Vikram Johri: A liberal failure

A picture doing the rounds recently was an illustration of the Google home page with the tab "I am feeling lucky" replaced with "I am feeling offended". The cartoon was drawn by Mumbai Mirror's Hemant Morparia, who is known for his sassy captions. After a Muslim techie was allegedly beaten to death by a mob in Pune this month, the familiar bogey of the illiberal Hindu was in the limelight once again. The Nationalist Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar went so far as to say that the Pune incident was an outcome of the change of guard at the Centre, which has ostensibly encouraged rowdy elements within the Hindutva fold. (Never mind that the police reports to the state government, which he runs in partnership with the Congress.)

In certain sections of the Marathi-language media, you hear familiar arguments that can now be traced to Maharashtra's unique status as the progenitor of Hindu fundamentalist ideology: namely, that while violence cannot be condoned, it must be asked why someone should circulate morphed pictures of icons who are looked up to by a large number of people. The arguments generally mention the exile of M F Husain as something that was justified and remind the viewer/reader of the violent protests in the wake of the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper.

There is little denying that, to most people, some things are sacred. Ask yourself if you would be comfortable seeing the God you worship - assuming you are a theist - in a pejorative light. Of course, there are ways other than violence to respond, but to expect people not even to take offence is a bit rich. However, when it comes to the Indian liberal, and let me count myself among this desolate lot, the articulation of such a position presents certain challenges.

From first principles, we are a little chary of religions of all stripes, and believe in individual freedom and liberty. However, when it comes to analysing social undercurrents from our decidedly ivory-tower perches, we tend to make judgements that can appear cute to the man on the street, who must not only engage with people of different denominations but also suffer whatever consequences such an engagement engenders.

Consider this. The Twitter account @RushdieExplains, a well-crafted spoof of Salman Rushdie's pronouncements, posted recently: "Dinner two nights ago with a friend in London. Learned that the Darul Uloom Deoband just banned dinner. And nights. And friends. And London."

We laugh, since we can relish the distance that this brand of fundamentalist Islam has from our lives. The liberal Indian, when confronted with visions of Islamist ideology, at best overlooks its ramifications. We laugh at the tweet precisely because, even as it showcases something reliably far-fetched, it is also not too far from our imagined reality of Islamist thought - and is, therefore, completely alien to us. Perhaps we look the other way at instances of Islam-related fundamentalism because we know we are secure from it. Not in the physical sense - anyone can die in a terror strike - but ideologically. They are the "other" and maybe, therefore, they are allowed their fundamentalism, we might reason.

As Swapan Dasgupta recently pointed out, this "otherness" is, among other things, a function of class. You don't have to be a Hindu to be liberal and look benevolently upon the Muslim as the "other". If you have attended the right schools and speak the right accent, you could belong to any religion and still have sufficient access to the right "corridors" to see yourself, genuinely, as different from the great unwashed.

Having said that, the vast majority among the ranks of Indian liberals will, naturally, be Hindus. When it comes to Hindu fundamentalism, our fear of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Malegaon and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is visceral. The Hindu fundamentalist seems to dip into the same cultural pool that, in spite of our deep familiarity with it, has never overtaken our sensibilities. We cannot fathom how a love for Ram - which our parents have, however unsuccessfully, tried to instil in us - can dovetail into a hatred of Babur.

But the two forms of fundamentalism are not all that different. If the Hindu would tell you that he hates not Babur but only the fact that the man demolished Hindu worshipping sites, the Muslim would say his terrorists are really "freedom fighters" working to rescue oppressed Muslims worldwide. None of those arguments is entirely true or false. Yet, we choose to go with the latter, and disparage the former.

That is our problem, and that is the reason the Indian liberal, in spite of being sincere and well meaning, faces an existential attack.