Naipaul and the secular rot

There could not be an easier target to pick. V.S. Naipaul’s vanity is legendary. One only has to read Paul Theroux’s memoir of a dead friendship. He has been accused of bigotry and prejudice against Muslims. Last week, actor and writer Girish Karnad criticized Naipaul for misreading Indian history, among other matters. Literary taste and merit apart, this is clearly a fight about secularism. Much like the Magisterium in the film The Golden Compass, India has a clergy that decides what can be said and what can’t. And secularism is its theological filter to separate good from evil.

Politically, it makes great sense for the bulk of the Indian political class to promote secularism. And in theory, the idea is positive. Discrimination between citizens solely on the basis of religion has a primordial ring. In a republic, this thinking ought to have no quarter. In reality, matters are different. Indian politics has no notion of a social contract. As elections near, the country resembles late Rome: the mob gets bread and the political class the support it wants. Secularism is more in the nature of a device that is meant to garner electoral support, though unlike bread, its appeal is not restricted just to the election season.

The result is that the gap between the idea of secularism and its practice has increased steadily since the age of Nehru. Today, the gap is so large as to threaten the principle itself. The promise of “official” secularism—that the most disempowered citizens can move to a better life economically and socially—has not only remained unfulfilled but such is the nature of mainstream politics that it is structurally impossible to fulfil. If secular practice were to make poor Muslims independent, then what will replace it at the ideological level? Unlike China, where there is a tight link between the Communist Party’s delivery of benefits and popular support for it, Indian secularism will remain viable only as long as its remains a promise. In the realm of performance—economic and administrative—Indian politicians cannot afford to close the gap between the promises of secularism and what it actually delivers. What riles a great mass of citizens is that some of the most thuggish and unscrupulous politicians remember secularism only when elections are on the horizon.

That, however, is the political realm where the costs and benefits are clear. What about its intellectual adjunct, the gatekeepers who decide what is secular and what isn’t? Their effect on the India of today is wholly pernicious. As explained above, a distinction has to be made between the idea of secularism and its practice. The amazing thing about these intellectuals is that they refuse to admit the gap alluded to above. It is hard to believe that they don’t see this contradiction. So what explains this rotting trunk of The Indian Ideology? Two explanations come to mind: Fear and greed.

In The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, social scientist Albert Hirschman drew a road map of how conservative ideologues and reactionaries make their arguments. He describes the situation where new reforms or ideas are considered as jeopardizing “older, hard-won conquests or accomplishments.” This “jeopardy thesis” is a staple of conservative argumentation.

In the case of Indian secularism, the logic of the jeopardy thesis is inverted. Any re-reading of history and the pointing of shortcomings of secular ideas and practice is considered threatening to secularism itself. This is the purest embodiment of fear on this count. One can only say that its genesis lies in a misreading or a linear reading of history and the fears that it generates. The core of this fear being that Hindus and Muslims are indeed two separate people and the best way to avoid tragedies borne of these identities is a simple denial. The endless championing of the “composite Hindu-Muslim culture” of India is one of its symptoms. In reality, this is at best, an elite idea completely out of sync with what ordinary Indians—Hindus and Muslims alike—experience on a daily basis. Like a thin film over a vast mass of water, it is flimsy at best. All that can be said about this line of thinking is that its authors ought to have greater faith in the idea of a common citizenship for it will surely wipe out these identities and the travails associated with them.

These champions are, in the end, well-meaning persons. That cannot be said about the retainers of the powers that be. For them it is a simple, utilitarian, exchange: praising this ideology as being vital to prevent the sliding of India to barbarism in return for what state power can bestow. Karnad clearly does not belong to this class. He is rightly celebrated both as a writer and as an actor. At the point of exaggeration, it can be said that his performance in Godhuli (1977) and Manthan (1976) are sufficient to elevate him to the rank of great Indian actors. That, however, does not absolve him from association with a crisis-ridden and unhealthy ideology.

 It is in the constant interplay between the political and intellectual domains that controversies of the Naipaul kind must be examined. In Naipaul’s case—he’s a writer—it is the intellectual wing of the ideology that “punishes” transgressions. Because he is well-established and virtually past his prime—he can’t be denied a professorship, a grant or a fellowship—that one is witnessing only sound and fury. Had he been a lesser writer, the results would have been far more severe.

Siddharth Singh is Editor (Views) at Mint. Reluctant Duelist will take stock of matters economic, political and strategic—in India and elsewhere—every fortnight.

To read Siddharth Singh’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/reluctantduelist-