindu nationalists that have been unleashed in the last four years can partly be explained as a violent, and in many respects fascistically modelled, effort to arrest the quickly accumulated ideological effects of recent efforts to undermine Brahmanical hegemony, and to expose the dissimulations of a unified, majoritarian Hindu society by adopting affirmative action policies in favour of the backward castes.
Bilgrami means the Mandal Commission report and the extension of affirmative action to the OBCs. He thought the 'Mandir' issue was led by Brahmins. But Advani wasn't Brahmin. Nor were Yogi Adityanath or Uma Bharati. In any case, the higher castes could be appeased by creating an 'Economically backward' category.
I make this point with a very specific theoretical end in mind, which is to show that local historical explanations can be given for the changes and the rise and fall of intensity in what is a longstanding social phenomenon.
The local historical explanation for the 'war on terror' which killed 1.3 million Muslims was that some Muslims be kray kray. Killing kaffirs, though praiseworthy, can cause kaffirs to bomb the shit out of you.
Nandy’s own appeal to various aspects of the modem and colonial period in the understanding of Hindu nationalism should, I believe, be read as local in precisely this way rather than in the way he presents them, (though obviously it is a good deal less local than the particular explanation I have just rehearsed of the most recent communal outburst).
Hindus irrespective of caste want a big temple at Ram's birthplace. The Supreme Court gave them what they wanted. They are happy now. There have hardly been any Muslim riots or terrorist incidents because the Government is expected to simply kill or incarcerate troublemakers while using the bulldozer on un-authorised buildings owned by Muslims.
This reading lowers the high-profile given to periodization in Nandy’s implicit historiography,
not to mention his implicit belief that cats are sodomizing dogs all over the place
and hence allows us to say something very different from his main claim. It allows us to say
something even sillier than that silly Bengali.
that to the extent that categories such as ‘modernity’ have explanatory force at all, it is only because this or that aspect of modern life and polity offer local explanations of local changes in non-local phenomena (such as Brahmanism) that often predate modernity.
This is silly. 'Modernity' means imitating affluent city folk who are themselves busy imitating cool pop stars or Hollywood idols. At one time, Indian movies made heroes out of ineffectual drunkards like Devdas. Then the cult of the tough guy hero took over. Hinduism became muscular because suddenly muscles were cool. Weeping into your whiskey while reciting heart-broken ghazals was passe.
Now this last point has no small effect on how we must think of Nandy’s own alternative to the Nehruvian secular ideal, for which he is right to resist the label ‘secularism’, in fact which he is happy to call ‘anti-secularism’. If the construction of a unified, Brahmanical version of Hinduism, which (on Nandy’s own account) is the basis of Hindu nationalism,
it isn't. Guru Gobind Singh was the beau ideal. Vivekananda demanded the 'Kshatriyaization' of Hinduism. Nehru, deriding the 'Baniaism' of the age demanded 'Brahminization' by which he meant Pundits proficient in 'Scientific' Socialism should fuck over the Economy. Gandhi chose Nehru as his successor because he knew that the fellow would make India poorer- i.e. closer to God- and weaker- i.e. more addicted to Ahimsa and getting fucked in the ass by all and sundry.
pre-dates modernity, a question arises as to what new complexion it did acquire in colonial and post-colonial India?
This is silly. Previously, Hindu nationalism was about getting behind Hindu Princes- preferably those who defeated Mlecchas. Then it became obvious that Kings and Emperors were shit. The 'Hindu Rashtra' would have to be a Republic.
The answer is that what electoral politics in the provinces under the last many decades of British rule, as well as certain forces in the national movement, brought into this construction is a growing mass element.
Bilgrami forgets that A.O Hume, who set up the INC, was a vegetarian Vedantist who believed cow-protection was essential for agronomic reasons. The Theosophists too thought India was a very special place which would produce a universal messiah though, under Annie Beasant, they also wanted Indian home rule. I should mention that Beasant had been an associate of Bradlaugh, the atheist, who was also a friend of the man who first used the word 'secularism'. Beasant returned to religion through Theosophy. Motilal Nehru had been a Theosophist and Jawaharlal's tutor (he was initially home-schooled) was one of Beasant's crew.
And industrialization introduced a more variegated caste-complexion through a co-opting of the commercial castes into the constructed hegemony of a monolithic Hinduism.
Fuck off! The 'commercial castes' were great sponsors of Hinduism and Jainism. They were particularly important in theistic sects like the Pushti-marg to which the Mahatma's father belonged.
This answer is by no means complete, but the instructive underlying moral I want to stress is that once we give up the primacy of periodization and accept the fact of the accumulation and consolidation of long-present tendencies in our understanding of Hindu nationalism,
Bilgrami does not understand Hinduism. To be fair, he also does not understand Islam.
we are less likely to think of these modern consolidations of it as effaceable for a return to a more traditional Hindu mentality that Nandy favours.
Nandy, being Christian, did not understand that Hinduism, Brahminical or otherwise, incorporated 'folk elements'. True, boring Brahmos may have tried to 'decontaminate' Hinduism of its folk elements, turn it into a classical Vedantic faith' but this was only because the orthodox Hindus considered them to have lost caste or not had very much of it in the first place. Thus, this was merely a case of one-upmanship.
The current idiom which has it that such social phenomena as Brahmanical Hinduism are ‘constructed’, and to which I have succumbed, must now have its bluff called.
in which case, it might strip off all its clothes, stick a radish up its bum and run around in the buff.
