Secularism - the Congress perspective

This weekend, I managed to put in a couple of hours of uninterrupted reading, something I hadn't managed to do for quite a while. If you haven't guessed already, my time management is lousy.

I chanced across the weekly column by Tavleen Singh. I regard her as one of the finest journalists writing for the Indian Express and I've rarely been disappointed reading her column. This time around, I found her column to be similarly thought-provoking. An excerpt:

Mr Bhatia must have been living in another country in 1984 or he may have noticed that exactly the same thing happened in Delhi with the Sikhs, only the toll was nearly double that of Gujarat and not a single Hindu was killed. He complains that the Army was not called out in time in Gujarat. Nor was it in Delhi until 3,000 "innocent men, women and children were butchered" and this despite former Prime Minister Chandrashekhar going personally to Rajiv Gandhi to beg him to deploy troops. As this column has pointed out before, under "secular" Congress rule, there were many riots as bad as Gujarat (Bombay, Bhagalpur, Moradabad, Meerut), not to mention that the Babri Masjid came down under a Congress prime minister.

Again, I could not disagree - much - with her views. Happening to glance at the feedback (to her earlier columns), however, I was amazed at the - blatantly - partisan attitude that the IE had exhibited. All the readers - save one, perhaps - were vehemently opposed to what Ms. Singh had written. Checking the online edition over the past couple of days, I found - quite naturally - that there were more people who agreed with Ms. Singh than apparent. Why then, does the media persist in presenting a biased view? But now, I digress.

I have a completely different explanation (and this is where I disagree slightly with Tavleen Singh!):

The Congress and its allies - the Left, the RJD, the UPA if you like to call it that - conveniently define "secularism" to suit their own shortsighted and bigoted agenda. What happened in 1984 was secular because it wasn't Hindus killing Muslims. It was Hindus killing Hindus. There are some of use who would argue that Sikhs aren't Hindus, but hey, they're not Muslims, right?

I mean, as far as the Congress is concerned, Sikhism is just an offshoot of Hinduism and therefore, it doesn't exist! They probably don't acknowledge the existence of Sikhism, therefore the issue of intolerance towards another faith doesn't arise! "Fundamentalism" is the intolerance of one faith (religion,as it has often been drummed into us) towards another, not the same religion against itself. Right...

Why, otherwise, doesn't anyone describe the oppression of Dalits by the Thakurs as "fundamentalism"? Why don't Laloo Prasad Yadav (he's calling himself plain ole' Lalu Prasad nowadays) or Mulayam Singh never admit that there is a problem with life in Bihar and U.P.?

So, the Babri Masjid came down under a Congress Prime Minister? Ah, but those were the fundamentalist Hindus, not the secular...er..uh...ummm.... FORCES, see?

And what about our Communist comrades? How can they even protest? As far as my limited - and possibly flawed - knowledge goes, God doesn't even exist. How then, can they even differentiate between what is secular and what is not? I mean, religion just doesn't have anything to do with Communism. How can the CPI/CPI(M) even begin to explain how who's secular and who's not?

And yet, we have the media hailing the "secular" credentials of the UPA. What utter hogwash.

Er, Laluji, no offence meant. I wasn't suggesting you don't have a wash everyday.