Safer to be a Cow than be a Muslim in India

‘Safer to be a cow than be a Muslim in India’, the honourable MP from Thiruvananthapuram just said that in Parliament.  Yes Mr Shashi Tharoor ‘foreign publications are talking about intolerance’ but is that the only thing the image of India stands on… And if it does, is saying something that sounds so insensitive, at least to my very Indian ear, helping that image?

I’m gobsmacked that our Parliament has nothing better to discuss than the ‘growing intolerance in India’. And if this is the most important thing in the country then I’ve missed a trick.

I’ve for 2 days now seen Parliamentarians heckle each other on the use and meaning of the word secular — the Indian concept vs the Western, etc.  So far most things said on both sides have made sense. For my idea of India, I will stick to Gandhi and Tagore. In 1937, Mahatma Gandhi had written in Young India: “For me, there is no politics without religion, not the religion of superstitions that hates and fights, but the universal religion of tolerance.”

And that was inherent in the spirit of the debates in the Constituent Assembly in 1948-49. Perhaps in the nearly three decades of Independence, politics had played to the gallery so much that it became necessary to mention ‘secular’ in the preamble of the Constitution. Perhaps it was politically expedient.

This is what Granville Austin, a leading American historian and expert on the Indian constitution had to say about the Indian constitution and the making of it: “Perhaps the greatest political venture since that which had been undertaken in Philadelphia in 1787.”

And the founding fathers of our nation, did not for once consider debating tolerance or mentioning the word ‘secular’ to being with.  The #IntoleranceDebate may be trending today on Twitter and lighting up our TV screens in the 9 ‘o clock debates but there was animosity between communities when India debated its constitution. The wounds of partition were fresh,  the country had been divided on religious lines.  In the extensive riots that had preceded the partition, some estimates say over 200,000 people were killed in retributive genocide. In the lines drawn through Bengal and Punjab, 14 million people were displpaced. And yet, as India adopted its constitution in 1950,  leaders like Pt Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr BR Ambedkar did not think it necessary to put the word ‘secular’ in the preamble to the Constitution where it lies now. Oversight? I guess not. It was, I believe, taken as a given.

For once I’m forced to let the Prime Minister have the last word: ‘Everything need not be divided as for and against, government and opposition. Some things need to be bipartisan’.