Internationally renowned economist Amartya Sen has said the “most profound weakness of Hindu politics lies in the basic frailty of relying on ignorance and illiteracy of different kinds.”
He was delivering the annual Nehru lecture at Cambridge University on Feb.5. Prof Sen said the oppressive chain of such politics can be broken at that weakest link.
An important factor in the gullibility that led to the acceptance of the new brand of politics, he said, was the “shockingly low level of literacy in the Hindi belt.” The Ram Janamabhoomi movement banks on “educational and scientific naivete,” he said. Conversion of that into actual exploitation, he said. Hindu political activists want to project India as a country of “unquestioning idolaters, credulous fanaticisis, quarrelsome devotees and religious murderers,” he said.
Prof Sen, now teaching at Harvard University identified three lines of challenge to Indian secularism communal fascism, sectarian nationalism and militant obscurantism, In the context of communal fascism, Prof Sen said, “the emergence of fascists movement stand, typically, to thrive on peasement by less determined political groups.” In this case, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), not a fascist party in itself, has typically condoned the violent activities of the Shiv Sena and has treated it effectively as an ally,” he said. But, he expanded his argument to say that the Congress party, which rules in Maharshtra, “had failed to provide an adequately determined attempt to stamp out the Shiv Sena’s fascists violence,” “The dog that did not bark is an important part of the terrible tragedy of Bombay, and more generally across India,” Prof Sen said. Prof Sen said the term fascism “is perhaps overused.” “It is certainly no part of my claim that the entire movement of Hindu politics is fascists in any sense,”
But at the same time, he observed, there were fascists features present in parts of Hindu extremist politics like “use of violence and threat to achieve sectanan objectives, reliance on victimizing members of a particular community mass mobilization based on deeply divisive appeals and willingness to use unconstitutional and strong-armed procedures.”
The Shiv Sena has won less than at hired of Bombay municipal seats, he said, but organized mass hysteria to “magnify the impact that popularity alone cannot bring,” and it had thrived on appeasement by less determined political groups like the Congress and the BJP, he said.
Communal fascism can be handled only be determined confrontation, he said. “It is terrible to watch responsible political leaders waiting for a shift in public opinion, rather than leading it,” he said. Maratha ruler Shivaji, after whom the Shiv Sena is named, himself was not anti-Muslim, and groups like the Shiv Sena have to be countered also at the ideological level.
Much of this countering will depend on what Hindu political Organizations choose to do, he said. But political will against communalism in Bihar “can be profitably emulated by others” he said. Also, he said, it was significant that leadership in Bihar comes from the backward castes. There had been little violence, he said, in those states in which “anti-high caste movements have been prominent and successful.”
Turning to sectarian nationalism, Prof Sen said that unlike the Hindu Mahasabha and the Jan Sangh, the BJP had been politically successful, though only in eight of 32 states and union territories, and with only 21% of the Hindu vote there.
There is no serious evidence, he said, that Muslim are loyal to Pakistan rather than India. The record of Muslims in the armed forces and various services has been no different from the Hindu, he said. Historically, he said, Aurangzeb destroyed temples and axed Hindus, “but to see him as the representative Muslim Monarch of India would be ridiculous history,” he said, “There is no communal line to be drawn through Indian literature and arts, setting Hindus and Muslims on separate sides,” he said Islam itself, “practiced in India cannot but be seen now as. an Indian religion.”
Prof Sen said India cannot but be secular, India is the “third largest Muslim country in the world” and seeing India just as a Hindu country, “is fairly bizarre in the face of that fact alone,” he said. “Given the heterogeneity of India and of the Indians, there is no real alternative to secularism that would even be half fair.”
But secularism itself had come to mean “the sum total of the intolerances of the different communities no other than the union of their respective tolerances.” The ban on Satiric Verses, he said, was an example of the “eagerness to respond to the union of the diverse irrationalities of the different Indian communities.”
Prof Sen spoke of the “asymmetry” in the application of secularism to different communities. “There is nothing no secular or sectarian in demanding that the provisions of Indian civil law as should apply more evenhandedly to individuals belonging to all the communities,” these issues remain to be more fully addressed in modem India, he said.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 12, 1993
