The Hindu Business Line : Secular because we're Indian, not because we're Hindu

IT IS common for Ministers to talk gas, much to our discomfort. However, when the Petroleum Minister, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar, talked about gas a couple of days ago, announcing that the LPG price would not go up in steady arithmetic progression, relief was evident.

He has written a new book, and it is not about how you can conserve fuel, or where you can find extra money to make both ends meet. The topic is just the thing that seems to be getting gassed these days: religion.

Aiyar's Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist, published by Penguin (www.penguinbooksindia.com) is an ambitious call — for "an unambiguous and decisive restoration of secularism," as the blurb puts it. The book informs us that his mother was religious, and his father had built a temple "in New Delhi near the Rivoli cinema next to the Shiv Mandir on Irwin Road"; yet Aiyar makes a `closing confession' — that he is an atheist. He has seen `the comfort' that religious conviction brings to many, and that makes him "a somewhat reluctant atheist".

He enjoys "long stays in the Sivananda Ashram", but that doesn't stop him from seeing a stone "where others see Divinity." He goes through the motions, when others worship. Why? Because his brand of secularism is not about giving primacy to his beliefs; "it is about respecting the right of others to hold beliefs" that he does not hold. Logically, therefore, there can be different versions of secularism too.

Aiyar draws a distinction between communalism and communitarian-ism. The former "seeks to absorb the other community by eliminating its separate identity", while the later "defensively seeks to preserve that identity."

Secularism seeks to synthesise both without dissolving either, he adds, giving an idealistic purpose to his `religion'. We are secular because we are Indian, not because we are Hindu, reasons Aiyar. "The Hindu religion coexists with the other religions of India, superior in numbers but equal in all other respects, and as part of the Indian dispensation." Grand, like the theory of everything.

He is no mere intellectual secularist, but an activist, as we witnessed in the Andamans. "The message has to be spread," he pushes; and the challenge met "on the battleground of the communalist's choosing".

There is no place for `Nehruvian calm' in Aiyar's dictionary, because that was not tranquillity but `secular somnolence' letting in `creeping communalism' through an unattended door.

Nehru won both the government and the argument, hypothesises the author, but "faint hearts after him let the argument go in the hope that the government might be kept," and worse, secularists lost both by the mid-1990s. The recent election results proved, in Aiyar's view, that secularists can win by taking up the argument. Well, you can't argue on that, as long as his government is in.

Aiyar advocates "secularism in inter-community matters and liberalism in intra-community matters," letting the Other rectify "what is reprehensible in the Other." Thus, reproaching triple talaq is no justification "for launching a pogrom against the mian and his mullah."

He draws a distinction between majority and minority flavours of fundamentalism: "Hindu fundamentalism is directed against other communities. Minority fundamentalism is inner-directed — against members of the same minority." Too suave a generalisation, it may sound, because fundamentalism has a tendency to move as a wave, cutting across religions, as in electoral drama. Results can, therefore, be equally unpredictable.

The author dismisses `Hindu Rashtra' as a private fantasy of the Sangh Parivar, and also rues the `huge gap' in the public perception "between Congress rhetoric and Congress practice" giving rise to the notion of `soft Hindutva', a few years ago.

When Aiyar is around, a discussion on Savarkar is not far away, but the author does not want to touch the word Hindutva even with a bargepole. "I would have no trouble with `Hindu' being the adjective for Hindustan," concedes Aiyar, but on one condition — that the word Hindu is defined in cultural terms.

For this, he draws support from a quote of Swami Vivekananda: "The word Hindu was the name the ancient Persians used to apply to the river Sindhu. Whenever in Sanskrit there is an `s', it changes into `h' in ancient Persian, that is how `Sindhu' became `Hindu'; and you are all aware how the Greeks found it hard to pronounce `h' and dropped it altogether, so that we became Indians."

Interesting etymological exercise, but in course of time, with people on this side of the Indus no longer belonging to one religion, there have to be two `Hindus', the Swami had argued — the literal, that includes all of us, and the religious connotation that refers only to `Hindus proper'.

There is a chapter on the historical dimension, beginning with Ekalavya, meandering through Ghazni and Ghori, and ending with the Partition. If history, as T. S. Eliot said and the book cites, is full of `cunning passages', history retold and reinterpreted can be crafty.

Aiyar devotes a chapter to the legal and Constitutional angle. But he is `a liberal constitutionalist', urging everybody to follow "the voluntary civil code embodied in the Special Marriage Act and related legislation". A gentle push, not a shove.

`Affirmative action' is compatible with secularism, points out the author; it is not `appeasement' or tushtikaran, "the hate word of the communalist". The alternative could be dangerous: `Cultural nationalism' can wipe out diversity, Aiyar warns, for it is `neither culture nor nationalism'.

Academic arguments that many may not relate to, even as they face economic conditions that eclipse secular expansiveness and religious abstractions. For them, money is god, not Mani.

Economics@TheHindu.co.in

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