“Construction” implies that there are constructs. And constructs are not figments,
a figment is something imaginary. So is a construct if its contents relate to imaginary things
though the anti-objectivist philosophical commitment that leads to the rhetoric of ‘constructivism’ in the first place may tempt us to think so.
This is silly. A constructivist does not think an 'inaccessible cardinal' is a dude who is fucking choir-boys in some remote location.
They cannot then be thought of as effaceable, nor even easily malleable, simply by virtue of having been diagnosed as ‘constructions’.
Constructions can be destroyed or effaced or changed into something else even if they are imaginary. But this is also true of things which were not constructed. That rock over there can be blown up with dynamite or else bits of it can be chopped off.
They are as real and often as entrenched as anything that any more traditional idiom and objectivist philosophical tendency described.
No. They are less real. You can't fuck Jessica Rabbit because she is imaginary. I was laughed at when I claimed she was my girl friend by the very same people who had expressed sympathy when I regaled them with tales of my deflowering at the hands of Mrs Thatcher.
So the more subdued and low-profile understanding of historical periodization suggested above should instruct us that we would do better to recognize constructs, not as figments, but as fused into the polity, and into the sensibility of citizens, and increasingly consolidated by modern developments;
This is silly. If you beat a Hindu sufficiently he will generally concede that Hinduism is a false religion and be willing to convert to the true religion of the peaceful community.
and therefore instruct us in turn to look instead for constraints to be placed upon them rather than to think in terms of their eradication or effacement.
You can eradicate the kaffir. You can't 'constrain' the fellow from anything save by beating or killing him.
The separatist electoral politics which were first introduced by the British
because Muslims demanded it
and whose vote-bank mentality is now entrenched in a functioning formal democracy, as well as all the other institutions of modern statecraft and an increasingly modern economy, are not exactly disposable features of the Indian political sensibility.
Yet, vote-banks don't matter if Hindus have to unite against an enemy- e.g. Sikh terrorism. But this is also true if better governance is on offer- look at Modi.
It goes without saying that there may and should be fruitful and sensible discussion about matters regarding the deliverances of modernity—about matters such as: should there be so much stress on capital-intensive technologies, should there be so much centralized government, etc.
Fuck off! The discussions about such things were wholly fruitless.
But even if we laid a great deal more stress on labour intensive technologies, even if we stressed decentralized local government and autonomy much more than we have done so far, this would not coincide with Nandy’s conception of a pre-modern political psyche where there will be no potential for the exploitation of one’s communal identity in the political spheres of election and government.
If Hindus aren't being killed by non-Hindus, they- like every other people- vote on the basis of their economic or national security interests rather than focus on their religious identity.
These spheres are by now entrenched in Indian society and just for that reason the sense in which religion is relevant to politics today cannot any longer be purely spiritual or quotidian and ritualistic as Nandy’s somewhat selectively Gandhian politics envisages.
Nandy was Bengali. All he was saying was 'the Left Front is shit. Why can't the Bengali Hindu see this? Why do they keep voting for those goons?' Obviously, Nandy couldn't actually say this in plain terms. So he gassed on about Gandhi and Nehru.
It is, in turn, just for this reason again that Nehruvian secularism thought it best to separate religion from politics,
No. Nehru wanted to pass the Hindu Code bills because, as he said in his autobiography, his own family had suffered under the old laws by which, for example, his sister was not allowed to marry a Jain non-Brahmin save by pretending to convert to the Brahmo creed. The fact is, one reason Hindus wanted democracy was because the Legislature could get rid of 'holier than thou' status competition with regard to rules regarding marriage, inheritance, etc.
because given the existence of these spheres it thought the linking of politics with religion could only be exploited for divisive and majoritarian ends.
No. Back then, people believed that religion was the opium of the masses. Nehru thought that the peasant wasted his wealth on pointless religious ceremonies intended to get him a nice mansion in Heaven. That is why it was important to ensure that the peasant could not grow enough food to feed his own family- forget about the Nation at large.
It seems to me quite one-sided then to place the blame for Hindu nationalism on its internal dialectical opposition to Nehru’s secularism, for it seems quite wrong under these circumstances of electoral democracy that are here to stay, to see a yearning to bring religion back into politics as something that is an “innocent” protest against the tyrannies of Nehru’s secularism.
Bilgrami didn't get that Hindus like Lord Ram and would love to visit a big Temple for Him at his birthplace.
It misdescribes matters to say that the yearning itself is innocent but modernity disallows the yearning to be fulfilled by anything but a divisive communalism.
Very true. Ethnic cleansing is a good thing because it gets rid of 'divisive communalism'.
The right thing to say is that in these circumstances of an ineradicable modernity, particularly if one views modernity as a fallen and sinful condition, the yearning of a religious people to bring their religion into politics cannot, simply cannot, any longer be seen as obviously innocent.
Sure it can. If people genuinely want something they are welcome to vote for the party which promises to get it for them. The 'sickularist' claims that every time a kaffir engages in his idolatrous worship it is only because the kaffir is maliciously trying to hurt the sentiments of the peaceful community. Moreover, men only pretend they enjoy sticking their dicks into vaginas so as to hurt the feelings of those who think that dicks only belong up their own rectums.
For its entry into politics is fraught with precisely the dangers that Nehru and his followers. say, dangers that have been realized in scarcely credible proportions of menace in the last three years.
