Raj Thackeray doesn’t like Bihari migrants in Mumbai to practise their way of worship, for example their native Chhat Puja or water worship. His mentor Bal Thackeray had similar issues with ethnic Tamil immigrants. That was way back in time, before he turned his benign gaze upon the Muslim and Christian communities of Mumbai even if they happened to be Marathi speakers.

Narendra Modi in Gujarat too doesn’t like Muslims or Christians in his state. In fact he doesn’t like secular Hindus either. Renowned artist MF Hussain whose studio in Ahmedabad was destroyed under Modi’s watch now lives in exile for fear of his life and danseuse Mrinalini Sarabhai is stoically coping with the full blast of the state’s ire. Any Hindu would face it in Gujarat if they spoke for an equal law for the minorities as Sarabhai did.

But minority groups are not far behind in championing their own narrow mindsets. They have played havoc with Muslim women’s rights. They have hounded Bangladeshi fugitive writer Taslima Nasrin, on at least one occasion physically assaulting her and threatening to have her killed for alleged blasphemy. The state has done one better. It has put Taslima Nasrin under an undeclared house arrest. Women writers who spoke to Taslima say she fears she would be deported. Her visa expires on 18th February. The government it seems has falsely claimed that it has been extended. If the virtual house arrest is the state’s way of keeping her secure from rightwing Muslim rabble-rousers who could harm her, it is tantamount to the cure being worse than the ailment. If Taslima has written something blasphemous, as perhaps she has in one of her books, a democratic state should be able to intervene to deliver fair justice without compromising on its commitment to either free speech or religious freedom.

The idea of India as the founders envisaged it was to have such a complete democracy in this country that it would give every single citizen, or a fugitive, or the casual visitor each and every freedom conceivable in a civilised world. That idea was enshrined in the Constitution of India. It remains the only bible the state is authorised to consult to resolve a substantive difference of opinion it may have with the people or to end a dispute about a matter of principle between them.

The founders neither desired nor offered room, in their delicately crafted idea of a nation state, for religious, regional, linguistic or ethnic mindsets to be entertained by the state’s representatives. This of course did not mean that they had failed to observe a few of these slants blossoming and flourishing in their time, but these were not given any space in what we generally know as public affairs. Of course the founders were aware that with a surfeit of regions, religions, languages and ethnicities co-existing cheek by jowl there would be differences or disputes that needed to be handled with care and special firmness.

Most of the biases India has inherited are chronic and cultural in their origin with a history of at least a few hundred years. In some cases, tendencies bequeathed by the hidebound caste system go back a few thousand years in history. All these have been found difficult to wish away. However, other forms of mistrust evolved meanwhile from modern classes and social groups thrown up by colonial and post-colonial economic quests. Consequently, India is currently divided between the worldview cherished by 20 to 30 per cent of its citizens who are destined to enjoy the fruits of its economic policies and the 70 to 80 per cent of those who are condemned to wait with fading hope for their space under the shining sun since 1991. The tussle of the rich and the have-nots acquires the form of irrational prejudices too which erupt occasionaly like in Raj Thackeray’s sermon to the Biharis who are otheriwse a poor hardworking lot.

The main political parties who had hitherto lived by taking money from the rich and the vote from the poor with the promise to protect them from each other are being compelled to consider more surgical methods to keep the 30:70 apartheid intact. Since in a democracy 70 per cent can easily vote out all policies that favour a mere 30 per cent, a method had to be evolved to break the brute majority of the have-nots. The staple so far has been to woo votes from among the 70 per cent by playing up their parochial prejudices. Muslims make a large and readymade vote bank here. Hindus are a lot more difficult to weld together as a voting lobby. We know of ‘AJGAR’ and ‘MY’ factors in Indian elections, representing Ahir, Jat, Gujar, Adivasi and Rajput in parts of north and western India and Muslim-Yadav in Bihar. These are all predominantly Hindu groups but usually at loggerheads with each other. Yet the overwhelming majority of India’s Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Christians belong to the 70 per cent of the have-nots. This should ideally pit them against the 30 per cent predominantly Hindu interest groups who are ruling the roost. Such a democratic coup would be unacceptable to the Indian state as it has evolved. Therefore, Messrs Thackeray and Modi are assigned a pivotal role to sort out the mess.

The imageries of Taslima and Husain are useful in this respect. Taslima, it is said, has hurt Muslim sentiments with her blasphemous writings and Hussain, we are told, has hurt Hindu sentiments with his supposedly offensive paintings of goddesses. But Taslima has been in Kolkata for years after she wrote Dwikhandita, the evidently objectionable book. So what has happened suddenly to bring her alleged apostasy into the mainframe of Muslim ire? The answer comes from a direction that is surprising. It has been suggested by a growing number of respected intellectuals that the communist government in West Bengal, hitherto regarded as the repository of secular virtues, is quite a lot responsible for targeting Taslima. Her criticism of the violence, which communist cadres had unleashed on the impoverished Dalit and Muslim residents of Nandigram is said to be a key reason for Taslima’s current misery. So it is a sad day indeed that the left also appears to have acquired the methods of “bourgeois” rule it had so far fought tenaciously. The left’s apparent culpability in the Taslima affair, and its willingness to use Muslim communalism even though it has been the target of Muslim obscurantist groups in the past, is a new development in the equation.

The anger, if not complete disillusionment, with the left seems to have outraged large swathes of left sympathisers and ordinary democratic opinion-makers across India. Implied in their criticism is the call to the left: stop behaving like the Congress and the BJP. Eminent writers such as Mahashweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, Ashish Nandy and Girish Karnad have called a major meeting this week to demand the release of Taslima Nasrin and the safe return of Hussain from Dubai, among other issues. But the most interesting message in this meeting to my mind will be a word of caution to the Left Front to distance itself from the brand of politics that breeds mediaeval prejudices.

The writers have taken measures of course to ensure that the BJP gets no succour from their ire against the Congress and the left. They released a statement on Sunday ahead of a public meeting on Wednesday. It says: “Inevitably, hoping to make political capital out of the situation, the BJP is publicly shedding crocodile tears over Taslima Nasrin, going to the extent of offering her asylum in Gujarat. It seems to expect people to forget that the BJP, VHP and RSS cadres have been at the forefront of harassing, persecuting, threatening and vandalising newspaper offices, television studios, galleries, cinema halls, filmmakers, artists and writers. Or that they have forced MF Hussain, one of India’s best-known painters, into exile.”

The writers also raised an alert about the little known incarceration of journalists in states like Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. “Away from the public glare of press conferences and television cameras, journalists are being threatened and even imprisoned. Prashant Rahi from Uttarakhand, Praful Jha from Chattisgarh, Srisailum from Andhra Pradesh, P Govind Kutty from Kerala are a few examples.”

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