Ayodhya verdict and India's secular ethos (Part 2)

Unfortunately, as much as we may pride ourselves for having bucked the subcontinental trend and chosen to tread the secular path, the fact remains that Indian secularism has not gone uncontested or remained free of controversy. Especially in recent times, more so against the backdrop of the rath yatra undertaken by L.K. Advani, as a part of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, India's secularism, or least as it has been practised, has been called into question.

The Sangh Parivar has dubbed it “pseudo-secularism” and accused the Congress of using it as a pretext to what they have derisively referred to as “appeasement of minorities”. The BJP has gone to town painting the Congress black over what it has perceived to be cultivating minority vote banks by the party, which was once in the forefront of the Indian national movement. The Shah Bano case only reinforced this view. It created considerable debate and controversy all over the country about the extent of having different civil codes for different religions, especially for Muslims in India.

The Rajiv Gandhi government made matters worse by passing the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, which diluted the secular judgment of the Supreme Court and, in reality, denied even utterly destitute Muslim divorcees the right to alimony from their former husbands. It was against this background that Advani cast his Ram Janmabhoomi movement. He felt the public pulse. He understood the popular mood. He sensed a national disenchantment with the Congress government at the time, which was already embroiled in several scandals that were being exposed by the print media.

The situation was ripe for the BJP to cash in on, and Advani, an astute politician that he was, made the most of it. As communal passions were aroused over the issue and reasoned debate became increasingly difficult, fate dealt a blow of another kind. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated bang in the middle of elections. A semi-retired, Telugu brahmin, P.V. Narasimha Rao, who had just undergone bypass surgery at that time, was suddenly catapulted to the position of the prime minister of the country. Unfortunately, despite all his obvious intellectual abilities, Rao was an indecisive man who allowed the situation to drift to a point of no return.

There was a rapid buildup of kar sevaks at Ayodhya from all over the country. Aggressive Hindu organisations like the VHP and political outfits like the Shiv Sena went into overdrive. Their cadres also headed for Ayodhya, and were ultimately, in no small measure, actually responsible for the demolition of the mosque. While the central government vacillated over its course of action, these determined groups had already whipped up passions to a frenzy at ground zero on that fateful day. And, while Narasimha Rao was having his customary afternoon siesta, the main dome of the mosque had already come crushing down. And, with it, India's reputation as a secular nation also took a body blow.

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Ayodhya verdict and India's secular ethos (Part 1)

The verdict of the Allahabad High Court in the contentious Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case in a sense reflected India's secular ethos. The three-judge panel exceeded its brief. The judges did not go entirely by cold logic or hard evidence. They sought to offer a way forward — a way towards reconciliation between the two communities. Their much-awaited verdict read like a manifesto of Indian secularism. Peaceful coexistence seemed to have been the motivating factor.

Indian secularism based on the lofty ideals of “sarva dharma samabhava” is unique in many ways. First of all, India is the only country in the subcontinent that consciously chose to cast itself in the mould of a secular nation. All other countries in India's immediate neighbourhood have a state religion or an official political ideology. Pakistan and Bangladesh are Islamic republics. Hinduism is the official religion of Nepal and Buddhism the state religion of Sri Lanka. China has communism, which is nothing but a godless religion, as the all-pervading ideology that has shaped its national identity.

Hence, it would seem that India went against the very grain of subcontinental culture by opting to go the secular way. To think of it, after theocratic Pakistan was carved out of the erstwhile British India, there was a case for declaring India as Hindustan — a Hindu rashtra. With Hindus comprising more than 80% of its population, it would have seemed the most logical thing to do. In fact, Jinnah had actually suggested something to this effect himself. He wanted all of British India to be called India, and the two nations that would emerge after partition to be named Hindustan and Pakistan. However, Sardar Patel shot down that idea no sooner than it had been mooted by Jinnah.

Just imagine. About 13% of the population in the areas that now constitute Pakistan and Bangladesh were non-Muslims. Now, less than 2% of the population of Pakistan comprises non-Muslims. That is because most non-Muslims chose to mass-migrate to the east. They must have felt they would not be safe in a theocratic state as they belonged to minority communities. On the other hand, most Indian Muslims chose to stay back in India. More than 90% of those who migrated to Pakistan were from UP and Bihar. Hardly anybody, for instance, from Kerala went to Pakistan. And, Kerala has two entire districts that are Muslim-majority areas — more than 20% of its current population.

That India should have chosen to remain secular had much to do with Gandhi and his protege, Nehru. Had it not been for these men, Muslims may well have panicked and many more would have opted to migrate to Pakistan. The calming influence of the Mahatma, an apostle of non-violence, coupled with the assurances of India's first prime minister, the westernised secularist, Nehru, brought an end to the post-partition communal carnage on this side of the border much sooner than it would have seemed at the time. In stark contrast, Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan did not go out of their way to make non-Muslims feel safe in Pakistan, although they did not actively endorse or encourage any ethno-religious cleansing of minorities. 

