Rare chance to change the discourse to secular issues
24 March, 2007
By Jawed Naqvi
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A few weeks before his team’s disastrous cricket defeat against Bangladesh in the World Cup qualifiers, Indian captain Rahul Dravid was in the wrong kind of news when he visited the headquarters of the religious revivalist RSS in Nagpur. The visit was condemned by a number of secular, liberal groups in India who otherwise greatly admire the cricketing skills of Dravid. The RSS is identified with obscurantism and mindless communal violence, and a visit to its offices by a national icon could not but trigger anger.
As for the Pakistani side, which got a right royal hiding from Ireland on the same day that India met its nemesis against Bangladesh, the team is increasingly known for the number of religious or sharai beards that are being sported its key players. We can detect a perceptible religious upsurge among several Pakistani team members. But it has neither helped them nor the team with any measure of success in the cricket field. If anything, Saturday’s second defeat for Pakistan in the cup qualifiers triggered considerable emotional venting on the web and in the mobile phone messaging circles.
One such angry message by an outraged cricket fan that came from Karachi said: “Pak cricket died at 3 am today. May its soul rest in peace. Funeral will be on March 21, after the match against Zimbabwe. Maulana Inzamam ul Haq Multani will lead the janaza prayer.” The writer’s sarcasm at the disappointing display of the game by Inzamam and his team was matched only by vitriol against a new tendency to sport religious beliefs, which despite a divine symbolism do not seem to have worked to Pakistan’s advantage.
If victory in sports could be determined by matters of individual or collective faith of any team, then our world would make for a confounding, even contrary example to cite. How would a predominantly Muslim country like Pakistan explain the 1983 win of non-believers from a country like India in the 1983 World Cup, and how would Indian groups like the RSS, who claim racial superiority for Hindus, explain Pakistan’s victory in 1992? (By the way, was there a single beard in Imran Khan’s winning squad in Australia?)
As a matter of fact both our countries are so full of themselves with their pompous religio-cultural perspectives that they can’t see how those of different cultures walk away more frequently with Olympic medals in every outing? Korean and Chinese athletes, for example, do not share the many dietary taboos of Indians and Pakistanis. They eat virtually everything under the sun, whereas we are bound by our religious limits as to what we can put in our plates. And yet the supposedly sinful and irreligious Chinese and Korean athletes would be merrily leading the cup tally at the coming Beijing Olympics, have no doubts about that. A less restrictive menu may not be directly responsible for the higher medal tallies for them, but it hasn’t come in their way of winning them either. That much has to be understood clearly by every sportsman, especially those who carry a talisman to bail them out of difficult spots in the course of a day’s play.
Although the founder of modern cricket was himself a bearded Englishman, there is nothing on record to suggest that Dr W.G. Grace allowed his batting skills to be guided by any religious beliefs as a Christian, if at all he was a man of faith. Today’s religious fervour not just in India and Pakistan but right across the world appears to have its roots in politics rather than in any organised religion itself. It suits those at the helm of our destiny to hide their banal and very much “this worldly” motives under the mullah’s cloak. For example the recent objective in Palestine has been to replace the secular discourse of a Yasser Arafat or a George Habbash with the more religiously imbued and dubiously wayward clout of Hamas.
We know that the men at the helm today had once overthrown the secular and popularly elected government of Sadegh Mossadegh in Iran for a very “this worldly” reason – all because he had opposed an Anglo-American sway over his country’s oil resources. Mosaddegh was no sabre-rattling Ahmadinejad and yet he was overthrown. However, brazen political perfidy is not always easy to repeat not the least because daylight robbery is not yet condoned by the United Nations. It has proved to be far easier to effect regime change and also to change the course of the dominant political dialogue by creating religion-based political interlocutors within the targeted national spaces. How can we not see that religion has proved to be a far more potent ally of corporate interests all over the world? When did we last hear of a religious group – say the MMA in Pakistan or the RSS in India -- waging a battle against the economic devastation effected by the so-called free market reforms that are being put in place in both countries with the active support of major powers and their financial outlets – the World Bank and the IMF?
Be it Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation of Pakistan or Gen Musharraf’s unravelling of that legacy in the name of war on terrorism, the context for the discourse is, and has been religion since the 1980s, not privatisation or free market reforms that are being supervised from the prime minister’s office. Similarly, Rajiv Gandhi prepared the ground in India way back in 1984 to launch his part of the country’s reforms by sharply shifting the focus away from economics to the then non-descript mosque-temple row, or the banning of Salman Rushdie even before Iran came into the frame and of course by setting back the country’s minority Muslims by several decades with the insidious support to the orthodoxy in the notorious Shah Bano divorce case. The BJP has only reheated the obscurantist discourse instigated by our secularism-mouthing Congress party. No election has been fought in India since 1989 without a prime focus on religious disputes in election manifestoes of the main parties.
Dr Manmohan Singh’s war on terror and Gen Musharraf’s war on terror have in a way served the same purpose -- to use a religion-based discourse to mask their potentially more insidious economic agenda. In recent days, for entirely wrong reasons perhaps, there has been a kindling of hope that a secular agenda can yet be re-launched in both the countries even though the political dice is still heavily loaded against such a move. The killing of 15 people in the communist-controlled West Bengal state in India could be the turning point in the discourse there. The communists, heading a Left Front government in the state for years, seem to have been suddenly taken up with the Chinese example and they have embarked on an industrialisation campaign in which the people are in all probability being left behind.
It is ironical that the killing of the people who had opposed the seizure of their land for an industrial project has come handy for the Hindu right too. But no religion-based party can sustain a popular economic agenda and the BJP will have to return to its core issues. In the meantime, there is ample room for a coalition of a secular agenda to take shape in India. In Pakistan too the recent action against the supreme court’s chief judge has galvanised both the secular and the religious opponents of the government into street action. The suspension of the judge and a mysterious attack on a TV channel’s offices in Islamabad now offer a good rare chance to Pakistan’s secular formations to return to major issues that are linked with the people’s wider support. The alternative is to focus more on beards as opposed to good cricket with disastrous consequences.
Jawed Naqvi can be reached at jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Courtesy -- Dawn
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