Time to alter the language of citizenship : move it away from identity politics

(Indian Express
July 10, 2008)

Partitions of the mind

by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

It’s been a long week in Indian politics. Its identity markers will be with us for a while


Some partitions are territorial. Some are expressed in a polarised politics. But some act slowly, almost insidiously, to trap people in identities and create gulfs that become unbridgeable. A whole range of events over the last week, from the dangerous to the ridiculous, reminded us once again how the concept of secular citizenship is almost dead in India. This has not yet manifested itself in the kind of explosive communal politics this country has experienced in the past. But we would be living in a fool’s paradise if we do not recognise the poison identity politics represents.

The events surrounding the controversy over the Amarnath Shrine are a cause of alarm for a number of reasons. First, they brought out the depth of alienation and resentment that still exists in the Valley, such that every action becomes overloaded with sinister meaning. An administrative matter acquired volatile proportions. Second, the nature of the protests in the Valley suggests a new generation of protest. The participants were young and the protests appeared to be spontaneous. But they were not merely directed against the state or India. But some appeared to use the language of “infidel”, at once communally entrenching the issue, and uniting all kinds of factions in Kashmir. The VHP’s violent response equally polarised the issue, and now things have reached such a pass that it will be very difficult to avoid this divisive trap.

In one stroke, these agitations have also nullified the little modest gains that had accrued as a result of the representative process in Kashmir. There has been no serious political initiative from the Indian government. The prime minister decided not to use whatever political capital he had, to follow through on his promising start on Kashmir. There are no leaders with any stature that can pick up the slack, and arguably no capable mediating figures left in national politics. Make no mistake about it: the crisis in Kashmir will only deepen, and its effect on politics in the rest of India ought not to be underestimated.

Then there was the disgraceful spectacle of Mayawati parading clerics on the Indo-US nuclear deal. We all heaved a sigh of relief when A.P.J. Abdul Kalam could be trotted out as a “Muslim” in favour of the deal. But that only reinforced the deeper insidious tendency: that one is always representative of one’s community; it is inescapable even for a former president. The phrase “don’t communalise foreign policy” was taken to mean one of two things: that not all Muslims have the same views, or as an exhortation not to make it a Hindu-Muslim issue. But the idea that any Muslim could speak on this issue without it being necessary to identify him as a Muslim was not even an option. It is nonsense to worry about communalising foreign policy when our mode of identifying citizens is communal in the first place.

The imperative of identifying citizens through communal categories has distinct sources. The first is the understandable proposition that the axis of identity might also define the lines of disempowerment and subordination. These forms of injustice need to be recognised. But the big mistake of secular politics, whether on caste or religion, has been to suppose that remedies must also reinforce the same identities, justice must be parcelled out along communal lines. Nirmal Verma once said something rather prophetic. So long as the distinction between minority and majority remained politically relevant, it would be impossible to prevent communal politics. The ideal ought to be to make what rights one has independent of the community to which one belongs. Each person should have the right to be who they wish to be, maintain whatever cultural identifications they wish, compatible with basic norms of justice. But what rights they have in employment, or against the state, should be independent of these identifications.

Given the messy realities of India, this was always a distant ideal. But the active backtracking on this ideal now under way in our educational institutions is, in a farcical way, a harbinger of things to come. One can discuss all the legal niceties of the rights of St Stephen’s College as a minority educational institution to set its own admission criteria. But four things were disturbing about its decision to increase the Christian quota. An institution that symbolised a shared public space and excellence will now be sacrificed to identity politics. Our minority institutions were excellent shared spaces; like AMU they have been progressively diminished. Second, so many progressive teachers, who in any other case would have balked at the idea of an institution largely funded by the state taking directives from religious authorities, openly condoned the idea of St Stephen’s being run, more as an appendage of the Church than an educational institution.

Third, it has been reported that so-called minority colleges will now also be exempt from the various requirements on faculty recruitment that the UGC imposes on colleges. Why not give all colleges the same freedoms? These exemptions will set in motion exactly the same opportunistic dynamic that my community of Jains engaged in recently: seeking minority status for no other than the most instrumental reason that they can run their own educational institutions without interference from the state. Instead of a straightforward set of freedoms based on freedom of association, we have made rights contingent upon community identity.

We are in this paradoxical and dangerous position, that real grievances and discrimination against particular groups is occluded from our consciousness. At the same time, the language of justice has been reduced to a ruse to parcel out benefits based on identity. Even the Left, which was ideologically wary of communal categories, has now fallen lock stock and barrel into using them. Our idea of an inclusive politician is not someone who can defend a principled liberal politics; it is someone who can cut a deal on any issue, sometimes for communalism, sometimes against it.

It could be argued that raising these questions is being over-anxious: communal polarisation is not worse than in the past, there is a revulsion against certain forms of violence; even Narendra Modi is apparently trying to keep up appearances. Terrorism has not produced the kind of backlash it did previously; there is, on the face of it, a new maturity. But this was precisely the time to fundamentally alter the language of citizenship, to rescue it from the dead end of a permanent distinction between majorities and minorities. While there is a surface calm, deeper divisions are being insidiously entrenched. Don’t be surprised if ugly times return soon.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi

pratapbmehta@gmail.com