Some Muslims ran amok after the destruction of the Babri Masjid. They were stomped. Compared to the Punjab quagmire, there was scarcely any 'menace' or other danger to the polity. True, the BJP rose a little, but so did caste based Samajwadi parties. Congress declined but this was inevitable. After the death of Sanjay, it didn't have an effective leader. I may mention that it was Sanjay and Kamal Nath who interviewed Sikh preachers and who settled on Bhrindinwale as their best chance to split the Jat Sikh vote. Had Sanjay lived, he could have managed Bhrindinwale and Punjab would have been spared a decade of bloodshed. Rajiv could have done smart things but was reckless when caution was called for and cautious when there was no good reason to be so.
Though the underlying flaw in the prevalent anti-Nehru intellectual climate is to misdescribe the sense in which religion may enter politics in India, given the realities of a slowly consolidating democracy and modem state, this is by no means to suggest that the Nehruvian insistence on a separation of religion from politics is feasible either.
There was no such separation. True, it had existed under the Brits but this was annoying to Hindus who wanted a uniform civil code so as to put an end to wasteful status competition between endogamous jatis.
Indeed my acknowledging that his secularism amounted to no more than a holding process is an acknowledgement of the unfeasibility of that separation in a country with the unique colonial and post- colonial history of communal relationships that India has witnessed.
Bilgrami is a fool. Nehru, like other Hindus, wanted Parliament to intervene in religious matters so Hindus could rise up without 'losing caste' or having to worry about a lawsuit seeking to disinherit them because their parents were 'swa-gotra' or other such nonsense. Still, Nehru, like many people back in the Fifties, thought 'Scientific Socialism' was a magical way to rise up rapidly. It was believed that the priests, in alliance with Princes and landlords, would try to brainwash the superstitious masses to passively resist the Five Year Plan by sticking their heads up their own butts. As Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyay mathematically proved, using only the Pontryagin principle, heads must only be inserted into the rectum of the control Hamiltonian as incarnated by Sukhomoy Chakraborty because, lets face it, no bigger asshole can be conceived.
Neither the pre-modem conception of an innocent spiritual integration of religion and politics,
The King should be the defender of the Faith of the people. He should not force them to whore after false gods.
nor the Nehruvian separation of religion and politics can cope with the demands of Indian political life today.
The Muslims refused to let the Courts or Parliament itself reform their personal laws. So what? Nobody greatly cared- except maybe Arif Mohammad Khan.
What I see as a strand of truth in the contemporary critique of Nehru is roughly this. Nehru’s secularism was indeed an imposition.
Nehru couldn't impose shit. He wanted to protect Delhi's Muslims but couldn't do shit even though he was Prime fucking Minister.
But the sense in which it is an imposition is not that it was a modem intrusion into an essentially traditionalist religious population.
There was no fucking imposition. The Hindu Code Bills just meant that you could escape vexatious litigation. Nobody had to change their actual customary practices. On the other hand, cow protection legislation in UP was brought in at the same time as the Hindu Code. But cow protection is a Directive Principle in the Constitution.
It is not that because as I said the population under an evolving electoral democracy throughout this century willy nilly has come to see religion entering politics in non-traditionalist modem political modes. It is an imposition rather in the sense that it assumed that secularism stood outside the substantive arena of political commitment.
The Brits were secular. Holyoake told his fellow Brits that if India could be ruled in a secular manner why not Britain? What great purpose had been served by putting Holyoake in jail for blasphemy?
It had a constitutional status, indeed it was outside even of that, it was in the preamble to the constitution
Secularism wasn't in the Constitution till Indira put it there during the Emergency.
. It was not in there with Hinduism and Islam as one among substantive contested political commitments to be negotiated as any other contested commitment must be negotiated, one with the other.
There were Socialist and Marxist parties, some avowedly atheistic- e.g. Periyar's Dravidar Kazhagam- along side the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League. However, it must be said, Congress was the high caste Hindu party par excellence.
I should immediately warn against a facile conflation. It may be thought that what I am doing is pointing to an imposition by the state of a doctrine of secularism upon a people who have never been secular in this sense. And in turn it may be thought that this is not all that different from Nandy’s (and others’) charge of an imposition made against Nehru, since states which impose entire ways of life upon a people are wholly a project of modernity.
Because Akhenaten didn't live over three thousand years ago. He was actually the fifth member of the Beatles- right?
Let me leave aside for now the, in any case dubious, idea that only modem states impose ways of life upon people, dubious because it seems to me a wholly unjustified extrapolation to go from the fact that the scale of imposition that modem states are capable of implementing is larger, to the idea that it is a novelty of the modern state to impose ways of life.
Only modern states can impose a modern way of life- e.g. Ataturk forcing his people to wear hats rather than the tarboush.
That is not the conflation I had in mind. The conflation is the failure to see that in charging Nehru with imposing a non-negotiated secularism, I am saying something quite orthogonal to the charge that his was a statist imposition. Perhaps his was a statist imposition, but that is not what my charge is claiming. Rather it is claiming that what the state imposed was not a doctrine that was an outcome of a negotiation between different communities.
The state imposed nothing. It passed a law which would prevent vexatious litigation and permit people to live better lives without being hindered by stupid customary laws. However, there was no element of compulsion to this.
As for 'negotiation between different communities', the plain fact is the Muslims didn't want a uniform civil code and, to date, there isn't one- save in Uttarakhand. Let us see if it survives judicial scrutiny.
