This week, I have two articles to share with you.
In Kerala should end over-dependence on remittances, my column for The Week, I write in tempered praise of the ‘Kerala model’, a phrase revived as the state successfully suppressed the Covid-19 outbreak for much of last year. Generations of state leaders have established a system of devolved government, with an emphasis on education and public health, with the result that Keralites now enjoy India’s top literacy rates, high life expectancy, more empowered women, a strong welfare state, and a vibrant and free civil society, not to mention a long tradition of religion tolerance. However, as Keralites go to the polls on 6 April, we must keep in mind where we can do better – notably, developing home-grown strengths to create jobs for Keralites in Kerala, rather than relying on foreign remittances.
In Will Indian Democracy be Tested Due to ‘Places of Worship’ Plea?, published in The Quint, I examine the BJP-issued plea, due to be heard by the Supreme Court, challenging the validity of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, and seeking the restoration of ancient temples on the sites where Islamic monuments or mosques currently stand – identical to the issues that led to the horror at the Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya. The Act that the plea challenges was enacted to prevent such atrocities, fixing the religious character of such places at whatever their status was on 15 August 1947. Replacing a mosque with a temple is merely trying to replace an old wrong with a new one – and the plea seeks to reopen such wounds before they have healed. It is untruthful to both Hinduism, which has never claimed a monopoly on religious truth; and to Indian democracy, which looks toward the prosperous future of tomorrow rather than attempting to correct the imagined wrongs of the yesterday. Such ideas should be consigned to the past, and allow the nation to move forward.
1. Kerala should end over-dependence on remittances; The Week; April 4, 2021.
Kerala has built on its tradition of decentralised governance, transparency, public trust and governmental accountability. While these must not be seen as a reason to underplay the current challenges the state faces, it offers a timely reminder that with greater sensitivity to the crisis at hand, more public willingness to continue to adopt counter measures like social distancing, wearing of masks and sanitisation measures, we can bounce back. Malayalis are a people of incredible resilience and fortitude. Whether it was during Cyclone Ockhi, the devastating floods in 2018 and 2019 or even in the face of similar virus outbreaks like Nipah, the people of the state have found a way to face these serious challenges head on.
2. Will Indian Democracy be Tested Due to ‘Places of Worship’ Plea?; The Quint; March 15, 2021.
We have seen this movie before. In 1992, a howling mob of Hindutva extremists tore down the Babri Masjid, vowing to replace it with a temple to Ram. They wanted to avenge history by undoing what they saw as the shame of half a millennium ago. That is exactly what will happen at Mathura, Varanasi and Delhi if the challenge to the Act is upheld. India is a land where history, myth and legend often overlap; sometimes we cannot tell the difference. To destroy a mosque and replace it with a temple would not be righting an old wrong but rather, perpetrating a new one. The Babri issue has been settled by the Supreme Court, but wounds fester. The current case seeks to reopen these wounds before they have even healed.
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With warm regards,
Shashi Tharoor
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Kerala should end over-dependence on remittances,
April 4, 2021,
The Week.
As I write these words, my state is riven in a bitter election campaign, with harsh words being flung at and by the ruling party. And yet, though much criticism of the government is justified, the ‘Kerala Model’ itself cannot be disputed.
The phrase was revived last year to praise the state’s success in initially suppressing the spread of Covid-19 and ‘flattening the curve’ till October, when cases re-escalated. But the government’s failures to maintain its performance do not discredit the Kerala model itself. For its Covid-19 response has emerged from a template that long preceded the current crisis. Among Indian states, it is unique for having allocated significant resources to public health, devolved power and funding to village-level bodies, and established a system that promotes community participation and public cooperation.
In addition to having the highest literacy rate in India (94 per cent), Kerala also boasts a declining birth rate, higher life expectancy, more empowered women, and stronger welfare support for the marginalised. People do not beg or starve in Kerala.
The state offers universal access to health care, and respects all residents as rights-bearing citizens. Throughout the current crisis, Kerala’s educated populace has behaved responsibly, limiting community transmission, cooperating with authorities, and seeking prompt treatment. This institutional and political culture is not the result of some one-off policy. Kerala has spent generations creating the infrastructure to support social development, placing it far ahead of the rest of India on many key indicators.
Kerala has a vibrant civil society, free media, and a competitive political system. Its robust form of social democracy reflects the contributions of alternating coalitions of communist and Congress-led governments over time.
Kerala has built on its tradition of decentralised governance, transparency, public trust and governmental accountability. While these must not be seen as a reason to underplay the current challenges the state faces, it offers a timely reminder that with greater sensitivity to the crisis at hand, more public willingness to continue to adopt counter measures like social distancing, wearing of masks and sanitisation measures, we can bounce back.
Malayalis are a people of incredible resilience and fortitude. Whether it was during Cyclone Ockhi, the devastating floods in 2018 and 2019 or even in the face of similar virus outbreaks like Nipah, the people of the state have found a way to face these serious challenges head on.
When sources for conflict have arisen, the people have found a way to remind the rest of the country that we are proud flagbearers of a phenomenon I call the ‘Malayali miracle’. No politician can claim credit for this, the “real Kerala model”—a community that has practised openness and tolerance from time immemorial; which has made religious and ethnic diversity a part of its daily life rather than a source of division; which has overcome caste discrimination and class oppression through education, land reforms, and political democracy; which has given its working men and women greater rights and a higher minimum wage than anywhere else in India; and which has honoured its women and enabled them to lead productive, fulfilling and empowered lives.
