Shaping a new polity

For a creative transformation of the Indian civil society in the 21st Century, we will have to turn to sections and communities that have expanded their horizons in the last two decades - women and the minorities. It also requires the rejection of the dominant cultural discourse of Hindutva, says noted historian RAVINDER KUMAR, in the second of his three-part series.

TO gain an insight into the churning process within national and regional politics in contemporary India, we have to do more than just dwell upon the anger of those sections of society which are turning their backs on the Bharatiya Janata Party. To fully comprehend this transformation, we also need to examine social classes and communities which have undergone an expansion of their social horizons over the past two decades. Such classes and communities are, therefore, ripe to be organised into a novel secular coalition that can provide the basis of India's entry into the 21st Century, as a polity capable of shaping for itself a new life of economic vitality and cultural creativity.

Perhaps the most substantial constituency that can be drawn into the secular resurrection of the Republic on a novel basis consists of women. Now, it is a fact that women from diverse classes, drawn by the charisma of Gandhiji, participated in the struggle for liberation in great numbers. But, after 1947, the upsurge for gender emancipation suffered a serious setback in two distinct directions. First, the new opportunities open to them through the advent of swaraj were largely monopolised by women drawn from the upper and middle classes. Women drawn from the deprived social orders: in agriculture; in artisanal activity; in mining operations; in lumpen activity; and in the industrial work force; gained little, if anything at all, from the advent of swaraj. No less crucial a defeat for women was the rejection of the Hindu Code Bill, floated in the Lok Sabha by Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s. This bill sought to upgrade the position of women in society through two devices: first, by radically redefining the Hindu family through the institution of divorce; and secondly, by decreeing that both the movable and the immovable assets of a family be equally divided between sons and daughters in the event of the demise of their father. It is not widely understood that the withdrawal of the Hindu Code Bill, in its original form, was one of the greatest failures of the Nehruvian programme of social transformation within Indian society. This was so because even though the Bill affected only the propertied classes, the consequences of an elevation of their status was, in the course of time, bound to transform the position of women as a whole within Indian society.

The extent to which the vision of gender liberation held out during the liberation struggle was aborted in the decades following 1947, is sensitively portrayed in the seminal Report On the Status of Women in India, published in 1975. In focussing upon the position occupied by women within society - at different levels, within different communities, and in divers regions of the Republic - this Report presents an over all picture of stagnation, or worse, so far as women (other than those from the elite classes) are concerned. Indeed, it actually highlights the reinforcement of patriarchy within the polity. This regression makes nonsense of the aspirations with which the women of India struggled and suffered during the decades of the nationalist movement. The loss was that of the country as a whole. For, it is one of the great lessons of history - a lesson fully understood by Mahatma Gandhi and his generation of nationalist leaders - that no social/political revolution can be deemed successful unless it restores to women the social and economic dignity to which they are legitimately entitled.

At the same time as the BJP was gaining ascendancy over national politics through invoking the doctrine of Hindutva, there is substantial evidence to believe that a new awakening was transforming the consciousness of women drawn from different classes and communities within society. The most sharply focussed gender movement, at this juncture, was the agitation against the proposal for a uniform civil code that was placed before the Lok Sabha in the 1980s. This Bill sharply divided the Muslim community. Although the agitation against this Bill resulted in a surrender to Muslim patriarchy and orthodoxy, there is reason to believe that this issue touched women in all sections of Indian society and encouraged them to reflect upon the manner in which they could advantageously redefine their position within the country.

Over and above gender movements, which sprang from the issue of a uniform civil code, the 1980s saw the growth of an intelligentsia, which protested against various discriminatory practices against women in different States of the Indian Union. Some of these agitations were led by women civil servants located in the heart of the Indian establishment, like the Collector in Tamil Nadu who demonstrated to her sisters how much freedom of movement a bicycle - admittedly a prosaic vehicle of locomotion - could confer on its owner. The powerful agitation against the consumption of liquor in Andhra Pradesh was a similar phenomenon. Such emancipatory movements, often led by faceless members of the intelligentsia, reached out to different segments of gender society and cumulatively provided the basis for the powerful and, in the long run, irrepressible, agitation for gender reservation in representative bodies, from the Lok Sabha in New Delhi, to the gram panchayat of the smallest hamlet in the Republic.

