Extract from ContExploration.net
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extract document nr |
8012 |
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local link |
http://contexploration.net/extracts/8012.htm |
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remote link |
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060227&s=sen022706 |
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title |
Chili and
Liberty |
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date published |
27.02.2006 |
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author |
Amartya Sen |
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source |
The New
Republic |
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further reading from
author |
THE USES AND ABUSES OF
MULTICULTURALISM.
Chili and Liberty
by Amartya Sen
The New Republic
27.02.2006
Chili and Liberty
by Amartya Sen
I.
The demand for multiculturalism is strong in the contemporary world. It is much
invoked in the making of social, cultural, and political policies, particularly
in Western Europe and America. This is not at all surprising, since increased
global contacts and interactions, and in particular extensive migrations, have
placed diverse practices of different cultures next to one another. The general
acceptance of the exhortation to "Love thy neighbor" might have
emerged when the neighbors led more or less the same kind of life ("Let's
continue this conversation next Sunday morning when the organist takes a
break"), but the same entreaty to love one's neighbors now requires people
to take an interest in the very diverse living modes of proximate people. That
this is not an easy task has been vividly illustrated once again by the
confusion surrounding the recent Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and
the fury they generated. And yet the globalized nature of the contemporary
world does not allow the luxury of ignoring the difficult questions that
multiculturalism raises.
One of the central issues concerns how human beings are seen. Should they be
categorized in terms of inherited traditions, particularly the inherited
religion, of the community in which they happen to have been born, taking that
unchosen identity to have automatic priority over other affiliations involving politics,
profession, class, gender, language, literature, social involvements, and many
other connections? Or should they be understood as persons with many
affiliations and associations, whose relative priorities they must themselves
choose (taking the responsibility that comes with reasoned choice)? Also,
should we assess the fairness of multiculturalism primarily by the extent to
which people from different cultural backgrounds are "left alone," or
by the extent to which their ability to make reasoned choices is positively
supported by the social opportunities of education and participation in civil
society? There is no way of escaping these rather foundational questions if
multiculturalism is to be fairly assessed.
In discussing the theory and the practice of multiculturalism, it is useful to
pay particular attention to the British experience. Britain has been in the
forefront of promoting inclusive multiculturalism, with a mixture of successes
and difficulties, which are of relevance also to other countries in Europe and
the United States. Britain experienced race riots in London and Liverpool in
1981, though nothing as large as what happened in France in the fall of 2005,
and these led to further efforts toward integration. Things have been fairly stable
and reasonably calm over the last quarter-century. The process of integration
in Britain has been greatly helped by the fact that all British residents from
the Commonwealth countries, from which most non-white immigrants have come to
Britain, have full voting rights in Britain immediately, even without British
citizenship. Integration has also been helped by largely non-discriminatory
treatment of immigrants in health care, schooling, and social security. Despite
all this, however, Britain has recently experienced the alienation of a group
of immigrants, and also fully homegrown terrorism, when some young Muslims from
immigrant families--born, educated, and reared in Britain--killed many people
in London through suicide bombings in July 2005.
Discussions of British policies on multiculturalism thus have a much wider
reach, and arouse much greater interest and passion, than the boundaries of the
ostensible subject matter would lead one to expect. Six weeks after the July
terrorist attacks in London, when Le Monde published a critical essay called
"The British Multicultural Model in Crisis," the debate was
immediately joined by a leader of another liberal establishment, James A.
Goldston, director of the Open Society Justice Initiative in America, who described
the Le Monde article as "trumpeting," and replied: "Don't use
the very real threat of terrorism to justify shelving more than a
quarter-century of British achievement in the field of race relations." There
is a general issue of some importance to be debated and evaluated here.
I will argue that the real issue is not whether "multiculturalism has gone
too far" (as Goldston summarizes one of the lines of criticism), but what
particular form multiculturalism should take. Is multiculturalism nothing other
than tolerance of the diversity of cultures? Does it make a difference who
chooses the cultural practices--whether they are imposed on young children in
the name of "the culture of the community" or whether they are freely
chosen by persons with adequate opportunity to learn and to reason about
alternatives? What facilities do members of different communities have, in
schools as well as in the society at large, to learn about the faiths and
non-faiths of different people in the world, and to understand how to reason
about choices that human beings must, if only implicitly, make?
II.
Britain, to which I first came as a student in 1953, has been particularly
impressive in making room for different cultures. The distance traveled has
been in many ways quite extraordinary. I recollect (with some fondness, I must
admit) how worried my first landlady in Cambridge was about the possibility
that my skin color might come off in the bath (I had to assure her that my hue
was agreeably sturdy and durable), and also the care with which she explained
to me that writing was a special invention of Western civilization ("The
Bible did it"). For someone who has lived--intermittently but for long
periods--through the powerful evolution of British cultural diversity, the
contrast between Britain today and Britain half a century ago is just amazing.
