Illiberalism: Why they ban burkhas and we Aarakshan

We live in a world of competing illiberalisms. In France, they have banned the burkha, and Italy hopes to follow suit. In India, we ban books and censor movies. The latest to face the wrath of demagogues is the Amitabh Bachchan film Aarakshan, which few people have seen, but this hasn’t stopped anyone from seeking to preview, censor, or ban it. What connects and separates Europe and India is that both societies seek to be liberal and illiberal at the same time. India and Europe make for good comparison because both of us are a multitude of nationalities bunched under one broader civilisational label. In Europe, the Right-wingers want to ban the burkha but not the prophet cartoons or books. They are more uncomfortable with the outward manifestations of diversity and faith than us. In India, we are fairly comfortable with the external paraphernalia of identity assertion and diversity, but not thoughts. This is why we ban (or try to ban) books and censor movies – from Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to Deepa Mehta’s Fire and, now, the subversive ideas behind Aarakshan (which is ostensibly about quotas and reservations). Knowing how our film-makers deal with sensitive subjects, it is more than likely that the controversy over Aarakshan is a manufactured one to gain publicity for the film before its release rather than a genuine attempt to critique the idea of seat and job reservations. Shahrukh Khan and Aamir Khan tried to generate controversies before the release of their films My Name is Khan and Three Idiots. But we are not on the point of how Bollywood manipulates the media, but about Indian and European illliberality. [caption id=“attachment_53899” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“In Europe, the Right-wingers want to ban the burkha but not the prophet cartoons or books. AFP”]  [/caption] In India, we are extremely wary of subversive thought – and not the reality of outward diversity. This is possibly the point of divergence between the illiberalism of Europe and India. It flows from our varied civilisational experiences, and how our forefathers saw their problems and the approaches they adopted to solve them. Europe’s geography of mountains and natural territorial limits allowed cultures to physically separate and flourish independently. Diversity thus meant physical separation. Which is why they sought an external ideological unity in religion. Europe is thus both strongly regional and internally homogenous in most part. This made them culturally similar within small countries, enabling the development of a high-trust society internally. This is also one reason why most of Europe has very high tax rates and very high unemployment, but social cohesion has never been an issue. The arrival of people with different skin colour and belief systems poses a threat to this form of internal unity. The liberalism that comes from a physically continguous culture places a high premium on being physically similar. Within any European country, enormous quarrels take place on ideology within a culturally homogenous society (every tiny European nation, for example, runs coalitions of varying hue), but this leaves them very concerned over external diversity. The influx of culturally dissimilar Muslims and other racial minorities scares the daylights out of them. This is why Europe gets more worried about Muslims not accepting their way of life and refusing to assimilate than, say, someone preaching a different ideology. Marxism and Fabian socialism caused few ripples, but Islam frightens them. In India, our geography could not ensure physical separation of peoples and identities. Even the creation of a Pakistan is artificial from a geographical point of view. In order to build kinship and trust, while still being geographically spread out, we created vertical nations in the form of caste. Despite huge differences in cultural and physical characteristics, we sought to create a channeled kinship across a vast geography by linking Brahmin to Brahmin, Kshatriya to Kshatriya, and so on. Our history has taught us that we are always going to have people from all races and belief systems coming here, either through conquest or migration. Our solution was thus to accept diversity as an inevitably while, at the same time, ensuring kinship and trust vertically through castes. That this system backfired and created the worst kind of discrimination is another issue. But this was the challenge as we saw it in the past and this was our solution to it then. A vertical division of society is more tolerant of external diversity but not internal diversity of thought since this can break the unity of caste. This is possibly one reason why we are so wary of subversive ideas than the west. We saw it as a direct threat to our idea of diversity of identity while allowing for internal consistency through caste. This explains – at least partly - why we are more scared of radical ideas than the west. Almost every nation in the world has had a revolution based on ideas, but not India. The Europeans had several revolutions, the Americans theirs, the Chinese and Russians theirs, but India? We are the world’s only evolutionists. We don’t believe in revolution because we have consciously stamped on ideas that are too radical. On the upside, this has spared us the kind of mindless violence that ideology brings. The Europeans who emigrated to the New World, Latin America and Australia physically exterminated the locals. The Germans tried to physically eliminate the Jews. The Russians under Stalin and Chinese under Mao and the Cambodians under Pol Pot followed the same logic while carrying out their internal pogroms. Closely aligned to this approach is the underlying assumption that one idea can be right. One god or one book is vital. Science has also explored the same idea – of trying to find a unified theory. Culturally, Europe and the Judeo-Christian world are not comfortable with the idea that two opposing ideas can coexist. It has to be black or white. This is the ultimate logic for separating church from state, the spiritual from the temporal. The twain need not meet. The appearance of Islam in Europe threatens this cosy compact because in Islam politics and religion are completely intertwined. In India, we have privileged the opposite stupidity of extreme greyness: we want to believe that nothing is totally right or wrong. This allows us to be diverse and liberal through hypocrisy, but within the rigid, illiberal confines of caste or narrow thought processes. It allows us to abandon rules if they don’t suit us (a scamster is thus a hero to his community). We have evolved a civilisational idea that confuses the cosmic with the corporeal. If, to the westerner, “Thou shalt not kill” is an iron law, for Indians it is relative. It all depends on the circumstances. Which is true – up to a point — but when we apply this notion to following road rules only when it suits us, we are opting for the absurd. The only iron law for us is the law of diversity. You can opt for any god or idea you like, but keep it to yourself. This is why when the Buddha challenged the Brahminical order of his time, the thought was too subversive even for that time. It threatened social order. Europe and the West have to learn from us and we from them. In the ultimate analysis, liberalism is not divisible. You can’t be a liberal in one area and not in another. Conversely, liberalism means conversation and the free flow of ideas. Emphasising an artificial external diversity is no substitute for dialogue and discussion. Neither the burkha nor the book needs to be banned. Bans diminish us.