On 23-26 July 2014, the European Association for South-Asian Studies
held its biannual conference in Zürich, Switzerland. The more than 150
participants came mostly from the EU and South Asia (including my first-ever
acquaintance from the Maldives), with a delegation from the US (including
someone originating in North Korea, a country exotic even to Orientalists), and
a few from China, Japan and Australia. It was very well-organized down to the
details. E.g., at most conferences, name-tags are half the time invisible
because the white reverse side of the badge is showing; here the badges were
printed recto verso. At the annual conference of the American Academy of
Religion (AAR), it is very difficult to find your friends back because it is
just too big and has no clear centre; here, everyone met for tea or lunch in a
single central hall, and the seminar rooms were in a single building, not
spread over the city as in the AAR conference of San Francisco 2012. The
different sessions of a panel took place consecutively and formed a natural
whole.
The atmosphere was quite relaxed and cheerful. It has been different at
one time. The last time I participated, Leiden 2006, it was a veritable
anti-Hindu hate-fest, with panels devoted to the “problem” of Hindu nationalism,
of history-rewriting etc. These conferences are long in the making and are
influenced by the atmosphere of the preceding two years. Back then, the memory
of BJP rule and of the unsuccessful attempt to effect glasnost in the history
textbooks after decades of Marxist domination were still fresh. Now, the
conference was prepared after long Congress rule and before it became clear
that Narendra Modi would sweep the elections and come to power. So, the usual
anti-Hindu animosity was limited, though we shall see that in subtle form, and
once very openly, it was still present.
Against classical studies
Most topics had nothing to do with “Oriental Studies”, i.e. classical
studies pertaining to the Orient. Once a very influential branch of philology,
it is now in full retreat, with chairs closing down, parallel to the decline in
learning about and sheer knowledge of Sanskrit in India itself. Sanskritists
present confided to me that they were desperate for a job. It could have been
different, for Chinese and Japanese studies are flourishing, even their
classical section, but then their governments are watchful and dynamic in this
matter. India, by contrast, is still dining out on the centrality it once held
(watch the Hindu websites jubilating over the nice things Arthur Schopenhauer,
William Faulkner or Romain Rolland once said about Hinduism, not noticing that
this was very long ago) and not doing anything to maintain its position in
academe nor even to counter the control of the India chairs by its declared enemies.
The importance of classical studies lies in the very importance of the
subject itself, but also in the continued importance of classical references in
modern Indian politics and culture. I was to find this out myself in the panel
on “divinization” in which I spoke. I read a paper on Vasistha, the Vedic seer
presiding over the unlikely victory against the “Ten Kings”. He was given one
of the Vedic hymns, which are normally only devoted to the gods. Here was a
classical subject, continuous with a tendency pervading the entire Hindu
culture till today, of extolling exceptional men and women and treating them as
gods. In passing, Vasistha mentions the “asikni visha”, the “dark people”. All
translations known to me explain that these are he “dark aboriginals” against
whom the invading white Aryans did battle. Very likely, the expression is a pun
(of which Vedic poetry contains numerous examples, no doubt including some
unidentified ones), meaning effectively “the people from the Asikni river”.
Other verses specify that the Ten Kings came from the Asikni (Chenab) river,
attacking eastwards to the Parushni (Ravi) river where the battle took place.
“The dark one” is a normal name for a river, e.g. the Thames in London or the Demer
in our town of Diest both mean “the dark one”, both names being cognate to
Sanskrit tamas. Mind you, the Ten
Kings came from the west, while the Vedic Aryans lived deeper inside India, and
many details unambiguously identify them as predominantly Iranian. Thus, many
names used by them or for them are known from Iranian, not from any Indian
“aboriginal” language. The few other Vedic instances of people being called
“dark” have satisfactorily been explained by the leading Sanskritist Hans
Heinrich Hock as applications of the universal equation “light = good, dark =
evil”, even attested in African languages. The systematic mistranslation of
“dark people” etc. as “the dark-skinned aboriginals subdued by the white Aryan
invaders and their caste Apartheid” for almost two centuries is one of the
grossest mistakes in scholarship, and extremely rich in consequences.
How this knowledge of ancient writings still affects modern Indian
politics was brought home to me by a fellow panellist, a young woman from
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. As so often, she was a Bengali Brahmin
(judging by her name) yet took up the cause of the “toiling masses” and called
them indigenous because she had swallowed the anti-Brahmin version of history.
