SECULARISMS (plural) OF INDIA

 

Secularism has long been the language of most public servants and many scholars in the Western world, enabling both groups to work and live as though religions were irrelevant to their respective fields. This perspective has meant that religious phenomena have been ignored or reduced to other categories such as civil society, humanitarianism or as part of a definition of “civilization.” Secularism has been more of a huge, welcoming umbrella, covering all those who object to a religious presence in public politics. In doing so, secularism has defined itself, and even been defined by its religious opponents such as the present Pope, more by what it objects to, namely religion, rather than what it is or proposes.

While the concept itself has deep historical roots, the term secularism itself dates only to the 19th century, when it was coined by British reformer George Jacob Holyoake. Revolutionary America and revolutionary France were the first two nations to establish themselves on explicitly secularist terms. The two revolutions, needless to say, had different trajectories – in part because the French Revolution was much more explicitly anti-clerical than the American one (Americans were no less hostile to Catholic priests than the French, there were just far fewer of them in 18th century America).

Secularism as a “defining ideology” is simply another Western imposition on societies that would prefer much more religion in their states. Secularism is under attack around the world in ways that are as unexpected as they are frightening. People are beginning to question the very basis and the conspiracy behind division of a secular British India on the lines of religion into independent Islamic Pakistan and an independent secular India. When the University of Texas surveyed 195 national constitutions from around the world, researchers found that over 70 of them declare some variation of the secularist ideal. Remaining 125 out of 195 national constitutions do not pretend to be secular. This may be disappointing for secularists.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and especially after the vent of September 11, 2001 there has been increasing talk of the determining role of religion in shaping the pattern of the behaviour of states and non-state actors. Years earlier, Samuel Huntington, in his article on the coming Clash of Civilizations, had argued that religion will become the most important marker of identity and the determinant of patterns of international conflicts and amities. To understand why we need to turn to the politics of secularism - what kinds of politics follow from different forms of secular commitments, traditions, habits, and beliefs? Two trajectories of secularism have been influential in international politics: laicism (separationist narrative in which religion is expelled from politics – as in Indian constitution), and Judeo-Christian secularism (a narrative of accommodation in which Judeo-Christian tradition, with all of the contradictions inherent in that hyphen, is perceived as the source and foundation of secular democracy – as in the US). These varieties of secularism don’t map cleanly onto one country or one individual—both appear in different modes in different times and places. Secular states are not atheists – the official United States motto says, “In God we trust.”

Modern, free, democratic, pluralist societies like India have many virtues, but they are also increasingly encountering one significant problem, “the problem of pluralism.” This is the problem of how to deal with a number of different, competing, and often conflicting, worldviews or philosophies of life in the modern democratic state, especially at the institutional level, such as in schools, government agencies, political parties, parliament, and most especially at the level of law. Let us appreciate the complexity; secular India places citizens of minority religions – Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians (Parsis) - on a different pedestal than the majority Hindus; but majority Hindus alone have socially disadvantages sub-groups that enjoy affirmative action.

There is an image of religion as organisations or communities around competing truths, which are mutually intolerant, which perhaps even hate each other’s guts. There is some truth in that in some times and places but the opposite is more important. Respect for religion is compatible with and may be a requirement of a democratic political culture. It is important to note that the world’s major religions are also powerful international networks in their own right. They are readily mobilized to support fellow religionists in other parts of the world. India has been a victim of the Muslim and Christian international networks repeatedly just for her being a Hindu majority nation. Religions are not sedentary entities. They come alive from time to time, often with serious implications for their neighbours, just as India need to be pro-active in working with the Muslims within her borders and across her borders.

One can only insist on a separation of religion and state if one means that the state will have no official religion, but we cannot invoke this separation if we mean that religious beliefs and values cannot be invoked to influence society and culture. If this is what is meant, then secularists would be contradicting themselves every time they make any argument for cultural change based on their values. What would we say about killing of animals for consumption but not to propitiate a deity or vice-e-versa, slaughtering of animals during Navaratri and during Eid al-Adha? Can a democracy, which gets her legitimacy from the majority of the people, turn around and posit itself as unmindful of the religious views of her majority? Would it not then be rendering herself as government of the majority, by the majority but not for the majority? Is that the agenda behind constitutional fragmentation of majority Hindus into minority caste segments? Is the discrimination in doling out the state’s largesse amongst Hindu-caste-segments, and religious minorities a strategy of unification and equality or the ‘divide, conquer and rule’ strategy of the British? If caste-based affirmative action was the prescription for social inequality, the evidence is that the remedy has failed to reduce the inequality even after 70 years of therapy. 

The biggest question before Indian democracy is how to solve or at least contain the problem of pluralism, without resorting to the suppression of some views, without producing too many disgruntled citizens, without abusing political power, and without slipping into moral and political relativism.