This critique cannot be equated with a critique of statism,
yes it is. Bilgrami says the state can impose things which have not been negotiated. In other words, it can act arbitrarily. That is a criticism of statism.
leave alone modem statism, because it may be quite inevitable in our times that, at least at the centre, and probable also in the regions, even a highly negotiated secularism may have to be adopted and implemented by the state (no doubt ideally after an inflow of negotiation from the grass-roots).
Bilgrami lives in America. Separation of Church and State is in the Constitution. No further negotiation occurs or is required.
There is no reason to think that a skepticism about Nehru’s secularism along these lines should amount in itself to a critique of the very idea of statehood, because there is nothing inherent in the concept of the state, which makes it logically impossible that it should adopt such a substantive, negotiated policy outcome, difficult though it may be to fashion such a state in the face of decades of its imposition of a non-negotiated secularism.
If a democratic state could be imposed on what was, for Centuries, an Empire, why would what Bilgrami asks for be 'difficult'? India could have a uniform civil code easily enough. Maybe Modi will implement this in his next term. But he has already helped Muslim women by getting rid of triple talaq.
Proof of the fact that my critique of Nehru does not coincide with a critique of statehood lies in the fact that the critique applies to a period before independence, i.e., before statehood was acquired.
India was a state. It became a member of the League of Nations in 1919. Various laws were passed during the Twenties and Thirties changing specific aspects of the personal laws of certain sects.
It is very important to point out that Nehru’s failure to provide for a creative dialogue between communities
there was no such failure. Communities could talk to each other inside and outside Legislative Assemblies.
is not just a failure of the immediate post-independence period of policy formulation by the state.
There was no such failure.
There are very crucial historical antecedents to it, antecedents which may have made inevitable the post-independent secularist policies whose non- substantive theoretical status and non-negotiated origins I am criticizing.
Fuck is this nutter talking about? Everything that happened in Legislative Assemblies was negotiated. Nothing was imposed by a Dictator because there was no fucking Dictator.
For two or three decades before independence the Congress under Nehru
Congress only came 'under' Nehru in 1946. Bilgrami is utterly ignorant.
refused to let a secular policy emerge through negotiation between different communitarian voices, by denying at every step in the various conferrings with the British, Jinnah’s demand that the Muslim League represent the Muslims, a Sikh leader represent the Sikhs, and a Harijan leader represent the untouchable community.
That was Gandhi who claimed to be a Harijan Muslim lady who represented everybody and everything.
And the ground for the denial was simply that as a secular party they could not accept that they not represent all these communities.
No. As a National party, the INC claimed to represent the entire Nation just as the Christian Democratic party in Germany claims to represent all Germans, not just Christian ones.
Secularism thus never got the chance to emerge out of a creative dialogue between these different communities.
There was no fucking 'creative dialogue'.
It was sui generis.
No. It was on the Irish pattern.
This Archimedean existence gave secularism procedural priority but in doing so it gave it no abiding substantive authority.
Nonsense! The INC was nationalist. The Raj was secular. People like Beasant and Gandhi and Azad were religious figures.
As a result it could be nothing more than a holding process, already under strain in the time of its charismatic architect, and increasingly ineffective after his death.
Fuck is this nutter talking about? Nehru presided over a vast ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Shastri didn't but would have if India had lost the '65 war.
It is this archimedeanism of doctrine,Wikipedia says 'In moral theory, the Archimedean point is that position one must occupy, if one's own decisions are to possess the moral force needed to govern the moral realm'. Congress acquired its 'archimedean' point through Gandhian 'satyagraha'- i.e. non violence and passive resistance. Sadly, Gandhi- not Nehru- was not prepared to 'negotiate' with other 'communities' at the Second Round Table Conference. Remarkably, he managed to piss off not just the Muslims and Dalits but also the Sikhs and the non-Brahmin Madrasis. When Congress formed Provincial Governments in 1937, it promoted Hindus at the expense of more deserving Muslims or Parsis (in the opinion of Azad) while its schools, under the Wardha scheme, appeared to Muslims to be doing Hindu propaganda.
and not its statist imposition, that I think is the deepest flaw in Nehru’s vision and it has nothing essential to do with modernity and its various Nandian cognates: Rationality, Science, Technology, Industry.
The 'archimedean' doctrine of Nehru, Indira, Rajiv, Atal and Modi is one and the same. They are Hindus determined to raise up Hindu India. Muslims are welcome to fuck off to Pakistan. Sikhs, sadly, must remain with us because they are good at fighting.
Though I believe it with conviction, given the brevity with which I have had to make this criticism of Nehru, I should add several cautionary remarks in order to be fair to Nehru’s position. For one thing, I do not mean to suggest that Jinnah and the Muslim League represented the mass of the Muslim people at these stages of the anti-colonial movement; he only represented the urban middle-class and was not in an ideal position to play a role in bringing about the sort of negotiated ideal of secularism that I am gesturing at.
The odd thing about Jinnah, or the Aga Khan for that matter, was that they ended up fulfilling the dream of the less affluent Doab Muslim which really was for a kaffir-free state. Sadly, not all could emigrate to it and, at a later point, some Muhajirs felt they had received step-motherly treatment.
Muslim elites would have done better in a united India. In Pakistan they were overshadowed by the Army. Sadly, courage in battle is not a function of social standing and you can't rise in the Army unless you have shown such courage.
