SPEAKING
FREELY Indian liberalism has a rough
week By Mosarrap Hossain Khan
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
This past week,
India witnessed a controversy regarding secularism
when V S Naipaul was awarded the Lifetime
Achievement Award at the Mumbai Literature Live
Festival. Girish Karnad, one of the speakers at
the festival, took umbrage at Naipaul being
awarded the honor and launched an offensive on
Naipaul's supposed prejudice in his writings
against Indian Muslims.
In this piece, my
modest purpose is to draw attention to the fact
that the V S
Naipaul-Girish Karnad debate has mostly been
conducted within the rubric of secularism in India
and its discontents. A second related purpose is
to illustrate the problems associated with such a
position.
While watching television
debates on three prominent television channels and
reading the opinion pieces, the reader might ask:
why is the whole issue reduced to a debate about
Indian secularism? The host of one of the
television programs explained that such an
explanatory framework was provided by Naipaul
himself when he responded to Girish Karnad's
offensive as a problem of Indian secularism and
its rigid principles.
Still the question
remains: why is this affair perceived and
conducted as a debate about secularism? Is it the
myopia that does not allow Indian intellectuals to
think beyond secularism when Muslims are dragged
into any controversy? Or is it a deliberate effort
to invoke secularism as the yardstick to judge
Muslim deviance from what the standards of a
liberal polity should be? In either sense, the
debate has been allowed to be co-opted by the
state because in India, as in the Western
countries, the state is the ultimate arbiter of
secularism and liberalism.
In a 2007 piece
in New York Times, "Liberalism and Secularism: One
and the Same", literary critic and theorist
Stanley Fish offers a critique of such a
state-centric view of liberalism, when he writes:
"It is a form of political organization that is
militantly secular and incapable, by definition,
of seeing the strong claim of religion - the claim
to be in possession of a truth all should
acknowledge - as anything but an expression of
unreasonableness and irrationality."
When
the Naipaul-Karnad controversy is viewed only as a
problem of Indian secularism, it is akin to moving
the debate to the realm of liberalism of a
particular kind that is, as again Fish reminds us,
closed-minded "with respect to religions that do
not honor the line between the secular and the
sacred ..." That is because liberalism can be
defined only through this separation and in no
other way, even in a country like India where the
state is supposed to be tolerant of all religions.
The Naipaul-Karnad debate and the
defenders of both have tended to prove their
liberalism by upholding their secular credentials.
Yet, at the center of championing the rights of
minorities, especially Muslims, in India, one
could always sense a discomfort about Muslims'
zeal for religion. The defense of Anil Dharker -
the director of Mumbai Literature Festival - that
he has supported Muslims in Gujarat riots cases
despite Muslim history of rape and rapine in
India, is the typical liberal position in India: I
know that you guys have a tainted history; you
guys are potentially communal; you guys are always
on a short fuse; but I do support you guys. I
support you because I am a liberal.
This
liberal position is problematic because here the
emphasis is laid far more on the liberal self or
on the one who espouses liberalism than on the one
for whom liberal ideals are being upheld. In
India, liberalism is more of a performance than a
commitment to the other, who in this case is a
Muslim.
Although Stanley Fish would not
like to make a distinction between liberalism and
secularism, for me the Naipaul-Karnad debate is
not so much about secularism but about liberalism.
At the core of Indian liberalism, one also senses
an implicit denial of the subject for whom liberal
subject is fighting. That is because the object of
liberal subject's pathos and empathy is capable of
extremism himself/herself. That is why our
liberals are always looking over their shoulders
for fear of being stabbed in their back. In a
televised debate, when playwright Mahesh Dattani
asks, "Are we truly secular?" he is actually
asking: "Are we truly liberal?" He seems to hit
the nail on the head. A truly liberal position
does not have to reduce every argument about
Muslims to an argument about secularism. That's a
statist position. Every Muslim is also a human
being, as much as a Hindu, a Buddhist, a
Christian, or a Sikh. A truly liberal position
should have treated Naipaul's politics as an
attack on human beings and Karnad's position as an
attempt to salvage the human and not just as an
incidental defense of secularism.
Naipual's retort, that Indian secularism
is always defined vis-a-vis Muslims, is not quite
the point. Rather, in the broadest sense, this
controversy is directly about Indian liberalism
and indirectly about Indian nationalism. We must
remember historian Gyan Pandey's contention that
Indian Muslims constituted - and continues to
constitute - Indian nationalism by becoming the
boundary where the claim of being "naturally"
Indian is fought.
When our liberal
thinkers and intellectuals agree that we must
accept Muslims came as invaders and marauders,
they are merely re-invoking the boundary line.
Because Indian Muslims have a tainted history as
invaders and because of their religious zeal, they
cannot be sufficiently secular, and by
implication, Indian. In a way, our liberals are
fighting a losing battle!
Mosarrap
Hossain Khan is a doctoral candidate in the
Department of English, New York University.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
