The intolerant Indian – by Gautam Adhikari – Part 2

Now coming back to the book itself, in what I write here, I might appear to be arguing with the book and the author and agreeing with them. But that is to be expected – we are dealing with a widely debated topic and it would be foolish to expect that the book would convince and convert me to its line of thinking. The book did successfully engage me in a debate with it and with myself. This being a book on democracy and healthy debates, I am sure that the author would be very pleased with the result that it has produced.

The author starts out explaining why he named his book as The Intolerant Indian. More than those reasons, I thought it goes well with the more celebrated predecessors like The Argumentative Indian and The Scientific Indian. However, the content of the book is only so much about Intolerance of the Indian – the book talks more about the State than the people, and that too more about not being secular than being intolerant. So a title like ‘the non-secular India’, though highly unimaginative, would have been more true to the content.

It is not my intention to suggest a different title for the book. I am glad that he used the more imaginative title. Otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up this book at all. But I would have liked to see the author do better justice to the title. And I would have liked him to differentiate between secularism and tolerance in his treatment. Instead he takes an inconsistent stand in the book: It is not clear whether he stands with secularism or with tolerance. This gets especially confusing in the treatment of Indian secularism, which according to the author, is tolerance than secularism. While we are on the clarity of terminology, there are sections where democracy and secularism are treated as one and the same. But unlike the treatment of tolerance-secularism, this did not create any conceptual confusion but was just a minor irritation.

In our introduction, we mentioned that intolerance can happen at two levels. It is intolerance when individuals or groups of individuals violate the fundamental rights of others. This is illegal intolerance. At another level, the state itself can be intolerant by denying what should have been fundamental rights of its citizens. The book dwells mostly on the intolerance perpetrated by the state and not on the illegal intolerance of its citizens.

The book inspects the Indian model of ‘secular, tolerant, democracy’ in the context of its peers in the world, especially the US. This comparison helps highlight the differences in the path that we took as a state as well as the gaps that we have when compared to the more evolved states. Some of these differences clearly point to the fact that we are at an earlier stage in the evolution – E.g. our urge to ban books, movies or paintings as soon as we find that these ‘hurt’ someone’s sentiments. What happened to MF Husain in today’s India will not happen to someone in US today. Something similar did happen to Bertrand Russell in the US, but that was many decades ago. Seeing that they have progressed further gives us the hope that we will too, in a matter of time. But some of the other differences are very unique to us. Countries like the US never passed through such a state – E.g. when India was formed as a new nation, there were fault lines along religious groups. There was a need to be explicitly inclusive to assure these religious sections that they are recognized and that they will not lose their identity among the more powerful majority. What is unfortunate is that after six decades of independence, we still can’t say that the fault lines have disappeared or even faded.

When we started off, we tried to define secularism, though not very successfully. The book also lives through many contradictions of secularism. In some parts of the book, the Gandhian model of tolerance is referred to as secular, but elsewhere anything other than an atheist state is not considered secular. With the latter definition, it is not clear if the US, which is the closest to the ‘ideal state’ as per the book, will qualify as secular. In God they trust. However in most parts of the book, a secular state is considered to be the one that does not recognize any religion. This would exclude atheist state as non-secular as atheism can be considered as another religion. I would consider this as the definition of secularism in the book.

Examples of special recognition of different religions by the state of India are covered extensively in the book. This would make the state non-secular. Considering that our topic is intolerance, the book does not clearly state if this makes the state more intolerant.

There is a very insightful section in the book on individual rights versus opinion of a group of people. It describes us as grateful disciples of Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarianism. The views of a group of people will always override individual’s rights and views. We think it right to ban a book and thus violate the individual right of the author if a large enough group of people think so. Is it because of the rational utilitarianism or out of the inability to control the group of people when they are denied their wish? Are we into ‘mobocracy’ than democracy? In every democracy, the most articulate and vocal will have a higher influence on decisions than the reticent. This is accepted as a quirk of democracy everywhere. The issue in India is that the activists are using non-democratic negotiation techniques to voice their opinion. When activists threaten to perpetrate illegal intolerance by resorting to violence, the state obliges by legalizing intolerance through the interference of the state on behalf of the activists. Since fundamental rights aren’t unconditional in our constitution, this interference comes easy.

There is a place in the book where different religions are compared. The author starts out on this treatise with a huge disadvantage that he is not spiritual and that he does not ‘understand’ religions. For someone with such a disadvantage he takes a very bold stand. He does not think that all religions have the same goal and are fundamentally the same, though many wise people have believed so. “If that were true,” he says “there should be no real ground for violent disagreement between Hindus and Muslims or Catholics and Protestants or Muslims and Jews”. I think Gandhi would have agreed him on this so far. Now he goes further. “Such is hardly the case”. So in his view, if you truly believe in a religion, it is only natural that you engage in violent exchanges with those who believe in other religions as these religions preach exclusivity of path to salvation. He is not able to see the difference between religious faith and fundamentalism. Has religion anything to offer towards the spiritual journey or is it all about rituals, dogma and collective posturing?

What I liked most about the book is that it covered a wide variety of issues and topics that are central to the discussion of tolerance – the attitude of the state towards religion, tolerance and artistic freedom, individual rights versus pure utilitarianism, and so on. It is not that I agreed with the treatment of each of these issues - I have expressed many of my differences above - but it made me ask many questions that I had not asked myself before. To me, that is the greatest value of this book. I seriously recommend this book for those who are interested on the topic but have been lazy enough not to ask these questions.

Part 3