Justice Katjus reported association of a beard with Talibanisation was a reminder of how over-determined conceptions of particular communities can be,abstracting away from complexities of identity,belief and signification. This over-determination has frozen our politics in a time-warp. The very enunciations of the collective categories Hindu or Muslim trap us. Even well-meaning attempts to complicate them simply enforce their binary opposition,providing further grist for the mill of those who see community relations only in competitive terms: who receives more? Whose hurt is more justified? Whose fundamentalism poses a threat? Even the invocation of secularism is often a pretext for flogging ones own favourite hobby horses rather than a real defence of first principles. Justice Katjus associations were,in my opinion,scary and ad hominem. What would it feel like if a judge collapsed a choti or tilak into a marker of fundamentalism? Would driving individuals who sported,from a pedagogical point of view,harmless markers,into separate institutions be better for integration and lessons for learning to live with difference? Secularism,like communalism,is no longer a first principles debate; it is a pretext for forcing issues where none exist. The only two interpretations of secularism that are current in India are deeply warped: secularism as erasure of identity,or secularism as communal parity. Neither interpretation has room for the core meaning: secularism is about the freedom of individuals to make of themselves what they will; it is about making identity irrelevant to politics,not about its enforced erasure. Political parties are in no position to understand the complexities and flux in Muslim politics. The BJP does not because it is,despite protestations,committed to a certain conception of the relationship between Hindus and Muslims to the nation which ends up pigeonholing both of them. But the Congress falls into a more nebulous but equally insidious trap. Over the years it acquired a kind of investment in communal politics. As the old joke goes,if communalism disappeared the politics of secularism would disappear too. For a while it tried to manage both Hindu nationalism and the keeping of Muslims as a supplicant minority; it ended up making both insecure. As its ability to run a credible and impartial state became increasingly doubtful minorities deserted it,and rightly so. It would be so nice if the Congress and the BJP worried about draconian laws like POTA and NSA,irrespective of individuals of which community were being targeted. The lesson for the BJP from the scandalous invocation of NSA in the Varun Gandhi case should be to recognise how dangerous state power is. But Congress needs its own introspection. The last few years profound changes are under way amongst Muslims,whose complexity and contradictions we are yet to fathom. Much of the media does not give space to the extent to which Muslims are taking recourse to a language of constitutionalism. Ironically,barbaric Talibanisation abroad is making many Muslims recognise what is truly special about the Indian experience,of this being the place where we can simply let religion be; it was a Muslim who gave General Musharraf the best put-down. There is,for the first time since the 1930s,the beginnings of a serious debate on social reform. Communal politics has this paradox: often extremism in a very tiny fringe can grow even more virulent as the mainstream grows moderate. It is quite possible that this is happening amongst Indian Muslims. There are groups that pose a threat to the state,even as the bulk is trying to join the mainstream. There is growing evidence that what Muslims want is not ghettoisation,but participation in the broader mainstream. Even in Gujarat,as sociologist Dipankar Gupta recently argued,there is a power discourse around the need for integration. But this is not what Congress (or the Left) will allow them. Nothing illustrates this better than the following story. It was recently reported that two regular Muslim-run schools in Bahraich had converted to madrasas. This was in order to access a grant of Rs 6000 available to madrasas,but not to other schools,to hire science teachers. Apparently children in these schools were now being asked to wear skullcaps,along with ties! This summed up identity politics in India: the deep desire for education and modernisation amongst Muslims,the ways in which identities get structured by the incentives provided by the state. But in a sense it is also illustrative of the way the Congress thinks: it wants to give benefits to minorities,not as a matter of their individual rights,not as part of an overall right to education,but as minorities. It confuses two objectives. For a secular state the important thing is that all public goods,law and order or education,reach all citizens without discrimination. Rather than achieving this objective,the Congress wants to showcase what it can do for the minorities qua minorities. The Congresss approach to minorities is to imprison them under the minority tag,whereas minority politics is struggling for something deeper: the desire to escape being tagged all the time. Real secularism is about giving citizens the freedom to escape being tagged,whether by caste or religion. The Congress politics now has limited appeal,even for the minorities it courts,because it is still caught in the politics of tagging. The BJP tags to target,Congress tags to provide noblesse oblige. But it is the tagging thats insidious. Nehru once said,It is a bad thing for any small group or minority to make it appear to the world and to the majority that we wish to keep apart from you,that we do not trust you that we look to ourselves and that therefore we want safeguards and other things. The result is they may get one anna in the rupee of protection at the cost of the remaining fifteen annas. That is not good enough looked at from the point of view of the majority either. Ironically,minorities want to participate in the full sixteen annas,as all citizens do. But parties cannot move beyond the one-anna paradigm. As the question of religion-based reservations appears once again on the agenda,the Congress would do well to reflect on this. The real challenge is to make the majority-minority distinction irrelevant to public policy and structures of opportunity. So long as that distinction remains entrenched,we will all be imprisoned by the tags imposed on us. The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi express@expressindia.com
