The lacunae created in public life because of the absence of a discussion on religion was filled by far right religious organizations who believe in consolidating their communities by annihilating others.
Catching them young: RSS shakha. Photo credit: India Today
“Turfatar yeh hai, ki apna bhi
Na jaana, aur yun hee
Apna, apna kehke humko
Sabse beygaana kiya”
-Saeed Naqvi
When Jawaharlal Nehru unquestioningly adopted the Euro-centric version of secularism for India he introduced the entire populace to public platforms of participation where religious identities were dismissed and disregarded. Nehru ignored the Indian reality which is deeply subsumed in religious experiences and refused to bring this discussion within the felt contours of public debates. He failed to create a healthy tradition of democratic engagement through public platforms wherein people from diverse socio-cultural and religious backgrounds could immerse in meaningful conversations.
Rabindranath Tagore had warned against uncritically enforcing a distinct separation between the state and religion; he emphasized that public life in India was invested with religious experiences and creating a political milieu where expression of religious affiliations is considered as “undemocratic” and “non-progressive” would engender negative feelings towards the ‘other’ who was unknown and inaccessible.
In this social realm where religious identities were formally dismissed and believers were mocked at, interactions between different communities could never materialize through safe channels of communication. As the “other” was always a distant entity within the larger social structure — never influencing the life outcomes of the ‘self’– it was fairly easy for radical ideologues to use this ‘fear’ as a site for fostering feelings of antagonism. As a consequence of this, we have been witnessing an increase in waves of communal clashes and violence as communities are compelled to share the same territory, resources and environment without ever trying to understand each other.
RSS has many ‘shakhas’ in the country to indoctrinate young minds with violent ways to combat the imagined enemy, the “religious other”. Similarly, many ‘madarasas’ encourage young students to criticize lifestyle practices which are different from theirs as necessarily un-Islamic and thus abominable.
This can be averted if the state recognizes that each human being is dealing with fear, longing and hope — the need to come to terms with the limitations of desire, and requires a material site through which this can be expressed. The nation needs poetry and religion so that un-assumed identities arbitrarily imposed on individuals do not convert them into religious monoliths with no other social identities to draw from.
Catching them young: Madrasa students. Photo credit: Wilson
The lacunae created in public life because of the absence of a discussion on religion was filled by far right religious organizations who believe in consolidating their communities by annihilating others. Often times, these organizations fight for positions within the political structures of the society and use religion as a means to increase their presence in the public sphere and consequently the public mind. Threatened by violent narratives from various partisan groups the religious self rushes to his/her community for safety and a sense of belonging.
As individuals limit their life experiences to what happens within their respective communities, religious organizations premised on a discriminatory ideology find it easier to radicalize young individuals through the use of a single narrative embedded in ideas of aggression, purity and superiority. This project of socializing individuals into enacting discrimination through the use of violence requires a host of collective capillaries of public life to permeate the lived realities of individuals. In the case of Indian politics, educational institutions and media have been identified as the two most important capillaries of collective life.
Educational institutions, for instance, have been recognized as fertile grounds to train young children in practices of discrimination. RSS has many ‘shakhas’ in the country to indoctrinate young minds with violent ways to combat the imagined enemy, the “religious other”. Similarly, many ‘madarasas’ encourage young students to criticize lifestyle practices which are different from theirs as necessarily un-Islamic and thus abominable.
On the other hand, the state is making repetitive attempts to re-write history in order to reinforce a singular narrative and worldview against the very many which define the character of a pluralistic country such as India. Such efforts denigrate the search for true facts and use educational institutions as foot soldiers to implement the massive project of insinuating students with a social obligation to reify the normative categories and habitual modes of thoughts and actions.
Media is not free from the blame either. It is an inseparable part of the system and often operates from within the folds of institutional obligations. It acts as a material channel through which the dominant ideology permeates the lived experiences of young children and translates into practices of micro-aggression. The entire gamut of biased media narratives use politics of exclusion to articulate “what it means to be an Indian nationalist” to produce a definition which supports the rhetoric of majoritarianism.
For instance, respecting religious sentiments of one community by curbing lifestyle choices of others through a series of legal sanctions illustrate how the practice of tolerance is selectively imposed on members of particular communities while others unethically continue to work as vigilantes of the great Indian culture! Though media organizations try to report objectively, they cannot withdraw from the dynamics of a market driven economy where the government advertisements are the most lucrative source of revenue.
The influence on media, however, is not absolute and uninterrupted. Audience engages in negotiated reading with the text and often supplant their interpretation with borrowing from their family belief systems, lived experiences and community networks. Media is one of the many important social institutions which shape people’s reality and influence the way they think and act. It is a powerful channel through which a selected slice of reality is validated and presented as ‘the ultimate truth’ of the society.
It is, therefore, important to encourage young individuals to critically analyze media narratives and actively participate in the meaning-making process. They must be equipped with the necessary critical skills that allow them to divest their world view of the normative categories of classification and the normalized patterns of discriminatory behaviour.
What we need, today, are open platforms for public debate where individuals can voice their concerns about the use/abuse of religion for personal and political gains. The need of the hour is to go back to the Tagorian philosophy of bringing every issue within the purview of a disinterested rational inquiry so that it is rendered accessible to diverse voices.
We need to initiate a project of promoting religious literacy i.e. engagement practices which create an experience of ‘critical distance’ between the text and the reader, believer and the religious experience, and individual and the immediate socio-political world. We need to focus on expanding the expressive and communicative repertoires of individuals and allow them to explore alternate realities.
The communal voices can be challenged only with a rational mind which is critical of the ‘self’ just as much as it is critical of the ‘other’. Religious literacy is a political endeavour of creating a dialectical field where opposing forces can interact and engage with one another. It begins with acknowledging that differences are inevitable to human existence and that one must learn to negotiate with them instead of dismissing them as something ‘blasphemous’.
As Gandhi explained, “For humans to coexist with all their complexities and differences, channels of communication must always be open. A refusal to deliberate with others only because they have a different worldview marks the end of a democratic society.”
The current political landscape in India makes it unimaginable for educators to appeal to government sanctioned educational institutions to promote these ideas in classrooms and playgrounds. Our only hope remains with not-for-profit organizations and individual members of the society to infuse young minds with critical learning skills and enabling them to question social hierarchies. This project, thus, is a call for people who self identify as ‘civically engaged’ to honour their moral obligation towards upholding principles of social justice and equality in whatever little way possible.
The writer is a PhD Scholar, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad