After a rather long hiatus, the arch-Secularist, U.R. Ananthamurthy creeps out of the woodwork by giving a rousing call to save the nation from “Godse’s way of thinking.” You must hand it to Ananthamurthy: on the august occasion of convocation, he couldn’t have chosen a better place than the Jamia Milia Islamia to spill his distilled meditations on Godse’s way of thinking. Plus he couldn’t have selected a better audience than the Jamia Milia Islamia to blast Godse. Ananthamurthy represents a rare breed of secular intellectual armed with a potent combination of a twisted version of Hindu culture, existentialism, socialism, and secularism. He will bend the most eminent people and ideas to suit the occasion. 

Ananthamurthy is a practicing master of the fine art of subtle flattery. When done well, flattery is honesty, which is the best policy. Which is how he begins the convocation address.

…in these difficult times for most of us, the vice-chancellor of this great University has shown the courage to act properly, and humanely that would have been the correct action by a head of an institution in normal times. But the hysterical attack on him by his critics prompts me to say that he has defended the ideals that our Constitution upholds and nothing more.

Right. Courage defined by Ananthamurthy in this context seems to mean that the VC of Jamia Milia was correct in announcing that the JMI will provide legal aid to the two students arrested as terror suspects. As expected, Ananthamurthy spews fire at the VC’s hysterical critics but doesn’t reveal the aforementioned reason for such criticism. As Offstumped excellently says, it is beyond the charter of the JMI (link to the official charter of the Jamia Milia Islamia. Link thanks Offstumped) to fight a legal battle on behalf of its students. Assuming the VC has acted in line with the Constitution, the nation’s legal framework also defines strict rules within the purview of which universities should act. Clearly, the VC has exceeded his brief. To bolster his buttering of the VC, Ananthamurthy says

I studied in the great Maharaja’s college of Mysore University which had a British principal. This living legend who was opposed to the Quit India movement, did not allow the police to raid the College without his permission. That was the story handed down by generations of students. In his eyes, the “erring” students were under his care. He was of the opinion that all students were under the care of the head of the University, and s/he must play the role of a parent.

His admiration for the colonial masters apart, Ananthamurthy tries to conceal a crucial distinction. The Mysore University was then under the direct rule of an alien imperialism. Does Ananthamurthy equate a situation where a nation was fighting for independence with JMI’s shameful defence of terror suspects using public funds? Can we then logically conclude that the JMI (or Ananthamurthy at least) considers that India is not independent? Besides, the same VC has admitted that the JMI was wrong. More here.

After denying any links with any of the suspected terrorists arrested by the police for the Delhi bombings of September 13, Jamia Milia Islamia, the denominational university that neighbours the Jamia Nagar ghetto where the Indian Mujahideen module was based, has finally been forced to admit it was wrong. Having attacked the police for allegedly misleading the public, the Jamia administrators have grudgingly accepted that two of those arrested were students of the university. However, this acceptance has not come with cold horror or sober contrition. Rather, the Vice-Chancellor of the university has, with uncharacteristic bravado, decided to put the weight of Jamia — as the institution is commonly known — behind the terror suspects. He has committed the university to providing “legal help to the two students … until they are proven guilty”. In short, a tax-payer dependent institution will use public money to defend probable terrorists. This is nothing short of a scandal; Jamia Milia Islamia is betraying its compact with the city of Delhi. The Vice-Chancellor’s act can be only marginally extenuated by taking the position that he is under pressure from the hot-heads and radicals who abound on his campus. Yet, this too would amount to justifying craven surrender and institutional cowardice. It would not address the essential point: The university’s refusal to acknowledge that its facilities are being flagrantly exploited by the Students Islamic Movement of India and its bloodthirsty cohorts.

Of course, being the arch-secularist, Ananthamurthy will deny this and claim that it is a communal conspiracy. As he does in a different way.

Let me quote again Mukul Kesavan to make clear what is at stake in our times now:

“When people, policemen and political parties buy into the narrative of a priori Muslim guilt, they run the risk of turning this remarkable republic into an ordinary, ugly, majoritarian State.”

I know how some of my Muslims friends have begun to feel these days. The media is largely responsible for this.

When any arrest is made for suspected terrorism, you invariably hear a Muslim name. Then you are told that the arrested have confessed. Who will not confess under police torture?

When I last heard, the media was no friend of Hinduism or Hindutva or Hindu causes. So how does he blame the media. We’ll get to that in a while. In this vein, let’s assume that Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, arrested in the Malegaon blasts confesses tomorrow under police torture. What is the bet that Ananthamurthy will muster this same stellar courage and come to her defence? And now the media’s role in victimizing Muslims.  

It is an assault on our psyche to be informed everyday that a Muslim has been caught by the police or killed in an ‘encounter’. We never know whether the encounter could have been avoided. How can the dead speak of what really took place? There is a constitutional guarantee that every ‘encounter’ killing is homicide unless proved otherwise through an impartial and transparent enquiry. [...] As a citizen I want to ask this question: Why should the media give out names of all the arrested under suspicion before they are proved to be guilty…The whole nation seems to be neurotic.

This feeling “safe and secure” is also a momentary illusion, for, tomorrow you hear again of some terrorist attack and of more Muslim names getting arrested. We are also shown on TV channels dangerous explosive material supposed to be in their possession for bomb making.
Do we believe in the much-hyped “Breaking News” of the TV channels?

Absolutely! The exact stark reality. But then, the media has graduated over the years. From calling them terrorists, they now resort to milder terms like insurgents and militants. And then they have discussions and elaborate talk shows about how terrorists are what they are because the majority community drove them to it, and variations thereof. Tehelka in fact, went on an elaborate fact-finding mission to prove that SIMI (Read every single article I’ve linked. It is truly a shocking eye-opener. Great work, Offstumped!) is a bunch of innocent students. Besides, who is escalating to the neurosis, Mr. Ananthamurthy? Look at your nauseating refrain: Muslim names, Muslims arrested, Muslim terrorists, more Muslims apprehended… And no, we don’t believe in breaking news items unlike you, who chooses to believe a news item depending on what or whose is broken. So what does Ananthamurthy propose? Stop airing such news items? If yes, we smell a Stalinist technique of obfuscating the unpleasant.

With the elections round the corner, Hindu rioters—a safe word for the Hindu communalists to mark their difference from Islamic fundamentalists—are attacking churches.

Now, this is the weakest point in the whole piece, hardly worthy of an eminence like Ananthamurthy. It reads almost like a speech delivered by a third-grade secularist politician. But never mind. This lengthy diatribe includes the usual suspects: Hindu groups, politicians and the US (But obvious. Hell, he’s speaking at the Jamia Milia.) and concludes that the Indian Muslims are feeling alienated. Hardly new. We’ve been hearing this since Nehru institutionalized minorityism.

Then it’s time for the juicy piece: a little digression is in order but it’s within the context.

In a Kannada newspaper, one with the largest circulation and owned by a prominent Indian newspaper group, published a few days ago an irrational and abusive article on the evil designs of Christians to annihilate the Hindu religion, which had the full support of their leader Sonia Gandhi. The article was right in the front page, which continued in the inner pages. The excuse was that by publishing the article the issue of conversion had been opened for impartial debate. Some months ago, the same paper conducted an SMS campaign against me for criticizing a communally poisonous novel against Islam by this very author, who has now launched himself against the Christians.

I’m here, and I am a witness to the whole episode. The newspaper in question is Vijaya Karnataka. The author of the piece is S L Bhyrappa, who wrote it about a month ago. Because it is a debate, the newspaper has consistently and laudably published both views. I wonder where Ananthamurthy discerns partiality. But then, the real currents run deeper. For a brief backdrop to Ananthamurthy’s fury, read these posts I wrote about a year ago. Ananthamurthy casually calls this irrational simply because his record in the regard stinks by the absence of any response to Bhyrappa’s article. The “poisonous” novel is Aavarana, a record bestseller in the annals of Kannada publishing industry, now running its 13th (16th?) reprint. As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the prominent characters in the novel is a snide, fictional caricature of Ananthamurthy. In its wake, Ananthamurthy launched a severe personal attack against Bhyrappa in a public speech. However, in the speech, he disguises his personal attack against Bhyrappa as an attack on Aavarana! Vijaya Karnataka followed this up with an SMS poll soliciting feedback on Ananthamurthy’s outburst. Predictably, SMSes poured in support of Bhyrappa, who continues to enjoy overwhelming popularity here based purely on the strength of his works. And Ananthamurthy calls it a campaign. The fact that Ananthamurthy lacks the courage to even name the newspaper and Bhyrappa speaks eloquently about his credentials. 

Little wonder that every concern he expresses about culture and social harmony echoes emptiness. Here is an example. 

This is about the three urges—I call them hungers of the soul following a great saint philosopher Simone Weil— that animated the Gandhian era of our country. They are, hunger for equality, hunger for the spiritual, and hunger for modernity. Writers like me all over the country were inspired by these urges. [...] Therefore, when one is deeply animated by these two hungers, as if the two hungers were the same, one becomes profoundly impatient with the existing social system, the existing structures of religion as well as the developmental dreams unleashed by science and technology, for this world doesn’t belong to man alone. Who is not familiar with the person of Ambedkar in European clothes (symbolizing modernity) who fought an incessant battle for equality and dignity of the Dalits? But it is the same Ambedkar who in his later years embraced the compassionate Buddha. This was not in contradiction to his social commitment but as a continuation of his struggle on another timeless dimension. [...]

