Playing fast & loose with secularism

FOREIGN Secretary Vikram Misri’s visit to Bangladesh for foreign office consultations early next week is not one second late in coming. Between Dhaka’s arrest of the ISKCON-related Hindu monk, Chinmoy Krishna Das, on trumped-up sedition charges and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s absurd remarks on the “same DNA” that connects the Mughal king Babur’s destruction of temples in Ayodhya, Sambhal and today’s Bangladesh, it’s fair to say that a communal feeding frenzy that feeds off each other is alive and well in parts of both India and Bangladesh.

Adityanath’s remarks are hardly unique. The RSS recently called on the “government of Bharat” to prevent atrocities on Hindus and other minorities in Bangladesh, while BJP leader in West Bengal Suvendu Adhikari has threatened a trade embargo if Muhammad Yunus’ government doesn’t stop attacking Hindus.

Nor is Adityanath the first big BJP leader to speak his mind. Back in 2018, then BJP president and current Home Minister Amit Shah described Bangladeshi migrants into India as “termites” — he used the Hindi word “deemak” — and promised that each of them would be struck off the electoral rolls. It is another matter that 43 per cent of “foreigners” in Assam between 1971 and 2014 (20,613/47,928 people), the Assam Government conceded this August, are Hindus.

Shah’s undiplomatic remarks were probably made with the full force of foresight and are testimony to the unhealthy mixing of Hindutva politics with a strategic insensitivity, especially since India’s all-important neighbourhood is in question. At the time, the Ministry of External Affairs held its peace, but it took a lot of effort to assuage then Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina that she shouldn’t take the politician’s remarks personally.

At the time, PM Modi had been fully involved in revamping India’s relations with its eastern neighbour — Shah’s comments constituted a great setback. Modi well understood that Bangladesh is certainly far too important a country to take for granted at any time.

That’s why Misri’s visit to Dhaka is so important. Ever since Hasina fled to Delhi in early August, bilateral ties have plummeted. The two countries have been at loggerheads over most things, including why the so-called revolution was allowed to reach a crescendo of violence, which ended in Hasina’s dramatic flight to safety. Dhaka believes that India deliberately refuses to understand Hasina’s starring role in the degradation of Bangladesh, while Delhi for the life of itself cannot comprehend why Bangladesh wants to wilfully erase today the memory of icons like Mujibur Rahman and dump it in the ignominious dustbin of history.

The problem, of course, is far more confounded. When Adityanath and Shah are seen as spokespersons of the ruling party, in this case by Bangladesh, and when Delhi refuses to either publicly censure them or privately call upon them to refrain from making the statements they do, the fallout escalates and snowballs and often acquires a life of its own.

Worse, when Indian politicians accuse Bangladeshi politicians of doing what they often do at home — for example, Adityanath’s “bulldozer justice” has often meant that houses owned by Muslims have been disproportionately demolished, as compared to houses owned by Hindus — or when Indian politicians openly call for the so-called “return” of disputed sites of worship, for eg in Varanasi and Mathura, even if it violates the Places of Worship Act, 1991, they sanction the communal politics in neighbouring countries like Bangladesh.

The difference between the Indian secular state and the rest of the neighbourhood has been plain to see for decades — in fact, the neighbourhood has often held up India’s democratic sensibility as a role model. It is nobody’s case that Indians of all political colours never wreaked vengeance on their minorities, or that justice was denied to these minorities, often for long periods of time — both the Congress and the BJP have been guilty of perpetrating riots. The difference is that India’s judiciary more often than not spoke truth to power. Democracy was more than just a word.

Even when compromises were finely wrought, as in the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute which ended with a mediated Supreme Court verdict in 2019 — in which the Muslim side gave up the claim to the sanctum sanctorum real estate on which the Ram temple had once been destroyed in 1529 and the Babri Masjid built by a lieutenant of Babur — it was hoped that the Hindu side wouldn’t thump its chest and flaunt its victory.

That hasn’t quite happened, of course. Instead of being satisfied with wresting the Ram temple back, aggressive Hindu litigants have targeted more and more sites, from the Gyanvapi mosque to the Krishna Janmabhoomi to the Sambhal mosque. It’s as if they are thirsting to wreak vengeance on past injustice, no matter they have no first-person experience of the injustice in question.

Imagine how the playbook plays out in Bangladesh, already seething with anger over the despotic Hasina fleeing to India. The Bangladeshi media rejects the charge that the Yunus government is not targeting minorities at home, but it is clear that the ISKCON monk is a lightning rod. He has become a fall guy. It will be easy to sacrifice him.

Imagine, too, what the BJP’s politics of Hindutva does to the BJP’s own foreign policy — it undermines India, of course, but it also undermines Modi, who in his third term certainly wants to leave a mark, even a legacy.

The irony is that Modi has creditably held his own elsewhere. He has held India steady against Joe Biden’s sanctions against Russia, he is preparing to deal with Trump, he has agreed to swallow his pride vis-à-vis China and he has reached out even to the Taliban in an effort to stabilise the neighbourhood.

And then there is Bangladesh — a country that India helped midwife back in 1971 and assisted with giving it an identity of its own. It would be truly tragic if India were to lose Bangladesh today because some short-sighted Indians are intent on playing fast and loose with one of the greatest ideas of our times — an idea called secularism.