* To be continued...

Allahabad High Court verdict — a path to reconciliation?

In some ways the verdict of the Allahabad High Court in the Ram Jamnabhoomi–Babri Masjid case came as a bit of an anticlimax. Most people expected the verdict to go decisively in favour of either the plaintiff or the defendant. The central government had geared up to meet any challenge to the law and order situation with its security apparatus fully activated and on high alert. Even bulk SMSes were banned. Prominent leaders cutting across the entire political spectrum appealed for calm. It was almost as if the nation expected a backlash from one community or the other. The world watched with bated breath, given the sensitivity of the highly contentious issue.

But, India stood still. Much blood had already been shed. The nation had grown weary of the issue that had defied a solution for six decades. Political parties had failed to rise above sectarian ideologies or vote-bank considerations. The parties to the dispute had failed to arrive at an amicable, out-of-court settlement. The onus was now on the legal process of the land. The high court was deemed the final arbiter of justice in our secular, democratic republic. And, what was truly gratifying was that when the verdict was finally pronounced, it did not lead to communal tension, leave alone violence. Indian democracy seemed to have come a long way.

The verdict of the Allahabad High Court itself, has met with mixed reactions from all quarters. Constitutional expert, Rakesh Dhawan dismissed it as “panchayati-style justice”. Former attorney general of India, Soli Sorabjee, however, welcomed the verdict and applauded the judges for their courage in going beyond what was expected of them. Ravi Shankar Prasad, a spokesperson of the BJP, who was also the counsel for one of the Hindu groups in the trial, saw the verdict as a tacit endorsement of their position.

 

The chief of the RSS sounded a sober note and opined it was not a victory or loss for anybody and grandiosely called for national integration. L K Advani, the man behind the movement, went public to say that the way had been cleared for the construction of a grand Ram temple at Ayodhya. The Sunni Waqf Board, meanwhile, announced its decision to appeal to the Supreme Court as it found the verdict and the recommendations of the honourable justices of the bench of the Allahabad High Court unacceptable. It is opposed to “bartering” of the disputed land in a three-way split. They have claimed the entire disputed structure as a mosque.

So, the saga continues. The matter will now be taken up by the Supreme Court. Status quo will be maintained for three months. The apex court can either uphold the judgement of the Allahabad High Court or come up with an entirely new judgement. The litigants have time to study the high court verdict and explore the prospect of a possible out-of-court settlement. This then, is not the final chapter of this painful story. But, what is heartening is that the country seems to have moved on. As of now, the average age of India is 26. The youth, naturally, consider everyday bread-and-butter issues more important than where a temple or mosque should be built. That is what makes the possibility of reconciliation a lingering hope. I, for one, hope so any way... 

Will Indo-Pak relations ever be good? (Part 9)

People-to-people contact is all very well. Cultural exchanges and sporting encounters are fine. But, expecting them to improve ties in a major way would be downright naive. All these measures have been tried a number of times. They have at best created fleeting bonhomie between the peoples of both countries given our shared history and culture. However, they have invariably been held hostage to political developments on the ground.

The former national security adviser, J.N. Dixit, had an interesting story to tell once on a TV channel. He narrated an incident that occurred when he was India's ambassador to Pakistan. Dixit said he was once invited to dinner by a Pakistani diplomat who picked him up and drove him to his house. Upon arrival, they were greeted by the aging diplomat's granddaughter who was just about three or fours old at the time. When Dixit's Pakistani host told his grandchild he had brought along with him an Indian guest, the child ran into the house shouting, “Hindustani kutta, Hindustani kutta”.

Children imitate their elders. They are privy to many a conversation by adults at home. Their impressionable minds are moulded by the prejudices of family members whom they live and interact with. Hence, what the little girl said cannot be taken at its face value and dismissed as the innocent banter of a child. It reflected just how Pakistanis thought and spoke of Indians. When this was the case in a diplomat's home that supposedly had educated people living in it, what can we expect from large multitudes of ill-informed masses who are easily swayed by anti-India religious and political propaganda?

The idea is not to demonise the people of Pakistan. To be fair, Pakistani diplomats may have a similar tale or two to tell after a stint in India. The point I am trying to make is that mutual prejudice and suspicion run deep in the psyche of the two ill-fated peoples. Consider the recent spot fixing controversy three Pakistani cricketers find themselves in. The Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK, no less, openly claimed it was a frame-up and hinted at an Indian hand, when all the available evidence seemed to indicate otherwise. It is another matter that the man mellowed soon afterwards and began to sound more like a diplomat that is he supposed to be, as evidence mounted, and more skeletons tumbled out of the closets of Pakistani cricketers.