She was clearly unnerved that I had uprooted the supposed Vedic evidence for
“white Aryan racism against the dark aboriginals” so effortlessly. As my
reference to Prof. Hock shows, I was not saying anything unorthodox in this
case: among the (admittedly very few) specialists, it is the new consensus that
the first Veda translators projected the then-common racial views onto the
Vedic testimonies. But those flawed and prejudiced views about Aryan invaders
defeating and then oppressing the “dark aboriginals” have a long life in
history textbooks and the received opinion. A few hours later, the JNU scholar
read her own paper, starting out with the curt information that the population
she studied belonged to the “dark aboriginals” oppressed by the “Aryan
invaders”, and that Shiva was a “non-Aryan god”. Her paper, pitting belief in
“Shiva the lazy peasant” against belief in “Dharma the Healer”, was interesting
enough, and would have remained standing without this erroneous framework of
Vedic racism. But such is the level of hate-driven anti-Hindu animosity that is
spoon-fed to these young scholars, and to the public in general.
She reminded me of another young woman, of Andhra low-caste origin, I
had seen a few years ago at the annual AAR meeting. She compared two myths
about the origin of caste, one of them being the Vedic Purusha Sukta’s
comparison between the Universal Man’s body parts and the functional classes in
society. In secularist mythology, this is an unspeakably evil text founding the
unspeakably evil caste system, though in reality it is only an explanation of social
differentiation as also given by Menenius Agrippa and Saint Paul. She noted
that Brahmins, Rajanyas (i.e. Kshatriya’s), Vaishyas and Shudras were mentioned
there, but not the Panchamas or Avarnas, i.e. those who later became known as
Untouchables. According to her, this was a sign of utmost contempt: the
Untouchables, not mentioned there nor in other older or contemporaneous texts,
had been left unmentioned because the Vedic author chose not to waste even one
word on them, so steep was his disdain. A more logical conclusion (while
weighing the caveat against argumentum e
silentio) would have been that there was no category of Untouchability yet.
Think of someone afflicted with paranoia who sees a man at a nearby café table
take notes. He thinks this is a spy taking notes on him. Then the other man
goes to the toilet, and our friend hastily looks at the notes; they are about a
different topic altogether. Someone with only light and passing paranoia would
be relieved that the man was not a spy after all. A real paranoiac, however,
would conclude that the man is an even more dangerously clever spy, who manages
to encode his report and not even to mention the person he is spying on. So,
that level of paranoia is patronized by the AAR provided it serves the anti-Hindu
cause.
Such politically motivated theories promoting caste struggle can only
flourish in a climate of complete ignorance. This explains why both in India
and in the West, the Left has been agitating for at least half a century
against the teaching of history and of classical languages. If successful, this
campaign would lock the next generations into the present and make them more
available for modern struggles. And as indeed it has been largely successful,
we do effectively have a young generation ignorant of ancient history and
susceptible to casteist and anti-Brahmin fairy-tales, even presenting these as
“scholarship” at academic conferences.
“South-Asian” studies
Nowadays, such conferences are filled with what amounts to “sociology of
modern South Asia”, with lots of “gendering”, “Othering”, “claiming cultural
spaces”, “negotiation of categories”, “politics of imagining” and “knowledge
constructs”. In general, sociological studies tend to be very superficial and
irrelevant, dressing up sheer barroom talk in jargon and then declaring the
conclusions scientific. I am reminded of the sociological study proving that in
a family watching TV together, the one holding the remote control has the
power: we all knew it already, but now, now it is “scientific”!
To be sure, sociology being boring and trivial is only the least of its
problems. Mostly, the academic setting, where physicists win Nobel Prizes with
genuine discoveries, serves to give a scientific veneer to theses that are
purely ideological. In the case of Indian ideologies, for instance, political
campaign slogans become summaries of “theories” pretending to be “scholarly”
and hence authoritative because of their footnotes, while being in reality
quite devoid of the prime characteristic of scholarship, viz. objectivity. Far
from being disinterested, such studies work mainly to undermine Hinduism and
buttress fashionable ideologies like anti-Brahmanism, lower-casteism and
feminism.
Thus, there was a panel on Indian Christianity in which all the papers,
one way or another, served the Christian side in the anti-conversion polemic. Many
people including India-watchers would not even be aware that there is a polemic
going on here, in this case one around the Hindu Nationalist claim that
“Christianization entails Westernization”, an effect which they as nationalists
find even worse than the conversion itself. There was nothing wrong with the
contents of the papers, though. For instance, on inculturation and
Westernization, I learned that already in the 18th century,
missionaries advocated inculturation while Indian converts wanted
Anglicization. It was yet another illustration of my old thesis that
“nationalism in a misstatement of Hindu concerns”: even then, Westernization
was not some conspiratorial scheme thought up by Westerners but an eager choice
by Indians themselves – albeit a subset estranged enough to want to identify
with the foreign occupier. The great Anglicizer TB Macaulay, the bête noire of the Hindu nationalists,
had to overcome the opposition of the British Orientalizers, among whom were a
number of missionaries wanting to spread the Christian message and teach
catechism through the vernaculars rather than English. I myself added the case
of Santhali, a tribal language used by the Flemish Jesuits as a medium of
education and Christianization, who upgraded the language to this extent that
it could be promoted to official language status in 2002. So far, so good.
