EPW Commentary May 11, 2002 Politics, Religion and Our Ailing Public Institutions
It would, of course, be naive to imagine that the corrosion of our political life could be arrested simply by tightening up law-enforcement. And yet one can't escape the conclusion that the accelerating erosion of our public institutions, the apathy of the judges and the death of professionalism in the civil services - particularly the last of them - are matters of far more concern than the inroads of religion into the nation's politics. J B D'Souza Some 65 years ago, still some years before I abandoned religion, I regularly attended services at a Catholic church. Even in those British days there used to be regular elections to the Bombay Municipal Corporation. At one of these elections there were two contestants for our area, both Christian. One of them was young Joachim Alva, a Congressman; the other, a good friend of the parish priest. It was during this poll campaign that our priest suddenly interrupted the service to yell from the pulpit: "Congress is nothing but Communism". That settled his parishioners' vote. After all, the priest spoke only the word of God, so Communism, and Congress, could be only the work of the devil. For me that trivial incident began the intrusion of religion into politics, and I have watched it grow ever since. So at a seminar in Mumbai on the March 27, I confidently answered 'No' to the question before us: 'Politics of Religion: Can We Get Rid of It?' The seminar was less an expression of revulsion against the mixture of politics and religion than a Congress Party effort to embarrass the BJP after the Gujarat tragedies, but it didn't altogether work out that way. Whatever you do, religion will affect politics, at times even dominate it, particularly in this country. Fifty years after independence our people still suffer untold hardship. Two to three hundred million of them cannot afford even two meals a day, although they might spend nothing on clothes, shelter, medical care or transport. About half that number don't have safe water to drink. About half our adult population are illiterate. And yet widespread misery agitates our people far less intensely than even pseudo-religious issues that arise out of festival celebrations, cow slaughter, the declaration of religious holidays, the construction of temples, mosques and gurdwaras, or the destruction of those built illegally. In our indifference to our own economic welfare we Indians are not alone. In the early 1930s Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that a political leader could never arouse a people on the basis of their economic misery - at that time the Germans were in a pathetic condition. So Hitler picked on the Jews as an object of hate, to unite the German nation behind him. Are we in India too choosing a set of scapegoats, choosing a similar route to destruction by letting religion dominate our politics? For some of our otherwise bankrupt politicians religious pretences can offer remarkable gains. After a shortlived flirtation with cartooning, Bal Thackeray began in the early 1960s to attack south Indian immigrants into Bombay. That attracted a large lumpen following, which welcomed their master's preachings as a good excuse to loot Udipi restaurants and other south Indian establishments. Thackeray's was an economic issue: South Indians were competently filling jobs in Bombay that unqualified Maharashtrians could not. However, all his eloquence got him too little mileage, so by 1968 he set his eyes on the Mysore-Maharashtra territorial dispute. Belgaum suddenly became vital to Maharashtra's survival. On January 18, 1969 he declared that if Indira Gandhi didn't award Belgaum to Maharashtra in a week, no central ministers would be allowed into Bombay. I haven't noticed that in the last 33 years the ministers of the centre have avoided Bombay. Obviously that issue didn't do him much good, so in 1992 Thackeray jumped on to Ayodhya for a cause, and to Muslims for persecution. With greater success than before. You will remember the horrors of 1992-93, and how they brought Thackeray into national prominence. One bit of wisdom that fell from his lips: "After independence India belongs to Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, etc, can stay, but must accept that India belongs to Hindus". To add to his otherwise doubtful appeal, he dyed his clothes saffron and put on a rosary of beads, in an attempt to look religious. What about our secular Constitution and the laws we have, to discourage the intrusion of religion into political campaigning? Thackeray himself suffered a six-year disqualification for breaking one of those laws in the heat of electioneering. No Constitution can effectively fence off a country's politics from religious prejudice. The American Constitution is even clearer than ours in its effort to distance governance from religion. This is what it says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". Yet American politics has suffered bitter intrusions of religious issues - prayer in schools, and abortion, to name just two. Some of the most bigoted religious preachers on TV in the US have been courted by presidential candidates. One of them even aspired to the presidency. In our country Narendra Modi has quite forgotten his oath of allegiance to the Constitution. He prefers to quote Newton's law of action and reaction to justify the brutal pogrom Gujarat inflicted on its Muslims. But neither Newton nor Einstein ever predicted a reaction over 20 times larger than the first action. And if Modi's allegiance to the Constitution might strike you as shaky, how do you regard Advani's? I heard him answer in parliament for the Gujarat atrocities: What about the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, asked India's home minister in reply to opposition charges. So, under this Constitution, I, responsible for law and order in India, defend the killing of thousands under Gujarat's BJP regime because you, the Congress, let 3,000 Sikhs be killed in Delhi 18 years ago. Talking of defence, our defence minister's loathsome utterances in parliament - that the public splitting open of women's insides is so common in our country - must have filled all decent citizens with revulsion. Neither the Constitution nor the laws our law-makers enact from time to time under the delusion that they