The problem is quite simply this: the core of the ideology that gave birth to Pakistan represents everything that is the complete antithesis of what India is and stands for. A theocratic nation state carved out for the Muslim community in the subcontinent is the very opposite of a secular and democratic India that has more Muslims in it than the entire population of Pakistan put together. Add to that the evil agenda of anti-India terror groups that operate from Pakistani soil whose avowed purpose is to fight the idol-worshipping kafirs of India to defeat and subjugate them.

What we have is an extremely complex situation from which there is no easy way out. In view of everything I have stated in this nine-part article, I am sorry to say, at least I for one am not very optimistic about the future of Indo-Pak relations. But then, this is one thing about which I would be glad to be proved wrong. Whether that happens or not, only time will tell.

* Concluded...

Will Indo-Pak relations ever be good? (Part 8)

Kashmir is not the only bone of contention between the neighbours. The Siachen glacier and Sir Creek are other territorial disputes between India and Pakistan that have defied a solution over the years. While the former was captured during military conflict, the latter is a boundary dispute due to differences of perception. Thanks to strategic and geopolitical reasons, India is not keen on vacating the Siachen glacier, the world’s highest battlefield. Its continued occupation gives India a distinct military edge although it has been at a huge cost in terms of the money spent to hold it and the lives of our soldiers that are regularly lost due to the extreme weather conditions prevalent up there.

Sir Creek is a marshland that separates the Kutch region in Gujarat from Sindh in Pakistan. Demarcating a maritime boundary in the 60-mile long estuary in the desert of Kutch has been a problem. India has always asserted that the Sir Creek boundary lies in the middle of the channel whereas Pakistan claims that it is on the east bank. These mutually incompatible positions have made it difficult to find common ground and resolve the longstanding dispute. And, such issues are constant irritants in all official discourse and dialogue between the two countries.

Other than these territorial disputes, there are certain obstacles that emanate from the Pakistani establishment itself that make peace with India difficult to attain. The political setup of Pakistan is very different from that of India. Its democracy is a sham. Its political leaders are weak and generally occupy positions of power only so long as they keep the army in good humour. Every democratically elected leader who became too powerful for the army to handle has been ousted in a military coup. External affairs and the nuclear doctrine of Pakistan are shaped and driven exclusively by the Pakistani army. The elected representatives of the people of Pakistan have absolutely no say.

The military establishment of Pakistan is totally hostile to India. It has continued to perpetuate a self-serving myth that India has not accepted partition and continues to pose a threat to the very existence of Pakistan. This makes it extremely difficult for the political class to build bridges with India. This was best demonstrated during the Nawaz Sharif regime when Vajpayee undertook that famous bus journey to Lahore from Amritsar. Despite that successful tour to Pakistan and all the bonhomie that was witnessed between the two leaders, Kargil happened. And, let us not forget Musharraf was busy planning the Kargil invasion while our prime minister was still on Pakistani soil and being feted by his own prime minister.


* To be continued...

Will Indo-Pak relations ever be good? (Part 7)

Kashmir has kept the wounds of partition from healing. The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the Indian Union when its Hindu king, Maharaja Hari Singh, signed the Instrument of Accession with the Indian Government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, and under the watchful eyes of Lord Mountbatten who was still around at the time. The Maharaja had initially entertained the thought of retaining the independence of his state and transforming it into some kind of a “Switzerland of the East”. Meanwhile, Jinnah felt that the state had to be integrated into the new nation of Pakistan as it had a Muslim majority.

Jinnah had watched how Sardar Patel had got more than 500 princely states in the Indian subcontinent to become a part of the Indian republic. These included Hyderabad and Junagadh, which were Muslim-majority states. In any case, these states could not have become a part of Pakistan because they were small in size and were not geographically contiguous with the new Islamic nation that had been carved out of British India. However, the case of Jammu and Kashmir was different. According to the partition plan, it had been decided that all geographically contiguous areas that had Muslim-majority populations would be grouped together to constitute the new nation of Pakistan.

Kashmir met both these conditions. And yet, it had acceded to India, felt Pakistan, entirely due to the whim of its Hindu king, and the guiles of Nehru and Mountbatten who had enticed him into doing it. One must not forget Kashmir forms a vital part of the very idea of Pakistan. In fact the letter ‘K’ in the name Pakistan stands for Kashmir. Yes. Rahmat Ali, a student at Oxford, had first mooted the idea of a separate homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent through pamphlets that were widely circulated in Britain. He had suggested a name for the new nation. He called it PAKSTAN. It did not have the ‘I’ in it then, which was added later. P stood for Punjab, A for the Afghan province (Northwest Frontier Province) K stood for Kashmir, S for Sindh and TAN were taken from Baluchistan.

