The Grinch who steals Christmas: Holidays and the Hindutva state

Original illustration by Angela Ferrao

We live in interesting times. Sometime around the middle of this month the press broke reports that the Union Government wanted to mark the twenty-fifth of December, birthdays of Hindu nationalist leaders Atal Behari Vajpayee and Madan Mohan Malaviya, as ‘Good Governance’ day. Towards this end, the media informed us, schools would remain open, and students would be encouraged to participate in a national essay writing competition. Howls of protest rang out across the country, and the Ministry of Human Resource Development hurriedly rubbished these reports. There was no question of having schools open on Christmas Day, they assured the country and added that the competition was voluntary and entries could be submitted virtually.

For the moment then, the crisis seemed to have receded. Nevertheless, the episode refreshed my memory over two earlier episodes involving holidays. One is an event that lies within the public domain, the other a personal memory that I would like to share and reflect on.

The first episode dates back a number of years, when the government of the then Chief Minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar, contemplated withdrawing the public holidays on the Good Friday and the feast of St. Francis Xavier. As can be expected, there was a hue and cry then too, until this controversial move was undone, with Parrikar later suggesting that the move had been an error.

The second episode dates from the time when I was working with an NGO in Hyderabad. I realised with some shock that this corporate-funded entity had not declared Eid (I forget which of the two Eids it was) a holiday. On the contrary, it was marked as an optional holiday. If one chose, for religious reasons, one could take the day off, but the rest of the office would continue working. I also recall being told that one could take the day off, but I would be merely eating into my own stock of optional holidays. I recollect sensing the suggestion of the threat that I would be compromising my days of Christian celebration were I to take the day off to commemorate the feast.

I was quite upset by this scenario. I had recently returned from Patna where I had a number of Muslim friends and had been sucked into a series of Eids, weddings, and other celebrations. Even though I was bereft of this network in Hyderabad, I could not contemplate an Eid that was to be spent working, instead of feasting with friends. It hurt, but rather than create trouble and stand up for a principle I was not yet sure of, I went to work that Eid day, mournfully walking past masses of men praying at the mosques along the route I took to work.

These memories were swirling around my head these past couple of days I realised that the issue of cancelling holidays, or restricting these holidays is much more important than showing disrespect or disregard for religious minorities. On the contrary, such governmental actions ensure that religious boundaries are hardened and religions are formed into water tight compartments. The learning from Hyderabad was just that, you can choose to be a Catholic and take your holiday, or you can choose to show solidarity with Muslims. We are not preventing you from celebrating Eid, but you need to make a choice. Similarly, had the feast of St. Francis Xavier continued to have lost its holiday, a great number of Catholics would have still taken the day off to visit Old Goa and venerate the relics of the saint. This option would perhaps not have been so definite for those Goans who are not practicing Catholics but still venerate St. Francis Xavier. It is possible that they would have continued with their daily routines. Similarly had the holiday on Good Friday been cancelled it would not only have complicated the possibility of having clear roads for the public processions that mark Good Friday, it would also have complicated the participation of non-Catholics, who light up the streets, and offer incense to perfume the funeral path of Christ. 

We must remember that we live in an environment where thanks to the threat of an aggressive Hindu nationalism, all religious groups have been hardening their identities and castigating what are called syncretic practices. When a government restricts a holiday, therefore, or fails to provide one, it is lending its own strength against these already existent social pressures. The issue of cancelling holidays therefore does not merely impact on the group for whom it is most significant. It impacts all, preventing communal celebrations, visits, exchange of sweets. It goes towards creating a fractured society.

It is in this context that we should evaluate the clarifications of Smriti Irani, Minister for Human Resources Development, on the issue of celebration of ‘Good Governance’ day, as well as the subsequent note from the Prime Minister’s Office that mandated various officers to mark ‘Good Governance’ day.  What is clear is that rather than let Christmas day be, the Central Government has identified the twenty-fifth of December as the day to commemorate ‘Good Governance’ day. The essay competition will continue apace even though the event will be restricted to submissions over the internet. Further, various officers of the Government were expected to attend and conduct commemorations linked to the theme of good governance.

What this effectively amounts to is providing an alternative to the celebrations of Christmas that have become a major feature across India. One does not need to be Christian, nor indeed have Christian friends to celebrate the day. Regardless of their religious persuasion, people engage in secular celebrations of this feast by organising Christmas parties, arranging visits from Santa Claus and the like. The fact is that thanks to a variety of factors, a number of Indians, and especially urban and upwardly mobile Indians are ‘culturally Christian’. They have imbibed many Christian and/or western cultural traditions and celebrate them as if these traditions are their own. That these aspects are not strictly religious is not important, it is in fact exactly the point, that the festival has ceased to be religious alone, but is a cross-communal secular festival. Indeed, if one is to take the historical novel, The Mirror of Beauty seriously, Christmas, or Bada Din was a significant festival in Delhi by the time of the last Mughal emperor, and avidly celebrated by the Mughal elites.

