Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

It is not a new definition of secularism that is called for, but a new agenda for secular activism

Democracy has been independent India's single-greatest achievement. Sadly, when democracy is not being taken for granted, it is merely denigrated. The root cause of this is that democracy touches the active life of only a small number of our citizens. It is a participatory democracy when the voter goes to the polls; for the rest, it is the private activity of public persons. And because citizen involvement in the running of our democracy is so minimal, public interest in politics is trivialised into scandal-mongering.

Justice Sarkaria has, I think, put his finger on the malaise where he says in his celebrated report, 'The interests and aspirations of most people are concentrated in the localities in which they live and carry on their avocations of life. Normally, they would be content to compete at the level of local-self governing bodies, making way for persons interested in larger issue of regional or national significance to opt for higher elective forums.'

Here we have the two elements that could make our democracy significantly participative. One, a meaningful third tier of governance which concentrates on the 'interests and aspirations' of the people in the 'localities where they live'; two, opportunity for meaningful interaction with governance for 'persons interested in larger issue of regional or national significance.'

It is the absence of democracy in the 'localities where they live' that has alienated most Indians from the actual working of our democracy; and the absence of any forum for interaction with governance for 'persons interested in larger issues' that has alienated the chattering class.

Panchayati Raj is the obvious answer to the first of these alienation syndromes. Unfortunately, only the shell of local self-government has been put in place. No party, not even the Congress, and no state government, not even those of the Congress, has shown the political will to pour substance into the shell. It was the Congressunder Rajiv Gandhi which had brought Panchayati Raj to the top of the nation's agenda. Tragically, it is the Congress post-Rajiv Gandhi that, notwithstanding the constitutional amendments of 1992, has put Panchayati Raj on the political backburner.

If, as the party which brought the miracle of democracy to India and which, as the natural party of governance, has done more than any other to nurture democracy in India, the Congress were to restore Panchayati Raj to primacy in its political profile, there is an army of 3 million elected grassroots representatives waiting out there to march to the Congress drum.

The Congress through the freedom movement and the Nehru years of freedom was the sounding board for the chattering classes. There was intensive interaction, as much in coffee-shops and dhabas as in more formal settings, between those in the business of politics and those not in the business of politics but 'interested in the larger issues'. That tradition has long since ebbed.

The Congress -- without every publicly avowing it -- has tended to retreat into a fortress where the non-party intellectual is denied entry. This has also had the unintended but extremely serious consequence of drying up the entry of intellectuals into the party. The excluded intellectual has tended to riposte to his exclusion by making a political philosophy of anti-Congressism.

Next, Secularism. It is something of a mystery that secularism held unchallenged primacy when the majority community was most threatened and is under most challenge when the majority community is most secure. Secularism as a canon of statecraft was fashioned in the white heat of Partition--and all the terrible consequence of Partition for the co-religionists in West and East Pakistan of the majority community of India.

Indeed, the proximate cause of the foundation of the Jan Sangh by Dr Shyama Prasad Mookherjee in 1951 was the maltreatment of the Hindi minority in East Pakistan even four years after Partition was a settled fact. Yet, what almost all Indians wanted was that India should rise above such inhumanity.

Instead of avenging itself on the Indian minority, the nation as a whole moved to protect them. The party of vengeance, the Jan Sangh, got but two seats in the Lok Sabha in the elections of 1952. Today, in their reincarnation as the BJP, they are the biggest single party in the House.

Why has this happened? In sociological terms, I suggest the reason is that 50 years after freedom, the parameters of the argument have shifted from issues of citizenship, identity and security to the question of a common charter of human rights for all Indians. Contradictions have emerged between the 'liberal' position and the 'secular' position. These contradictions cannot be brushed aside or left to simmer.

Reconciling the two is feasible -- but has not really been attempted. The result is that the communal forces have succeeded in camouflaging their essential communalism in the garb of human rights activism. They have masked their original questions about the citizenship, identity and security of the minorities into questions of human rights. While secularists must continue unmasking the communalists and struggling for preservation of the half-century old consensus on citizenship, identity and security, this must be accompanied by an earnest endeavour to reconcile identity, culture and freedom of worship with imperatives that are commonly accepted as uninfringible human rights. It is not a new definition of secularism that is called for, but a new agenda for secular activism.