Hence, there is no way Pakistan will ever give up its claim on Kashmir. It considers the entire state as disputed territory and its accession to India illegal. If Pakistan ever accepts the state of Jammu and Kashmir as a part of India, it would amount to surrendering the very raison d'être for its existence, which it can never do. That is why despite its much smaller size and military inferiority vis-à-vis India, Pakistan has dared to engage India in three wars over Kashmir. Meanwhile, India cannot afford to surrender Kashmir to Pakistan either for its own ideological and geo-political reasons.

Kashmir is a test of Indian democracy and its secular credentials. India does not have an official state religion like other countries in its immediate neighbourhood do. The Indian Constitution guarantees to all its citizens equality of status before the law and the freedom to profess, practise and propagate their religion. Article 370 of the Indian Constitution accords the state of Jammu and Kashmir special status within the Indian Union. This was done to accommodate the legitimate, democratic aspirations of this Muslim-majority state and allay the fears of some who thought they would be unsafe in Hindu-majority India. It is another matter that despite such extraordinary Constitutional safeguards, Kashmiris have felt alienated and the insurgency in the Valley has continued unabated. Perhaps, successive governments at the Centre have failed to integrate the state with the rest of India.

* To be continued...

Will Indo-Pak relations ever be good? (Part 6)

Even Jinnah did not expect to see the creation of Pakistan during his lifetime. However, after World War II circumstances changed rapidly. Churchill lost the elections in Britain and Clement Atlee became the new resident of 10, Downing Street. Atlee was favourably predisposed to granting India independence and sent Lord Mountbatten to New Delhi with the specific purpose of expediting the transfer of power. Mountbatten held last-minute parleys with leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League to explore the possibility of averting partition. However, irreconcilable differences between the two parties coupled with the lack of feasibility of the alternatives he presented made partition ultimately inevitable.

Dividing British India along communal lines was not at all easy. There were Hindus and Muslims in every city, in every village of India. So, Muslim-majority areas were demarcated to constitute the new state that was proposed. Even this proposition presented its own problems. Muslim-majority states were at two opposite ends of the geographical expanse in the north of India. However, Jinnah was adamant. He insisted on his Pakistan, no matter what. Even a last-ditch attempt to make him the prime minister of an undivided India by Gandhi failed. In any case, Nehru and Patel were also totally opposed to any such move. They felt they could not trust Jinnah and feared they would not be able to work with him. Further, in their opinion the move would be very unpopular among the people who had stood solidly behind the Congress.

The Radcliffe Line became the border between India and Pakistan on 17th August 1947. The line was decided by the Border Commission chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who was to divide equitably 1,75,000 square miles of territory with 88 million people dwelling in it at the time. It was a stupendous task that the man was called upon to execute at very short notice. Naturally, everybody was not pleased with the outcome. Jinnah labelled the Pakistan he got as a “truncated and moth-eaten Pakistan”. Actually, Jinnah had dreamed of getting the whole of Punjab and both East and West Bengal. Furthermore, he also eyed Assam although the region did not have a Muslim majority in it. Besides, he assumed that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir would fall into his lap eventually, any way, given its demographics.

Unfortunately, things did not go as he had hoped, and perhaps, even calculated. The states of Punjab and Bengal got divided on the basis of religious identities, and the Hindu-majority areas remained with India. What is more, eventually, even Kashmir acceded to India. In the runup to partition, Jinnah had tried to carve out a much bigger Pakistan than we see today on the map of the globe. He had even tried to weave together a larger coalition of all non-Hindu populations in the Indian subcontinent to make this dream come true. With this in mind, he had even reached out to the Akalis. However, despite his obvious intellectual ability, Jinnah betrayed a shallow knowledge of history. Sikhism had originated as a bulwark against the march of Islam, and avowedly to "protect" and "purify" Hinduism. With the result, there was no way, the Sikhs would have preferred the Islamic Republic of Pakistan over a secular India.

From the outset, from the time Pakistan came into existence, Jinnah was an unhappy and bitter man. He blamed everybody from Mountbatten to Gandhi to Nehru. He did not even attend Gandhi's funeral and chose to stay put in Karachi, which was initially the capital of Pakistan. He merely sent a condolence message to the Indian Government stating rather caustically that “India had lost a great 'Hindu' leader”. The atmosphere was further vitiated by the large-scale communal carnage that ripped apart the very fabric of the Indian subcontinent. The ill-will that was generated during those turbulent times kept many a wound festering. The psychological scars left indelible marks in the minds of people on both sides of the divide.

* To be continued...