But imagine somebody proposing a panel in which every single paper would
find for the Hindu side. The organizers probably would have disallowed it, or
at least they would have asked for somehow presenting both sides of the story.
In the present case, however, they probably didn’t even realize that something
was unbalanced. After all, Hinduism means injustice and superstition, therefore
modern scholarship cannot help being anti-Hindu in its conclusions. To be sure,
a situation won’t readily arise where all papers are pro-Hindu. Even a single
pro-Hindu paper on any controversial issue is hard to find. In the USA, the
Hindu American Foundation has already gotten as far as to send observers to the
audience of the Hindu-related panels in the annual AAR conference. But a
genuine representative of Hindu thought (as opposed to a Gandhian nincompoop
calling himself Hindu all while praising Hinduism’s enemies) among the speakers
is as yet unthinkable. This is because on the one hand, the anti-Hindu
prejudice is so prevalent that even non-political people will help keeping a
pro-Hindu out while letting an anti-Hindu in; and on the other, because the
Hindus themselves have utterly failed to groom their own scholarship, mostly
because they have never understood its importance.
However, history is moving on. The battle against Hinduism and the
criminalization of Hindutva have succeeded so thoroughly, that a new generation
has grown up with little involvement in this struggle. Off-hand they say things
that are just factual, but that an earlier generation would at least have
omitted from saying out loud because indirectly they could be used by Hindu
polemicists. Thus, it was said here that “Dalit”, a very popular word and theme
at this kind of conference, is not a name used by Dalits themselves, because
they prefer their own caste name, just as Ramdas Lamb at the AAR had also
related from his fieldwork. Since all anti-Hindu forces have pushed the term
“Dalit” to the point of making the Gandhian term “Harijan” disappear, they
might not want to play into the hand of the putatively anti-Dalit Hindutva
forces. (It is a different matter that Hindutva is not against these castes,
that every RSS man whom I have ever asked for his caste replied: “Hindu”; but
in the Western imagination, Hinduism means caste and hence “militant Hindu”
implies “militant casteist”.)
With the decline of clear ideologies, Hindu-bashing has become diffuse
and less intense. It is vaguely assumed that Hindu activists are evil and their
worldview ridiculous, but this is rarely thematized anymore. Everyone coughs up
the obligatory grin whenever a Hindu militant position is quoted. The panel on
Indian Christianity, for instance, treated it as a given that poor hapless
Christians are victims of Hindu attacks, but didn’t bother to discuss the
Christian guilt for the Lakshmananda murder and hence partly for the violent
tribal reaction to it. With Narendra Modi in power, however, we can expect a
renewed agenda of Hindu-bashing.
Aurangzeb
I have to concede I learned a lot at this gathering. Thus, I rarely get
to travel anymore, and when someone has spent a full year with a Nepali nomadic
tribe accompanying its complete economic and migration cycle, I tend to listen
with full attention. Those
anthropologists doing “participant observation” have a lot of stories to
tell. Or when someone reports that the Garo tribals in Meghalaya have their own
Shamanic medicine while associating modern medicine with the West and the
missionaries (hence calling it “Jesus medicine”!), I have to smile at the irony
that Jesus never used medicine but worked his supposed “miracle healing” much
like the Garo Shamans, viz. by exorcism, by “driving out spirits”, as the
Gospel reports. And when hearing a report on the relations between Kumari (i.e.
young girls’) worship in Nepal and the recent Communist regime there, I am amused
to learn that one girl’s father resolved potential tensions by adorning his
house with a Communist banner and a placard “The Communist Party salutes the
Kumari”! Not to mention the “invented tradition” of the Kalbeliya Dance of the
Rajasthani Gypsies (presented by Ayla Joncheere whom I know from Ghent
University), existing only since the 1980s but sold to tourists as age-old. The
fact that not Western but South-Asian society was discussed, made for a far
more colourful narrative, enough for a few days of entertainment. So, the
exotic element did make these excursions interesting, but that couldn’t hide
the fact that the more serious issues were being avoided.
Case in point: the panel on the bad reputation of the Moghul emperor
Alamgir, better known as Aurangzeb, and how contemporaneous sources nuanced
this picture. It was organized by Prof. Heidi Pauwels, whom I used to know at
Leuven University in our student days but who is now teaching Hindi literature
in Seattle. In three consecutive sessions, scholars spoke about various
literary and devotional writers of the period giving a mixed to positive
account of the Moghul emperor. The atmosphere was pleasant and cheerful, and I
see no reason for finding fault with any of the factual findings presented here.