Nor am I suggesting that these various elitist fora at which Jinnah demanded communal representation
Jinnah was not a member of the 1906 Simla deputation. He only joined the League in 1913 and advocated joint-electorates. However, a parting of the ways was inevitable because all Muslim leaders- including Azad- wanted a disproportionate share of power. Once Hindus understood that Muslims could not be bamboozled, they had no further use for the Muslim majority areas where, sooner or later, kaffirs would have their throats slit unless they converted.
could be the loci for the sort of creative dialogue between communities that would have been necessary.
There had been such dialogue. Muslims would give up beef in return for Hindu support for Turkey. This was doable but Gandhi didn't fucking do it. It turned out the Viceroy- a Jew- had done more for Khilafat than the Mahacrackpot.
However, neither of these cautionary remarks spoil the general point of my criticism of Nehru’s position.
Bilgrami's criticism is based on ignorance. He believed Nehru had been leading Congress for decades before Independence. On the other hand, it is true that Nehru was Congress President in 1937 and showed a certain ruthlessness against not just Muslims- whom not all Hindus hate- but also Bengalis- whom all non-Bengalis resent because of their superior educational and cultural attainment.
The general point was to call attention to the horizon of Congress high command thinking about secularism in the pre-independence period,
Nehru, to his credit, was no big fan of khaddar and Nai Talim and other such mumbo jumbo.
a horizon on which any conception of a negotiated ideal of secularism was not so much as visible.
The Muslims were right to want to get away from Gandhian craziness and Nehruvian Socialistic stasis. Sadly, Pakistanis can be just as stupid as Indians at least when it comes to Socialist panaceas.
Putting Jinnah and the elitist conferrings aside, the fact is that even Congress Muslim leaders such as Azad were never given a prominent negotiating voice in a communal dialogue with their Hindu counterparts in conferrings within the supposedly mass party of which they were members.
Azad and other Muslim leaders more than earned their keep by acting as peace-makers when Hindu Congressmen fell out with each other. However, as acolytes of the Mahacrackpot, they obviously couldn't say to the Hindus 'in return for paying lip service to your stupid shibboleths like 'khaddar' and 'Nai Talim' kindly give us one or two Premierships in Congress ruled States'. On the other hand, Jinnah's crew found no difficulty in negotiating with Ambedkar's pal- J.N Mandal whom Jinnah made his Law Minister. Sadly, Mandal had to run away to India soon enough.
The question of the need for such a dialogue within the party in order to eventually found a substantive secularism in the future never so much as came up.
There was dialogue and the upshot was no uniform civil code. Muslims don't want 'substantive secularism' because they have a little thing called 'Sharia'. That is the archimedean principle of Islam.
The transcendent ideal of secularism Nehru assumed made such a question irrelevant.
Nehru studied botany and passed the bar exams. He wouldn't have known a 'transcendental ideal' from a fucking hole in the ground. All that Nehru was saying was 'we must cultivate Scientific temperament because cultivating cauliflowers is too much hard work. Instead of 'gobi manchurian' we can dine heartily on whatever it is that Einstein keeps gassing on about.'
However, the last and most important of the cautionary remarks
Bilgrami is a caution, right enough.
I wish to make might be seen as attempting to provide an answer to this line of criticism of Nehru. It is possible that Nehru and the Congress leadership assumed something which to some extent is true; that the Congress Party was a large and relatively accommodating and (communally speaking) quite comprehensively subscribed nationalist party in a way that the Muslim League had ceased to be.
Because only Muslims want to join a League for Muslims. However, in 1939 Gandhi wrote an article saying that Congress was a Hindu party. If the Brits left without handing over the Army to the INC, the Muslims and the Punjabis (regardless of creed) would conquer the country. Would they also sodomize the Hindus? No. This is because the Ahimsa fairy would protect the anal cherries of the Hindus and perhaps also the Harijans if they gave up meat and alcohol.
And on the basis of that premise, they could draw the conclusion that an implicitly and tacitly carried out negotiation between the component elements in the subscription was already inherent in the party’s claims to being secular.
There were explicit negotiations of this sort. An example is the 1937 Congress decision to sing only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram.
In other words the secularism of a party, premised on the assumption of such a comprehensive communal subscription, had built into it by its very nature (that is what I mean by ‘tacitly’ or implicitly) the negotiated origins I am denying to it.
So Bilgrami is denying something which he knows to be true.
This is a subtle and interesting argument which I think had always been in the back of Nehru’s mind in his rather primitively presented writings and speeches on secularism.
Nehru, strange as this may sound, was actually less stupid than Bilgrami.
And I think the argument needs scrutiny not dismissal.
This fellow needs his screws tightened.
I say that this argument was at the back of Nehru’s mind partly because it was often pushed into the background by the rhetoric of a quite different argument that Nehru voiced, which was roughly the argument of the Left programme, viz., that a proper focus on the issue of class and the implementation of a leftist program of economic equality would allow the nation to bypass the difficulties that issued from religious and communal differences.
To be fair, Nehru, like many Leftists, assumed that Stalin's Five year plans were a big success. The Left was saying 'the poor can have a much better material standard of living' whereas Gandhi was saying that everybody should live like a starving peasant.
Speaking generally, this argument is a very attractive one. However, except for a few years in the nineteen thirties even Nehru did not voice this argument with genuine conviction; and in any case, if he were thinking honestly, he should have known that it would have been empty rhetoric to do so since he must have been well aware that the right-wing of the party was in growing ascendancy in Congress politics despite his central presence, and there was no realistic chance of the programme being implemented.
