Manish, with all due respect I think the point was that it would have been beneficial for you to have mentioned in the original article exactly who you were referring to (as you have just clarified). SMers like myself and Punjabi Boy — who could hardly be labelled as “conservatives” — were both attacked on another related discussion by a couple of other SM participants a few weeks ago for making detailed points about the nature of the Islamist threat here in the UK and the reasons behind the actions of the extremists. We were both shot down by the aforementioned objectors by using pretty much the same kind of terminology you’ve applied here. Hence my diplomatically-worded request higher up this thread was aimed to prevent that kind of response from recurring, not just with regards to any present/future posts by myself but also to hopefully mitigate the risk of yet another slanging match occurring between multiple other participants too (which has happened on a fairly regular basis, as we all know).

Conservatives taking umbrage. I’m not sure why y’all identify with “the idiots who post frothing, right-wing rants in our comments quoting wingnut Web sites.” I refer to those we delete regularly who call all Muslims child rapists, quoting the craziest stuff on ultra-right sites. Your identification with those is to your detriment.

Conservatives saying the Bali bombing proves something about all Muslims. Non sequitur. Somewhere that same day, a Christian and a Hindu committed murder.

Objection to the word ‘puss.’ I appreciate the respectful tone of your comment, but I just as respectfully disagree. It’s ‘puss’ and not ‘pussy’ for a specific reason of connotation. Even if it were ‘pussy,’ pungent conveys anger well, if sparingly used. God forbid any political commentary use ‘Wax Bush,’ ‘Buck Fush’ or any variation thereof.

Objection to lumping Muslims together. This essay throws back cultural elision in the same voice. It is not an academic treatise. As its message is pretty blunt, I won’t footnote it.

… the sentence above still leaves me quite sad. It pretty clearly defines who is ‘we’ and who is ‘them’ at Sepiamutiny.

Your lumping together the views of all SM bloggers leaves me quite sad. It pretty clearly defines who is ‘we’ and who is ‘them’ to you.

Yes, I wonder where the media gets their bizarre indeas for such bogeymen…. I did hear that something related to that did happen recently in Bali. Though that could be somebody’s imagination…

I have lived on two continents (Asia and America)long enough to comment about the power and necessity of secularism, pluralism, and separation of religion and state. Maybe, as a kid in India, secularism in India only meant to be speaking about it in eloquently in a high school debate, going to friends home during Id and inviting them to Diwali to ignite firecrackers, extolling about Akbar golden age, and putting Zeenat Aman/ Nafisa Ali poster in my room.

Now, it has a deeper meaning. I am a minority in US instead of belonging to majority in India. Concepts imposed like “us” vs. “them”, immigration, and imposing concepts of intelligent design on everyone touch me directly. Perhaps, that is why I speak up for minority rights and dignity more eloquently be it in USA or India without invoking any special status through “model minority”. I cannot cherry pick – safeguard my minority status in US and slam them in India. That would be hypocrisy.

Why am I now more an avowed secularist? Maybe, I have to be as a minority.

PS: I have to defend Manish. I think he was addressing it broadly to everyone else as how Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians have live together in peace for most part on Indian subcontinent (I must add for most part). It is true that the new bogey man in media here is the islamic sleeper terrorist.

I think the Mutineers do exactly what should be expected of them in terms of making people feel comfortable here. I don’t mean to be cruel when I opine the following, but we are individually responsible for our reactions and feelings, not them. If the language or atmosphere here make you uncomfortable, then that’s your right, articulate that (as you did so well) but don’t say that you feel like you can’t say your peace, because that’s wrong– you just did.

Manish, I respect your work and words which I have had the delight to read over the past year plus. I realize that SM is about accepting and appreciating viewpoints from all around. However, according to SM policy, one cannot make comments that are “Requests for celebrities’ contact info; racist, abusive, illiterate, content-free or commercial comments; personal, non-issue-focused flames; intolerant or anti-secular comments; and long, obscure rants may be deleted. Unless theyÂ’re funny. ItÂ’s all good then.”

I personally don’t find the use of the above words funny. I find it abusive, gendered, violent, sexist, and intolerant. Not to get at you, but when we sit and get angry over the things that leaders of various South Asian countries say about their women, we should not continue to add fire to that flame. I am sure you respect women and men, so I would suggest not using language like that. It makes me, and I’m sure others, uncomfortable to comment because that keeps lingering in the back of their head….

