Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist , livre ebook

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Dedication
Prologue: A Conversation with Arun Shourie
1. Secularism: An Overview
2. The Ideological Dimension
3. The Historical Dimension
4. The Constitutional and Legal Dimensions
5. Secularism in a Time of Communal Activism
6. Secularism and the Indian Religious Minorities
7. The External Dimension
8. In Conclusion: Why I am a Secular Fundamentalist
Author s Note
Appendix: Secular Answers to Communal Questions-A Catechism for Communalists
Notes
References
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
CONFESSIONS OF A SECULAR FUNDAMENTALIST
Born in Lahore in 1941, Mani Shankar Aiyar received his education at the Doon School, Dehra Dun; St. Stephen s College, Delhi; and the University of Cambridge, UK. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1963 and served in Brussels, Hanoi, Baghdad and as India s first-ever Consul General in Karachi. From 1985 to 1989, he was Joint Secretary to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He made the transition from the civil service to politics in 1989 and was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Mayiladuturai constituency of Tamil Nadu in 1991, and again in 1999 and 2004. In May 2004, he was named Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, and of Panchayati Raj.
He is also a well-known author and columnist who, for a decade from 1989 to 1999, penned the popular weekly column Mani-Talk in Sunday magazine, later resumed in the Telegraph of Kolkata. He has also written for a number of English, Hindi and Tamil journals. His books include Remembering Rajiv (1992), One Year in Parliament (1993), Pakistan Papers (1994) and Knickerwallahs, Silly-Billies and Other Curious Creatures (1995).
Mani Shankar Aiyar is the founder-president of the Society for Secularism.
Praise for the Book
A delightfully readable book. . . deals with substantial issues with unusual elegance - Frontline
Gives a sound picture of how the secular mind functions. . . Well-argued, surprisingly sober - Free Press Journal
An excellent addition to public discourse on a subject that needs far greater analysis and advocacy than it has so far received in South Asia - Hindu
A deft tour-de-force - Time Out Mumbai
To my mother S. Bhagyalakshmi (1910-1988)- religious and secular
It is all very well for the likes of Sapru and me to talk pompously and in a superior way of our tolerance in matters of religion but neither of us has any religion worth talking about.
-Jawaharlal Nehru, letter to Mahatma Gandhi, dated 10 March 1933, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru , vol. 5, pp. 459-460, cited by Sunil Khilnani in his Nehru Memorial Lecture, 2002

The holy word of God is on everyone s lips. . .but we see everyone projecting their own versions of God s word, with the sole purpose of using religion as a pretext for making others think as they do.
-Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), displayed in the Holocaust Museum, Berlin
If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both as the head of the Government and from outside.
-Jawaharlal Nehru as quoted by S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography , from the National Herald report on 4 October 1951
Prologue: A Conversation with Arun Shourie
Mani Shankar Aiyar (MSA): What are your personal religious beliefs? Are you, like I am, an atheist, an agnostic, or do you, like Shahabuddin, profess a religious faith?
Arun Shourie (AS): Conditioned by the suffering that I have seen, I cannot reconcile myself to the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing and compassionate God. But I am an ardent idolater. As for religious practices, I meditate every day for about one hour, guided almost entirely by Buddhist scriptures.
MSA: Would you describe your personal religious faith as Buddhist?
AS: By practice, Buddhist; by culture, Hindu.
MSA: Your ideological beliefs, would you say, are Hindu in origin but the rites that you follow are Buddhist?
AS: The rites that I follow are Hindu, in the sense that I would go to the temple, celebrate raksha bandhan or Diwali. . . I would also go to dargahs, because of idolatry. But in the sense of a religious ideology, or a body of ideas, I would be closest to the ideas of the Buddha-his explanation for suffering and the way to mitigate it. I ve derived great sustenance from it.
MSA: Is that because the Buddha did not concern himself with the question of whether or not there is a God?
AS: Yes. It is just the fact of suffering-that it is there, that no great personal purpose is served by it for which this is inflicted. While we cannot erase the objective source of suffering, we can work on our own reactions to it to be able to bear it and be of service to others.
MSA: So what attracts you to that religion is that it enables you to cope with the human condition. It eschews any attempt at an all-pervasive explanation, unlike Islam which attempts an all-pervasive explanation . . .