But while it was good to get the details of the period’s public opinion,
it was hardly news. First of all, before his newfound fervour for Islam,
Aurangzeb had continued the established policy of the Moghul empire. From the
second half of his great-grandfather Akbar’s reign to the early period of his
own reign, this Muslim empire had persisted and flourished by virtue of a
compromise with the Hindu populace: the temples which had been demolished by
the preceding Sultanate and other Muslim regimes were allowed to be rebuilt,
and the toleration tax was abolished. On these conditions, most Hindus were
willing to live with a Muslim overlord, hence the favourable references to the
younger Aurangzeb.
Even afterwards, Hindu writers could have their reasons for writing
favourably about him. He had the power, backed up by a fearsome military
machine and a ruthless repression of dissent, a factor which modern academics
in their cosy literature departments fail to appreciate. When Guru Govind Singh
wrote his Zafar Nama (“Victory letter”) to
the Emperor, he wanted to wrench a concession from him and therefore had
every reason to express himself diplomatically, to invoke the duty of justice
incumbent upon a wielder of authority, and to create a common moral universe
from which to draw arguments that might convince Aurangzeb. Yet it would be
wishful thinking to deduce therefrom that he bore no grudge against the
murderer of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, and his sons. At least no one in the
panel dared to doubt Aurangzeb’s decision to execute Tegh Bahadur, though the
subject was avoided.
Moreover, then as now, some Hindus were very good at whitewashing
religious injustice. Since I can’t look inside people’s heads, I will not
discount the possibility that some writers genuinely thought favourably about
Aurangzeb, even when Shivaji, Chhatrasal and other rebels had a different idea.
But then, what do all these testimonies in favour of Aurangzeb prove?
After the attacks of 11 September 2001, numerous politicians visited mosques
and issued statements expressing sympathy for the “religion of peace”. Even
George W. Bush and Tony Blair, all while preparing to invade Afghanistan and
Iraq and kill many thousands of Muslims, said some nice things about Islam and
were never caught in the act of criticizing it. That is the difference with
critics of Islam: these don’t kill Muslims, while praisers of Islam do. Now,
you could collect all those pro-Islamic gestures and statements, explore them
at length in a panel, and conclude that the relations between Islam and the
West in late 2001 were very good, especially if you keep the WTC attacks and
the jubilant reactions in the Muslim world out of view. This is what the panel
amounted to: much beating around the bush about the mixed reactions to Aurangzeb
all while keeping his actual conduct out of view.
The fact that Guru Govind Singh diplomatically swallowed his resentment
at Aurangzeb’s killing his father and sons when petitioning the emperor who
held all the cards, does not nullify that other fact, that Aurangzeb did kill
the Guru’s family. Indeed, this nicely illustrates the utter superficiality of
the secular approach: at heart, Govind hated the murderer of his family, but on
the surface, he used diplomatic language, and the secularists think they can
then use this surface language to trump the reality of his deeper attitude. Or
the fact that some classical musicians were patronized by Aurangzeb does not
nullify his decision to throw the musicians out once he got serious about
religion. The fact that some “secular” Hindu writers had their reasons to
praise him, does not nullify that other fact, viz. that he did order the
demolition of thousands of temples and that he did provoke and mercilessly
suppress the Hindu rebellions. The panel’s fervent attempt to shift the
emphasis to more pleasant words and gestures than this grim display of Islamic
tyranny provided some interesting excursions in less well-known texts, but
cannot seriously alter the not-so-pleasant reality.
The facts that were sought to be downplayed were indeed given minimum
visibility, yet everybody present knew that this panel was meant to exorcise
the Hindu focus on those facts. But the real elephant in the room that
everybody was assiduously looking away from, and that, as far as I noticed,
nobody ever even mentioned, was the motive behind Aurangzeb’s behaviour. This
motive was the doctrine of Islam. What happened was that Aurangzeb got
religion. He realized that his father Shah Jahan, grandfather Jehangir and
great-grandfather Akbar had betrayed Islam by making their historical
compromise with the Hindus. He was yet to find out that this compromise was
necessary for a stable empire, but what animated him in his religious phase was
a desire to imitate the Prophet’s precedent to persecute the unbelievers and
destroy the temples and idols that embodied this unbelief. This is what
explained his behaviour, not some idiosyncrasy of his personality.
