Naseeruddin Shah and a Liberal Nostalgia for Niceness
By: Avantika Tewari
Tags: Liberal, Secularism, Populism, Democracy, Fascism

Picture Credit: Live Wire

A. G. Noorani (2017) noted Ambedkar’s observations made in a Memorandum on the Rights of States and Minorities, dated March 24, 1947, which he submitted to the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights set up by the Constituent Assembly’s Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights, Minorities:

“Unfortunately for the minorities in India, Indian nationalism has developed a new doctrine which may be called the Divine Right of the Majority to rule the minorities according to the wishes of the majority. Any claim for the sharing of power by the minority is called communalism, while the monopolizing of the whole power by the majority is called nationalism.” (B. Shiva Rao, Select Documents, volume 2, page 113).

A few days ago, Naseeruddin Shah appealed to sects and sections of Indian Muslims to not celebrate and support the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan. With very little context, it is hard to tell what might have triggered him to make such an appeal, but the right-wing was quick to generalize Naseeruddin’s message, urging all Indian Muslims to similarly announce their fidelity to secularism and take a “righteous” position against the Taliban. Despite us not knowing the referent of the message to which Naseeruddin’s speech is addressed, it resonated widely because the dominant Hindutva fantasy structure renders the Indian Muslim capable of (secretly) rejoicing in what is unfolding in Afghanistan.

Naseeruddin Shah’s statement, even if unwittingly, coincides perfectly with the hegemonic Hindutva narrative on Islam. Following Naseeruddin’s statement, right-wing celebrity trolls started demanding Indian Muslims to declare their unequivocal condemnation of the Taliban. Characteristic of reactionary populism, the right-wing latched onto the video to reproduce dominance in the guise of resistance, perniciously making the dominant ideology of “home-grown” Hindutva look like the resisting force to the “global Islamist threat.”

This is not the first time that the onus of repeating compulsory secularism has fallen on Muslim people and it won’t be the last. It is a trope that is ceaselessly reiterated to seemingly “neutralize” the simmering seeds of fundamentalism in the community. Naseeruddin’s emphatic appeal to Indian Muslims, even though it could have been motivated by an honest spirit of open-mindedness and social acceptance, the gesture ends up revealing something about the political unconscious. In trying to subvert the dominant caricaturing of the Muslim ‘hardliners’ with his secular proclamations, Naseer still ended up legitimizing the existing power relations — if not by intention then because of the political design of the social field. His words reified the hegemonic social sentiment towards Islam, which is driven by a hermeneutics of suspicion. In doing so, he perfectly represents the secular paradox.

The secular paradox is that no amount of performance of secularism from Muslims can diminish such suspicion, since the basis of communalism is not only discursive but is rooted in material and ideological dispossession. It is precisely because of that, that their every gesture is received by a Brahmanical society as a stratagem or move in a game whose point is to conceal and obscure the “actuality” of suppressed and latent fundamentalism. Indeed, it also presupposes a “tendency” within Islam to be instrumentalized/radicalized. Thus, the self-assumed burden of restoring secularism falls on the cultural elite who have grasped the importance of placing the sacredness of human life, humanity, and humanism; on a neat continuum — within and along with every religion.

However, despite their musings on the innate niceness and inherent humanism of every religion, the liberal elite loves to demonstrate their critical distance from religion to assert their integration into the “civilized” world against the “barbarism” of religious fanatics. Under the garb of universal ethics, the liberal elite is engaging in an “indigenous” variant of the civilizing mission, which continues to lend support to Brahmanical dominance. They seem to want to assert that the very idea of the sacredness of human life should itself render humanism as a guiding principle for a shared polity against all “constructed and constituted identities.”