thereby solve serious problems, can keep religion out of politics. Nor need we dread the mix, if we have leadership that is moral, honest and sincere, leadership committed to the common man's welfare, leadership that has been missing in India ever since Lal Bahadur Shastri died. Since then we have had to suffer either leaders like Charan Singh, who, when asked for his views on a particular subject, said he would have to ask his followers, or leaders like Indira Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee, who have totally identified the good of the nation with their own survival. Let me not leave you with a totally negative answer to the question before us. Even with the leadership we are doomed to suffer, the intrusion of religion need not mean the end of India. When they go to vote, Indians - and that means Hindus, since they are in so large a majority - choose carefully. In just the last few weeks, after the Hindutva forces had played up the Ayodhya temple theme for all it was worth, the BJP was trounced in elections in UP, Uttaranchal, Manipur, Punjab and Delhi itself. And yet, lest we delude ourselves into reliance on our voters' good sense, we have to remember the kinds of options voters face. At the recent UP polls for some 400 seats, no less than 965 candidates had a criminal track record. Nearer home, the 220 seats in our Mumbai Municipal Corporation attracted 250 criminals - 45 of them Shiv Sainiks (in the lead, of course), 33 NCP, 23 Samajwadi, 20 Congress and 11 BJP, the rest independent. Who knows how many of our MPs have similar track records? Rather than blame religion for horrors of the kind perpetrated in Gujarat in February and March, we have to recognise the failure of leadership and the breakdown of public institutions in our country, specially the judicial system, and the civil services, including the police. With persistence, determination and unfortunately with success too, Indira Gandhi set about undermining the law-enforcement establishment. An endeavour which her successors have continued with vigour. "As one who has served in the IAS for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration", Harsh Mander writes about the Gujarat tragedy. "The law required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially, decisively, with courage and compassion. If even one official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence. I have heard senior officials blame the communalism of the police constabulary for their connivance in the violence. The same forces have been known to act with impartiality and courage when led by officers of integrity." Having myself joined the IAS in 1947, when I served in the Punjab during the partition riots, I too hang my head in shame. District magistrates and senior police officers in Gujarat who neglected their duty under the law must be prosecuted. Instead, Narendra Modi will promote them. In Mumbai the delinquent police commissioner who sat in contemplation while about 1,000 live were lost during the 1992-93 riots moved up into the Public Service Commission. His joint commissioner, indicted for murder of Muslims, soon became the city's commissioner. And the judiciary? (Here one has to tread with care, however grave one's misgivings. Truth, our judges tell us, is no defence against a contempt charge. I learned to think that respect had to be earned, not demanded, but that lesson is now obsolete.) The criminal justice system creaks along at a miserably slow pace, specially when it deals with Narasimha Raos, Satish Sharmas, Harshad Mehtas, or Laloo Prasad Yadavs. There is hardly an instance where ministers or top-level bureaucrats are jailed for their crimes. Delay makes the suborning of witnesses a routine practice, so that conviction and punishment are rare. Nor is anyone unduly bothered about these endemic delays. Our judges continue to work at a leisurely pace, with vacations lavishly interrupting their working time. They are liberal in staying the operation of decisions, in granting adjournments, and in allowing lawyers to spin out their arguments for weeks, even months. So you have in Mumbai the cruel protraction of the bomb blasts case of 1993, which has kept a large number of Muslim undertrials in jail for eight years, while practically none of the Hindu criminals who perpetrated the brutal riots before the blasts have suffered. The superior courts don't seem to mind. The 1984 Congress-inspired killings of Sikhs in Delhi have also gone unpunished. At the seminar on March 27, the Youth Congress president complacently told us that three Congress leaders who inspired those murders have now disappeared from prominence in the Congress - as if that were sufficient penalty for their crimes. It would, of course, be naive to imagine that the corrosion of our political life could be arrested simply by tightening up law-enforcement. And yet one can't escape the conclusion that the accelerating erosion of our public institutions, the apathy of our judges, and the death of professionalism in the civil services, particularly the last of them - these are matters of far more serious concern than the inroads of religion into the nation's politics. Another 60-year old story: I recall with nostalgia an example of commitment that has stayed vividly in my memory. Bombay suffered a wild, destructive cyclone in the 1940s. We then lived in an old house at Versova beach, isolated from other habitation by a 100 yard-long drive. About mid-day, while the rain poured in torrents and the wind roared and we speculated whether our roof would weather the storm or be blown off, we suddenly spotted a slight crouching figure pushing his way doggedly down the drive against the wind, drenched to the skin. It was our humble postman, come to deliver a single letter. Where shall I look for that dedication, that professionalism, at any level of the services today? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-W-E-B---S-I-T-E-=-=-= To Subscribe/Unsubscribe from GoaNet | http://www.goacom.com/goanet =================================================================== For (un)subscribing or for help, Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dont want so many e=mails? Join GoaNet-Digest instead ! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Help support non-commercial projects in Goa by advertizing!! * * * * Your ad here !!