The new consciousness that has dawned upon women in India, rich and poor, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others, who constitute slightly less than half the population of the Republic (and thereby hangs a tale), makes up the most formidable constituent of the winds of change that are blowing across our country. While a number of movements directed towards women are visible to those who care to survey the national scene, it is a matter of deep concern that few political organisations, not excluding radical parties, have really attempted to reach out to this distinctive (and demographically so significant) constituency, and creatively transform the collective aspirations of women into an instrument of social transformation within the country. The repeated adjournment of the Bill seeking reservation for women in the Lok Sabha bears witness to our contention; for it highlights the cynicism and bigotry with which the established party system views the prospect of gender emancipation in a society suffering from the most brutal form of patriarchal hegemony. Yet the first party to reach out to women collectively, wherever they are located in Indian society, can secure for itself, at least for a generation (witness the umbilical tie between the share-croppers and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Bengal), the support of the single largest voting block in the country. We are not making a case for gender warfare on a monumental scale in the Republic. We are merely making a plea for an initiative within the sphere of protective discrimination, which the Constitution has already extended to several sections of Indian society.

Next only to women in their capacity to transform Indian society for the better, stand the minority communities, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, to mention only the three largest groups who collectively constitute some 200 million citizens of the Republic. No Party can preside with any semblance of stability over the governance of India, which does not enjoy the confidence of the minorities and seeks only to browbeat then into sullen acquiescence to a dominant religious and cultural discourse. Perhaps the height of amicable political relations between the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs in the 20th Century was attained during the great Gandhian agitation of 1920-22, when roughly 10 per cent of a diverse civilisational society of 400 million was drawn into a heroic struggle for national liberation.

This was, in all likelihood, the greatest mass movement in world history in the 20th Century, deeply flawed though it was in its ideological and organisational coherence. Since then, for reasons too complex to spell out in a brief essay, the minorities - nationalist in their own rights, for nationalism in India is not the divine right of any single community - could not be drawn into a truly cohesive coalition with the Hindu majority. Instead, the history of India in the past century is marked by substantial conflict between the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs. The most violent confrontations took place in 1947, 1984 and 1992.

As already observed, the reason why religious consciousness still substantially shapes collective identities in India is not an easy question to answer, unless one makes a digression into the cultural past of the country. Much more disturbing is the fact that the communitarian hold on the Indian psyche has increased with the growth of a market economy and a democratic polity in the 20th Century. The conventional view that the British controlled their empire over South Asia through a policy of "divide and rule" is not a sufficient explanation of these divisions though this tactic was a substantial constituent of the total mix of imperial politics prior to 1947. No less significant were the tensions - social, economic and moral - between different religious communities, which have gained a new intensity over the past half a century, after the demise of British rule over South Asia. Be that as it may, the time has come for various political parties within India, national or regional, to take serious steps to weave the fabric of society into a cohesive polity. The conventional mechanisms of bringing about such unity - including the Gandhian solution of stimulating creative interplay between different religions - seem to be inadequate to the needs of the situation. Nor is it possible, as the Marxist left has argued for a long time, to devise revolutionary politics which can dramatically transform "community" into "class" consciousness; and in doing so, map out afresh the political configuration of Indian society.

Indeed, there are no easy solutions to what is conventionally described as the "communal problem" within India. What we can reject forthwith is the device of Hindu dominance, currently being peddled by the BJP through the application of the concept of Hindutva, as the bridging mechanism between different religious communities. Besides, any nostalgic look at the history of our society, in the belief that the wisdom of past centuries can successfully resolve communal hostility, is doomed to prove futile. For there were in days gone by multiple conflicts - class, community, sectarian, and ethnic - within India. The only lesson history holds to contemporary statecraft is to keep alive the memory of past conflicts, not with the aim of settling old scores, but in order to transcend the unloveliness of the past, with the objective of generating a new ethos of tolerance in the public domain. Lest this sound too simple minded, let me hasten to add that there exist, dispersed through diverse cultural sites in our intensely plural society, various arenas of consensual deliberation and social reconciliation, that can be exploited by political actors who can wield moral authority to good effect. Perhaps Mahatma Gandhi and Badshah Khan in the recent past and, near our own times, Sant Longowal exemplify what I mean by actors of proven moral stature who can strive to heal the deadly virus of religious strife within the polity. Such reconciliation between different religious and communitarian groups can alone generate that climate in which the collective endeavour of the people can transform India into a peaceful and creative nation.

(To be continued)

The author is former Director, Nehru Museum and Chairman, Indian Council for Historical Research, New Delhi.

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