IT is an easy explanation for her death at the hands of
suspected Hindu extremists that Gauri Lankesh stood for secularism,
gender equality and a host of human rights, which offended her foes.
These are all laudable causes associated with Indian liberals who oppose
Hindutva.
However, few from this club have truly
targeted the right-wing quarry’s beating heart as Lankesh and her
ideological soulmates did. And they did it by rejecting their Hindu
identity. That is by far the bigger challenge for Hindutva — people
disowning their Hindu identity. Muslim- and Christian-baiting is a means
to dealing with this potentially insurmountable challenge. Lankesh and
her fellow apostates, if that is the word, include, but are not confined
to, social reformers in the Lingayat community of rationalists and
Shiva mystics that are common in southern India.
Unlike
many of her grieving supporters, Lankesh’s sympathy for causes she
embraced was firmly aligned with her aloofness from Hinduism, which goes
beyond the fact that she was buried and not cremated. Let us stay with
the crucial point. Lalu Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, Mamata Banerjee, Arvind
Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi are perceived as ideologically disparate
politicians fighting Hindutva in their different ways. In their
opposition to the extremists, they indeed reject Hindu majoritarianism
as well. But they do not disown the popular perception (or reality) that
they belong to the religious or cultural majority, which their Hindu
identity constitutes.
Lankesh saw Hinduism not as a religion open to change but as a hidebound hierarchy ranged against women and the lower tiers of society.
They may see themselves as good, kindly, or even atheist and
non-practising Hindus, followers of Nehru, perhaps, or Bertrand Russell
or even Karl Marx. Yet, for better or worse they would perhaps struggle
to denounce their Hindu identity, as Lankesh did, be it for political
expediency or by cultural reasoning.
Communist cadres
carrying Ganpati idols in Kerala in recent years offer as good an
evidence as any that being overtly Hindu may have become a political
requirement in this era of religious surge that shapes the new identity
politics. Hindutva seems to have sent devout Marxists cartwheeling,
grudgingly, hopefully, towards religion, a paradox of sorts. Right-wing
groupies may deride admirers of Lankesh as anti-Hindu but her liberal
supporters do not, in their own reasoning, see the Hindu identity as
problematic, which Ambedkar and Gauri Lankesh, among others, did.
Lankesh
saw Hinduism not as a religion open to change but as a hidebound
hierarchy ranged against women and the lower tiers of society. Which is
more or less how her liberal admirers may also see it. The difference is
that she underscored her non-Hindu minority identity in the battle with
Hindutva. And, for rejecting that identity, from the perspective of her
right-wing foes, she became an apostate worthy of matching retribution.
Consider
this: The clarion call of Hindutva is: “Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain.”
(Own your Hindu identity with pride.) And what was Lankesh saying? “I am
not a Hindu.”
Ideally, there should be no column for
apostasy in a multifaceted system of beliefs that Hinduism has so far
spawned. Apostasy is thus not a term that should lend itself to
Hinduism.
To be sure, apostates have been a feature
almost exclusively within Semitic religions in which there is one God,
one Satan and one Book. I once unburdened on Shimon Peres my knowledge
of Judaism, which I had picked up from The Ten Commandments, the movie
about Moses. I asked him why Israel, which should follow the tenet
‘Though shalt not kill’, does just the opposite with the Palestinians.
Peres, who was visiting Delhi as deputy prime minister of Israel,
cleverly dodged the question, and said a brilliant mind like Einstein’s
could be snuffed out with a bullet. And a brilliant mind needed to be
protected, with force if necessary.
A less contrived
answer would be that killing fellow humans is not entirely forbidden for
Jews, regardless of a commandment they were handed. The Book of
Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Torah and the Christian Old
Testament, decrees death for apostates though it may be no longer
practised. “And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to
death; because he hath spoken perversion against the Lord your God, who
brought you out of the land of Egypt…”
Accusations of
apostasy and blasphemy, now routinely punishable by mob justice, have
become a cottage industry in many Muslim countries. That’s what Fahmida
Riaz was trying to alert her Indians friends about: “Tum bilkul hum
jaisey nikley/Ab tak kahaan chhupey thay bhai?” (You’ve turned out to be
just like us [in troubled Pakistan]. Where were you hiding all this
while, brother?)
The secular-communal binary, shared
enthusiastically by Lankesh’s liberal admirers, was not her winning
card, however. If recent history is anything to go by, we can see that
the more vociferous the call for secularism the greater the victory
graph of the communalists becomes. Ambedkar had warned against the
trick. But he also gave the antidote, emphasising that Hinduism is
constructed around self-absorbed castes that have little in common with
each other except when there is anti-Muslim violence. Muslims provide
traction to Hindutva and vanquishing an entire community may not
necessarily be the chief aim of the extremists. The real objective, in
Gauri Lankesh’s view, as I understood her, was her fear of the
subjugation of the vast and potentially intractable majority of Hindus
by the elite, splintered as they are into mutually exclusive castes.
The
impact of Lankesh’s ideas could go beyond the fact that she challenged
Hinduism. A less consolidated Hindu identity was possible had Ambedkar
won his battle with Gandhi’s notion of a benign Hindu-Muslim binary. It
would then perhaps be a struggle to forge a hastily assembled counter
identity of Indian Muslims. Had Lankesh been around to assist Ambedkar
before partition she would have challenged Jinnah and Gandhi alike.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2017