Given the kind of pressure that Indian society places on students to excel and gain laurels, one can imagine that children would be encouraged, if not pressured, to take part in a national competition that could get them national recognition. Remember we live in a country where even a certificate of participation is regarded as useful. As such, having a competition at the time of the Christmas holidays, with a submission on Christmas day, no matter that the submission can be made virtually, ensures that one has created a substantial diversion from the pleasures, and significance, of Christmas. In addition to these competitions, the low-key government commemorations of good governance  that continued even while the holiday was still officially on clearly indicate that the conspiracy to steal Christmas is, therefore, still on.

It should be noted, however, that it is not only the BJP government that is engaged in a project that dismisses Christmas. A variety of organisations in India, including academic and non-governmental, as well as those patronised by the nominally secular-liberals think nothing of hosting significant retreats immediately prior to, or soon after Christmas day. This scheduling ensures that very often Christians have to either opt out of Christmas, or the event, or spend a good part of Christmas day in travel. And, as I pointed out earlier, this callous scheduling does not impact Christians alone, but fractures the possibility of non-Christians in participating in what is a wonderful feast of familial gathering. The loss is communal.

We live in a country where the plethora of holidays we enjoy is often castigated. Over the year these holidays have been vilified merely as days free from work. What this vilification does not recognise is that holidays are a way for us to indicate that an event is important enough for us to take time off work and engage with each other. Even if we choose to not engage with other communities, the holiday continues to be a mark that this other community is important. It is this tradition of honouring those who are unlike us that is at stake when holidays are so callously countermanded.

Feliz Natal! Have a blessed and joyous Christmas season!

(A version of this text was first published in the O Heraldo dated 26  Dec 2014)

Rethinking Special Status - I

I laughed, long and hard, and then laughed out loud some more on reading the aghast responses to the denial of Goa’s request for Special Status. The laughter was not because the demand for Special Status is unjustified, but because the response was so obvious! Our hopes were pegged on the assurances of Chief Minister Parrikar, and the electoral promises of Prime Minister Modi. It should have been obvious at that time that the Goans interested in Special Status were being taken for a ride. There is no way that a government composed of the BJP, a party committed to the RSS vision of an undivided India, and the creation of the history of a Hindu(only) India, will ever concede to the recognition of special-ness for any part of India that does not rest on Hindu-ness.

The impossibility of a BJP government ever conceding to Special Status is not, however, what I would like to focus on in this column. Rather, I would like to suggest that the denial of Special Status by the Modi government should be looked upon as a blessing in disguise. This denial opens up for us the opportunity to rethink what it is that we are demanding under Special Status, and how we are making this demand. In other words, what exactly are the principles that underlie the demand for Special Status, and what are the implications of each principle; that is to say, who benefits from the choices made?

Thus far most demands for Special Status seem to revolve around the issue of special economic status, and constitutional clauses to ensure that only locals can own land in Goa. In other words, the demand has been restricted within the bounds of Article 371 of the Constitution. I have argued in earlier columns that such a phrasing of the demand for Special Status ensures that it is really the landed and business elites in Goa who stand to benefit from Special Status. The vast segment of former tenants really do not benefit from this form of Special Status given that local landlords can still get into partnerships with external capitalists to allow for highrise apartments and other developments to allow for more of the wild speculative ‘development’ that has characterised Goa in the recent past. Similarly, grants from the Centre would appeal to the business and industrial elites and wold not reach the common person except through possible increase in employment.

If they are intent on ensuring that they do not get cheated in the process of being mobilised to demand for Special Status then it is critical that Goans put aside an obsession with form and identify the problems they seek to address by gaining Special Status. Thus far the debate has been about saving land, identifying land sold to non-Goans as the reason for cultural peril. This argument also blames Goans for selling land in the first place.  This is a particularly unhappy argument since it ignores the fact that the non-landed Goans who are selling land are doing so because this is by and large the only way through which they can make money. The argument does not recognise that these Goans operate in a context where a system of power is in fact loaded against them.

