The intolerant Indian – by Gautam Adhikari - Part 1

I picked up the book Intolerant Indian by Gautam Adhikari from Bangalore airport some months back, and finished reading the book in a couple of weeks. From then, I was considering noting down my thoughts on this book. The book covered a topic that is very interesting to me, which is why I picked it up from the bookshop in the first place. It raised a lot more questions than providing answers, which was not really a bad thing. But the book did not leave me better equipped to analyze these questions, which according to me, was a bad thing. So I decided to do that preparation myself. Here I am sharing most of my thoughts with you, as I went through it.

It might be that my brain is too simplistic that I needed further assistance. Those of you who have a better IQ than me (which means most of the world) might find these points too trivial.

Before we discuss the intolerance of Indians, it is important to answer some fundamental questions. Why it is important to be tolerant for democracy and what is the level of tolerance that is acceptable? More fundamentally, what is tolerance?

Tolerance is typically understood as the openness to accept others who look different, speak differently, dress differently and most importantly think and believe differently. In today’s context the tolerance does not mean that we have to love these people and their ideas, just that we should accept them and let them be. It would definitely be intolerant to use violence against them or to deny them any of their rights because they had different views. How different can the difference be? In most societies the outer limits are defined by the laws of the country that one lives in. You can be as different as the law permits. But in most societies the system of laws are continuously modified to allow or deny different behavior. E.g. when slavery was abolished it removed some privileges that the slave owners had and granted some rights that the slaves did not have. In a more recent example, gay marriages are becoming legal in many places. There is some discussion in India to increase the ‘legal drinking age’ which if it happens will remove some privilege for some set of individuals. This would be perfect as long as we have the perfect set of laws. But what if some or many of our laws are intolerant and discriminating? This question might appear to be of academic interest to some as legal system appears to be ‘reasonably’ fair and open. But just go back to our prior two examples of changes in law – Slavery and gay marriage. No one today considers slavery as fair (or at least I hope so J) and gay marriages are becoming more acceptable across. Some years down the line I am sure that we would consider not allowing gay marriages as very unfair. There is another aspect of intolerance of the system : how many books and movies were banned in the country and was it all fair?

To summarize, there are two aspect of tolerance that we need to consider to decide if we are tolerant or not:

· How do we react to others who are different from us but are within our system of laws and

· How tolerant and open are our system of laws.

Since many of the questions on tolerance are discussed in the context of religion, let’s look at the relationship of secularism and tolerance. Is a secular system always tolerant, and is a religious one always intolerant? There is no single answer to this question as secularism is interpreted differently by different people.

· Type 1: When secularism is seen as rejection of all religions, the citizens have no right to practice any religion. Many of the communist governments would have fallen into this intolerant extreme.

· Type 2: When it is seen as neutral to religions with the law not discriminating between religions but allowing the citizens to practice religions of their choice, secularism becomes the most tolerant

· Type 3: Then there is secularism as defined in India, for example – here all the religions are seen as equal and citizens have the right to follow the religion of their choice. However, some of the larger religious groups (like Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism) are officially recognized and some of their religious practices have special legal acceptance. This makes the religions not large enough to be seen by the system less than equal to the larger religions.

What about the religious state? Curiously, a religious system is almost a special case of type-3 secular state where the number of recognized religions is one. It is likely to be more intolerant than the generic type-3 system as a single religion state can get more rigid than a plural state. However equating secularism with tolerance is not right.

Should a democracy be tolerant? Yes, if not open to different views, democracy means little. But should a democracy be secular? We see that many existing democracies fall into type 2 or type 3. But can we have a religious democratic state? In theory, it should definitely be possible. If we can democratically decide on a national language in a multi-linguistic society, why not a national religion or a set of national religions? For the time being let’s keep secular/non-secular consideration aside and keep focus on tolerance.

Part 2