Imagining a Secular Political Alternative not premised on the nation space

(Economic Times, 12 Jun, 2008)

Secularism and the rites of man

by Pothik Ghosh

In her The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, Hannah Arendt pointed to a troubling crisis in the liberal conception of human rights. The problem was that “the whole question of human rights...was...inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed to able to insure them.”

In Arendt’s view, the crisis caused by this conflation of the human with the national became most acutely evident during World War II. The large-scale displacement of individuals beyond the geo-political frontiers of their original nation-states had rendered them politically invisible as human beings because their stateless condition had deprived them of their elementary human rights.

Implicit in Arendt’s diagnosis of the problem is the need for a wider, more inclusive political and juridical conception of the human being. The search for such a universal definition of man must now become the lynchpin of secular politics in India.

For, as long as secularism continues to be articulated in terms of the Indian nation and its nationalist narrative, an effective opposition and affirmative alternative to the sangh parivar’s ideology of “cultural nationalism” (Hindutva) cannot be imagined.

All politics premised on the idea of the nation-state is, thanks to its structural orientation, condemned to lend itself to a narrow and exclusivist articulation, irrespective of the historical specificity of its content. The inability on the part of advocates of secularism, including the Left, to comprehend that has left them with no choice but to reactively pit the idea of a ‘secular’ Indian nation against the BJP’s credo of Hindutva.

It is a no-brainer that secularism cannot succeed unless the anti-BJP formations jettison patronage-based electoral enlistment of minorities for a broad-based strategy to mobilise people to effect socio-economic development. Yet, that, by itself, would be a task half done.

As important, if not more, would be the invention of an overarching ideological idiom that would articulate disparate local issues of modern governance as a singular question of democratic politics. This idiom must pose development as a paradigm of post-, even non-national, human self-determination as opposed to the preponderant political-economic model of national development.

That would give individuals real agency by liberating them from all manner of paternalistic domination, coercive inclusion and/or physical extinction. Such politics could well be conducted within the geo-political context of the nation-state even as it seeks to free the discourse of human rights and entitlements from the vicissitudes of national citizenship.

Given that the BJP has, over the past one-and-a-half decades, re-invented its strategy to successfully refract issues of modern governance through the prism of majoritarian cultural nationalism, the need for an inclusive ideological and structural alternative to that of the exclusivist nation-state has become even more pressing.

Advani’s call to the BJP national executive to forge a more aggregative National Democratic Alliance, even as party chief Rajnath Singh urged it to return to its core agenda of Hindutva is precisely an expression of such insidious politics. As far as the BJP is concerned, Singh and Advani have struck mutually complementary, not contradictory, postures.
This apparent contradiction of positions is entirely consonant with its NDA experiment, which embodies a calibrated shift in the party’s strategy in its post-Babri phase: focus on a variety of often dissimilar local issues of governance if only to weave them into a single tapestry on the larger fabric of “cultural nationalism”. Its recent Karnataka victory, and more so Narendra Modi’s re-election in Gujarat earlier, has yet again underscored the effectiveness of this strategy.

Socio-economic development is meant to create a modern human being, whose allegiance in public life is no longer to traditional identities of caste, religion, language and so on. But there are, in reality, broadly two kinds of political practice that can yield this normatively modern human being.

The first seeks to produce a universally acceptable modern order by facilitating engagement between the existing mainstream and various pre-modern cultural minorities, even as it mobilises those groups to transform the modern mainstream into a more participatory and inclusive socio-political space.

The second, in sharp contrast, is all about enforcing a pre-existing, majoritarian mainstream on minorities through legislation, and institutional and extra-institutional fiat. The political-economy of national development is predicated on precisely this kind of pre-defined modernity and a priori mainstream.

The BJP subscribes to the latter. It can certainly become, as many have predicted, a party of the liberal right that upholds the creed of the post-traditional individual. But what is omitted in this seemingly optimistic portrait of the party is the massive political cost it would extract — it is currently doing exactly that — to obtain to this Edenic state.

It is, after all, not without reason that votaries of Hindutva can, without the least bit of irony, present their vision of majoritarian nationalism as real secularism as opposed to the “pseudo-secularism” of their ideological adversaries. That the BJP has changed tack to represent the socio-cultural specificities of minorities, especially Muslims, as a threat to the modern Indian nation, and not to Hindus alone, bears that out.

The Congress would, in that context, do well to recognise that it has turned its legacy of being the party of Indian national liberation into a fetish. It is this, more than anything else, that has prevented it from advancing the cause of secularism. The Congress, which fancies itself as the principal keeper of secularism in India, should re-examine its legacy in a ‘late’ Gandhian light.

The ideological architect of the Congress had, by the 1940s, become fully aware that national independence made sense only insofar as it set the agency of the human being free from all manner of structurally violent and majoritarian domination. That was clearly indicated by Gandhi when, in 1942, he said: “Non-violence has brought us nearer to Swaraj as never before. We dare not exchange it even for Swaraj. The question is not what we will do after Swaraj. It is whether under given conditions we can give up non-violence to win Swaraj.”