Correct. There is a lot of “group labelling” and generalisation going on here. I think one needs to be very careful and very precise in terms of who one is speaking about when using terms like “we” and “them”.

For example:

we’ve lived among a hundred and fifty million Muslims in India. Unlike you, we know them, we understand them, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends

Unless you’re referring to SM participants based back in India, with all due respect this is factually incorrect. The vast majority of Mutineers appear to be based in the US, along with a sprinkling of people like me and Bong Breaker who live in the UK. Therefore, “we” have not lived amongst 150 million+ Muslims in India, and so on. As an ethnic group we certainly have a history connected with Muslims going back over 1000 years, and due to our familial and cultural environments we therefore do have a greater level of knowledge and understanding of the dynamics involved than, for example, your average Caucasian person would, even though we live out here in the West. However, beyond a certain point, we are not necessarily in a position to speak for the 800 million+ non-Muslims who live back in India. The same logic applies to the rest of Manish’s paragraph.

I am honestly asking if there is a third way — fill me in.

Yes. Indian Muslims — on an individual basis — “side” with whoever happens to morally be right, irrespective of their nationality or religious affiliation. Which means one’s “allies” should be individuals/groups who one regards as having the moral higher ground. This therefore means that one does not “side” with another person or group purely because they share the same national or religious affiliation as you, and the converse does not apply either. View everyone as your fellow human being first and foremost and make a decision based on that.

“I have been asked several times over the last year– by Pakistani acquaintances and relatives, by supporters of the BJP– what I thought about “the status of India as a secular democracy in light of what happened in Gujarat.” Now, I’ve thought a lot about this, since the 1992 Babri masjid demolition, the 1993 pogroms, and in a more focused way since the Gujarat pogroms, and I have to say at the outset that this is a very difficult question. Part of the difficulty lies in the extreme partisanship that underlies so much of the debate over this issue over the past year– indeed I think it no exaggeration to say that most of what has been said on Godhra and the subsequent pogrom is very rarely considered on its merits, but is instead dismissed as “anti-Hindu” by many, “fascist” by others, and “an attempt to justify/excuse/overlook violence” by yet more. I must confess that I find it somewhat shocking that so many should have asked the question “is secularism dead?” in the wake of Gujarat. Consider: two thousand people have been massacred, a hundred and fifty thousand have been rendered homeless (some have put the figure even higher), and some people seem to mourn the “death” of “secularism” far more than the indisputable deaths of such large numbers of people. This is characteristic of the vacuousness, and even callousness, at the heart of so much debate in India– many Indians from the “educated classes” have always concerned themselves far more with abstractions like “secularism,” and in recent years, “Hindutva”) than with flesh-and-blood people [Case in point: contrast the outrage evoked by mistreatment of Muslims, because it implicates "secularism," with the relative indifference to caste-based atrocities, because that "merely" implicates "caste-ism," understood simply as a form of "backwardness" or prejudice by many]. The first question to ask is what one means by the term “secularism.” There are several possible answers to this question. Let’s start with something like a dictionary definition: as applied to politics, government, and statecraft, secularism would mean the absolute separation of religion from these aspects of life. In this sense secularism is certainly dead in India, but this begs the question as to whether it was ever “living” in any meaningful sense of the word. It can hardly be disputed that since 1947 India has never been a secular state in this sense. A more interesting question is whether ANY state would pass the test were the bar set so high. For instance, Britain is not even formally a secular state, given that it has an official religion, the head of state also heads the religion, etc.. In the United States, which is formally secular, Christian imagery, symbolism, and rationale pervade political discourse (far more in some parts of the country than in others, obviously)– it’s even debatable whether any Presidential candidate could win these days without professing his religiosity, and it’s highly unlikely that a hard-core atheist would win even at the state- level in the USA (which serves as an interesting contrast to India, where at least one state– Tamil Nadu– has several times elected militantly anti-religious political figures since 1967). Having said that, certainly Britain “feels” like a secular country, as does the USA for the most part. But this is not because of any British legal or conscious political commitment to secularism, but simply reflects the fact that organized Christianity has withered away in Britain (and many other Western countries); i.e. Britain, I would argue, “feels” secular more because the majority of the “Christian” population doesn’t care much for religion one way or another (compared to the USA, church attendance, to use one barometer, is extremely low. Given that Indians (at least in my experience, though I am aware that I am generalizing here) tend on average to be more attached to their religions than Britons are, it is to be expected that religion will play a greater role in public life in India than in Britain (when Brits were more attached to the Church of England, it was not particularly pleasant to be either a Jew or even a Catholic in that country, or for instance a Jew or a Protestant in France). In short, Britain is a “secular” country mainly for HISTORICAL reasons (which histories were of course not inevitable), and India, taking my “hard” definition of secularism as the benchmark, never has been. In the US, the founding fathers made a willed decision in favor of secularism, that is to say a POLITICAL decision. The same sort of political decision was made by at least two of India’s most prominent “founders,” Nehru and Ambedkar. But Nehruvian secularism (in the sense of how Nehru saw the issue, not the term-of-abuse the Congress has transformed it into)and even moreso Ambedkarite secularism was always (well, at least for the foreseeable future) going to be a minority viewpoint in India.

