Southasiasphere

The primacy of politics

The solution, as the Mahatma suggested, lies in recognising the primacy of religion and then subjecting it to the supremacy of politics.

by | CK Lal

Though (we) know the reality of heaven;
As an emotional diversion,
It’s an alluring notion.

For a poet, Mirza Ghalib was remarkably pragmatic. He knew that in the realm of faith, fact and fiction were inextricably intertwined. To be rigorously religious, a person must begin by suspending disbelief. So what if the heaven is merely a vision, a believer must accept its authenticity in order to endure everyday reality. But such is the power of unreason that the faithful need not show patience till the judgement day; he must become the police, the prosecutor and the judge to make the impious face the fire of hell. There is nothing else that can explain the Muslim rage in the wake of the blasphemous cartoons published by the rabidly right-wing Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

The offending cartoons first appeared in September 2005, but the full force of its reverberations began to be felt only in February. The question to ask is: why now? For the believers, it’s never too late to hit back, even though they are the ones to suffer most in the process. Who did the protestors hurt in Gwalior, Islamabad, Karachi, Srinagar, Lahore, Lucknow and Peshawar? In an atmosphere so charged with emotion, nobody dare ask such questions, but they will continue to haunt the conscience of the Muslims of Southasia for a long time. But first things first: how many of the agitators shouting “Death to West” knew about the state of the Kingdom of Denmark?

RAJESH KC

The landmass of Denmark is smaller than Bhutan or the state of Haryana. In terms of population, it is half the size of Dhaka or Karachi. Of course, its economic presence is much bigger, but that is of little consequence to the Southasian public. Unlike Norway, Denmark is not a Peace Superpower; and, in absolute terms, it is not much of an aid-giver either. The country is not a favourite destination of students or job-seekers from Southasia. While ignorance can breed hostility, a certain degree of familiarity is necessary to nurture enmity. The fact is that most of us do not know Denmark well enough to hate it. For example, we did not know that so many Danish politicians and the media were openly racist, particularly against their Muslim minority, even though the European Network against Racism had mentioned it in its Shadow Report in 2004.

None of the Southasian media ever cared to mention that most Danes lived in a state of denial as, “…most politicians, media, and the common man in the street, not only express their racist opinions openly, but at the same time believe that there is no racism in Denmark.” In this supposedly tolerant country of Scandinavia, Muslims are neither allowed to build mosques nor permitted to have separate cemeteries. Had we known that something was as rotten as this in the state of Denmark, we would have probably been better prepared for the nastiness of a cruel cartoonist. And that brings the matter of freedom of expression into focus.

Political lampoon
While it is true that freedom of expression has no meaning unless that freedom is unconditional and absolute, every society sets limits upon it to protect the dignity of the individual, respect for minorities, and harmony between communities. Those are broad terms, but not too difficult to keep in mind while exercising the inalienable right of freedom of expression.

Unless the intention is to instigate, inflame or insult, there is no reason why one would need to draw a prophet into a contemporary political duel. Despite their belated apologies, the concerned cartoonist, editor, and the government stand guilty of intentionally hurting the sentiments of Muslims, and there are Muslims all over the globe. But is that act punishable by death in this day and age? Such a suggestion itself would be outrageous in any civilised society. Alas, there is no dearth of lunatics in our midst.

Haji Yaqub Qureshi, a minister in the ‘socialist’ Mulayam Singh Yadav cabinet in Uttar Pradesh, announced that he would pay INR 5100 million to the killer of the offending cartoonist. A Peshawar cleric, Maulana Yousaf, was more modest in his offer – PKR 7.5 million and a car for the aspiring assassin. Such shocking suggestions are not just disgraceful; they strengthen the mistaken image in the West that most Muslims are fanatics.

A string of causative factors have since been paraded to justify the rage of the Ummah: suppression of Palestine, subjugation of Afghanistan, occupation of Iraq, humiliation of Abu Ghraib, the degradation of Guantanamo Bay … the list goes on. Under the rubric of War on Terror, the neo-conservative regime of the United States of America is conducting an all-out ‘crusade’ against Muslims all over the world, we are told. The hounding of regimes in Syria and Iran is evidently part of a plan to keep the Ummah trembling, and resistance against the neo-empire has become the moral imperative of the Muslim world.

The fact is, however, that the War on Terror and the threats to Damascus and Teheran have more to do with political contestation based on spheres of influence and energy security. Islam or Christianity have a peripheral role in this confrontation, and it is important to realise this. Despite the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy to it, this isn’t what Samuel Huntington called the ‘clash of civilisation’. If lampooning the Prophet was uncivilised, the call for lynching the offender
is barbaric.