Put simply, the system of power that I am referring to is one where Goa, its homes and its landscape are fetishized by a Indian elite. Armed with greater economic and political power thanks to the fact of a different political history under the British Raj, supported by a representational system that privileges Goan property but disregards the Goans, these elite consumers from India are able to skew the market such that it often makes more sense to sell a property, than to sustain the property. Add to this the almost non-existent support provided by the state government to maintain homes, or even diverse employment possibilities within the state, as well as a solid public infrastructure. All too often then, the Goan who sells one’s property is in fact operating against a system that is solidly weighed against them.

The Special Status we demand, therefore, must be about meaningful political equality within the country and the right to reforge the political relationship with the Indian state. Further, unless we recognise the powers that operate to cause the insecurity within Goa, any demand for Special Status result in the repetition of the history of the past fifty odd years of Goa’s presence within the Indian Union.

While making this argument I would like to especially underline the fact that almost every postcolonial popular movement to save Goan identity ranging from  the Opinion Poll, Language Issue, Statehood, to the Regional Plan, has rested on the shoulders of the bahujan Catholic men and women of Salcete. Each and every one of these movements has appealed to their insecurity and each time their aspirations have been frustrated, largely because the demand for protecting Goan identity has been couched within the language of Indian (i.e. Hindu) nationalism. These demands have failed to assert that cultural demands, where Catholics are cast as not-quite-Indian are only a part of the problem. The other problem rests in the fact that there has been no systematic development that can empower the Goan population to gather both economic as well as cultural capital.

The result has been that the Catholic bahujan of Salcete in particular have been converted into the oxen pulling the cart that fulfils the interests of Goa’s landed and business elites. These groups have always managed to use these movements to increase the scope for their autonomy. Any demand for Special Status therefore, must be one that recognises that there is a great socio-economic diversity among Goans. This demand must recognise that different kinds of Goans require different kinds of support under Special Status, and that local elites need to be restrained from exploiting the situation.

One could also make the argument, that the failure to effectively articulate issues of social and economic equality both within and outside of Goa has in fact resulted in the kind of communalisation of Goan society that we are witness to today. The interests that were served were invariably of the upper caste and business elites, but the movements were always misrepresented as Catholic. This has pitted the vast bahujan majority against the Catholic bahujan minority.

If the movement for Special Status is to provide genuine benefit to the people of Goa then it must necessarily assert that the basis for this demand lies in recognising the insecurity and marginalisation that the non-Hindu, and bahujan minorities in Goa have faced since 1961, as well as commit itself towards a vision for economic justice. Such a twining of agendas would allow for us to also address the increasing communalisation of the Goan polity. The Special Status movement would need to make alliances with the Hindu bahujan samaj, who at this moment, have been largely seduced by Hindu nationalism. Indeed, there is good reason for them to be seduced, given that it was Indian liberation that ensured that they could escape the clutches of their landlords. Additionally, this Indian liberation has also involved providing space for the Hindu bahujan through the marginalisation of the Catholic bahujan rather than opening up new avenues for all Goans. The Special Status movement needs to necessarily reach out to the Hindu segments of the bahujan samaj to ensure that Special Status will meet the aspirations of both the Catholic and Hindu segments, and that development in Goa will be egalitarian. Such a reaching out would only be possible once we start asking deeper questions about Special Status, not limit it to the issue of ownership of land, or grants and tax breaks from the Centre, and recognise that the negotations for Special Status need to be directed both towards the outside, i.e towards Indian state; as well as inside, within Goan society.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 8 Aug 2014)

Breaking Secularism´s cast(e): The curious case of the poor Indian Muslim

In an opinion piece in The Hindu on the 3 March 2011, Vidya Subrahmaniam wrote of her discussion with a group of Muslims in Deoband about the reported validation that Maulana Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, the controversy shrouded new Vice-Chancellor of the Dar ul Uloom at Deoband. These are her words;

‘I raised the Modi issue and was instantly put down: “We are not saying that Muslims should forgive Modi or forget 2002. But all of you in the secular media want the Gujarati Muslim never to get out of his grieving. Hindu or Muslim, the Gujarati is a businessperson, and that is what Vastanvi was trying to say.” The words stung but they were true. The Congress and the secular media wanted the Gujarati Muslim forever to fight Mr. Modi but neither was there to protect him.’

Subrahmaniam should be credited for her perspicacity and sensitivity. This fact should be obvious to many an observer of the unfolding of Indian secular democracy, but has by and large remained unspoken.

