I
Members of a right-wing Hindu group attacked and cut the hair of three couples on the last Valentine’s Day near Taj Mahal, that 17 th century monument to love built by Mughal Emperor Shajahan in memory of his favourite wife. The same day, a group of burqa-clad women belonging to a fundamentalist Muslim group in Kashmir vandalised a shop selling Valentine cards and a restaurant that attracted lovers. These instances of moral policing in India by fringe groups such as the Shiv Sena, Sri Ram Sene and the Kashmir-based Dukhtaran-e-Millat were meant to express their outrage against the trappings of ‘degenerate and promiscuous Western culture’ that threaten traditional religious values. A few weeks before, a group of Sri Ram Sene activists barged into a pub in Managalore in Karnataka State and roughed up girls sitting there.
On another Valentine’s Day 20 years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. That fatwa was arguably the first open war cry against individual freedoms in modern times. It marked the beginning of the practice of treating as blasphemy any expression of freedom that questions 'traditional values and religion'. The Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh who made a 10-minute film Submission which touches on the plight of women in Islamic societies was killed by a Muslim immigrant youth while he was bicycling to work on November 2, 2004. Author Ayan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the script for the film, has received several death threats. On May 10, 2007, a group of Sangh Parivar activists stormed into the Department of Fine Arts, M.S. University in Baroda in Gujarat, and vandalised a painting exhibition there. Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen legislators manhandled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen in the Press Club in Hyderabad on August 9, 2007. The mind policing has begun to cast its menacingly long shadow on how and what we think and express. The free zones of cultural and intellectual expressions are growingly being encircled by expanding darkness of intolerance, bigotry and hate-speech.
Our civil liberties are under threat from the marauding forces of obscurantism out to put out anything that gives off sparkles of freedom: freedom of thought, of conscience, of religion and from religion. By extension, democracy itself is in danger of being engulfed by the advocates of culture fatwa of different shades. For, democracy ceases to be democracy if the foundational principles it is built upon collapse.
II
The narrative of 'religion or culture under attack' from practitioners of free speech and free thinking is an extension of the mindset that treats Western Enlightenment values of liberal democracy as inferior to ‘Our (non-Western) Culture’. This sense of ‘superiority’ allows them to be self-appointed crusaders to protect their religion and culture from the ‘corrupting’ influence of Western notion of free inquiry and freedom of expression. They fear that the influx of social changes that come with the universal values of gender equality, human rights, equal access to law and due process that are integral to the Enlightenment spirit of the West will undermine their ‘superior’ and patriarchal religion or culture. Central to this unsettling sense of an imminent threat to ‘tradition’ is the fear of female sexuality. For them the whole notion of ‘tradition’ crumbles if women come out and uphold their authority over their sexuality. What else could be the reason why obscurantist outfits sanctimoniously advocate the role of women in sustaining ‘tradition’?
What is good and what is not good for us is a moral question that we humans always ask in our daily life. We derive our morals from our collective idea of what is good and what is bad in the time in which we live. The collective idea has emerged from our shared experiences, achievements and progress. Slavery was acceptable centuries ago. Today, even denial of political freedom is treated as unacceptable. Philosophers and thinkers from Socrates to Galileo were faced with the charge of blasphemy. Killing or burning at stake people for their views is not an acceptable response in a liberal democracy. The right to freedom of speech is recognised as a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
One cannot make a political call for restricting and limiting this freedom just as one cannot demand reversal of abolition of slavery. Slavery, restriction on freedoms, denial of human rights, totalitarianism and suppression of critical inquiry are now universally accepted as bad for humanity even as there are sections that entertained the desire to bring people back to the times when there was slavery or killing of people for blasphemy or inequality before law or suppression of dissent.
After Independence, India opted to be a liberal democracy modeled on British Parliamentary democracy. Despite all deficiencies, history has proved the usefulness of democratic exercise in India. The fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution guarantee civil liberties including rights to equality, right to freedom, right to freedom of religion, among others. There may still be inequalities in the country, but these fundamental rights have helped us overturn the social inequalities and abolish untouchability. If the advocates of ‘tradition’ had a stronger voice among the leadership of the freedom movement, we would still be living with those social ills. Thank goodness, the ancestors of moral and mind policemen of today were not strong then as they are not strong now. How many of us will want institutionalised caste system back, our freedoms restricted? Who among us want to live under the Taliban rule?
Imagine there was no Enlightenment. We would be living in a dark age where secularism, rationalism, human rights, liberal democracy, equal access to law, due process and freedom of conscience and expression meant nothing. We would not be free to read books we want to read, free to practise our faiths, to doubt dogmas, to discuss and to criticise. There would be no science, no technology, no life saving medicines, no eradication of mass-killing diseases. We would be living in the comfort zones of certainties set by ‘tradition’ and religious faiths. We would be living without electricity, computers, communication networks, the Internet... The list goes on.
III
Enforcers of culture and moral fatwas indirectly derive their inspiration from relativist ideas of postmodernism. For a relativist, there is no absolute truth, no ‘grand narrative’, as Jean-Francois Lyotard writes in Postmodern Condition (1979) and no universal criteria. There are only fragmented discourses and a variety of criteria. Modernism, on the other hand, is an offshoot of the Enlightenment which advocated reason as the primary source of authority. Reason replaced the absolute authority of religion and the state. It led to critical questioning of traditional values and morals. It established reason, freedom and democracy as primary values of society.
Postmodernist advocates of relativism look at Enlightenment value system as one among various value systems. For them, reason and critical inquiry form one way of understanding the universe and religion is just another way of understanding the same. Modern medicine is just another system, one among different systems of treatment. Science is just another story and scientific truth is just one kind of truth. Shamanism explores a different kind of truth. For a relativist, there are no superior or inferior value systems, there is no absolute good or absolute bad. In a relativist discourse, a society that is based on principles of freedom and democracy is not superior to another society that denies freedoms to its people in the name of culture, religion and tradition.
Relativism is unacceptable because it gives intellectual fodder to those who hold their tradition, religion and customs, however retrograde and dangerous they are, to be as good, if not better, as reason, democracy and rule of law. An intellectual battle against relativism is long overdue. Any retrograde tradition that allows its practitioners to take arms against freedoms and democracy is bad and any value system that ensures individual liberty and happiness is superior. We have to call a spade a spade.