No. Nehru was aware that big business houses wanted the State to create big capital intensive enterprises and to do massive infrastructure investment. The Bombay Plan wasn't so different from what Nehru had in mind.
Given that fact, the negotiative ideal of secularism became all the more pressing.
You can give up superstitions and oppressive religious restrictions without negotiating with people of a different faith. There is no 'negotiative ideal of secularism'. There can, however be legislation which promotes it. But, if this is done through Parliament then there is bound to be some discussion and negotiation. The fact is Ambedkar and Nehru didn't want 'Secularism' put into the Constitution. In November 1948, Prof. K.T Shah, representing Bihar, proposed the following amendment “India shall be a Secular, Federal, Socialist Union of States.” Ambedkar pointed out that 'Secular' was redundant. The Constitution claimed no divine origin. It came from the people's representatives- not their priests. 'Federal' was anathema because that was what the League had wanted. Hindus felt they needed a strong unitary state to defend themselves now the Brits had slyly fucked off. Nehru did get Congress to commit to Socialism some 7 years later.
And it is to some extent arguable that it should have been pressing anyway.
Why? Only if your Constitution claims sacred origins would it not be au fond secular.
To return to what I am calling Nehru’s argument from “implicit’ negotiation for his secularism,
no such thing existed. Nehru wasn't religious. Thus he was secular.
I strongly suspect that scrutiny of the argument will show, not so much that its premise (about the Congress Party’s comprehensive communal subscription) is false, but that the very idea of ‘implicit’ or ‘tacit’ negotiation, which is derived from the premise and which is crucial to the argument, is not an idea that can in the end be cashed out theoretically by any confirmational and evidential procedure.
only if you ignore evidence for actual negotiations such as occurred within Congress when a compromise re. Vande Mataram- which kids in Wardha type schools had to recite- was reached. Muslims wanted the whole thing gone but settled for the omission of five stanzas which mentioned Goddess Durga.
As a term of art or theory ‘implicit negotiation’ (unlike the real thing: negotiation) yields no obvious or even unobvious inferences that can be observed which will confirm or infirm its explanatory theoretical status.
There was explicit negotiation. Still, there can also be 'implicit' negotiation which is operationalizable in a game theoretic manner. When threat points change, they may not be explicitly mentioned, but the consequences are observable.
Hence the argument is not convincing because there is no bridge that takes one from the idea that an anti-colonial movement and a post-colonial party is “composite” (a favourite word of the Congress to describe its wide spectrum of communal representation) to the idea that it stands for a substantive secularism.
Perhaps Bilgrami is thinking of the Iqbal-Madani debate. Madani was for composite nationalism, i.e. Hindu-Muslim unity as the precondition for Independence. Iqbal wanted a separate Islamic state starting with autonomy for Muslim majority provinces. The 'bridge to substantive secularism' would be provided by the Socialist theory that as economic exploitation was ended, men would become free of the illusions associated with 'the opium of the masses'.
My point is that to claim that the mere fact of “compositeness” amounts to an “implicit” negotiation among the compositional communal elements which would yield such a secularism, is a sophistical move which does nothing to bridge that gap in the argument.
In which case there is no argument- merely a gap- because nothing can be implicit. Thus, when I walk down a narrow street and see a big muscular hooligan approaching me, no 'implicit negotiation' occurs when I bow obsequiously and flatten myself against one side of the road so the big fellow can stride past me without altering his gait. It is not the case that my behaviour was designed to placate the fellow. On the contrary I would have flattened myself against the side of the street even if I was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.
It is a mere fraudulent labelling of a non-existing bridging argumentative link between “compositeness” and, what I am calling, a “substantive” secularism.
which means precisely nothing unless no behaviour whatsoever is motivated by sacred considerations.
The label “implicit” just serves to hide the fact that the commitment to genuine negotiation (which alone could build the necessary bridge from the party’s compositeness to a substantive secularism) was manifestly avoided by the Congress party.
Nonsense! Back in those days, Congress sessions were big tent affairs with lots and lots of explicit negotiation going on all over the place. However, it was atheistic or Marxist parties which, though composite in the sense that people of any creed or linguistic group could join them, were committed to battling religion and creating a purely secular society from which 'the opium of the masses' had been banished.
In reaction to this failure it would be a mistake to formulate an alternative vision of secularism which harked back nostalgically to the idea of a pre-modern India.
Yet, that is what obtains. It is a fact that some Muslims and Christians want to pray in Hindu temples because they have faith in Hindu deities. The Madras High Court has clarified that they can do so provided they certify that this is the case to the Temple authorities. It is 'common knowledge' that Indians were like the Chinese in that they preferred to hedge their bets and get in the good books of all the various Gods for whom Temples and Churches and Mosques have been built.
Since, as I have argued, the sense in which it is a failure is not so much to do with it being a modernist imposition on a traditional people, but rather with its rarefied nonnegotiable status,
In a parliamentary democracy any justiciable matter is negotiable inside and outside the Legislature. There could have been a negotiated settlement to the Janmabhoomi dispute.
the right reaction to it should be to acknowledge that secularism can only emerge as a value by negotiation between the substantive commitments of particular religious communities.
Why acknowledge what is obviously false? Holyoake invented the term 'secularism' without any fucking negotiation with the Anglicans or the Catholics or the Dissenters.