 

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One may refer to Adrija Roychowdhury (writing in the Indian Express of December 27, 2017 for debate in the Constituent Assembly on the subject) “Secularism: Why Nehru dropped and Indira inserted the S-word in the Constitution” https://indianexpress.com/article/research/anant-kumar-hegde-secularism-constitution-india-bjp-jawaharlal-nehru-indira-gandhi-5001085/

 

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First published 06 Sep 2021

 

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Politics of Commotion: Superficial Dialogue through Digital and Social Media

 

Over the last several years, we are witnessing, may be not perceiving it seriously, that political discourse in India is now getting confined to TV and Social Media and is commandeered by the scheduling consideration of these media options.

To enable the TV editors to gather participants for the debates and encapsulate content for prime time viewing, the messages are created no later than 5:00 pm. Likewise, to ensure proper rest for the media persons and the message sources, political activities, agitations, rallies, sloganeering, press-conferences, are all usually held after 10:00 am but before 2:00 pm.

The use and proliferation of digital and social media has radically changed both the way we are using language and the way we are ‘doing politics’ these days. Virtual space has now become the ‘natural habitat’ of an increasing number of individuals around the world; a space where they engage in discussions, work, shop, bank, hangout, relax, vote, find love partners, conduct their day-to-day activities, and so forth. A large proportion of day-to-day verbal and visual communication has migrated to various participatory web platforms. Social media have been hailed as either emancipatory tools contributing to a more participatory democracy, creating instant awareness about different social issues, a new public space of sorts (‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Occupy’ movement are two widely cited examples).

A public sphere is a space of political communication and access to resources that allow citizens to participate in it. In this sense, given the exclusionary and commodified character of digital and social media, they cannot be considered as public spheres nor should they raise our hopes that revolution will be tweeted. Social and digital Media is dominated by corporations that make money by exploiting and commodifying users and this is why they can never be truly participatory. On a serious consideration, digital and social media are just another tool of control and containment, a profoundly depoliticising arena that fetishizes technology leading to a denial of a more fundamental political disempowerment.

One can realize the magnitude and impact of the medium if they consider that in the famous ‘Russia meddling,’ posts from a Russian company had reached the newsfeeds of 126 million users on Facebook during the 2016 US election and hundreds of thousands of bots posted political messages during the election on Twitter alone.

Digital and Social media is a new kind of an effective political instrument that, in the context of advanced capitalism, both dehumanizes politics and struggles and absolves people from the guilt of inertia in the face of major social and economic crises. It serves as an escape from the stress of intelligence, the pain and tension which accompany autonomous mental activity. Social Media is actually an effective anaesthesia against the mind in its socially disturbing, critical functions – leading to the knocking out of the mental agitation. Social media, as tools for producing and consuming different kinds of texts promotes a one-dimensional discourse. Consider the characteristics of Twitter’s one-dimensional discourse:

Language used in Twitter is short, fragmented and decontextualized: it is a language that tends to express and promote the immediate identification of reason and fact, truth and established truth, essence and existence, the thing and its function leaving no room for a dialogue and counter-reason. Twitter demands simplicity, promotes impulsivity, and fosters incivility.

Digital media takes the pedestal of instrumental and technological rationality and reduce audiences to the status of commodities and consumers of advertisements.  Such audience commodities that the media consumers become themselves are than sold as an audience to the advertising clients of the media.

Face-book, Twitter and other sites serve as an escape from the mechanised work process, and a breather to muster strength in order to be able to cope with the next round of work again. This allows social media to be marketed as entertainment – an entertainment that is accessible, on demand, any time and every time. For this entertainment to remain as a pleasure, it must not demand any effort of independent thinking from the audience. This constructs an involvement through inertia that creates a false sense of participation, security, homogeneity and consensus. Everyone is presumed to be a producer as well as a consumer of content, and the meaning of the messages get lost.

While there is around-the-clock exposure, constant access, and immediacy (all content is immediately available for reading and commenting), the message in the digital and social media is often decontextualized. The context is always that of-the-moment, limiting broader interpretations, connections and exploration of ramifications. Such content have a planned obsolescence, as the next programme or tweet will draw even more attention, commentary, visibility, and currency. The contents history is the here and now, as an ongoing critique of reality. Meaning loses history.

It comes, then, as no surprise that digital and social media have been serving as the ideal medium for populist parties and their leaders promoting the Politics of Commotion.  Digital and social media constitute an alternative to the mainstream media. Political campaigns started using social media as early as 2009, but it was with the 2019 General Elections that their use was taken to the next level.

Today, most political figures and parties use digital and social media platforms to disseminate their agendas and this has largely changed the way politics is conducted. This is a time when politics is ‘branded’ through social media. While democracies need liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control,  it seems that digital and social media have a firm grip on a large percentage of the our population, while people, in turn, have no control over digital and social media.