The above definition of secularism does not interest me all that much–more accurately, since I would certainly like my government to not be mixed up in religious matters, I should say that DEBATE on this issue does not really interest me very much, as it seems pretty much like an open and shut case: a country either professes this sort of secularism, or it does not; if it does profess this sort of secularism, various historical/social/political reasons will determine the “secular” nature of its society (think Britain: formally not secular, but “actually” far more secular than many theoretically secular countries like India), and of its polity. Gujarat or no Gujarat, this sort of secularism has not existed in a meaningful sense in India since the founding itself. There is another sense in which people use the term “secularism,” namely that secularism does not mean the absence of religion from politics and government, but that on the whole no one ought to be disadvantaged on account of religion. By whatever label we wish to call the latter, it seems to me a very worthy idea. Now where does this idea of secularism stand after Gujarat? Certainly in the violence-affected parts of Gujarat it would be a cruel joke to tell a Muslim that he/she has not been disadvantaged in the most extreme way because of his/her religion– that is simply not true, and all this talk of post-Godhra “reaction,” and all the various obfuscations cannot hide that fact. Gujarat is not a secular state. Period. As was true of the Sikhs in 1984, or Bombay in 1993, minorities are grievously disadvantaged, because the state itself turns against them in times of crisis, and the very signs of citizenship– voter registration lists being a prominent example–are used to hunt them down, often with active police and politician participation. If this were all that could be said about the position of minorities in India, then even the question of secularism could not arise.