They point out the paradoxes and aporias in the reactionary right wing narrative and the given social order till they confront the inherent radical negativity (ontological impossibility of completeness of society and subject) that endures colonial mediation, which paradoxically becomes a tautological claim and ground for organising resistance: “the only truth then is there is is no truth!” Of course, the process of production of destitution, marginality renders people stateless and rightless in spite of democratic recognition of their citizenship. It is this internal negation of the universal liberal ideal of equality which paves the way for brazen calls for recalling people’s citizenship, de-recognising them as politico-legal subjects with rights. This is a fundamental aporia at the heart of liberal democracy but it is also the condition on and against which the ground for substantive freedoms and equality needs to be made.

However, the limit of post-colonial methods of thinking (which has increasingly become commonly accepted lens) can be traced back to their conceptual fetish for deconstruction, which guides their politics of countering the reactionary politics of Hindutva by puncturing holes in the cohesion of the Hindutva narrative. To them, the inconsistencies in the Hindutva narrative should in and by itself imply its untenability, since it is built on the hollow substance of myths, mythologies and lies. Can it not be that the material contradictions in society are discerned in the inconsistencies of a sovereign, theological edifices? Since theological texts, the politicization of religion, communalisation of politics, and politics of religious institutions are constituted by social contradictions, a materialist basis of dialectics — of unity of opposites between universalization of humanism and communal edifice of universalism — dwells in these cracks.

One expects that the liberal intelligentsia and cultural elite are not completely out of touch with society to be acquainted with the systematic logic of devaluation of human life through the very processes of capitalism that inscribe the State, which renders the most marginalized sections vulnerable to violence along the axes of religion, caste, ethnicity, gender, etc. The purpose of thing writing is not to merely “expose” the“dualism” or “hypocrisy” of an amorphous category of liberals but is a desperate effort to get Marxists to decathect from their cynical attachment to the democratic electoral politics, a delusion that depends entirely on projecting a real difference between “greater and lesser evils,” to sustain a oppositional framework of performative secularism and dominant communalism. The question that we need to ask ourselves then is how does the structural repetition of violence then coexist with the general humanist essence of all religions as well as with secular law? One does not have to look far afield to the process of obfuscation of the production of the gap between the communal other and the secular self through the post-colonial institutions and enlightenment discourses. However, the challenge is to confront the effects of such “naturalisation and internalisation” of the communal social field which has become the secular ideal. The baggage that weighs on everyone who is constituted in and through the process of separation of “us and them” which won’t change with good intentions and the right semantics.

Fighting Communalism with Condemnation, and Secularism with Radical Self Determination!

Communist Party of India — Marxist’s poster reads: “Stand in solidarity with Naseeruddin Shah and Javed Akhtar! Isolate and defeat fundamentalist forces of all colors!” Communist parties in India seem to want to directly assert a radical stance on religion without getting into the messiness of political subjectivity, thus harboring a juvenile “principled” aversion towards “the fundamentalism of all hues” at the cost of Marxism itself. To a Marxist, permanent radical atheism is undesirable, since it is divorced from the society in which religion operates as a frame for the community. A puritanical self-fashioning principle of assuming permanent distance from religion is neither possible nor productive in the efforts to transgress religion. Neither is it possible to re-purpose religion for strategic ends without understanding the force and power of doctrinal and religious belief.

The point of Marxism tools is to equip people to assess and analyze their history, without having to rely on timeless principles and dogmas. In the Indian context, when the Muslim population has been deprived of socio-economic rights, let alone driving the wheels of state power and institutions, would it be fair to follow up every condemnation of the RSS with an unequivocal condemnation of the “extremists on the other side?” It remains unclear whether such moral condemnation of fundamentalism and fanaticism is rooted in radical atheism or amounts to sheer convenience-based opportunism — since the parliamentary Left simultaneously holds space for internally subverting majoritarian religion through “subaltern” and “counter-hegemonic” inversions and narratives. Since the contours of “religious fundamentalism” are undefined, the Left traps itself in its subjective uses of irony, cynicism, instrumentalism to bolster the masses towards revolutionary transcendentalism against religious transcendentalism.

