(Indian Express, August 06, 2008)
A country in 40 acres
by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
On Amarnath we’re in denial. Let’s admit the communal problem. Then learn the politics of healing
Let us cut through the cant of our political class. Amarnath has become a serious communal issue. In an interview given to a Hindi daily, Narendra Modi had, in a chillingly prophetic way, described Amarnath as a second “Shah Bano”. Whether we like it or not, Amarnath has deepened the Hindu-Muslim divide in many respects. It has exposed the fact that possibilities for intercommunity reconciliation are thinning daily and revealed how every political party has huge investments in a politics of divisiveness that none is likely to divest. It has given the BJP a peg on which to hang its faltering politics. It has given Muslim fundamentalists a pretext to wage war on the infidel. It has exposed the limited capacity of the Indian state to quell violence. It has brought out the ways in which the Congress’s myopia and lack of initiative set the stage for a communal politics. And it has revealed the dirty secret of all us constitutional secularists: we are more interested in having somebody to beat upon than in creating the conditions for peace. As with Ayodhya, the inability to find small compromises, articulate meaningful gestures of reconciliation, might haunt us for ever. Recognising that there is a communal problem is a necessary step towards solving it. Denying the problem merely shortens the road to doomsday.
Most politicians hide behind mendacity. This is a problem of nationalism, not of religion. Therefore it is not a communal problem. This is nonsense. Most problems of communalism in India are related to nationalism, not to disputes over faith. The creation of Pakistan was about competing visions of nationalism, not faith, as have been the ravages of identity politics since. The idea that locating a conflict’s source in nationalism does not make it communal is a form of self-delusion we should shed. Both nationalism and communalism are also integrally linked to the politics of territoriality. Omar Abdullah’s ridiculously feted speech exemplifies this perfectly. When he made the claim that opposing the land transfer was a case of fighting for one’s land, he made the link between communalism and territoriality. Implicit were two explosive links: first, that only one particular community has any claim to land in Kashmir. Even granting Kashmir’s special status, the acceptance of this foundational principle is a massive concession to communalism. Second, he lent credence to all those who exaggeratedly believe that a mere 40 acres is a prelude to colonisation by some “alien”. Of course Muslims have for centuries facilitated the yatra. But that deep cultural fact is then used as a shield to elevate a minor matter to gigantic political proportions; a hard-won cultural interface sacrificed on the altar of that innocent sounding phrase, nationalism.
Equally, there is an investment in exaggerating the implications of withdrawing the order by self-declared defenders of Hinduism. The fate of the yatra has after all never been in question. No, this 40 acres, like Ayodhya, has become for one community the sign of a dangerous majoritarianism about to gobble it up. For another community, it has become the sign of an intransigent minority, not willing to allow even the smallest concession for what the majority holds dear.
But there are other deeper registers of communalism. Take the morally obnoxious way in which we keep an account of parity between communities. The Congress started this trend during the ’80s: one concession to community A, so another one to community B. The result is an insidious entrenchment of competitive group politics that now extends to victimisation. Leaders cater to the victims only of their communities, and rush to pile up competitive narratives of victimisation. There are those who will focus on the suffering in Jammu and those who will focus on the blockade of the highway. There are no leaders who have credibility across community lines and there is almost no space to imagine the predicament from each other’s point of view. Gandhi was right: the radical test of our ability to coexist would not be the ability to parrot principles. It would be the ability to understand each other’s anxieties and fears. Which politician really understands the accumulated alienation our politics produced inside the Valley? Who really understands that if you were in the Valley there would be more than good reason to fear the Indian state? And if we do not understand these histories, we will keep repeating the same mistakes. Conversely, which Valley politician can now credibly look at the Kashmiri Pandits in the eye, or can argue 40 acres might help heal a rift, rather than represent the road to more colonisation? The politics over Amarnath is squarely a product of this almost unbridgeable chasm.
As Hazari Prasad Dwivedi once said, jab dil bhara ho, aur dimag khali ho, then all urging of principle seems beside the point. We can talk of bureaucratic decisions, the flip-flop of political parties, technical points in the law, the need to disentangle the state from all religion. But these all seem so unmeaning. In the end, the possibilities of a solution depend upon mutual trust, not the other way round. And trust cannot be legislated or conjured out of this air; it has either to be assumed, or daily recovered through the hard work of politics. But trust enhancing gestures are now impossible to imagine.
Every dimension of social existence, what rights people have, what territory they can claim, what kinds of institutions they can run, what justice they will get, is increasingly suffused with communal categories. The state has exacerbated this trend by getting tangled in religious affairs in so many contexts that it now has no language in which to articulate a sense of common citizenship. Communalism has now seeped into the consciousness of all our politicians so deeply that they exemplify it even when they mean to deny it. But perhaps Gandhi was right. We need a politics that is more therapeutic in character, that can help us confront our unconscious slippages and exaggerated fears. For in the absence of this kind of politics, the Amarnath Yatra, instead of marking the passage from Ashada purnima to Shravana purnima, will seem more like a long dark night towards communal carnage. No wonder the lingam is melting, propped up by artificial means. Any self-respecting God ought to have abandoned this suffocating madness long ago.
The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
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