Prof. Pauwels had said in her introduction that Aurangzeb is being
demonized. This is entirely true, though with different implications than she
thinks. Numerous Hindu writers do indeed hold him up as an example of cruelty
and fanaticism. Yes, he did lock up his father and execute his brother to wrest
the succession to the throne from him. Not so nice, but not all that
exceptional in dynastic histories. If his rule had been benevolent, he would on
balance have received a positive evaluation from his subjects and from the
historians. Generally, his personal life could give rise to such a positive
evaluation, vide the nuanced 1912 book by Jadunath Sarkar (dubbed a “Hindu
communalist historian” by the Marxists) about the history of “Aurangzib”. But
most Hindus only know about his public policy, especially his persecution of
Hindus, his attempts to militarily suppress Hindu rebellions, and his
demolitions of thousands of Hindu temples. Since these acts resulted from the
Islamic doctrine, a correct critique of Aurangzeb’s policies would have focused
on Islam. Regardless of his personality, the pious Aurangzeb broke with the
Moghul compromise because as a true Muslim, he wanted to imitate the Prophet
who had divested all of Arabia from Pagan temples and idols and broken the
idols of the Kaaba with his own hands.
So, Hindus ought to remain
neutral vis-à-vis Aurangzeb but become critical of Islam as the basis of his
iconoclasm. Instead they shield Islam from criticism and vent their anger upon
the person Aurangzeb. They “demonize” him,-- in order to avoid “demonizing”
Islam. In some cases this is a deliberate ploy, in most cases they have really
believed and interiorized the Gandhian propaganda that all religions and their
founders are noble and well-intentioned, but their followers are misguided and
twist the message. These “demonizers” are only being politically correct: they
avoid blaming Islam, but since the facts are too clear and undeniable, they
explain these by putting the blame on the person Aurangzeb. In some cases, this
is a deliberate exercise in opportunism, but more often, people have
interiorized this puerile worldview of blaming persons rather than the beliefs
that drive them. One can compare this to a development that took place at the
time of the Zurich conference: the conquest of northwestern Iraq by ISIS, or
the self-styled “Islamic State” or Caliphate. When the ISIS activists
themselves posted videos of their demolitions, decapitations, rapes and other
cruelties, Western commentators fell over each other to dub them “crazy”. But
they were by no means crazy, they justified their actions with reference to
Islam. Since these commentators have a holy fear of blaming Islam for anything
(that would be “Islamophobia”, God forbid!), they have no remaining option but
to blame the undeniable facts on the personality traits of these Islamic
militants.
Conclusion: we should do as this panel suggests and stop the
demonization of the pious Muslim Aurangzeb. Instead, we should name and shame
Islam as the true culprit.
Hindu majoritarianism
In the titles and abstracts of this august gathering, most
non-specialist people would look in vain for signs of anti-Hindu animus.
Indeed, a lot of speakers genuinely didn’t think of it. Well, there was a
session as well as many other papers on the poor hapless Indian Muslims but
none on the terrorized Bangladeshi Hindus, and nobody noticed anything amiss.
By contrast, the keynote address by Professor Ratna Kapur (Jindal Law School,
Delhi, and Harvard) was all about demonizing every Hindu resisting the
annihilation of Hinduism: “‘Belief’ in Law. The Politics of Secularism,
Religion and Hindu Majoritarianism in Indian Constitutional Law”.
First off, she noted as a general societal fact that “religion has come
out of the closet”, citing as example that India uses religion as a tourist
attractor. In fact, for as long as modern tourism exists, religion has been a
tourist attractor to India. The place of religion in the Indian public sphere
hasn’t substantially altered since Mahatma Gandhi’s days. Where a real change
is in evidence and religion has effectively “come out of the closet”, is in
Europe. Secularism originated as an anti-Church and anti-obscurantist position
and therefore counted as progressive and Leftist. But now that the Leftists are
crawling ever deeper before their ever more numerous Islamic voters, their
secularism is eroding. More and more, they are adopting the Indian version of
secularism, viz. appeasement of Islam. Thus, in Belgium, the militantly secular
Socialist Party had defended a ban on the Islamic headscarf in schools and
public functions in 2006, but in 2014 they have made a U-turn. The remaining
Christian progressives are piggy-backing the Islamic wave and making use of the
secularists’ confusion to argue that “religion is becoming relevant again”. And
now, Indian secularists have discovered this development and use it to justify
Indian “secularism”-cum-appeasement to Western audiences.
But perhaps the Hindu Right’s discourse was so impressively correct that
even during a political low ebb, it could influence the judges and other public
figures? That is what Prof. Kapur implied. She described the Hindu Right’s
position as opposed to both the Gandhian and the Nehruvian versions of
secularism. The Gandhian version is the one most Hindus have come to accept and
which pervades the Indian law system: Sarva-Dharma-Samabhava,
“equal respect for all religions”, often over-interpreted as “equal truth of
all religions”. The Nehruvian version is the wall between religion and
politics, Dharma-Nirpekshata,
“religious neutrality”. Both versions are invoked when pleading the defence of
“indian secularism”, yet neither fully accounts for the policies, laws and
constitution articles that irritate the “Hindu Right”.