Furthermore, the simplistic gesture of drawing a false equivalence between Hindutva politics and Islamic politics is based on an ideal abstraction that ends up foreclosing space for any serious challenge to undo the communal polarities in Indian society by preemptively declaring neutrality on religion, as such! Ironically, most radicals on Twitter and Facebook have taken on Naseeruddin Shah while completely ignoring the statement that led to police deployment outside lyricist Javed Akhtar’s house. His statement was an inversion of the one made by Naseeruddin, one that is more compatible with the Left’s own subjectivist turn of politics. Javed Akhtar said he sees an uncanny semblance between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Taliban, in that they are both fascist theocratic organizations. The difference is that the RSS is not a product of proxy wars, American occupation but is a supremacist, Brahmanical force which has historically benefitted from a caste-inflected political economy and has had state power. Zizek writes,

“Neoconservatives easily find a common language with the Taliban…it was not neocons who boosted Islamic fundamentalism, this fundamentalism grew up in a reaction to the influence of Western liberal secularism and individualism.”

However, what makes such comparisons accessible and legible? The global (and even universal?) fantasy of secularization, in which the secular emerges as an object of desire for liberal democratic capitalism. The secular stands in for the ‘constructed, exogenous cultures,’ as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘modern’ institutional religiosity and ancient ‘tribalism.’ Such a notion of secularism then seeks to identify and denounce the figures of in-assimilable religiosity, who then also assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. (Morrison 2021)

Identification of “extremist and revivalist” ideologies hinged on cultural “authenticity” and religious “purism” can be tirelessly used, and trans-historically applied to organizations, ad nauseum. Yet, pathologization of communalism, and fascism reflects a liberal disavowal, which externalizes communalism onto the ‘illiterate’ Other, who is passionate about religion or a political organisation/institution to the point of being a fanatic. Such a position makes a fundamental error of believing that the erosion of ‘belief in theocratic projects or political programs’ is what is needed to check ‘hardliners.’ It presumes innocence and ignorance as the starting point of uncritical support in politics and religion. History is then reduced to a mere stage on which timeless struggle between fanatics takes shape against the sobering appeals by post-ideological liberals.

One cannot productively engage with religion by externalizing its social ramifications or by “demystifying” theological claims from above. A study of religious practices, rituals, and myths is integral to trace the processes of community formations and social identification. The function of religion in society communicates something even in its failure to translate, or even effectively, articulate the need for socialization, communalizing, commonizing. What urban liberals who argue for mutual respect for humans as respect for God fail to understand is that no such fundamental equality exists between humans and religion or the Party can provide that commonality. Thus a mutually reinforcing secularism, at once also reinforces the perpetuation of political inequalities. Slavoj Zizek, (2013: 27) says, without belief the whole texture of social reality disintegrates, if we believed in nothing then we would be de-capacitated to preserve ourselves, “Cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself,” we believe in things (despite their (un)truths) because the logic of the belief; initiates our conditions for being.

The cultural elite fails to acknowledge the conditions under which communalism breeds. It refuses to see the role of narrow communalism-secularism in creating and sustaining inequality and injustice. It fails to register how communalism comes to displace (not distract) class struggle by rendering the minority community economically and socially vulnerable to the law, society, and the State. Displacement is not a secondary operation, but the fundamental gesture of ideological mystification. Reality is a subjective process mediated by desire and constructed discursively, therefore to define radical autonomy and self-determination as access to unmediated and authentic cultural experience, (Morrison 2021: 2) fails to apprehend the paradox at the heart of capitalism while also placing themselves over and above the ideological social matrix, of which they are a part.

Following this, communal self-determinism presents itself as a false alternative to social depression by substituting the struggle for the emancipation of all by positing the enemy in the social other! Surya Prakash Upadhyay and Rowena Robinson (2012: 35) argue, “Communalism has been commonly understood as conflicts over secular issues between religious communities, particularly between Hindus and Muslims…Communalism may be seen a process of the competitive aspirations communities to dominate and/or resist domination of others over perceives as well as real threats, grievances, insecurities and distrust.” Against that, the secularist universalism that seems to be under attack for taking a “radical stance on religion” is not radical enough. On the contrary, it ends up reaffirming a superficial difference between a narrowly defined secularism working against “communal sectarianism and competing hegemonies” while providing for a renewed basis for communalism. Freedom under such narrow frames would mean freedom from being made contingent by our social powers, not a social transformation towards covert normative principles and the practice of equality.

