Justice Katju’s 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 one’s own favourite hobby horses rather than a real defence of first principles. Justice Katju’s 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.

... contd.