And, yet, this election has again confirmed the need to update the Kerala model while preserving it. We must sustain our human development not by borrowings but by attracting investment. Instead of exporting our unemployment, we must generate jobs and support entrepreneurs. Instead of relying on remittances we must develop our home-grown strengths. The red-flag culture of repeated hartals must end with an acceptance of social responsibility for the common good.
As a Malayali and an Indian, I look forward to the day when Kerala will no longer be the exception in tales of Indian development, but again the trailblazer.
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Will Indian Democracy be Tested Due to ‘Places of Worship’ Plea?,
March 15, 2021,
The Quint.
“I’ll tell you what your problem is in India,” the American businessman said. “You have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battle axe, against each other.”
The businessman does not exist; I invented him for a novel — Riot — that came out in 2001 and concerns a Hindu-Muslim riot that erupts during the early stages of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation. Yet the views of this fictional character seem more real each day, as reports come in of the Supreme Court’s willingness to hear arguments by BJP spokesperson Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, challenging the validity of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991.
At least three suits and one writ petition have been filed seeking the restoration of ancient temples at sites on which mosques or Islamic monuments now exist – exactly the same scenario as the demand to build a temple to Ram above the ruins of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. These seek the removal of the Shahi Idgah Masjid adjacent to the Shri Krishna Temple Complex at Mathura, revered by many as the birthplace of Lord Krishna, and the restoration of an ancient temple at the site of Gyanvapi Mosque at Varanasi, both dating back to Aurangzeb’s rule; and another seeks the right to worship at the Qutb Minar complex, which allegedly stands on the ruins of 27 Hindu and Jain temples destroyed by Qutbuddin Aibak.
In a nonfiction afterword to Riot, I alerted readers to the threat by Hindutva extremists to a renewed cycle of killings and mob violence, which duly occurred a few months later in Gujarat in 2002. I take no solace whatever from prescience. The tragedy in India is that even those who know history seem condemned to repeat it.
In 1991, the Parliament was of the same view — enacting the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, whose Section 4 states that the religious character of a place of worship — existing on 15 August 1947 — shall continue to be the same as on that day, and bars courts from considering cases filed over the character of such places of worship. The intent of the Act was to ensure social peace, which had been so grossly violated in the Babri Masjid affair.
It is one of the ironies of India’s muddled march into the third decade of the 21st century, that it has a technologically-inspired vision of the future, yet appears shackled to the dogmas of the past. The petition challenging the Act is about places of worship, not software labs; it is devoted to religion and not ‘vikaas’.
We have seen this movie before. In 1992, a howling mob of Hindutva extremists tore down the Babri Masjid, vowing to replace it with a temple to Ram. They wanted to avenge history by undoing what they saw as the shame of half a millennium ago. That is exactly what will happen at Mathura, Varanasi and Delhi if the challenge to the Act is upheld.
India is a land where history, myth and legend often overlap; sometimes we cannot tell the difference. To destroy a mosque and replace it with a temple would not be righting an old wrong but rather, perpetrating a new one. The Babri issue has been settled by the Supreme Court, but wounds fester. The current case seeks to reopen these wounds before they have even healed.
To most Indian Muslims, the Babri dispute was not about a specific mosque but about their place in Indian society. For decades after Independence, Indian governments had guaranteed their security in a secular State, permitting the retention of Muslim ‘personal law’ separate from the country’s civil code and even financing hajj pilgrimages to Mecca. Three of India’s first nine presidents were Muslim, as have been innumerable Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals, cricket captains, and even Supreme Court justices.
Until the mid-1990’s, India’s Muslim population was greater than that of Pakistan. The destruction of the mosque felt like an utter betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a vital part of India’s pluralist democracy. Dismantling more mosques and undermining other Islamic sites on Indian soil would underscore that betrayal.
That is why the Parliament drew a line at 15 August 1947. Enough, they decreed, was enough. It was time to stop trying to scratch the scars of history, and move on into the future.
The Hindutvavadis who attacked the mosque had little faith in the institutions of Indian democracy. They saw the State as soft, pandering to minorities out of a misplaced and alien secularism. To them, an independent India, freed after nearly 1,000 years of non-Hindu rule (first Muslim, then British) and rid of a sizeable portion of its Muslim population by Partition, had an obligation to assert an identity that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu.
That is what the current petition is about.
Hindutvavadis root their Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or spiritual underpinnings — and, unlike their Islamic counterparts, not in the theology of their faith — but in its role as a source of identity. They seek revenge in the name of Hinduism as a badge of affiliation, rather than of Hinduism as a doctrine.
In doing so they are profoundly disloyal to the religion they claim to espouse, which stands out not only as an eclectic embodiment of acceptance of difference, but as the only major religion that does not claim to be the only true religion.
All ways of worship, Hinduism asserts, are valid, and religion is an intensely personal matter related to the individual’s self-realisation in relation to God. Such a faith understands that belief is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone.
The true Hindu seeks no revenge upon history, for he understands that history is its own revenge.
The Places of Worship petition is also untrue to the promise of Indian democracy, which seeks to order society to permit the welfare and prosperity of the Indian people tomorrow, rather than correct the imagined wrings of yesterday. As the courts deliberate on a solution to the case, the violence could resume, spawning new hostages to history, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right.
“We live”, Octavio Paz once wrote, “between oblivion and memory”. Memory and oblivion: one leads to the other, and back again.
It is time to put memory aside and focus on the future. The petition before the Supreme Court needs to be consigned to the oblivion that it, and our ravaged nation, deserves.
Shashi Tharoor · 97, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi 110 003 · New Delhi 110003 · India