Fantasy Structure of Secularism

The non-partisan, cosmopolitan, liberal democrats though want to leave religion behind along the way of capitalist progress. Thus, idealizing an empty notion of “modernity” which resolves social contradictions by pretending they do not exist or by valorizing selfless acts of turning away from one’s class position. Against undertaking the work of building cross-cultural solidarities through a collective struggle, the liberal idea of dismantling the State’s project of communal polarization and social marginalization of communities is carceral and moralistic: it seeks to isolate, condemn, criminalize, defeat! It wants to cement the cracks and fissures between communities with an idealistic balm of universalism that rests on a fundamental betrayal to realizing the material universality of humans through communism. To the venal liberal atheist, however, capitalism itself substitutes for religion. Secularism then is reduced to aesthetics of love for a culturally different ruling class, which thrives in broader contours of democratism than narrow conservatism. Anthony Reed rightly observes, “Clichéd sentiments implicitly provide cover for quotidian violence, or personalize and depoliticize it, all the while evacuating everything messy and singular about subjectivity.”

The presumption that Muslims would celebrate the emergence of the Taliban obscures the ideological contestations and contradictions within the community, but the reality of such internal differences is hardly important to the right-wing. Driven by the force of instrumental reasoning, Naseeruddin’s statement was weaponized by the Hindu right-wing to support its fantasy structure — that posits a narrative in society, in which the apparently “latent fundamentalism” in Islam seems to have exploded into a celebration at the triumph of the Talibs, except for few “good, patriotic Muslims.” The dominant fantasy does not designate a form of perception opposed to reality but is both a scene that stages Hindutva desire and offers a relatively stable mode of defense of the existing power structure. It is a frame through which all contradictions in society can be reconciled in a rudimentary relation of “us versus them.”

The secular fantasy is a real abstraction which defines the contours of the communal in the image of the other. Liberal secularism proposes the subsumption of all cultural differences into a universalizing logic of multiplicity without materially reconstituting social relations that breed structural exploitation and oppression. What is integral though is that the racial ontology which casts the Muslim person as a radical other — not only structures-economic exploitation, social oppression, and state violence against Muslims, but also sustains it.

The idea of the Indian Muslim is thus not a mirage and the body of the Indian Muslim is not a screen on which Hindutva politics projects its desires. (Morrison 2021: 3)Rather, the workings of society grafts the project of Hindutva through the function of law, organisation of labour and capital relations and not only through ideological and everyday violence. It is precisely through our participation that the social fabric augments a reality which produces politico-economic exploitation, marginalisation and juridico-legal violence. Such that the fantasy of the ontological Other is able to sustain itself by rendering the religious distance and principle of colonial difference as objective facts, while also lending reality of Muslim people’s marginalisation a retroactive framework to coalesce and exist in. Following which, they are blamed for “self-segregating themselves” (Jamil 2017) from the ‘secular’ Hindu body politic.

Fantasy is the structure through which we construct our reality, which is marked by an impossibility of laying authentic and coherent claims to identity, culture, and belonging. In this present moment, the fantasy structure has been monopolised with the Hindutva discourse which racialises the body of the Muslim in order to sustain an ontological principle of religious separation as well as to produce structural violence and exploitation along that principle of difference. The truth of the Muslim is not relevant to the fantasy structure which thrives on presumption of ontological otherness. Morrison proposes a deviance from the common political science notions of secularisation thesis which emphasises the marginalisation and domestication of religion through the constituted separation of private and public, State and faith. He offers us the psychoanalytical prism through which fantasy and secularisation are on the side of the constitution of the political unconscious, such that the social fabric itself propels and interpellates subjects towards a secular norm, which in this case happens to be interlaced with majoritarian communal identity. (Morrison 2021: 4)