He also invokes Basava, Akka Mahadevi, Tukaram, Kabir, and Narayana Guru in words wet with profundity. But coming from Ananthamurthy it is calculatedly mischievous. We only need to remind him of the message he conveyed in his Samskara and Bharatipura. Both novels were direct attacks on the foundations of Hindu society. The same Hindu society that produced all of these eminent people. Every soul in his list were staunch Hindus. That includes Ambedkar because he spoke about Hindu society waging a battle against Islam. There’s another thread here. Despite his fascination for a multitude of ideas and philosophies, he continues to remain a colonial slave at heart. The starkest giveaway is his mention that European clothes symbolize modernity. But there’s more mellifluence to come.

There is a moving picture of him, although not so popular as the Ambedkar in western dress, in Buddhist robes and shaven head. Those who consider both these pictures of Ambedkar as intensely connected would understand how difficult, yet how beautiful, it is to connect the hunger for equality and human dignity which seeks ruthless political action in the temporal world outside, with spiritual hunger which seeks fulfillment in an inward silent struggle.

Doesn’t this just wrest the tears from your eyes in spite of yourself? Sigh. Where Ananthamurthy is concerned, there’s always a huge BUT. His incessant, and rather recent harping about Ambedkar is a disguised ploy to play right to the gallery. In other words, a subtle gambit to stay right in the limelight of the current political fashion. Why didn’t we see this touching concern for Dalits in his heydays of communist torchbearing? Whatever his faults, you cannot accuse Ananthamurthy of inflexibility, like full-convertibility currency encashable by whatever ideology rules the day. But then, only Hinduism has been unfortunately deprived of his services because,

I am not able to say the same about the contradiction between the ideas of Veer Savarkar for a strong nation state, and Gandhiji’s dream of gram swaraj. They are irreconcilable, and we see enough proof of that in our troubled times in India.

Ah! So there, the troubled times of India are a direct result of modern India following Savarkar, the staunchest of Hindus and the most surefooted patriot. But Savarkar lived in far more troubled times when he had to battle the twin might of British rule and incensed Islamic fundamentalism. But when Sarvarkar is nearby, it shouldn’t be hard to locate Modi.

After such trauma and violence in Gujarat, the country seems to have forgotten the role played by Narendra Modi in making Gandhi’s Gujarat almost a nightmare for Muslims. He is now a hero for all those who believe in Development. Every political party speaks of Development and the industrialists and multinationals know that a majoritarian state where dissent is curbed is the best site for development. No political party seems to speak of Gandhiji’s ideal of Sarvodaya, an economic policy that would even benefit the last poor person.

Perhaps Ananthamurthy has not read the first part of the Nanvati report, which absolves the Gujarat government and Narendra Modi of complicity in the Gujarat riots. But Ananthamurthy is a past master of burying facts under the debris of rhetoric. So economic development is suddenly an obscenity. But by Ananthamurthy’s token, that mecca of business, USA is a totalitarian state! As far as Gandhi’s Sarvodaya is concerned, it was a joke that became immediately obsolete when Nehru took over and began to hatch the grandiose factory-pillars of modern India. But Ananthamurthy is not done yet. 

Development should disassociate itself from an unabashed consumption and its need of an authoritarian state where the majority can rule ruthlessly, suppressing every form of dissent.

Oh sure! And what will people consume? Only Ananthamurthy can redefine a term or concept to make it stand on its head. Unabashed consumption needs an authoritarian state? Yes, yes yes! We should adopt Stalinist Russian model where people prospered in abundance till 1989. Or like India under Indira Gandhi. I challenge Ananthamurthy to show me exactly one authoritarian state, which prospered economically. After economics, it is sociology. Ananthamurthy says

…violence in our societies has never been effectively curbed by counter-violence.

Agreed. However, has this intellectual ever given a thought why our society is currently this violent? There’s a simpler, more commonsense explanation: we don’t abide by the rule of law. The result is, today every Indian is a law unto himself/herself. The reason for this is again, simple. The eminences that ruled India after independence systematically demolished every symbol, faith, principle, and institution that millions of Indians held sacred. Under slogans of socialism, secularism, communism, and syncretistic culture, they decimated a deep-rooted, subconscious–but living–sense of ethics specific to India. In a line, they extinguished Dharma in its own bastion. And now, Ananthamurthy pontificates about the grave threats facing Indian society.

For Brutus is an honorable man,
So are they all, all honorable men