It must emerge from the bottom up with the moderate political leadership of different religious communities negotiating both procedure and substance, negotiating details of the modern polity, primarily the codification of law.
But that's not how Secularism emerged in England. Bradlaugh was refused his seat in the Commons though re-elected four times. Since 'affirmation' had been permitted in Courts since 1870, it was perverse of the Commons not to permit Bradlaugh to affirm rather than take the oath. Even when he offered to take the oath he was refused. It was only in 1885 that the new Speaker allowed him to take the oath. Three years later a Bill was passed allowing 'affirmation' as an alternative for atheists or free-thinkers. But there was no fucking negotiation and nothing 'bottom up' about this strange saga.
In the case of the Hindu codes, there was much deliberation but not negotiation. Muslims wanted no part of codification and nobody wanted to watch them run amok and then got shot.
To take the crucial example in the vital domain of the law, negotiation among leaders and representatives of the different communities may deliver the conclusion that Muslims have better laws for orphans, say, while Hindus have better laws for divorce and alimony; and so on.
That is 'deliberation' not 'negotiation'. Suppose a uniform civil code had been offered in 1955. Muslims and some Hindus may have agreed to support divorce and alimony in return for a concession re. polygamy such that it would be permissible under certain circumstances, e.g. with the permission of the wife, or without such permission if no son has been born to the husband or so as to maintain customary 'Levirate' etc, etc. In practice, these exceptions could be made if it could be established that it was a customary practice of the community in question.
A civil code, had it emerged in this way, would very likely have preempted the present controversy surrounding the idea of a ‘uniform’ civil code.
In the same ways as India having become independent some 15 years before I was born pre-empted any controversy regarding my patriotic gesture in vomiting on Rishi Sunak to further my demand that Home Rule and Dominion status be granted to India without further delay. Anyway, it turned out it wasn't Rishi Sunak but rather my neighbour's cat. Sadly, this has caused some very heated controversy with my neighbour.
By giving participatory negotiating voice to the different communal interests, it would have preempted Muslim fears about the idea of a ‘uniform’ civil code
No it wouldn't. Muslim men may not want four wives, but it is always nice to have that option.
and Hindu resentment at Nehru’s failure to endorse that idea.
till those same Hindus wanted to marry a second wife and saw that a bogus conversion to Islam would permit them to do so.
Because of the archimedean rather than emergent character of India’s adopted secularism,
not to mention Jinnah's secular Pakistan
Nehru and other leaders found themselves inevitably providing special status to Muslim law.
No. It retained the status it had under the secular British Raj.
It was the internal logic of its non-negotiated methodological character that it find this special status the only fair treatment of India’s most substantial minority, thus yielding aggressive resentment among the Hindus which in turn bred reactionary fear of giving up the special status among the Muslims.
The plain fact is that laws which can't be enforced, or which it is not profitable to enforce, don't matter in the slightest.
In short, I am arguing that it is precisely the refusal to acknowledge the existence of communities and communitarian commitments in the first place that leads the state eventually to constantly capitulate to the demands of the most reactionary communal elements within the communities on visible public issues such as, for instance, Ayodhya or the Muslim Women’s Bill.
Rajiv Gandhi did stupid shit because he was a stupid shithead. Then he was blown to pieces because he told a journalist he might send the Army back to Sri Lanka. As for the two issues, Bilgrami mentions, what he does not understand is that it was the Court, in both instances, who set the ball rolling. The Executive was reactive, not proactive. Rajiv fell between two stools. He neither appeased the Muslims nor won over the Hindus. But it was the substantive issue of his own corruption which brought him down as his own cousin and other Dosco chums turned on him.
An alternative secularism, emergent rather than imposed in the specific sense that I have defined,
Bilgrami can't define shit.
sees itself as one among other doctrines such as Islam and Hinduism.
Fuck off! Which type of Secularism promises to get you a nice mansion in Heaven?
Of course there is still a difference of place and function in the polity between secularism and Islam or Hinduism. But once we see it as a substantive doctrine, this difference can be formulated in quite other terms than the way Nehru formulated it.
Nehru had endorsed Russel's 'a Free Man's worship' and his 'Religion and Science'. Sadly, not every Indian could afford to attend Trinity College as Nehru and Russell had done.
In my conception, what makes secularism different from these specific politico-religious commitments
which ones? Building the temple? Telling Muslim women they can't have alimony?
is not any longer that it has an archimedean and non-substantive status,
if it is archimedean and action guiding than there must be some substantive content to it.
but rather that it is an outcome of a negotiation among these specific commitments.
Which isn't the case. Secularism, like Socialism, is not the outcome of a negotiation. It is a stand-alone doctrine. It is a different matter that the manifesto of a Secular (or 'Atheist') or a Socialist Party may be the result of negotiation. However, any type of political party can copy portions of that manifesto if that will get them elected.
This gives secularism a quite different place and function in the polity, and in the minds of citizens, than Islam or Hinduism could possibly have.
Islam gives Muslims stuff they really want- e.g. spacious mosques where they can worship- while Hinduism gives Hindus stuff they really want- e.g. richly adorned Temples where they can seek God's blessings. Secularism gives secularists nothing but verbal diarrhoea.
Yet this difference does not amount to wholesale transcendence from these substantive religious commitments in politics.
If you are secular you will rise higher than any paradise of the religious. You and Charles Bradlaugh and Kali Marx can get drunk together and then piss upon the angels from a great height.