Ghazala Jamil’s (2017) work details the mechanisms through which the processes of production are organised in society to inscribe the logic of dispossession. This is how the political unconscious of social reality is formed: through a dialectical relation with fantasy. Psychoanalytic thought, then, does not approach fantasy as either a distorted image of an actual event or “an imaginary expression designed to conceal the reality of the instinctual dynamic…fantasies are bound to unconscious wishes” which constitutes the capitalist part of dreams. (Laplanche and Pontalis [1967] 1973, p. 315) (quoted in Morrison 2021: 3) The second function of fantasy is to stabilise the inherent impossibility of cohesion of borders, identities, cultures with a thread that runs through the past, present and future as a temporal narrative structure. The Hindutva trope organises the discursive field in such a way that every inequality and injustice can be justified, explained or co-opted within its own terms.

If Naseer’s message was to be taken in isolation and generously read for the sake of argument, it seems like a word of caution, that “despite” the systematic marginalization and criminalization of the Indian Muslim, they should abstain from placing their faith in ideological forces such as that of the Taliban (assuming they are doing so already). The idea is that religious consciousness and religiosity are something that needs to be “managed and regulated” in society by a bunch of enlightened agnostics who believe in a pre-ideological cosmic unity of all species. Such a position fails to grasp the concrete reality — ideology and materiality — of religion and faith.

Slavoj Zizek writes,

“So we have to learn again Marx’s crucial lesson: True capitalism systematically violates its own rules (‘human rights and freedoms’) — just remember that, at the beginning of the modern era that celebrates human freedoms, capitalism resuscitated slavery in its colonies… But capitalism at the same time provided standards to measure its hypocrisy, so we should not say, ‘since human rights are a mask of exploitation, let’s drop human rights’, but: ‘Let’s take human rights more seriously than those who founded the ideology of human rights!’ This is what, from the very beginning, Socialism meant.”

It is not my contention that religion should not be transgressed but that the transgression of religion cannot happen through liberal-capitalist methods of reconciliation of differences. Religion, after all, is not a mere illusion but an ideology that is materially rooted in social practices and formative in a subject’s identity formation. Total renunciation of religion by reducing all cultural, religious, and theological particularism to acts of ‘sectarianism’ or painting over all power imbalances and inequalities with concepts of neighborly love; are both unhelpful methods for resolving social antagonisms; for they pave the way for the Hindu right-wing to deepen its footing in society by not offering an alternative, an emancipatory idea of a shared community that radically alters political belonging. At the same time, the pitfalls with liberal signaling such as the one performed by Naseeruddin Shah is that even though it speaks of universalism as democratic values of justice, equality, freedom, which should inform the core values in every society; it does so by rhetorically imposing a frame of constitutional secularism that is incapable of materially reconstituting the social contradictions within and between different religious communities.

Secularist assertions such as Naseeruddin Shah’s then elides into majoritarianism while rendering all religious assertions as de-legitimate, if not illegitimate by law — by defining them as the sectarian Other to a secular Self. If anything, the act of putting out such a message only shows the necessary compulsion to demonstrate the Muslim community’s secularity against a general social consensus that sustains anti-Muslim bigotry through a fundamental skepticism. Given this reality, the secular-communal divide becomes superficial and tautological if we privilege universal secularism which defines communalism as a deviation to itself. This is precisely what the prosecutor argues in court against Sharjeel Imam, where the mere utterance of “As-salamu Alaykum” was seen as “communal” and his refusal to conceal concrete disparities and inequalities that conditions Muslim people’s existence was read as “non-secular.” In sharp contrast, in 2015, RSS leaders recalled how many members of the Flag Committee constituted by the Congress Working Committee in 1931 saw the idea of representing different religions on the flag as “communal.”’ Is the communal (community-based on religion) nothing but the opposite of secular? Is it not also fraternal? Is the community not internally splintered? Is there no social basis for Hindu communalism to assume a de facto, “secular role” in Indian society? Upadhyay and Robinson (2012: 36) argue that the notion of the community, Gemeinschaft, marks a “we-feeling” while the notion of the communal has attained meaning through colonial mediation to narrowly define community through religious association.