The encouragement given to cultural diversity has certainly made many
contributions to people's lives. It has helped Britain to become an
exceptionally lively place in many different ways. From the joys of
multicultural food, literature, music, dancing, and the arts to the befuddling
entrapment of the Notting Hill Carnival, Britain gives its people--of all
backgrounds--much to relish and to celebrate. Also, the acceptance of cultural
diversity (as well as voting rights and largely non-discriminatory public
services and social security, referred to earlier) has made it easier for
people with very different origins to feel at home.
Still, it is worth recalling that the acceptance of diverse living modes and
varying cultural priorities has not always had an easy ride even in Britain. There
has been a periodic but persistent demand that immigrants give up their
traditional styles of life and adopt the dominant living modes in the society
to which they have immigrated. That demand has sometimes taken a remarkably
detailed view of culture, involving quite minute behavioral issues, well
illustrated by the famous cricket test proposed by Lord Tebbit, the
Conservative political leader. His cricket test suggested that the sign of a
well-integrated immigrant is that he cheers for England in test matches against
the country of his own origin (such as Pakistan) when the two sides play each
other.
Tebbit's test has, it must be admitted, the merit of definiteness, and gives an
immigrant a marvelously clear-cut procedure for easily establishing his or her
integration into British society: "Cheer for the English cricket team and
you will be fine!" The immigrant's job in making sure that he or she is
really integrated into British society could otherwise be quite exacting, if
only because it is no longer easy to identify what actually is the dominant
lifestyle in Britain to which the immigrant must conform. Curry, for example,
is now so omnipresent in the British diet that it features as "authentic
British fare," according to the British Tourist Board. In last year's
General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations, taken by
graduating schoolchildren around sixteen years old, two of the questions
included in the "Leisure and Tourism" paper were: "Other than
Indian food, name one other type of food often provided by take-away
restaurants" and "Describe what customers need to do to receive a
delivery service from an Indian take-away restaurant." Reporting on the
GCSE in 2005, the Daily Telegraph complained not about any cultural bias in
these nationwide exams, but about the "easy" nature of the questions,
which anyone in Britain should be able to answer without any special training.
I also recollect seeing, not long ago, a definitive description of the
unquestionable Englishness of an Englishwoman in a London paper: "She is
as English as daffodils or chicken tikka masala." Given all this, a South
Asian immigrant to Britain might be a bit confused, but for Tebbit's kindly
help, about what will count as a surefire test of British identity. The
important issue underlying the frivolity of the foregoing discussion is that
cultural contacts are currently leading to such a hybridization of behavioral
modes across the world that it is exceptionally difficult to identify any local
culture as being genuinely indigenous, with a timeless quality. But thanks to
Tebbit, the task of establishing Britishness can become nicely algorithmic and
wonderfully easy (almost as easy as answering the GCSE questions just cited).
Tebbit has gone on to suggest, more recently, that if his cricket test had been
put to use, it would have helped to prevent the terrorist attacks by
British-born militants of Pakistani origin: "Had my comments been acted
on, those attacks would have been less likely." It is difficult to avoid
the thought that this confident prediction perhaps underestimates the ease with
which any would-be terrorist--with or without training from Al Qaeda--could
pass the cricket test by cheering for the English cricket team without changing
his behavior pattern one iota in any other way.
I don't know how much into cricket Tebbit himself is. If you enjoy the game,
cheering for one side or the other is determined by a number of varying
factors: one's national loyalty or residential identity, of course, but also
the quality of play and the overall interest of a series. Wanting a particular
outcome often has a contingent quality that would make it hard to insist on
unvarying and unfailed rooting for any team (England or any other). Despite my
Indian origin and nationality, I must confess that I have sometimes cheered for
the Pakistani cricket team, not only against England but also against India. During
the Pakistani team's tour of India in 2005, when Pakistan lost the first two
one-day matches in the series of six, I cheered for Pakistan for the third
match, to keep the series alive and interesting. In the event, Pakistan went
well beyond my hopes and won all of the remaining four matches to defeat India
soundly by the margin of four to two (another instance of Pakistan's
"extremism" of which Indians complain so much!).
A more serious problem lies in the obvious fact that admonitions of the kind
enshrined in Tebbit's cricket test are entirely irrelevant to the duties of
British citizenship or residence, such as participation in British politics,
joining British social life, or desisting from making bombs. They are also
quite distant from anything that may be needed to lead a fully cohesive life in
the country.
