Secular Common Sense

I read Mukul Kesavan's essay on secularism in India. He makes a lot of interesting points which I would like to recount here.

An important point but one which we might already be aware of is that Congress's secularism was founded as an opposition to imperialism. Only when it represented all of the Indian society could congress be successful in its freedom struggle. India as a state as we know it today was ironically formed as a result of imperialistic economic oppression of all sections of our society. If congress were any less secular, then it is possible to imagine that the Indian subcontinent might have been divided into more parts than is the case and the divide and rule policy might, once again have been triumphant.

He quashes the idea which finds many entertainers that Congress (and hence the Indian state) has appeased minorities at the cost of majority to establish the State's secular credentials. Exactly opposite has been the case and too little has been done in this respect. Muslims, and I am speaking of only a section of the minorities here, albeit the largest one, were by all standards of development, backward compared to the rest of the country, even before independence. At the time of partition, many well-to-do Muslims moved to Pakistan and so the discrepancy widened.

Kesavan then talks about reservation. Caste-based reservation was built into our constitution to right the centuries of wrong done to Dalits by the upper caste Hindus. This reservation is exclusively for those Dalits who are Hindu. Thus in a curious way all the minorities, who do not have any kind of reservation have been subsidizing a large section of the Hindus. This, on top of when the ones responsible for the condition of Dalits were Hindus.

I believe that reservation is still necessary to have because the centuries worth of injustice cannot be undone in a short time. But then, we have to make sure that our current policies are not creating future conditions for more reservation. An option could be to make financial condition of a family the criteria for reservation instead of caste.

In 1996, Supreme Court of India in relation to the case of annulling an election on the grounds that the candidates had used religion as a tool to garner votes, ruled that "...the word Hindutva is used and understood as a synonym of "indianization". i.e. development of a uniform culture by obliterating the difference between all the cultures coexisting in the country." At best, Hindutva might be understood as a way of life, just like Islam is. But I do not think the minorities think of Hindutva in the same breath as indianization.

But as an unnatural nation as chronicled beautifully by Ramachandra Guha in India After Gandhi I believe we would go on and become better along the way.