The fact is that in addition to being pilloried as a result of the Orientalist and subsequently nationalist histories of India, the Indian Muslim is held hostage by another force that masquerades as its friend, the ‘secular’ Indian. The key article of faith of the secular Indian in contemporary times has been to moan the fate of poor blighted Muslim. Reams of paper, rivers of ink and oceans of tears are spent in this cause, to the extent that the cause of secularism – in this case the welfare of all minority groups in Indian – has become less of a concern, and has been replaced by a singular concern for the Muslim.The problem with the Orientalist and subsequently nationalist understanding of India is that it has understood India to be originally Hindu. All those who came ‘after’ are seen as the non-Indian, or less Indian. In the terms of scholarly debate, they are the ‘Other’ to the Hindu ‘Self’. Given the locus of dominant Indian nationalism in North India, the Muslim was seen as the ‘Other’ to the Hindu state, and blamed for all the shortcomings of nationalism, most significantly of all, Partition. Ever since, the Indian Muslim has been bludgeoned to the desperate condition they find themselves in today. The argument here is not that concern for them is misplaced. The argument is that by focussing on the Muslim ‘Other’ alone, what these secular Indians do is reaffirm the central place of the Hindu in the national imagination. The problem with Indian secularism is not the Muslim, it is the central place of the Hindu in the national imagination. This problem can be rectified only when we start realising that India is more than Hindu and Muslim, but includes tons of other minorities as well, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Adivasis, Dalits to name just a few. Displace this binary relationship, recognise the pluralism of the Indian reality, and we would have progressed multiple steps towards combating the problems confronting Indian secularism.

The question that remains unanswered in all of this however is why does the ‘secular’ establishment in India fail to grasp this seemingly obvious fact? Why does it persist in this obsessive focus on the Muslim and reaffirm the central place of the Hindu? The answer is once more hinted at by Subrahmaniam in her observation that ‘The Congress and the secular media wanted the Gujarati Muslim forever to fight Mr. Modi but neither was there to protect him.’ In her formulation of the problem, Subrahmaniam falls into the regular trap of identifying the Congress as secular, and the BJP as communal. We would grasp the nuances better if we harked to the words of Khalid Anis Ansari, a scholar researching the Pasmanda movement.

Ansari points out that ‘…there are a few differences between BJP and Congress … even when in the ultimate analysis they defend the same caste/class interests. For one Congress is dominated by anglicised and elite Brahmins, the BJP on the other hand is controlled by Brahmins from the rural or middle class backgrounds.’

In this formulation, Ansari helps us get to understand the obsession with the Indian Muslim. If one reads the ‘BJP’ and ‘Congress’ as symbols for opposing camps in Indian politics, and not merely – as normally done – as representative of the electoral parties, then one can see Indian politics as the struggle between the anglicised and elite dominant castes, and the rural and middle class dominant castes. The first group sold on the idea of western modernity, is empowered by its access to western cultural capital and drawing its power from international hierarchies, seeks to make a modern ‘secular’ India on these ideas. The other group as yet unable to acquire this western cultural capital, drawing its power solely from local hierarchies, seeks to delay this transition to western modernity until they too are in the seat of power. In the battle between these two dominant caste elephants, it is the Muslim grass that suffers. As Subrahmaniam rightly realised, the Muslim is by and large a pawn in the battle for access to State power. The ‘Congress’ claims to uphold Muslim interests, and the ‘BJP’ in response attacks them. In response to these attacks the ‘Congress’ calls the ‘BJP’ communal, and restricts our understanding of ‘secularism’ to essentially the Muslim cause. In the meanwhile secularism as a larger ideal of the protection of minority interests against majoritarianism falls by the wayside. What complicates this picture is that the battles are not between religious groups, but between caste (and especially dominant caste) groups. As such when the ‘Congress’ espouses the ‘Muslim’ cause what it is primarily doing is espousing the cause of the dominant Muslim castes. Further, it is quite capable of absorbing those people into its upper echelons who can walk the walk and talk the talk, be the Muslim, Christian or Hindu. All that is required is the ability to behave like an anglicised dominant caste. The power of the ‘BJP’ on the other hand, given its rural and middle-class character, is largely based on the assertion of ‘traditional’ caste structures. Thus this group too can make peace with non-cosmopolitan Muslim (or Christian) dominant caste groups toward the larger end of preserving rural social orders and traditional hierarchies.

Two lessons emerge from Subrahmaniam’s observations. The first that the solidarity that large portions of the secular lobby in India show to the Indian Muslim are motivated by the desire to wipe out their contender for power. Second, is the lesson that these political divisions in India, are not so much about religion as they are about caste power and caste battles. It thus appears that we would make some progress towards secularism if we complicated the picture of secularism in India to look beyond the Muslim, and also accounted for the manner in which both groups seek to establish the norms for gaining power in this diverse country.

(First published in the Gomantak Times 9 March 2011)