The dispute over the Babri Masjid was a distillation of many historical anxieties. It is, therefore, a matter of relief that all major political parties have given a commitment to abide by the due process of law and avoid violence.
Governments are taking proactive measures to ensure that violence does not take place, making it possible to envisage legal justice being meted out, in an environment free of mob intimidation.
But what does this moment tell us about contemporary India? Is this a genuine turning point?
This question can be answered at different levels. Violence in India is often made possible either by direct state complicity or state indifference to preventing it. At the moment no state government wants to be held responsible for allowing violence. Violence in UP would, in all likelihood, upset the political calculations of both Mayawati and the Congress. Narendra Modi's pre-judgment appeals to avoid violence have been most emphatic. A recasting of his image can do him no harm in the context of on-going legal investigations in Gujarat and the political imperatives outside the state. Most of the leadership of the Sangh Parivar is old, weary and still trying to cope with its own lack of credibility. Advani cannot still make up his mind whether the movement was his great legacy or occasion for regret. All parties are reading, correctly, that the electorate does not at this juncture want polarising politics of any sort. So the political incentives are, ex ante, aligned to defuse violence.
But the question to ask is this. Is the absence of violence an indicator of genuine peace with the subject? Does the absence of political mobilisation indicate the absence of sentiment? Under what circumstances could this equipoise be derailed? A good deal depends on the quality of the final judgment itself, the care and credibility with which it is argued, and the artfulness with which it handles sensitivities. Shah Bano was the last judgment that occasioned significant political mobilisation. But in that case the trigger was not the substance of the ruling itself, but the casualness with which interpretive matters pertaining to the authority of the Koran were handled. Even a stray observation about the claims of faith and history has the potential of derailing a technical land dispute.
Ayodhya itself became an explosive issue in mass politics only under very special circumstances. For decades the issue had no political traction, till it was reinserted into a larger narrative. What happens to the issue in coming years will also depend largely on how broader developments sustain or subvert the elements of that larger narrative. What were those elements? How are they playing out?
There were three elements to the larger narrative that gave the movement momentum. The original movement was shaped in the context of great national anxiety: secessionism and a sense of abysmal national failure. To a certain extent, India's recent success has helped assuage much of the crisis of self-esteem that fuelled the movement. This success has given various stripes of nationalist longings an alternative narrative. But given the general level of political drift, conflict and fragmentation we are seeing, it would be unwise to take it for granted that the new narrative of hope cannot quickly be supplanted by the resentments of memory.
A further element was the long history of inconclusive negotiations between Hindus and Muslims. For some minorities, Ayodhya became the symbol of refusing majoritarian domination. For many Hindus, it became the symbol of an intransigent minority, unwilling to give even a small concession. This made the dispute intractable. From the point of view of law it is a healthy development that all parties seem, at the moment, to treat it as a land title dispute. But there is a political irony in this attitude. If the dispute had been merely a land title dispute, it would have been easy to negotiate and settle. But whether the cold water being thrown over the dispute remains effective will depend on future developments in this history.
The silver lining is that the third element which made this dispute so explosive seems less urgent at the moment. This was the majority's minority syndrome. A section of the Hindu consciousness managed to talk itself into a psychologically damaging sense of victimhood based on three issues. The first was a discourse on pseudo-secularism, which the Congress played right into. There is now a greater realisation that the so-called concessions to minorities, which occasioned a political backlash, were largely symbolic; the actual material and political conditions of Muslims have in fact been deteriorating. The challenge now is to address those without falling into the procrustean trap of identity politics.
The second issue was a sense of being a community that was at the receiving end of history, unable to stand up for itself. It would be hard to deny that for many there was an element of catharsis in the Ayodhya movement. But a catharsis cannot be long sustained, and much of that desire has dissipated. There is still a great deal of concern about terrorism and fundamentalism. But there is also a recognition that polarisation can only help the cause of terrorists, not combat it.
The third element was a deep intellectual crisis. It was thought that the canons of modern historical consciousness somehow denied the legitimate claims of tradition. The status of important forms of knowing and being were under assault from a range of ideologies. But this element has also dissipated somewhat. In self-proclaimed secular circles there was an ignorant denigration of the complexity of tradition, and often an unthinking embarrassment about religiosity. This had created a constricted intellectual discourse. At one level this challenge remains. But it is largely an intellectual challenge. Its force is also blunted by the fact that there was no genuine intellectual flowering of Hindutva thought along with the Ayodhya movement; if anything the movement decisively killed of flickers of creativity Indian intellectual history had seen earlier in the century. The vitality of Hinduism requires that it be liberated from being colonised by the Ayodhya movement.
It is worth thinking about how these long-term trends will play out. We are perhaps being a little too blase in our claims that India has moved on. The extent to which it has will be tested by our willingness to peaceably submit to the due process of courts. And there is reason to be optimistic on this score. But how much we have really moved on will be decided not today or tomorrow, but by how the long march of our history unfolds.
The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi express@expressindia.com
Source: Indian Express
0 comments:
Post a Comment