What we are witnessing now, is something that the RSS founders had foreseen many years ago — democracy, effectively paving the way for Hindu Rashtra. Aditya Bahl describes “Hindu nationalism as the modality in which the crisis of postcolonial capitalism is lived.” We need to ask what this insertion of secularism as a constitutional principle has done to mask the communal social relations to persist in society while becoming a legitimate basis of the majoritarian rule for State power. Saroj Giri asks, how did we come to accept a Nehruvian notion of secularism which purports to fight communalism but merely creates a self-enclosed space for its definition in an antagonistic relationship with the world? Is secularism merely a narrow conciliation of all communities to respect their communal difference without fundamentally agreeing to transform social relations in such a way that communalism as the social order continues to exist? (Giri 2010) I contend that secularism need not define itself as the politics of concealing extremist skin with a moderate mask. It need not define itself against the “excess” of Hindutva forces by discursively elevating into the properly sublime evil, but also recognize and reconstitute the field of productive socio-political relations that makes us all complicit in the communal order itself.

Liberal Defence of Free Speech or Revolutionising Freedom?

Soon after Javed Akhtar and Naseeruddin Shah were trolled, people signed statements in defense of their freedom of speech. The secular project seems to have reduced itself to a celebration of diversity, issuing facile statements of condemnation of religious fanatics of all communities while mobilizing around their right to free speech and expression as the litmus test for democracy. Against such liberal seesaw of verbal resistance and a liberal defense of free speech, Jonah ben Avraham offers a revolutionary aspiration for free speech:

“…Our ultimate goal is to smash fascism, along with capitalism, and build a new world in which racist, sexist and any number of other oppressive conclusions are unthinkable…free speech…guarantees the right to speak without intervention from the state. It doesn’t guarantee the right to speak unopposed or uncontested from below…The argument that we must silence the right by any means necessary fails to account for the fact that we simply can’t do so…We are strong enough to be successful and popular enough to sway public opinion only when we embrace the greatest possible degree of collective action.”

Hegel invented a great name for this position: the “beautiful soul.” (Zupancic 2018) A “beautiful soul” sees evil and baseness all around it but fails to see to what extent it participates in the perpetuation of that same order of things. The point, of course, is not that the world isn’t evil, the point is that we are part of this evil world. A narrow reading of secularism rests on individual virtues of literacy, nobility, culture, and modernity which then celebrates the Other for their difference by undermining and condensing difference into mutual indifference. The urban secularists are habituated to look for similarities in the ideologies of the oppressors than study the historical developments, dissimilarities, and gaps that yield space for resistance against social subjection, immiseration, and destitution. Shah Nawaz Afaqque offers a good critique here.

Coming back to how this discussion started, the fact that both Javed Akhtar and Naseeruddin Shah are disproportionately under fire from all sides for speaking their minds and saying two tangentially related but contrary things, reveals the operation of deeper communalism in Indian society. Tracing the roots of this deep-seated communalism becomes important in the fight against it.

A. G. Noorani writes, “Ambedkar was perceptive. It is not necessary to declare India a Hindu state formally by amending the Constitution and making Hinduism the state religion.”

He wrote, “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” (Constituent Assembly Debates, volume 7, page 38).

Only in democracy, we are free by surrendering our freedom for a collective political power but precisely due to the persistence of structural exploitation, oppression, and inequality, that freedom to socialize, communize, commonize shared resources and lands, remains unrealizable in practice. This is precisely why the liberal fascination with “fact checks’’ and “dispelling racial myths’’ fails to mark a dent, even in the discursive space. The materially rooted ideological capture of the social field by Hindutva is not a fiction, even if it governs through the production of fictions. What is needed a unity which is forged on shared internal displacement within the system which produces the conditions for dehumanisation, destitution, discrimination and death, not just a universal appeal for the unification of all “like-minded, peace-loving people” against “political corruption of religion.”

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