India: Secularism one year later - Promises to Keep (Harsh Mander)

[Hindustan Times - 9 June 2005]

Promises to Keep

by Harsh Mander

In the mixed record of the UPA government in its first year in power, the greatest disappointment has been its neglect of steps to genuinely strengthen and restore the gravely threatened secular fabric of our land. During its term, the BJP-led NDA recklessly engineered a communal divide. The entire Muslim community was systematically demonised, especially in the hearts and minds of large sections of the influential middle class, as implacably unpatriotic, regressive, unreliable and violent. The manufacture of hatred extended, especially in distant tribal regions of central India, to other minority groups like Christians. Textbooks were re-written, and popular cultural forms like cinema distorted, to propogate a false, dangerously communal, undemocratic, patriarchal and non-egalitarian vision of our pluralist history and cultural legacy.

The 2004 elections were therefore no ordinary elections , signaling merely a change of fortunes of various political formations. Ordinary people in many parts of India recognized that its outcomes would decisively influence in many ways the destinies of our nation and its people, and the survival of the very idea of India. The Congress-led UPA alliance was catapulted to power by people who decisively rejected the politics of hate and the assaults that these had mounted on the secular democratic idea of India. The new government needed to acknowledge with humility the trust that had been bestowed on them. Its first year in office shows little awareness on its part, that its actions would influence profoundly the future course our country will take.

The first set of unmet expectations relate to healing of - and justice to- the survivors of Gujarat, who were denied even elementary reparation and rehabilitation by a government unashamedly hostile to a segment of its citizens. Even more than the Babri masjid dispute, the fate of the survivors of the 2002 carnage has come to symbolize the very terms on which minorities in India will continue to live in India- whether with head held high exercising fully equal legal rights, or as second class citizens.

As legal justice is openly subverted and economic boycott and fear persist in many parts of Gujarat, no hand has reached out from the centre or parties to wipe their tears. There is no special rehabilitation package, no measures to secure independent investigation, prosecution and trial. The constitution under Article 355 had bestowed them with both the powers and the duty to intervene in such moments of intense internal strife. They have instead chosen to look the other way. The defiant impunity of the state government continues unchecked. A year after the UPA government came to power, life has not improved in any way for the survivors of the state sponsored carnage. This is its gravest indictment.

There was hope that at least the brazen misuse of POTA, applied exclusively in Gujarat against the minorities, would be corrected by repealing the legislation. The law was allowed to die, but all those charged under it by the previous regime continue to languish in jails. In fact, the Modi government has made fresh arrests under POTA, including of lawyers fighting cases of the survivors, even after the meaningless repeal, maintaining that investigation is still in progress in half a dozen cases of terrorist conspiracy.

Many hopes were pinned on the law on communal violence, as promised in the CMP, to prevent the recurrence of state impunity in communal massacres like Gujarat. The expectation was a law that would strengthen the hands of citizens by codifying the mandatory duties of the state to prevent and control communal violence, and to secure reparation and legal justice. Instead, the government has produced a draft that adds to the powers of the state, including measures from POTA and the Armed Forces Act, that, far from protecting minorities, have been used against them.

There is a dangerous conspiracy of silence in the ruling political establishment about the continued hate mobilization of the Muslims by the Sangh Parivar organizations, and the attacks on Christians in many parts of the country. Communal tempers are mounting dangerously in states like Rajasthan. The Sangh schools continue to propogate hate in young minds, by falsifying history and demonizing minorities. Several of these schools, especially in tribal areas, are resourced by overseas supporters of the Sangh, and many are even state-funded. But the centre has done little to control this. It has not even challenged the content of the textbooks of these schools which defy the Indian constitution itself.

The government seems guided by the cynical calculas of vote banks, believing that minorities have nowhere else to go, and that decisive steps on secularism may alienate an allegedly communalized Hindu majority. On this flawed and utterly dishonourable computation, secularism remains exiled to the peripheries of the national political agenda and discourse. Future generations will pay dearly the price of this unconscionable and shameful abdication.