But Gujarat is not contemporary India’s only communal reality. This is not to underplay Gujarat– it is certainly A reality of Indian life, but it is not the ONLY reality. Obviously, the media is structured to report the exceptional, the sensational, and has little incentive to report the innumerable ordinary instances of peaceful co-existence. It is important to assert that Gujarat is the heinous exception to the rule, but also to remember that it is in the heinous exception that disadvantage on the basis of religious affiliation manifests itself in the most extreme way possible. Yet there are also other realities: when I was growing up no state seemed to me more notable for communal violence than U.P.; when my parents and grand-parents were growing up perhaps no city was more famous for communal violence than Calcutta– and yet today both places compare very favorably to Gujarat. There is nothing in Gujarati, Bengali, or U.P. culture that makes communal violence more or less likely– what is different, and what made a difference, in U.P., Bihar, and West Bengal was a certain sort of politics, a politics that actively has tried to lessen the extreme disadvantages of massacre and mayhem based on religious affiliation, and (in U.P.) of systemic disadvantage on the basis of caste to some extent (though not yet on the basis of religion). Take the Left Front in West Bengal– one can criticize that government on a number of fronts (and that would be the subject of some other musing of mine), but I think it is beyond dispute that they have made the fostering of communal, relatively peaceful, co-existence one of their aims. What name shall we give this politics, or the politics of the Samajwadi Janata Party, or Laloo’s RJD, or the BSP, or of the Telegu Desam, or the current Congress government in Delhi, etc.? One such name, I believe, is “secular.” If Gujarat is India’s reality, these other examples are equally “real.” If Gujarat is cited for the death of secularism, then these other places should be cited for the reverse, as places where a “secular” politics is struggling along (not always coherently, not even in a principled manner, but impossible to ignore nonetheless, trying to assert itself. So what does this say about India’s status as a secular country? My answer is another question: what sort of secularism is this, that dies in Gujarat, but seems alive and kicking in Calcutta? Is it fair to judge Calcutta on the basis of Gujarat? No, it is not. But one has to realize that many of those who say India’s claim to secular status is dead after Gujarat are not simply stating a fact, but they too have a political aim. The “two- nation theorists” are not really interested in answering the question “Is India secular or not?” at an empirical level; rather, they already have a set view of what India “is,”–namely, not secular– and given that view it is not surprising that they have seized upon Gujarat, not as a pogrom, not as a manifestation of fascist violence, not even as a tragedy: they have instead seized upon it as revealing the very ESSENCE of India. This is as true of Praveen Togadia–who insists that Gujarat represents a watershed awakening for “Hindu Samaj”– as it is for Musharraf, who insists that Gujarat “shows” that Indian democracy is simply a “bluff.” For both, then, Gujarat makes everything clear. Quite frankly, I have little patience with attempts to read an event as affording special insight into the essence of any country,culture, or religion, particularly of one as fantastically complex and diverse as India. To read Gujarat as revealing the essence of India says more about one’s own ideological position than it does about India. India does not need such champion exegetes to give the Gujarat pogrom meaning–such people are interested only in judgments, not in contributing to anyone’s understanding, because they have already made up their minds. To repeat, if Gujarat shows all of these things, what does Calcutta show? For those of us who feel that Indians have not yet made up their minds, who feel that the country’s future every which way is still up for grabs, Gujarat does not “settle” the issue of secularism, but shows that the way ahead is unknown, difficult, but not hopeless; those who throw up their hands and say “it’s all over after Gujarat” (unless one is talking about the victims: in their situation despair is perhaps the only natural reaction) never had much invested in secularism in the first place. The above should not be misunderstood as a call for complacency– one reason we are at this pass as a country is because, faced with periodic outbursts of violence, the Congress-style secularists often respond with some platitude, such as “the people are basically secular.” This is drivel. “The people” are “basically” neither secular nor intolerant– i.e. “the people” can be tolerant,but they can also be frighteningly intolerant. It all depends on what sort of politics is gaining ground, what politics is being created–and “the people” are not just passive recipients of politics, but “make” politics every day in their own lives. The way to oppose bigotry and fascism is not to resort to abstractions, but to articulate a vision of politics that can effectively counter fascism. If fascist politics spreads everywhere, then no doubt Gujarat can happen in Calcutta, in U.P., in short everywhere; but if we react to Gujarat as if such politics already had taken over everywhere in India, and that the success of such politics is forever assured in Gujarat, then the latter will soon become a reality.

There is a third way in which one can use the term “secularism” in an Indian context. This approach recognizes that there is no hard separation between religion and politics in India, and that minorities are often grievously disadvantaged on the basis of religion (as in Gujarat, by the state itself)– the crucial thing is that secularism on this view is not a fact but an aspiration. We might not be very secular, but we are trying to be moreso, would be its mantra. This is how I understand the Indian constitution’s commitment to secularism: the Framers knew that in several respects secularism only existed on paper– but the paper expressed an ideal, and by virtue of being enshrined as an official ideal, India became more of a secular country than it otherwise would have been. But ideals must be nurtured– all too often, in recent years “secularism” is a word Indian politicians like to trot out only in international settings, to taunt Pakistan and to show the West how much more enlightened and progressive India is compared to its neighbor. At home, the aspirational force of this ideal has certainly dimmed, and a stridency is in the air: “accomodation” and “compromise” have become dirty words where communal relations are concerned (unless it’s the Sangh Parivar insisting Muslims do all the compromising), but there are plenty of people in India (and Gujarat has only highlighted this)for whom secularism (however one defines it) is still a worthy ideal. Will this be enough? I don’t know. But as long as the aspiration exists in some significant way in society, secularism (as defined in this third way) is not dead yet. The day no-one cares about secularism, the day secularism only exists as a stick to beat Pakistan with in international fora, that day secularism will truly be dead. But as long as that day is not here in full force, let us not hasten its coming by writing secularism’s obituary.”