The 'secular' conceit

By M.S.S. Pandian

TORMENTORS OF Dalits, women-haters, swindlers of public money, foes of free speech, class enemies of the proletariat, kar sevaks of the past - all can now pass off as political radicals. This is an irresistible gift of Indian `secularism' - a `secularism' scripted and staged by India's parliamentary Left for the past decade. Conversion to `secularism' - more precisely, to the `secular' front, and in particular, during times of elections - cleanses one instantaneously of all sins of the past, present, and future. The prophets of `secularism' are lying in wait with such a spiritual bonanza for everyone who, in any sane reckoning, would be treated as belonging to the political Right.

Take for instance, the two key constituents of the so-called secular front in Tamil Nadu - the PMK and the AIADMK. Dr. S. Ramdoss, who broke bread with the BJP till yesterday, has been welcomed into the `secular' front without a moment's hesitation. Ms. J. Jayalalitha did not even think that she should consult her allies before accepting the PMK into the `secular' fold. She knew that her comrades-in-arms would be just as delighted as herself to secularise the PMK. She was indeed right. The CPI declared the decision of the PMK `bold'. The high priest of Indian `secularism' and the general secretary of the CPI(M), Mr. Harkishan Singh Surjeet, took a detour to Poes Garden, on his way to Thiruvananthapuram, to endorse the new-found `secularism' of the PMK.

The new convert was not even asked to make a confession of his past sins. In fact, the obstinate convert pledged that he would continue to practice the sin of all sins - the communal sin. He declared, even as he walked out of the BJP-led NDA, that he had nothing to complain about the BJP. Truthful to his conviction, he continues to support the BJP at the Centre. In other words, he is half secular, half communal - chameleon-like. Ever merciful `secularists' do not make much of such contradictions. After all, elections are round the corner.

If this is the credibility of the PMK in matters communal, its credibility in other matters is not any different. The Vanniars, led and incited by the PMK, are more or less exclusively responsible for the systematic attacks on the Dalits in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu. The poll violence unleashed by the PMK in the Chidambaram constituency in 1999 - which included the prevention of Dalits from voting by well- organised terror, arson of Dalit settlements, vandalisation of their properties - is a recent instance. If the `secularists' then wept their hearts out at the plight of the Dalits, it was merely because the PMK was part of the NDA. Now that the PMK is `secular', the `secularists' do not take a moment to abandon the Dalits. In the self-righteous world of the `secularists', Dalits are disposable.

Let us now turn to the track record of the AIADMK, secularism's bulwark in Tamil Nadu. One need not retell the well-known story of how the AIADMK rule under Ms. Jayalalitha programmatically communalised Tamil politics, and her decision to pull down the BJP-led Government at the Centre had nothing to do with anti- communalism. Even after the Left certified that the AIADMK is `secular', Ms. Jayalalitha chose not to give up her irrepressible desire for the agenda of the Hindu Right all endorsed by the Left without a whimper of protest. Even the godless Mr. K. Veeramani of the Dravidar Kazhagam found it all secularism, pure and simple.

To reduce what Ms. Jayalalitha can offer to the Tamils to mere `secularism' is to lack a sense of history. But for the feigned amnesia of the `secularists' a la CPI and CPI(M) - feigned, because they claim history matters to them - everyone else who has even the least concern for the people of Tamil Nadu knows that any `secular' rule led by the AIADMK would, on its immediate trail, bring inconsolable suffering - both political and personal. Unprecedented looting of the public money, violent stifling of democratic dissent, and unrepentant anti-Dalit politics have been the bounty that the AIADMK rule offered to the people of the State. Things have changed, the Left claims. We know differently. The very story of how the Left has been reduced to pick up mutely and ingloriously single- digit seats at the feet of Ms. Jayalalitha tells us how things have not changed.

In all these, one unmistakably finds a pattern which is familiar. If in the past, the parliamentary Left rendered communism a humourless joke in the very name of communism, now it is sweating it out to render secularism another humourless joke in the very name of secularism. Skills of the past are being employed remorselessly in a new climate.

There is another past which is equally at play - a past of single-agenda politics of the Left. By reducing the field of politics to singular oppositions - in the past, class vs. non- class, and now, communal vs. secular - the Left has denied and continues to deny any space to contest manifold oppressions of the marginalised based on caste, gender, language etc. Instances from the heydays of the Indian Left's `class' politics would illustrate this. Take for example, caste. The Left is the last political formation in the post-colonial India to discover that there is something called caste and it matters to the most. When caste dawned on them, they resisted it. They worried relentlessly, what would come of `class'. The victim of class is not merely caste-based equality. Gender is yet another instance. Today, instead of class, secularism is employed by the Left to elbow out the articulation of other identities based on different forms of oppressions.

The long wait in vain by Mr. R. Thirumavalavan, the State Organiser of the Dalit Panthers of India (DPI), for the Third Front to emerge, tells us how the `secularism vs. communalism' divide is leaving by the wayside other issues of critical importance. Mr. Thirumavalavan is no political angel. He has of course chosen his own brand of political opportunism to end the upper caste monopoly over such opportunism. That story can wait for the present. When the `secularists' inducted the PMK into the `secular' front, his voice resonated with passion and reason. Who can deny the truth of his statement that `a genuine fight against religious fundamentalism should attack casteism which is the basis of communalism'? The non-existing unity of the Hindus peddled by the Hindu Right is obviously a move to keep at bay the caste-based demand for equality. All the same, his anguished cry asking the TMC, the CPI and the CPI(M) to `understand the wounded feelings of the Dalits' fell on deaf ears. Along with the Left, Mr. G.K. Moopanar of the TMC, who claimed in 1999 to have ushered in a `new effort in Tamil Nadu's history' by aligning with the Dalits, chose the single-agenda `secular' path - forcing the DPI into the hands of the NDA. Secularism as it is practised cannot engage with the needs of the religious minorities, the Dalits and similarly placed others, at the same time. That is the tragedy of single-agenda politics.

To open up a field of politics where multiple demands for justice and equality enunciated by different social groups can jostle together, is not to be enslaved by the commonsense that politics is the art of the possible. Politics as the art of the possible is so entrenched today that even self-proclaimed communists think that defamation suits can recover sullied honour. We need to think of political options as not given within the domain of parliamentary politics, but created in the crucible of grassroot mobilisation and creative political imagination, outside the mainstream.

We do have models of politics which self-consciously treated politics as the art of the impossible, and left behind great legacies of radicalism. The critique of religion - in particular Brahminical Hinduism - by Periyar E.V. Ramasamy is a case in point. In tirelessly propagating how religions inferiorised, here and now, different social segments such as women, lower castes, minor linguistic regions and those who perform physical labour, he brought in the open and addressed varied forms of oppressions simultaneously. His movement, thus, offered space for diverse sections of the marginalised at once in the heydays of nationalism which sought to keep on the backburner multiple demands for justice by projecting a fictive unity of the Indians in opposition to the British. These neglected models of politics have much to offer to our present which is dominated by single agenda exclusivism marked by radical pretence and rank opportunism. To reduce Periyar and others who attempted to do the impossible as a mere stick to beat the DMK, as is being done by the `secularists' of Tamil Nadu, is to mortgage our future by denying ourselves a politics of radical inclusivity.

(The writer is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Previous : A dim road-map for democracy
Next     : The budget & the food economy