Where did we go wrong?

MEDIA: I do not know why after every bomb blast, whether at Mumbai in a Hindu locality or at Malegaon outside a mosque or elsewhere we, particularly the media, resoundingly say that there was no communal riot.

One leader after another repeats in more or less the same words that terrorists have failed in their nefarious purpose to disrupt the Hindu-Muslim unity.

So far the refrain has been that terrorists have no religion. But after the Malegaon blasts, most Urdu newspapers have said that the bomb blasts were the handiwork of Hindu fundamentalists.

Probably so but, if in the past, the comment has been that terrorists have no religion, why change the stand now? It does reflect anger but smacks of parochialism. If the blasts are engineered by particular communities, it is bad enough.

But the worst is the message it conveys: the Hindu-Muslim unity is superficial. When the two communities, leave the elite apart, live in their own localities, have practically no social contact and very limited economic dealings, why should we feel that blasts were used to cut the unity asunder? The absence of conflict is not unity. We are confusing it with co-existence.

The fact, however sad, is that even after 60 years of independence, we have not been able to establish a secular polity which we thought we would after getting rid of the British rulers and parting company with those who wanted to establish a separate, religious polity.

Our freedom struggle projected pluralism as its ethos. Where did we go wrong? This was the question I raised in my maiden speech in the Rajya Sabha in 1997. I still have no firm answer.

Either the seed of separatism has been sown so deep that we have not been able to uproot it or we have left things as they were because we did not care.

Our main interest was independence and, once we got it, we were hardly bothered to establish a secular society.

True, we have adopted a constitution which has given all communities equality before law. But to make this meaningful, we have done little, neither in the field of education nor in employment.

The effort to blot out old prejudice or rectify communal thinking has seldom gone beyond paper. We have stayed more as Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs than Indians.

Our approach has been sectional and it has remained the same way in one form or another. There were always terrorists in our midst. Otherwise, how do we explain the Gujarat pogrom, the 1984 killings of Sikhs or even the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948?

We have not imbibed the secular spirit which a secular society demands. That is the reason why most of us do not rise against blatant acts of communalism and a few even give shelter to terrorists, foreign or Indian. We are barking at the wrong tree.

Take for example, Vande Mataram. It is a song which has stirred national feelings for years. To use it for political purpose is fatal. Union Minister Arjun Singh, a top Congress leader, was the first to throw the brick, making the singing of the song compulsory at government-aided schools on September 7 when Vande Mataram is supposed to be 100 years old. Congress president Sonia Gandhi would have done the country proud if she had said that she was not compelled to sing it.

True, she did not sing but the party's explanation was that the date of September 7 was historically wrong for the centenary year. The message that a person does not become less patriot if he does not sing the song went awry.

The BJP which has no other programme except to communalise every facet of India feels happy that it has embarrassed the Congress.

This may well be true but by communalising the issue, the BJP has pulled down the Vande Mataram from its high national pedestal. The question is not whether the Congress has lost or the BJP has won.

The question is whether Indian nation has won. It has not. The BJP may have scored a point but it is at the expense of Vande Mataram.

I was amused to read the comment by the Muslim Personal Law Board and some Islamic organisations.

They do not have to teach the nation that Islam does not worship anyone else expect the Allah. After living together for centuries, all Indians know that.

Yet nearly 70 years ago, a committee comprising Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Subhas Chandra Bose decided in favour of singing Vande Mataram's first two stanzas.

Why didn't these organisations leave the matter at that? They made it a religious issue and played into the hands of the BJP.

I think that former Union Minister Arif Mohammad Khan wrote a commendable article in support of Vande Mataram and stood by the side of former Prime Minister Inder Gujral in public to sing the song.

But some "custodians of Islam" have run him down and compared him with the late Union Minister M.C. Chagla, a Muslim who joined politics late like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The mullahas, moulavis and their ilk used to call Abul Kalam Azad "a Hindu show boy" before partition because he was the leader of the Congress, paraded as a Hindu organisation then.

They have their pet horse of fundamentalism to ride though they go on swearing by secularism to hide their real colour.

A society does not become secular by enunciating that it is secular. It requires commitment to the principle of tolerance and accommodation.

Above all, it needs conviction that one's religion is not superior to that of others. All people, belonging to different religions, realise that their separate entities merge into one entity, that of India. See America where there is only one civil code, no personal law of any community.

What is disconcerting is that the Congress is politicising issues and institutions and the BJP communalising them. Both parties have only election and power in view and they care a hang about the country.

The BJP never had any secular traditions. The Congress has. But the latter's behaviour reflects a bent of mind which is not trying to learn how to retrieve the society from parochialism but how to down the BJP.

The delay in judgments has worsened the situation. For example, a special court has taken 13 years to convict the first set of guilty in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts.

The Supreme Court has not yet taken up the case praying for rejection of the Action Taken Report that called the Sri Krishna Commission report on the 1993 blasts "biased and anti-Hindu."

When there is no odium of guilt in a community which kills people of the other community, every verdict gets lost in recrimination. A secular society should be made of sterner stuff.