She summarized the Hindu Right’s critique thus: “The laws protecting
minorities and giving them special treatment are unsecular.” She quickly went
over this point, not wanting to draw attention to India’s non-secularism. The
word “secularism” already had a meaning long before Nehru adopted it, and it means: religious neutrality, i.e. equality of all
citizens before the law regardless of religion. So, India is a secular state if
all citizens get the same treatment in law regardless of their religion. Is
this the case? Of course not: Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis have
different law systems, chiefly because Muslims insist on it. So, contrary to
all those fear-mongers’ loud proclamations that “the BJP constitutes a threat
to the secular state in India”, firstly, India definitely is not a secular
state, and secondly, the BJP wants to enact a Common Civil Code and is thereby
the only major party that wants to turn India into a secular state. The other
major parties including the long-ruling Congress Party, by contrast, keep on
promising their Muslim voters that they will preserve legal Apartheid between
the religions and prevent India from becoming a secular state. Indeed, Muslims
outside India openly abhor secularism; those in India only swear by
“secularism” because they know that there, the word is used improperly and
effectively only means “anti-Hindu”.
Not that she drew attention to the fact that “secularism” has a very
different meaning to Westerners from what it has come to mean in India. Indian
secularists prefer to keep the rest of the world in ignorance about their own
dirty little secret, viz. that “secularism” in India often means the very
opposite of its normal meaning. When you question an Indian secularist at close
quarters, he will try to save his position by explaining that secularism in
India happens to mean something different from what it means in the West? But
do they tell this to Western audiences? Prof. Kapur at any rate did not.
Westerners’ automatic sympathy for Indian secularism (and against the supposed
“theocrats” they hear about) is predicated on the assumption that their own
familiar secularism is also present in India, that both are the same. Logic
teaches that “a = a”, that a term has the same meaning throughout a reasoning process,
so Westerners assume that “secularism” means secularism, and this Indian law
professor certainly wasn’t going to pin-prick that illusion.
So instead, she
explained that the Hindu Right only wanted “formal equality” (understood as
“justice to all, appeasement of none”) while the rest wanted “substantive
equality”, a position she found far more sophisticated and just. But any law
scholar would understand that the law is precisely about “formal” equality. In
the real world, one man is rich and another poor, one is talented and another
dumb, etc.; but at least in law, they are equal. The law cannot neutralize the
inequalities given to men by nature; but the least it can do, is to make men at
least “formally” equal. And that is the case in a Common Civil Code, which the
BJP advocates and which she therefore considered a “threat to India’s
secularism”.
Progressive issues “high-jacked” by the Hindu Right
The so-called “substantive equality” advocated by Prof. Kapur effectively
means inequality, the subjection of citizens to different law systems depending
on their religion. She said this was necessary because the “minorities”
suffered a historical disadvantage and Hindus carried a “special obligation to
redress systemic discrimination”. Westerners will be familiar with the
“positive discrimination” of (or with the now-official weasel word:
“affirmative action” for) the American blacks. Whether these policies are right
or wrong, at least they are based on an undisputed historical fact, viz. the grave
disadvantage that the Blacks suffered in the form of slavery. That is why, esp.
among Humanities academics, a wave of sympathy for this legal privileging of
certain communities can be expected, including when they hear of it being
applied in India.
But in fact, no such historical disadvantage applies to the Muslim
community. To the Scheduled Castes, yes, but not at all to the Muslims, who on
the contrary have a history of being a privileged group. Indeed, many Hindus
converted to Islam to escape the burdens imposed on non-Muslims and enjoy the
status reserved for the people of the true faith; and their descendants are the
present-day Muslims. Ever seen a Bollywood movie making fun of the Muslims as
such, to name one example of the type of discrimination that should be
redressed? Numerous film scenes make fun of Brahmins, but Muslims as such are
always treated with reverence.
Now, secularists will point to some statistical
parameters where the Muslims prove backward. Yes, due to the selection by the
Partition (where many well-to-do Muslims migrated to the promised land which
they themselves had created), the backwardness of their religion (as noted by
Dr. BR Ambedkar, who saw the will to change as a redeeming feature of a
Hinduism he deemed obscurantist, but failed to see it in Islam) and the larger
number of children, Muslims have slided backward. But that is a self-imposed
condition for which Hindus ought not to pay with legal inequality. The same
thing counts for Christianity: in the colonial period, it was a very privileged
community, and no disadvantage has been imposed on the Christians after
Independence. Abroad, before ignorant audiences, Christians may cite the
positive discrimination of Hindu Scheduled Castes (which Prof. Kapur implicitly
supported) as an inequality imposed on them, but in the preparation of the
Government of India Act 1935 the missionaries themselves had rejected the
extension of this privilege to the Christian community, citing the caste-free
nature of their religion.
