A country in 40 acres

Let us cut through the cant of our political class. Amarnath has become a serious communal issue. In an interview given to a Hindi daily, Narendra Modi had, in a chillingly prophetic way, described Amarnath as a second “Shah Bano”. Whether we like it or not, Amarnath has deepened the Hindu-Muslim divide in many respects. It has exposed the fact that possibilities for intercommunity reconciliation are thinning daily and revealed how every political party has huge investments in a politics of divisiveness that none is likely to divest. It has given the BJP a peg on which to hang its faltering politics. It has given Muslim fundamentalists a pretext to wage war on the infidel. It has exposed the limited capacity of the Indian state to quell violence. It has brought out the ways in which the Congress’s myopia and lack of initiative set the stage for a communal politics. And it has revealed the dirty secret of all us constitutional secularists: we are more interested in having somebody to beat upon than in creating the conditions for peace. As with Ayodhya, the inability to find small compromises, articulate meaningful gestures of reconciliation, might haunt us for ever. Recognising that there is a communal problem is a necessary step towards solving it. Denying the problem merely shortens the road to doomsday.

Most politicians hide behind mendacity. This is a problem of nationalism, not of religion. Therefore it is not a communal problem. This is nonsense. Most problems of communalism in India are related to nationalism, not to disputes over faith. The creation of Pakistan was about competing visions of nationalism, not faith, as have been the ravages of identity politics since. The idea that locating a conflict’s source in nationalism does not make it communal is a form of self-delusion we should shed. Both nationalism and communalism are also integrally linked to the politics of territoriality. Omar Abdullah’s ridiculously feted speech exemplifies this perfectly. When he made the claim that opposing the land transfer was a case of fighting for one’s land, he made the link between communalism and territoriality. Implicit were two explosive links: first, that only one particular community has any claim to land in Kashmir. Even granting Kashmir’s special status, the acceptance of this foundational principle is a massive concession to communalism. Second, he lent credence to all those who exaggeratedly believe that a mere 40 acres is a prelude to colonisation by some “alien”. Of course Muslims have for centuries facilitated the yatra. But that deep cultural fact is then used as a shield to elevate a minor matter to gigantic political proportions; a hard-won cultural interface sacrificed on the altar of that innocent sounding phrase, nationalism.

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