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First published 05 Aug 21

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BABU-isation of India

 

My learning and experience makes me believe that the officers from the Indian Administrative Services do not have the wisdom it takes to make India succeed. IAS personnel are good at rationalising and articulating any and every point-of-view or governmental action, but they do not know how things work which would make India great.

I have nothing against bureaucratic administrative machinery. However, induction into the IAS itself does not automatically give the wisdom to be an effective leader. Their training and experience makes IAS very familiar with "how things work and have worked in the government.” They however have no idea about "how things ought to work instead of how they have worked in the government" to unshackle Indian potential.  IAS often parachute into formulating a policy and implementing it without knowing "how to change the work ethics and work-culture." By training and grooming, most IAS lack innovation skills and risk-appetite. People in the top echelons of Indian government are predominantly IAS, who do not spend enough time on process-improvement and fail to give citizens what they really want and deserve. They spend more time on attending and chairing meetings or protecting the steel frame of bureaucratic processes; but much less time in connecting with the citizens, whom they govern.

Right from the selection and training to job-rotation, IAS are well trained into all sorts of things necessary to preserve and protect the structure and the system. In 16-years since their induction into the IAS, when they are empanelled for being Joint-secretaries in the Government, most of them have been through eight different experiences of about 2-years each. Such experiences do not provide any domain experience except training them in ways to protect and preserve the systemic and structural frameworks of varying designs. Their superb training is no substitute for knowledge, acumen and wisdom, which is so essential for paving and leading on strategic paths for change.

The IAS has long had its critics. Most politicians have criticised IAS in the past but when in government, they have found IAS to be their biggest support systems. Governing for nation building requires competencies in envisioning, planning, executing and controlling. IAS are competent in executing and controlling within the boundaries of the existing frameworks and thus make up the essential half of governance. When it comes to envisioning and planning, the competencies are about disrupting the status-quo and the IAS are uncomfortable there. While accelerating the growth is not possible without envisioning and planning that is different from the past, IAS can provide the necessary counterweight to the politicians forcing dangerously radical policies upon us. If the counterweight were to exceed the extent of departure from the benign paths followed in the past, there will be no new growth trajectories. Those would be circumstances of growth in spite of governance and despite of governance, as if there were no governance.

PM Modi, recently, while speaking in the Parliament, had remarked, “Sab kuch BABU hi karenege. IAS ban gaye matlab woh fertilizer ka kaarkhana bhi chalayega. Yeh kaun si badi takat bana kar rakh di humne? BABUon ke haath mein desh de karke hum kya karne waale hain?”

Was PM Modi insulting the IAS? I do not think so.  I think he was sharing his impression and experience. Modi is very balanced in his outpourings even when he is angry. PM Modi has worked with the IAS for 20-years now and surely he has seen and worked with not just a few but many of them.  It was no outburst in the Parliament and his use of the expression ‘BABU’ for the IAS was not to belittle the IAS but to present them on a more real plank rather than ‘on-a-pedestal’ projection, which the IAS have been making of themselves. Some in the IAS will surely be feeling hurt thinking that ‘BABU’ is a derogatory expression.

Let us keep the emotions aside and examine the statement is terms of reality. Bureaucratic structures are like a nest in which the future progeny is protected and nurtured. IAS are only the twigs. The twigs that make up the nest have to hold together so that the nest holds and protects the eggs and the young ones from vagaries of nature. The twigs themselves cannot decide the design of the nest or the place of perching the nest or fight the predators. IAS are like twigs of nest to home and nurture progeny of nation called India.  BABU has been a historical nomenclature for jobs of custodians of organisational memory and customs.

Wisdom is not restricted to IAS. In fact, politicians, especially those in power, are wiser and more experienced than the IAS, in guiding the course of national growth while keeping a finger on the pulse of the citizens. PM Modi has been selective in his use of IAS for “doing the job” necessary for implementing his strategy for India. He has had unsupportive experts who were in “positions of doing” due to political patronage and such experts were unable to overcome their sense of subservience to their political benefactors. When he found that the expert with international credibility and from across the Atlantic as RBI governor was unable to deliver, he replaced him with a homeland expert. Seeing this expert also faltering, he brought in an IAS BABU as RBI Governor, not so much for strategic direction but for protecting the steel frame. Similar things happened when he had to replace an expert, experienced in the insurance sector by an IAS BABU as Chairman, Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (IRDA). Former IAS succeed in such roles because others from their fraternity in the government would not let them fail.

IAS are better than most non-IAS in “doing the job” but exceptions apart, most IAS are not competent at “designing the job.” Reciprocal exceptions exist among non-IAS. Like any generalisation, exceptions exist to this one too.