Moreover, even the granting of social privileges to certain groups does
not justify a separate religious law system, which in the case of Islam is
notoriously and unapologetically inegalitarian and thus in conflict with Prof.
Kapur’s stated egalitarian aim. On the other hand, if at all she insists that
justice (nay, even secularism!) demands separate law systems, she is really
saying that he Swiss host country, or France as the motherland of secularism,
or the US or any Western country, are not just and not secular until they
introduce separate religion-based laws. And indeed, some people in Western
countries already advocate the adoption of the Shari’a for the Muslim minority,
but so far they haven’t dared to call that “secular”. Indeed, this
“alternative” is still recognized as “anti-secular”. And in India too, the
prevailing legal inequality is indeed anti-secular.
So, in this regard, the Hindu Right’s demand of a Common Civil Code is
in tune with what prevails in the main secular democracies. She fully
recognized this, but put a negative spin on it. According to her, the Hindu
Right has “hijacked the progressive discourse”. Similarly, the abolition of a
separate Muslim (and also of Christian) law is justified with arguments from
feminism. Thus, polygyny, forbidden to others but legally allowed to Muslims,
constitutes an obvious inequality between the sexes. Its abolition is an
important demand of feminist groups in Muslim countries. So, the BJP’s demand
for a Common Civil Code is effectively buttressed with feminist rhetoric. In
Prof. Kapur's spin, this shows how devious and Machiavellistic the Hindu Right really is.
In a less partisan explanation, this only shows how the demand for a Common
Civil Code is a common demand of different groups. As nationalists, the “Hindu
Right” (which calls itself “Hindu nationalist”) care about the oneness of the
nation, and that justifies the abolition of divisive religion-based Civil Codes
including the Shari’a. As egalitarians, feminists (and normal people in
general) want to abolish the sexual inequality inherent in the Shari’a, which
they will achieve in a Common Civil Code. So, there are different reasons for
abolishing an Indian legal systems that falsely flatters itself to be
“secular”. Or in other words: there are several reasons, Hindu-Rightist as well
as other, why Prof. Kapur’s defence of the present system is wrong.
Incidentally, we have borrowed from the speaker the term “minorities”.
As Rajiv Malhotra has pointed out, this term carries a wrong but intentional
connotation. The Christian and Muslim communities are not only historically
privileged, they are also Indian branches of multinational enterprises,
benefactors of worldwide networks of solidarity. The term “minority” evokes a
poor hapless group, and that is precisely what Muslims and Christians are not.
For materialists, this can be explained with the money streams: both the said
communities are the benefactors of enormous sums of money coming from abroad,
especially but not exclusively in their religious functioning. Hindus have no
such thing: even the remittances from Hindus settled abroad are far smaller and
are, after all, generated by people with roots in India, not by non-Indian
donors.
Ayodhya
The occasion for Ratna Kapur’s talk was the Allahabad High Court’s
verdict on Ayodhya in 2010. Most people present vaguely knew that this verdict
had gone in favour of the Hindu claim on the contentious site where a Hindu
temple had been replaced with the Babri Masjid, which had served as a mosque
till the British closed it down in 1935. (Since 1949 it had been used as a
Hindu temple, but the architecture was still that of a mosque.) What the
audience did not know, and emphatically did not learn from this lecture, was
that the judges had ruled largely in favour of the Hindu claim because the
documentary and archaeological evidence went entirely in favour of it (or
rather, of what was until the late 1980s the consensus), and against the new
secularist-cum-Islamic claim that there had never been a Hindu temple at the
site. To make a long story short: Ratna Kapur’s own side lost, and it lost
really badly. Her keynote address had the single purpose of obscuring this
stark fact to keep the larger “secularist” narrative behind this falsified
claim afloat.
According to her, the pro-Hindu verdict stemmed from the increasing grip
on Indian public discourse by an entity called “the Hindu Right”. This expression refers to different
movements, esp. the BJP, the RSS and the VHP, and then other organizations of
which she only named the Shiv Sena; though sometimes they go their own way. As
its chief ideologues she named VD Savarkar and MS Golwalkar. The real ideologues
of the Ayodhya movement were left unmentioned, esp. the late historian Sita Ram
Goel, whose list of two thousand demolished temples and discussion of the
underlying Islamic theology of iconoclasm have gone entirely unrefuted. She
identified Savarkar and Golwalkar with an ideology based on the concept of
“Hindu nation”, overlapping with “race”, in which Muslims and Christians count
as aliens and invaders unless they assimilate. And then the whole point of her
lecture: “The judiciary strengthens this development.”