These points were quickly seized upon in post-imperial Britain, and despite the
diversions of such invitations as Tebbit's cricket test, the inclusionary
nature of British political and social traditions made sure that varying
cultural modes within the country could be seen as being entirely acceptable in
a multi-ethnic Britain. To be sure, there are many natives who continue to feel
that this historical trend is a great mistake, and that disapproval is often
combined with severe resentment that Britain has become such a multi-ethnic
country at all. (In my last encounter with such a resenter, at a bus stop, I
was suddenly told, "I have seen through you all!," but I was
disappointed that my informant refused to tell me more about what he had seen.)
Yet the weight of British public opinion has been moving, at least until
recently, quite strongly in the direction of tolerating--and even
celebrating--cultural diversity. All this, and the inclusionary role of voting
rights and non-discriminatory public services, have contributed to an
interracial calm of a kind that France in particular has not enjoyed recently. Still,
it leaves some of the central issues of multiculturalism entirely unresolved,
and I want to take them up now.
III.
One important issue concerns the distinction between multiculturalism and what
may be called "plural monoculturalism." Does the existence of a
diversity of cultures, which might pass one another like ships in the night,
count as a successful case of multiculturalism? Since, in the matter of
identity, Britain is currently torn between interaction and isolation, the
distinction is centrally important (and even has a bearing on the question of
terrorism and violence).
Consider a culinary contrast, by noting first that Indian and British food can
genuinely claim to be multicultural. India had no chili until the Portuguese
brought it to India from America, but it is effectively used in a wide range of
Indian food today and seems to be a dominant element in most types of curries. It
is plentifully present in a mouth-burning form in vindaloo, which, as its name
indicates, carries the immigrant memory of combining wine with potatoes. Tandoori
cooking might have been perfected in India, but it originally came to India
from West Asia. Curry powder, on the other hand, is a distinctly English
invention, unknown in India before Lord Clive, and evolved, I imagine, in the
British army mess. And we are beginning to see the emergence of new styles of
preparing Indian food, offered in sophisticated subcontinental restaurants in
London.
In contrast, having two styles or traditions co-existing side by side, without
the twain meeting, must really be seen as plural monoculturalism. The vocal
defense of multiculturalism that we frequently hear these days is very often
nothing more than a plea for plural monoculturalism. If a young girl in a
conservative immigrant family wants to go out on a date with an English boy,
that would certainly be a multicultural initiative. In contrast, the attempt by
her guardians to stop her from doing this (a common enough occurrence) is
hardly a multicultural move, since it seeks to keep the cultures separate. And
yet it is the parents' prohibition, which contributes to plural
monoculturalism, that seems to garner the loudest and most vocal defense from
alleged multiculturalists, on the ground of the importance of honoring
traditional cultures--as if the cultural freedom of the young woman were of no
relevance whatever, and as if the distinct cultures must somehow remain in
secluded boxes.
Being born in a particular social background is not in itself an exercise of
cultural liberty, since it is not an act of choice. In contrast, the decision
to stay firmly within the traditional mode would be an exercise of freedom, if
the choice were made after considering other altenatives. In the same way, a
decision to move away--by a little or a lot--from the standard behavior
pattern, arrived at after reflection and reasoning, would also qualify as such
an exercise. Indeed, cultural freedom can frequently clash with cultural
conservatism, and if multiculturalism is defended in the name of cultural
freedom, then it can hardly be seen as demanding unwavering and unqualified
support for staying steadfastly within one's inherited cultural tradition.
The second question relates to the fact that while religion or ethnicity may be
an important identity for people (especially if they have the freedom to choose
between celebrating or rejecting inherited or attributed traditions), there are
other affiliations and associations that people also have reason to value. Unless
it is defined very oddly, multiculturalism cannot override the right of a
person to participate in civil society, or to take part in national politics,
or to lead a socially non-conformist life. No matter how important
multiculturalism is, it cannot lead automatically to giving priority to the
dictates of traditional culture over all else.
The people of the world cannot be seen merely in terms of their religious
affiliations--as a global federation of religions. For much the same reasons, a
multi-ethnic Britain can hardly be seen as a collection of ethnic communities. Yet
the "federational" view has gained much support in contemporary
Britain. Indeed, despite the tyrannical implications of putting persons into
rigid boxes of given "communities," that view is frequently
interpreted, rather bafflingly, as an ally of individual freedom. There is even
a much-aired "vision" of "the future of multi-ethnic
Britain" that sees it as "a looser federation of cultures" held
together by common bonds of interest and affection and a collective sense of
being.