Mango cart
Southasians like to believe that evil colonialists from across the seas introduced religious politics in the Subcontinent where otherwise there was and would have been broadmindedness and coexistence. The reality, however, is a little less sanguine. This is the region where Parashuram once wielded the axe to decimate all kshetriyas from the face of the earth. The conversion drive of Emperor Ashoka was unquestionably backed by the force of ‘or else’. It is a little hard to believe that the once-flourishing Buddhist and Jain empires of the region passed into oblivion solely due to the scholarship of various Shankaracharyas. Akbar did think of Din-i-lahi to assimilate the faiths of his subjects into a new whole, but Islam too was essentially a court religion that spread on the basis of sword and reward of the Mughal Empire. Religious strife is in fact as Southasian as Masala Curry and Mango Chutney. But so have been the attempts to synthesise the immense diversity of this region.

In a region as rife with unreason, intolerance, fanaticism, hatred, intransigence and despair as they found in India, the British colonialists would have failed miserably had they applied their bible-for-land policy so successfully applied elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America. To tackle the diversity and complexity of their Indian dominion, the British devised their failsafe ‘don’t-disturb-the-mango-cart’ policy that was based on the secular idea of separation of religion from politics. Perhaps that was one of the reasons that antagonism arose among Muslims and Hindus alike, leading to the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 – both the communities were equally enraged by the non-religious character of their new masters, who did not differentiate between the meat of holy cows and unclean pigs.

When the soldiers of Awadh, Bengal and Bihar refused to bite the bullet believed to have been greased with the tallow of beef and/or pork, the British promptly had the people of these areas declared as non-martial races unfit for recruitment into imperial forces. Religiosity of the political variety was a disqualification, while the secular piety of the Sikhs and ritualistic obscurantism of the Gurkhas were accepted as ingredients of corps camaraderie. Ironically, politics of religion started to vitiate the atmosphere of unity with the expression of Hindu solidarity to the Caliphate. The Khilafat Movement of the 1920s, spearheaded by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and opposed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was the perhaps the first instance that sowed the seeds of suspicion towards each other in the minds of Hindu and Muslim Congress leaders.

Much has been written about the secular outlook of Jinnah and the religiosity of Gandhi, but what is often ignored is that neither wanted an Islamic or a Hindu state. What Jinnah had in mind was a Muslim-majority state where citizens of all beliefs would live together amicably, and Gandhi envisioned a Ram Rajya where justice for all would be the supreme goal of the state. As it happened, both of them failed. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan bears no resemblance to the Muslim country of Jinnah’s dreams, and the irreligious rather than secular Indian state is not what the Mahatma worked for throughout his life.

Both the Quaid and the Mahatma would have been horrified to see the overwhelming role of religion in the politics of the Subcontinent. An Islamic state is based on the Shariat, whereas all that the Muslims of British India wanted was a country safe for their beliefs, a Muslim-majority state. The Indian republic is based on a denial of religion in daily life, which breeds resentment among the majority for various minorities, leading to occasional eruptions. None of these models are
truly sustainable.

Nepal is a ‘Hindu kingdom’ and Bangladesh an ‘Islamic state’, but a very vicious religious-cultural separatism hit Sri Lanka, a Buddhist majority country that was supposed to be most multi-cultural and tolerant towards minorities. The Danish cartoon controversy has created devastating effects, but brawls of smaller intensity keeps hitting India whenever M F Hussain paints Saraswati in the nude or depicts Bharat Mata in unconventional ways. In Pakistan, the Ahmadiayas have been at the receiving end of Sunni chauvinists for a long time.

The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan and made Hindus wear yellow armbands. Who only knows what the generals of Burma are doing to their religious minorities as they change the location of headquarters to suit the numerological charts of the ruling clique. It is easy to dismiss West Asia as a hotbed of fundamentalism; the fact is, Southasia looks milder because we are better at hiding our hostility towards each other.

After all the agitations and destructions, there has been at least one positive outcome of the unfortunate cartoon controversy: a realisation seems to have dawned among the ruling classes of the region that if ideological contestations are not allowed to their space, religious confrontations will edge out politics from national life. Another lesson that must be remembered from the heady pre-Partition days concerns the importance of religion in the lives of the people. No matter how secular the regime, it cannot make all citizens irreligious in public affairs. The solution, as the Mahatma suggested, lies in recognising the primacy of religion and then subjecting it to the supremacy of politics.

Politicians of post-modern societies have to accept that religious beliefs of the people are too deep-rooted and fragile to be handled on the basis of written and secular constitutions alone. An understanding of religious sensitivities is essential to establish the primacy of politics: the civilised way of settling disputes, building solidarity and laying the foundations of a better society. That is the way Gandhi would have preferred and Jinnah would have accepted after having endured the horrors of religious hatred.