When people want to whip up fear for the Hindu movement, they claim
firstly that this is a fanatical and violence-prone movement out to oppress the
minorities, and secondly, that it is powerful. In this case: that its
compelling influence is inescapable even in the judiciary. Yet this is, on the
face of it, quite improbable. When the verdict was pronounced, the BJP was at a
low ebb. It had surprisingly lost the national elections in 2004, and even more
badly in 2009. Ideologically, the Hindu side had been defeated in the textbook
reform of 2004 in India, and of 2005-09 in California. Otherwise, its
government of 1998-2004 had raised no ideological issue, didn’t profile itself
as Hindu, and paid obeisance to the unchallengedly reigning doctrine of secularism.
Its supposedly hard-line leader LK Advani publicly called the peak day of Hindu
militancy, the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, as the
“blackest day” of his life. Its next leaders were neutral time-servers,
apparently because the BJP estimated that outing itself as pro-Hindu no longer
paid. Indeed, observers explained that
its electoral defeat of 2009 constituted a final rejection of Hindu activism by
the Hindu electorate (an analysis starkly refuted by Narendra Modi’s landslide
victory of 2014). In reality, it was a rejection of the BJP’s slide into
ideological neutrality, but because the supposed “experts” eagerly insisted on
describing the BJP as “Hindu fanatics”, they failed to see the real
disappointment of the Hindu voters, viz. in the BJP’s wishy-washiness.
India-watchers such as Christophe Jaffrelot happily announced that the Hindu
movement was in decline, and Christian convert Kancha Ilayah even mused about a
“post-Hindu India”.
In this climate, the judges were certainly not acting on a
deeper-than-before Hindu activist influence. In a thoroughly anti-Hindu
climate, they only ruled in favour of the Hindu claim because it happened to be
irrefutable. And mind you, in the preceding 21 years, it had been “refuted”
numerous times. Or at least, the secularists led by the Marxists had
indefatigably kept on claiming that the old consensus (as exemplified in the
Ayodhya entry of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1989, which mentions the Hindu
prehistory of the Babri Masjid curtly as an established fact) was laughably
wrong. Under cross-examination, the “eminent historians” who testified before
the Court turned out to be far less knowledgeable than a compliant press had
made them out to be. And so, when faced with the actual evidence rather than
with the hyped media version, the judges found in favour of the old consensus,
now known as the Hindu claim.
It may be added, in telegraphic style, that she also made the following
points. According to Hindus, Hinduism alone is committed to secularism, only
Hinduism is truly tolerant and genuinely secular! (General laughter.) Rama is
hailed as a supreme god, Hinduism is turned into a monotheism. (False, and
borrowed from an article by Romila Thapar or from the general secularist thesis
that activist Hinduism is not “real” Hinduism.) The Hindu agitators claimed
that Rama was born right there. (True, and general laughter, as always when she
mimicked a Hindu position.) The concept of a Hindu nation or “Hindu Rashtra”
entails forced conversion. (The RSS has been exhausting itself trying to argue
that this is untrue.) Progressives have lost a lot of ground because, while
naïve Muslim litigants have treated the Ayodhya case as a property dispute, Hindus
have made it a larger issue; indeed, they have proven very clever.
Well, I hadn’t noticed that cleverness, but I’ll take her word for it.
At any rate, it is normal that Hindus treat Ayodhya as a larger issue: for them
it is a place of pilgrimage, for Muslims is has no special significance. And
this fact immediately suggests what a secular solution for Ayodhya would be:
take the energy out of the conflict by doing the obvious, viz. leave the place
to those who care for it. What is more natural than leave a Hindu place of
pilgrimage to the Hindus? But secularists love to humiliate Hindus (for that is
what they were doing with their anti-temple stance for the last
quarter-century) and stoke religious conflict, so they couldn’t leave well
enough alone and declared the Babri Masjid as the ultimate bulwark of Indian
secularism. This position has served them well: they have successfully fed
their version to the whole world and managed to present themselves as brave
fighters against the formidable forces of obscurantism. This ludicrous
self-flattery was even sold to the body of India-watchers that formed Ratna
Kapur’s captive audience here. Well, that collective delusion was pin-pricked
by the High Court judges, and that is why their verdict urgently needed to be
given a secularist explanation.
Conclusion
Not able to do justice to the whole conference, I hope at least to have
given an idea. What struck the most, and even more in the hindsight perspective
of a report, was the complete absence of the voice of Hinduism. Of course, many
people with Hindu names spoke, and indeed quite a few practising Hindus, but
only about non-controversial issues. The ones that mattered in the ongoing
argument against Hinduism, were monopolized by the other side. Hindus weren’t
heard, weren’t invited to give the Keynote address or to be present in any
other capacity. They were not present, and to my knowledge, they didn’t even
try.
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