But must a person's relation to Britain be mediated through the culture of the
family in which he or she was born? A person may decide to seek closeness with
more than one of these pre-defined cultures or, just as plausibly, with none. Also,
a person may well decide that her ethnic or cultural identity is less important
to her than, say, her political convictions, or her professional commitments,
or her literary persuasions. It is a choice for her to make, no matter what her
place is in the strangely imagined "federation of cultures."
There would be serious problems with the moral and social claims of
multiculturalism if it were taken to insist that a person's identity must be
defined by his or her community or religion, overlooking all the other
affiliations a person has, and giving automatic priority to inherited religion
or tradition over reflection and choice. And yet that approach to
multiculturalism has assumed a pre-eminent role in some of the official British
policies in recent years.
The state policy of actively promoting new "faith schools," freshly
devised for Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh children (in addition to pre-existing
Christian schools), illustrates this approach, and not only is it educationally
problematic, it also encourages a fragmentary perception of the demands of
living in a desegregated Britain. Many of these new educational institutions
are coming up precisely at a time when religious prioritization has been a
major source of violence in the world (adding to the history of such violence
in Britain itself, including Catholic-Protestant divisions in Northern Ireland--themselves
not unconnected with segmented schooling). Prime Minister Tony Blair is
certainly right to note that "there is a very strong sense of ethos and
values in those schools." But education is not just about getting
children, even very young ones, immersed in an old inherited ethos. It is also
about helping children to develop the ability to reason about new decisions any
grown-up person will have to take. The important goal is not some formulaic
parity in relation to old Brits with their old-faith schools, but what would
best enhance the capability of the children to live "examined lives"
as they grow up in an integrated country.
IV.
The central issue was put a long time ago with great clarity by Akbar, the
Indian emperor, in his observations on reason and faith in the 1590s. Akbar,
the Great Mughal, was born a Muslim and died a Muslim, but he insisted that
faith cannot have priority over reason, since one must justify--and, if
necessary, reject--one's inherited faith through reason. Attacked by traditionalists
who argued in favor of instinctive faith, Akbar told his friend and trusted
lieutenant Abul Fazl, a formidable scholar with much expertise in different
religions: "The pursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so
brilliantly patent as to be above the need of argument. If traditionalism were
proper, the prophets would merely have followed their own elders (and not come
with new messages)." Reason had to be supreme, in Akbar's view, since even
in disputing reason, we would have to give reasons.
Convinced that he had to take a serious interest in the diverse religions of
India, Akbar arranged for recurring dialogues involving not only people from
mainstream Hindu and Muslim backgrounds in sixteenth-century India, but also
Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains, and even the followers of
"Carvaka"--a school of atheistic thinking that had robustly
flourished in India for more than two thousand years from around the sixth
century B.C.E. Rather than taking an "all or nothing" view of a faith,
Akbar liked to reason about particular components of each multi-faceted
religion. Arguing with Jains, for example, Akbar would remain skeptical of
their rituals, and yet he was convinced by their argument for vegetarianism and
even ended up deploring the eating of flesh in general. Despite the irritation
all this caused among those who preferred to base religious belief on faith
rather than reasoning, he stuck to what he called "the path of
reason," the rahi aql, and insisted on the need for open dialogue and free
choice. Akbar also claimed that his own liberal Islamic beliefs came from
reasoning and choice, not from blind faith or what he called "the marshy
land of tradition."
There is also the further question (particularly relevant to Britain) about how
non-immigrant communities should see the demands of multicultural education. Should
it take the form of leaving each community to conduct its own special
historical celebrations, without responding to the need for the "old
Brits" to be more fully aware of the global inter-relations in the origins
and development of world civilization? If the roots of so-called Western
science or culture draw on, say, Chinese innovations, Indian and Arabic
mathematics, or West Asian preservation of the Greco-Roman heritage (with, for
example, Arabic translations of forgotten Greek classics being re-translated
into Latin many centuries later), should there not be a fuller reflection of
that robust interactive past than can be found, at this time, in the school
curriculum of multi-ethnic Britain?
When a British or an American mathematician today employs an algorithm to solve
a computational problem, he or she implicitly commemorates the contribution of
the ninth-century Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term
"algorithm" is derived, and from whose path-breaking Arabic
mathematical book, Al-Jabr wa al-Muqabalah, the term "algebra"
originates. Even if Muslim faith schools fail to celebrate such non-religious
works of Muslim intellectuals, should not all British students--old Brits as
well as new ones--read something about such global contributions to the roots
of modern world civilization? Educational broadening is important not only in
Britain but across the world, including the United States and Europe. World
history need not come to children (as it often does) only in the form of
parochial recollections, combined sometimes with small capsules of packaged
history of religion--not to mention the lampooning cartoons encountered outside
the school. The priorities of genuinely multicultural education can differ a
great deal from the intellectual segmentation of a plural monocultural
society.
