India’s Salon Secularists Sing The Same Old Song

Slowly and surely, India’s  Salon Secularists are being challenged.But they are far from being defeated.

This has happened to all of us at various stages of our lives – hearing the same old song, except that the song itself has become dated and tuneless. To make things worse, it is now coming from an utterly down-at-heels record player, a venerable 78 rpm manual gramophone. Even the logo is hardly traceable on the instrument.

All this doesn’t seem to bother the impresarios, who now insist that you listen to the recitals from the live maestros, who want to do a repeat of the recorded sessions in salons that have also seen their best days many years ago. Some would be uncharitable and say many decades earlier.

The net result is that we, in India, are being inundated with products that are way past their shelf lives, being served to us by waiters and waitresses who are dowagers desperately eking out their livelihoods, knowing fully well that their employment scenario is most uncertain.

The latest opportunity for the secularist symphony ensemble to belt out its anthems was the French President‘s visit earlier this week. Among the most egregious outbursts from the salon secularist (SS) cabal was in a national English broadsheet that claims to be have one of the highest circulations in the world among English newspapers.

I propose to concentrate on the article in the editorial page of this newspaper published on Republic Day, written by a little-known author who is on the faculty of a private university. However, given the pivotal positioning that his piece obtained, I feel that this person may well be on the way to stardom in the fiercely competitive desi SS club.

The author chooses a novel technique among the current SS lot. While extolling the Indian model of secularism, he runs down the French model (laïcité), which he correctly describes in his opening remarks as the model that inspired the framers of the Indian Constitution.  According to him, the French framework has “has become so rigid that it is impeding integration of Muslim immigrants who comprise 10% of the French population.”

This is such a disingenuous and crafty stand that it must be rebutted here itself. It is laïcité that has given France’s immigrant population from the Maghreb and other Islamic-majority areas the same rights, privileges, conveniences and entitlements as the indigenous people of the country.

What has prevented the Muslim immigrants in France from seamlessly integrating with the rest of the population is not laïcité – it is the incessant clamour from the mullahs in the mosques who have spewed venom and hatred from the pulpits, and sold the myth to the faithful that Islam, alone, will provide them salvation and happiness.

The situation in France is an exact parallel of what is happening on our shores. Our Muslim fellow-citizens are sold the same stories about their special status as Muslims, and are fed the same fable that their religion and culture will enable them to become prosperous and content, without traversing the learning path and the skill-induction processes that the rest of India’s citizens are obliged to take.

French and Indian Muslims are victims of the same insidious agitprop that come from the minarets and are echoed mindlessly by the small groups of intellectuals in both countries, who are hallucinating in their make-believe worlds. In India, of course, the mess is compounded by the fact that many of the mainstream political parties have studiously cultivated the Muslim vote bank and have a lot riding on how Muslims vote in state and national elections.

Finally, of course, the Indian socio-political structure has a built-in time bomb –the separate personal law regimes for different religious communities, a suicidal legacy bequeathed to us by Nehru and his coterie.

The next shabby disinformation peddled in the article is that “Islamophobia is on the rise in France” and that “the defence of the French republic is nowadays a thinly disguised code to force Muslims in France to abandon expression of their cultural symbols and willingly conform to majoritarian ways of life”.

While I will later spell out what this implies in the Indian context, a few queries need to be posed to the gung-ho author at this stage. Does he seriously think that a modern, democratic republic that has been a role model for the rest of the world for more than 225 years in the areas of human dignity, fundamental rights and fraternity, will countenance a political structure that gives a small minority the overriding privilege of dictating socio-political norms?

The Indian SS seems to be perfectly comfortable with minority rule and vetoes in the 21st century, so long as the people who are the beneficiaries of such abnormalities belong to a specific religion. It is a throwback to the 16th century when the Caliphate was a conquering force and the defeated / colonized people needed to kowtow to the occupiers.

The next question for the author is whether it is an equitable or ethical state of affairs for a tiny minority, with its own religious-cultural symbols, to ask for the majority to abandon theirs. Is there anything remotely wrong for the French republic to expect its Islamic citizens to adhere to the common values (“les valeurs républicaines”) that have been in practice since 1789?

Similarly, the Indian Republic has every right to demand that its citizens adhere to the basic values enshrined in our Constitution.  The caterwaul of the Indian SS reaches its crescendo when the essay goes on to summarise its sublime ridiculousness.

In our shores, we have evidently perfected a recipe where “our openness to refugees and our more mature acceptance of multiple faiths and ethnicities holds lessons for France”.  Furthermore, “the fabric of coexistence and tolerance is robust in our country”, and “we have built a relatively harmonious national identity which gives space to parochial loyalties instead of trying to smother them, as is the case in France.”

To try and wrap up this critique of intellectual sleight of hand and duplicity, it is essential to take the SS bull by its horns (no pun intended). The only openness to refugees we have had in this country is to Bangladeshi illegal immigrants, who have effected a demographic coup in Assam and West Bengal.

Hapless Hindus and Buddhists who have tried to escape to India from horrendous persecution in Bangladesh or Pakistan have had not been welcomed with open arms by any means. The dangerous ramifications of the massive demographic changes in Assam brought about by decades of infiltration from Bangladesh were spelt out by the Supreme Court in two stinging judgements in 2005 and 2006 (Sarbananda Sonowal Vs. Union of India and Anr – Writ Petition (Civil) 131 of 2000, decided in 2005 and Sarbananda Sonowal Vs Union Of India, Writ Petition (Civil) 117 Of 2006).

The national “fabric of coexistence and tolerance”, far from being “robust” is being stretched to a breaking point. We now regularly see manifestations of communal outbursts that openly challenge the integrity and even the right to exist of the Indian Republic, as constituted by statute. For many decades, such outbursts were confined to parts of J&K. Now, it is par for the course to see them in many districts of UP, West Bengal and Bihar.

It would now be appropriate to come to the punchline in the article published on Republic Day. The author unequivocally endorses a policy where a “national identitygives space to parochial loyalties instead of trying to smother them, as is the case in France”. His subliminal confusion finally surfaces ; surely, no person in his senses would like “parochial loyalties” to be given primacy in a country. Such an approach is a sure-fire recipe for disaster and no country worth its salt would hesitate to “smother” them.

A recent essay in an Indian daily, by a columnist, Sadanand Dhume, who also writes for a prestigious American daily, referred to the systematic challenges to the Indian nation-state’s existence from belligerent Islamist elements. My all-time favourite Pakistani, Tarek Fatah, also came out with all guns blazing in a TV discussion programme (on a Delhi-based channel) and confronted two Indian Muslim clerics who were spouting the usual party line. Although he demolished them with impeccable logic and facts, the ramifications of the stand taken by Tarek Fatah’s opponents were disturbing and upsetting.

Slowly and surely, the Indian SS bandwagon is being challenged. But it is far from being derailed – the paid-up members of this cabal continue to sell snake oil to their followers, listeners and to the country at large. And propagate the insidious notion that their deranged worldview overrides eternal human values.