The row sparked by The Kerala Story movie, resulting in the ban of the movie in the state of West Bengal — the ban announced by none other than CM Mamata Banerjee herself — speaks of the loathing and abhorrence of the state administration. Subsequently, a popular Twitterati refuted and took a swipe: “Padmaavat was freedom of expression; Udta Punjab was freedom of expression; Parzania was freedom of expression; PK was freedom of expression; The Kashmir Files was propaganda; The Kerala Story is propaganda. Art and freedom of expression depend on the mood of a special community.”
This tweet, taken matter-of-factly, expresses the Indian—fact of the matter, a distorted—version of secularism, or the Nehruvian model of secularism that is equivalent to minorityism, so to speak. On one hand, we have seen movies like Pathaan and Tiger Zinda Hai portraying the unconvincing possibility, wherein the ISI helps R&AW and nobody seeks proof; on the other hand, movies like The Kerala Story show ISIS inveigling Hindu girls and all the votaries of Nehruvian secularism demand proof.
The much contentious Wikipedia defines secularism as “a movement towards the separation of religion and government, often termed the separation of church and state.” Secularism imputes the separation of religion from political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of life, the treatment of religion as a purely personal matter, the dissociation of the state from religion, and full freedom and tolerance for all religions.
Renowned Indologist Dr Koenraad Elst once noted, “Whilst in Christian Europe, secularism used to be a way of curbing the intrusive power of the churches. Ever since the term was propounded by Jawaharlal Nehru, being an Indian secularist doesn’t require you to reject theocracy and the intrusion of religion into politics. On the contrary, every obscurantist in India swears by secularism.” In public discourse, (Indian) Nehruvian secularism, or minorityism, is principally a form of snobbery that confers a cheap moral superiority on self-hating Hindus to mark them off as enlightened sophisticates against the cramped and backward Hindu “fundamentalists.” This carefully crafted and well-contrived ideology would lay the blame for Muslim grievances with the Hindu side, thus hoping to win the Muslims over at last, though no longer to the national cause nor to a polity recognisable as “secular,” but to an arrangement that usurps this self-description while humiliating the Hindus to a point of dehumanisation. This labelling is a cardinal trait of the Marxist culture that forms the genesis of the wake culture of Wokeism. Globally, liberal secularism and militant Islam make for strange bedfellows.
Last year, the then Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s curt quoting of the Hadiths started an orgy of violence and a spate of beheadings across the country. In truth, it was conveniently and mischievously overlooked that Nupur had only rebutted the incendiary abuse on Hindu gods by one purported Islamic scholar and PFI supporter, Tasleem Rehmani, and congruent to the customary liberal privilege, only Nupur’s rebuttal cropped up invariably to showcase her as Gustakh-e-Rasool, causing the global tumultuous furore and ire in the militant Islamic world. Ever since, unfettered decrees by the Muslim mobs for her beheading have echoed the streets of secular India.
This only ratified Hamid Dalwai, a Marathi Muslim scholar who, in his 1969 book, ‘Muslim Politics in Secular India’, critiqued appeasement politics as the furtherance of Jinnah’s separatist mindset. According to him, the real problem was Muslim obscurantism — that Indian Muslims had shunned their doors and, in a way, evaded public scrutiny. In a way, they are secluding themselves from the rest of the country’s majority, i.e., the Hindus. He also observed that Indian Muslims are more likely to blame Hindus than to reflect. This “obscurantism medievalism” needs to be confronted instead of evading it using political chicanery and the charade of “minority protection” or “secularism.” The word’s effective meaning has shifted to a point quite unknown to its European coiners, viz., the struggle against Hinduism, and is now fully crystallised as a weapon in an anti-Hindu acrimonious tirade.
A purported Left-liberal eminent scholar, Neera Chandhoke, in her telling book, ‘Rethinking Secularism: A View from India’, notes: “Secularism, however, is in crisis, having been subjected to overuse. While a ‘thin’ and limited concept, secularism in India, for example, has had to shoulder the onerous task of nation-building, take on the construction of a uniform civil code, bear responsibility for reorganizing and equalizing hierarchical relationships within religious communities, and even stand for democracy. Unable to bear the weight of too many political projects, it shows signs of imploding. The West, in the meantime, seems to have given up on secularism.”
But today, India is having to firefight on two fronts: with the woke secular brigade, intellectuals, and media that shield Islam’s egregious violent instincts, and the courts, occupied by Nehruvian secularists, that predominantly side with the Islamic world due to its macabre nature and the paranoia of religious persecution in India.
In many key observations, the courts have repeatedly broken the fourth wall for Hindus by often critically cracking down on Hindu festivals, but extended the longest rope to the most cloistered traditions of Islam. Despite the ubiquity of endless reports discarding Diwali s culpable for the toxic smog that floods New Delhi every year, the Apex Court ruled to ban the sale of fireworks in the Indian capital. The proliferation of subjections extends so much so that in 2016, the Supreme Court, siding with the Bombay High Court’s directive, brusquely limited the height of human pyramids during the Dahi Handi celebrations to 20 feet. In 2018, the Supreme Court ordered the management of the Jagannath Puri temple to permit entry to all visitors, irrespective of their religion, to offer respect and offerings to the deity.
However, the same strenuous courts contort themselves into paralysis over Islam’s exceptional orthodoxies. Earlier this year, Punjab and Haryana High Courts recognised the marriage of a 15-year-old girl according to the applicable personal laws in Islam. With no victory in sight, the Apex Court has yet to ban the barbaric and regressive practice of female genital mutilation of minor girls in the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community. In another instance of discernible bigotry, the Kerala High Court declined to entertain a plea challenging the constitutionality of the Kerala Animals and Bird Sacrifices Prohibition Act, which laughably allows the killing of animals and consuming them but prohibits sacrificing animals, offering them to the deity, and then consuming them. The SC of India, which pushed for the use of arrest powers to be used sparingly in the case of Mohammed Zubair’s arrest, has now refused to intervene in the Tamil Nadu government’s use of the National Securities Act against Bihar-based YouTuber Manish Kashyap.
Calling out the not-so-clandestine nature of the well-oiled secularist-Islamist machinery, Dr Elst noted, “The secularist-Islamist alliance is one of the wonders of the world and requires ever-new exercises in hypocrisy on the part of the former, sometimes descending into grotesque buffoonery.”
The archaic laws that have a penchant for minority appeasement in the garb of secularism need to go for good. Bharatiya universalism has to oust and replace this phony secularism.
Yuvraj Pokharna is an independent journalist and columnist. He tweets with @iyuvrajpokharna. Views expressed are personal.
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