AS: There is no comparison between the two. There is an entire tradition, the Eastern tradition other than Confucius, where the inner dialectics . . .
MSA: You said Eastern tradition. You do not regard the Middle East as part of the East?
AS: No. I d like to distinguish this Eastern tradition from the Semitic tradition like Judaism, early Christianity especially Christianity of the Church, and Islam and Marxism-Leninism. That is one tradition, the premises of which are completely destructive.
MSA: And those premises you don t accept. You even find them offensive.
AS: No, not personally offensive. But destructive in the extreme.
MSA: So you find the Middle Eastern traditions, particularly those influenced by Islam, destructive in a very significant sense. They are not constructive but destructive.
AS: Yes. And I mention that because I think there are four premises underlying all these (Semitic) traditions, that Truth is One; it has been revealed to one person; he has given it in one Book; that Book is very difficult to understand; you need an intermediary for it; it is the task of that intermediary to offer his services; if you still do not accept it, he must convince you; if you are still not convinced, then you are coming in the way of Jehovah, of Allah, of history; therefore, the intermediary must be allowed to put you out of harm s way.
Then, there is the Eastern tradition. The truth has not been revealed by one particular person. Many persons have thought about it. They have left marks, milestones, carvings on the walls, maps. So that if you choose to tread the path they will be of some help to you. Which of them is yours, you will determine by introspection, by a search for, as the Gita would say, svadharma . A test of the right path would not be whether I am conforming to the party line or that it conforms to some book, but my inner perception.
MSA: You were born a Hindu but are deeply attracted to the Buddhist faith. You are a Buddhist by ideology but follow Hindu rites. Supposing you had been born a Muslim, would you have converted yourself either to Buddhism or to Hinduism?
AS: I would have had a great problem, because I would have had to turn to the basic structures and texts-as I did in my own circumstances-and the basic structures would have dealt exclusively with externals and they would not have gone into the cure . . .
MSA: So, you would have converted from Islam to some other religion?
AS: I do not know. I do not know.
MSA: Why should there be any doubt? As a Hindu, you were ready to be attracted to a non-Hindu faith. As a Muslim, would you not have wanted to be attracted to a non-Muslim faith?
AS: I would have been attracted, but the conditions are such that it would have made tor great trauma and difficulty . . .
MSA: So, does that mean being a Muslim makes it more difficult to be an Indian than being a Hindu makes it to be an Indian?
AS: Adhering to Islam in purity would make it impossible to live in a multicultural, multi-religious society and still abide by the tenets (of Islam). But for a Hindu . . .
MSA: So you re saying you have to be a bad Muslim in order to be able to live like a good Indian?
AS: Er . . . I think that s putting it in strong words, but certainly he would have to depart from the edicts of Islam as enshrined in the Koran and the Hadith.
MSA: The obverse of that is if you re faithful to the edicts of Islam as enshrined in the Koran and the shariat, you would have difficulty in being a good Indian.
AS: I think so.
MSA: So, there is a fundamental antithesis between being a good Muslim and being a good Indian?
AS: What do you mean by a good Indian ? For instance, Maulana Azad was a good Muslim-
MSA: Before we get into that-
AS: I don t want to let your observation pass. Being a good Muslim, Maulana Azad would say, is only devotion to God and righteous living. That s his thesis. No difficulty in that, okay?
The difficulty came in defining what devotion to God was and righteous living. The difficulty also came in defining a good Muslim . If good Muslim means brotherhood of man and so on, then there is no difficulty. But if it means, as 1000 verses in the Koran say, Spread Islam, have nothing to do with these kafirs, kill them, they are untrustworthy, they are unclean , then? The Hadith is full of this. There are rewards for killing the kafir. If this is a good Muslim then a multi-religious society in India would become impossible.
MSA: Therefore, if one is a good Muslim, in the very broad sense of this word, as defined by Maulana Azad, then it is reconcilable with being a good Indian . But if you are even tending towards faith in the totality of Islam, then it s not possible to be a good Indian?
AS: Or a good Britisher, or a good citizen of any place where Islam is not in full control.
MSA: But supposing you are a faithful Muslim in a Muslim country, then it is not possible to be