When PM Modi says, “Country has been handed over to BABUs” he is saying that the BABUs are in jobs where they need not be and that people should fit the boots rather than “any IAS would do in any boot” approach.

IAS (rather ICS) used to be something that really helped the British crown stand out. The British had no illusions of building India. Now that elite clique is more like a small crowd utterly for self-preservation by maintaining the legacy systems and structures. When it comes to success in any vision for nation building, an IAS is optional.

We do not see a lot of IAS as Governmental Leaders. The IAS tend to be hired for the Governmental Leaders and by the Governmental Leaders.

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First published 16 March 2021

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We, the People of India

 

What does the term "minority" mean in a democracy based on equal citizenship for all? The term minority denotes "less-ness" compared to the "more-ness" of another entity. How could some citizens of a democratic state, which guarantees ‘equality of status and opportunity’, be considered ‘less’ than any other citizens?

For from being progressive, in a democracy like India, dividing the citizens based on castes is a reactionary position that belongs to pre-modern societies. Ancient Greeks understood the difference between ‘ethnos’ and ‘demos.’ The term ‘ethnos’ denoted community of customs and traditions of groups within society that, when coming together to create and operate a common space, would form a ‘demos.’ The talk in the agora (Agora, in ancient Greek cities, was an open space that served as a meeting ground for various activities of the citizens. The name, first found in the works of Homer, connotes both the assembly of the people as well as the physical setting) was not about ethnocracy (a type of political structure in which the state apparatus is controlled by a dominant ethnic group (or groups) to further its interests, power and resources) but democracy. Caste denotes human communities before the emergence of The People with a capital P. Thus, India is about "We the People," not "We the Minorities".

Republic of India began as a ‘SOVEREIGN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC’ in 1950, whose motto became ‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People.’ Democracy is a melting pot, not a salad bar. In the melting pot are veggies, spices, condiments, colours, fragrances, garnishes, oils and what not; every ingredient added in different measures and sequences as per the recipe.

Article 14 of the Constitution reads: The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.

In addition, Article 15 of the constitution reads as:  

(1) The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.

(2) No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to— (a) access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment; or (b) the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State funds or dedicated to the use of the general public.

(3) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children.

This is what WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, gave to ourselves in 1950.

Then came the very first and a very controversial amendment to the constitution in 1951, by the Jawahar Lal Nehru Government (Nehru was not the elected Prime Minister of India then but an appointed Prime Minister of India – appointed by Lord Mountbatten on 15 August 1947) which added [Added by the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, s. 2.]:

(4) Nothing in this article or in clause (2) of article 29 [Cultural and Educational Rights -Protection of interests of minorities ] shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.

As if this were not sufficient, to break the very backbone of the “Right to Equality” another controversial amendment to the constitution in 2005, by the Man Mohan Singh Government (Man Mohan Singh was never elected to any public office by We, the people of India, but ‘appointed’ Prime Minister of India - appointed by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi in May 2004, rendering 7 Race Course Road subordinated to 10 Janpath) , which added [Ins. by the Constitution (Ninety-third Amendment) Act, 2005, s. 2, (w.e.f. 20-1-2006)]: (5) Nothing in this article or in sub-clause (g) of clause (1) of article 19 [Right to Freedom] shall prevent the State from making any special provision, by law, for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes in so far as such special provisions relate to their admission to educational institutions including private educational institutions, whether aided or unaided by the State, other than the minority educational institutions referred to in clause (1) of article 30.

Nationalism created the Indian nation, not the other way round. Progressivism is a secular religion rather than an ideology that could have its place in the competitive field of politics. Dividing citizens based on castes can have no place in a democracy. In Indian democratic secularism, the state is tasked with protecting all castes, and by extension, other communities, but not of relying on them as component parts.

In the Indian democracy, terms such as minority and majority can only have a political meaning. A political party or a political manifesto that has collected more than 50 percent of votes in an election represents the majority. In such a system, majority and minority do not describe a permanent state of affairs. Today's majority could be tomorrow's minority as it was yesterday.

Starting with the parliament, which is the seat of all legislation, to pretend that this or that member was chosen because of his or her influence over people of some specific religious faith or other "minority" attribution is certainly not a compliment. If the choice is based not on the individual's competence but on salad-bar considerations, it cannot be justified on democratic grounds. If, on the other hand, such considerations played no part in the choice, why make such a song-and-dance about ‘reserved seats’ and progressive representation?

Fortunately, many members of the parliament have impressive academic and practical resumes. It is in everyone's interest to hope that they see themselves not as figures in a game of ethnic tokenism but the servants of the Indian people at a difficult time.

India is about "We, the People of India" and not "We, the Minorities of India" or "We, the SC/ST/OBCs of India" or "We, the farmers of India" or any other sub-sets of “the People of India.”

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First published on 02 Feb 2021

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