If secularism transcends religious politics in the way I am suggesting, it does so from within, it does not do so because it has a shimmering philosophical existence separate from religious political commitments, nor because it is established by constitutional fiat by a pan-Indian elite unconcerned and unrealistic about the actual sway of religion in politics. It does so rather because after climbing up the ladder of religious politics (via a dialogue among acknowledged substantive religious commitments in politics) this emergent secularism might be in a position to kick that ladder of religious politics away.
Start off by negotiating with the Pope and the Ayatollah. You will begin to levitate. Fuck you need a ladder for? Soon you will be pissing down upon the angels from some great summit of transcendence.
There is no paradox here of a doctrine emerging from its opposite, no more so than in any movement of synthesis, for the point is essentially Hegelian.
Hegel too will join you for a drink and then piss down upon the angels.
Unlike the pure liberal fantasy of a secularism established by an ahistorical, philosophical (‘transcendental’, to use Kant’s term) argument,
But Kant's transcendental arguments are the basis of his proof of God.
the argument being proposed is essentially dialectical, where secularism emerges from a creative playing out (no historical inevitability is essential to this Hegelian proposal) of a substantive communal politics that is prevalent at a certain historical juncture.
If so, secularism was sublated long ago.
When it is hard won in these ways, secularism is much more likely to amount to something more than a holding process.
It will be a dropping process. One could shit on the angels from a great height if only one were Secular enough.
And this is so not merely because (unlike Nehru’s secularism) it acknowledges as its very starting-point the reality of the inseparability of religion from politics,
yet they have been separate for centuries in the country where Bilgrami works and resides.
but also because, at the same time, it does not shun a realistic appreciation of the entrenched facts of modern political life, which Nehru (unlike his contemporary critics) was right to embrace wholeheartedly.
Nehru embraced his own narcissistic delusions- stuff like 'Hindu-Muslim unity' and 'Hindi-Chini bhai bhai'.
This way of looking at things gives a philosophical basis to the widespread but somewhat vague anti-Nehru feeling (shared by a variety of different political positions today) that in a country like India we cannot any longer embrace a secularism that separates religion from politics.
You have to pander to the Hindus because they are more numerous. Pretending you care about Muslims won't win you any seats.
And it does so without in any way ceding ground to those who draw quite the wrong conclusions from this vague feeling: it cedes nothing to the Hindu nationalist,
in which case it will be ceded nothing. Hindus are the vast majority in that nation. If you can't placate them, you don't matter politically.
nor to the Muslim communalist, nor even to Ashis Nandy’s nostalgia for a bygone pre-modernism. The crucial importance of seeing things this way lies precisely in the fact that it counters what is a dangerously easy and uncritical tendency today, the tendency to move from this vague but understandable feeling of the inseparability of religion from politics to one or other of these conclusions.
Hindus want nice Temples. Let them pay for building them and then say sweet things about how nice they look.
It counters this tendency by a very specific philosophical consolidation of this feeling,
which feeling? The feeling that Bilgrami is as stupid as shit?
so that these conclusions which are often derived from it now no longer seem compulsory.
if you have the right feelings and can 'philosophically consolidate' them, then it will no longer seem compulsory to obey the law of gravity. You can start levitating and end up pissing down upon the angels.
Or, to put it more strongly (and more correctly), this philosophical consolidation of this understandable feeling allows us to see these conclusions derived from the feeling as simply non-sequiturs.
It does not follow from the fact that you are pissing down on the angels that you don't have shit for brains.
I have tried in this paper to distinguish between two notions of secularism by criticizing the Nehruvian vision from a quite different angle than Ashis Nandy’s.
You have failed. One might say that Indic 'henotheism' is what 'secularism' cashes out as in India. Alternatively, one might say Holyoake & Bradlaugh's Secularism was inherited by certain Dravidian parties as well as the Marxist parties. Congress Socialism was mere dynastic kleptocracy.
Unlike as with Nandy, I did not argue that the failure of Nehru’s secularism flowed from its being an Enlightenment-laden ideological imposition of modernity
Nehru's economic and diplomatic policies failed utterly. Back in the Fifties, it was assumed that Religion was a 'Giffen good'- i.e. as the masses rose in affluence they would become less and less religious. But, in South Asia and the MENA, it turned out that Religion has high income-elasticity. As people get richer they want more of it.
I argued that it was characterized more by a deep methodological flaw, which made it an imposition in a far more abstract sense.
i.e. in a wholly non alethic, or nonsensical, sense.
It was a failure in the quite different sense that it pretended, both before and after independence, to stand outside of substantive and contested value commitments,
this was not the case with Nehru or Periyar or other secularists or rationalists or atheists of the period. All of them took substantive positions on highly contentious issues of the day.
and was thus not able to withstand the assault of the reactionary and authoritarian elements in the value commitments that never pretended to be anything but substantive and contested, the commitments, that is, of the nationalist Hindu, the communalist Muslim and the nationalist Sikh.
The communalist Muslim got Pakistan though this entailed second class status in North India. Sikhs can be as Khalistani as they like- in Canada. Hindus got a Hindutvadi India though Hindu 'purushartha' assigns a higher place to 'Artha Shastra'- i.e. economics and governance. This makes sense. It is difficult to pray or meditate if one's kids keep crying out for a morsel of food. On the other hand, you could become a Bilgrami type secularist and levitate so far above the angels that when you piss down upon them, they will believe God is getting a golden shower.
No comments:
Post a Comment