Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: May 21, 2006
In his compelling critique of majoritarianism
and the impending "clash of civilisations", Amartya Sen has argued
that each individual embraces a multiplicity of identities and not merely
a religious one. In short, we are all, in some way or the other, a minority.
Sen's argument has been enthusiastically endorsed
by India's politically correct community. The mere invocation of the term
"minority" is enough to make them mushy and infuriatingly sanctimonious.
Minority rights, we are repeatedly told, must be preserved at all costs, even
if it involves making hideous compromises with the principles of equity and
modernity.
Last week, we had a grotesque assertion of
minorityism when Information and Broadcasting Minister P R Das Munshi chose
to obliterate the crucial distinction between accuser and judge. A clutch
of people, said to be the custodians of Roman Catholicism in India, were called
upon to judge the universal suitability of the celluloid version of The Da
Vinci Code.
It does not matter that the collective wisdom
of the group was limited to issuing a faith warning. What is significant is
that the Government deemed it necessary to consult and respect "minority"
sentiments.
I am not going to address the issue of whether
the Minister would have displayed similar interest had the offence been caused
to people who call themselves Hindus. A privileged status for minorities has
become the Great Indian Consensus. There is no outrage when a Minister in
the Uttar Pradesh Government sets a handsome reward for the murder of some
Danish cartoonists. Nor do we turn collectively incandescent when Pope Benedict
XVI presumes to lecture us on domestic legislation. When it comes to minority
interests, democracy and sovereignty are deemed to be negotiable.
It has taken India's most recent Nobel Prize
winner to point out that identity should not be circumscribed by religion
only. It must, he insists, be secularised. Minority rights in terms of gender,
sexual preferences, aesthetics, food and dress preferences and quirky flights
of whimsy must be institutionally accommodated if we are rise above mobocracy.
This is why it is odd that the widespread
protests by medical and other students in professional courses against Arjun
Singh's infamous quotas hasn't propelled politicians into defending minority
rights. Let's be quite clear, the affected students and those likely to be
affected are in a woeful minority. They are the best and brightest of our
youth, those who can hold their own in any internationally competitive environment.
They have precious little need for either affirmative action or grace marks.
They are India's undisputed crème de la crème.
For this precise reason, those who marched
on the streets of Delhi on Saturday are in a minuscule minority. In theory,
that should lead to a clamour among politicians to be photographed with them.
Yet, for the past seven days, not one politician of consequence from any of
the mainstream parties has dared to be associated with this minority movement.
Manmohan Singh had breakfast on Friday with
a bearded friend of the Taliban, Das Munshi hobnobbed with the Catholic clergy
on Thursday and Comrade Sitaram Yechuri, after spiritedly giving the bear
cartel on Dalal Street a generous leg up, rubbished all flirtations with knowledge
at a Sahmat meeting on Friday. No one, not even BJP leaders who are privately
in sympathy with everything the students stand for, dared to either show solidarity
or at least lend them a sympathetic ear.
Remember that only two MPs, and none from
the Lok Sabha, mustered the courage to oppose the infamous 104th Amendment
Bill. I don't believe this strategic abstention is occasioned by the allegedly
upper caste composition of the protesters. To equate merit with genetics is
grotesque and an assertion worthy of race supremacists. The real reason is
a little more complex.
At the very heart of protests against the
new quotas is a frighteningly modern demand. The students are asserting their
right to be treated first and foremost as Indians - overriding all class,
caste and creed. That's a majoritarian argument no self-respecting minority-ist
will ever countenance.