If one issue concerning faith schools involves the problematic nature of giving
priority to unreasoned faith over reasoning, there is another momentous issue
here, which concerns the role of religion in categorizing people, rather than
other bases of classification. People's priorities and actions are influenced
by all of their affiliations and associations, not merely by religion. The
separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan was based on reasons of language and
literature, along with political priorities, and not on religion, which both
wings of undivided Pakistan shared. To ignore everything other than faith is to
obliterate the reality of concerns that have moved people to assert identities
that go well beyond religion.
The Bangladeshi community, large as it is in Britain, is merged in the
religious accounting into one large mass along with all the other co-religionists,
with no further acknowledgment of culture and priorities. While this may please
the Islamic priests and religious leaders, it certainly shortchanges the
abundant culture of that country and emaciates the richly diverse identities
that Bangladeshis have. It also chooses to ignore altogether the history of the
formation of Bangladesh itself. There is, as it happens, an ongoing political
struggle at this time within Bangladesh between secularists and their
detractors (including religious fundamentalists), and it is not obvious why
British official policy has to be more in tune with the latter than with the
former.
The problem, it must be admitted, did not originate with recent British
governments. Indeed, official British policy has for many years given the
impression that it is inclined to see British citizens and residents
originating from the subcontinent primarily in terms of their respective
communities, and now--after the recent accentuation of religiosity (including
fundamentalism) in the world--community is defined primarily in terms of faith,
rather than by taking account of more broadly defined cultures. The problem is
not confined to schooling, nor to Muslims. The tendency to take Hindu or Sikh
religious leaders as spokesmen for the British Hindu or Sikh population,
respectively, is also a feature of the same process. Instead of encouraging
British citizens of diverse backgrounds to interact with one another in civil
society, and to participate in British politics as citizens, the invitation is
to act "through" their "own community."
The limited horizons of this reductionist thinking directly affect the living
modes of the different communities, with particularly severe constraining
effects on the lives of immigrants and their families. But going beyond that,
how citizens and residents see themselves can also affect the lives of others,
as the violent events in Britain last summer showed. For one thing, the
vulnerability to influences of sectarian extremism is much greater if one is
reared and schooled in the sectarian (but not necessarily violent) mode. The
British government is seeking to stop the preaching of hatred by religious
leaders, which must be right, but the problem is far more extensive than that. It
concerns whether citizens of immigrant backgrounds should see themselves as
members of particular communities and specific religious ethnicities first, and
only through that membership see themselves as British, in a supposed
federation of communities. It is not hard to understand that this fractional
view of any nation would make it more open to the preaching and cultivation of
sectarian violence.
Tony Blair has good reason to want to "go out" and have debates about
terror and peace "inside the Muslim community," and (as he put it) to
"get right into the entrails of [that] community." Blair's dedication
to fairness and justice is hard to dispute. And yet the future of multi-ethnic
Britain must lie in recognizing, supporting, and helping to advance the many
different ways in which citizens with distinct politics, linguistic heritages,
and social priorities (along with different ethnicities and religions) can
interact with one another in their different capacities, including as citizens.
Civil society in particular has a very important role to play in the lives of
all citizens. The participation of British immigrants--Muslims as well as
others--should not be primarily placed, as it increasingly is, in the basket of
"community relations," and seen as being mediated by religious
leaders (including "moderate" priests and "mild" imams, and
other agreeable spokesmen of religious communities).
There is a real need to re-think the understanding of multiculturalism, so as
to avoid conceptual disarray about social identity and also to resist the
purposeful exploitation of the divisiveness that this conceptual disarray
allows and even, to some extent, encourages. What has to be particularly
avoided (if the foregoing analysis is right) is the confusion between a
multiculturalism that goes with cultural liberty, on the one side, and plural
monoculturalism that goes with faith-based separatism, on the other. A nation
can hardly be seen as a collection of sequestered segments, with citizens being
assigned places in predetermined segments.
V.
There is an uncanny similarity between the problems that Britain faces today
and those that British India faced, and which Mahatma Gandhi thought were
getting direct encouragement from the Raj. Gandhi was critical in particular of
the official view that India was a collection of religious communities. When
Gandhi came to London for the Indian Round Table Conference called by the
British government in 1931, he found that he was assigned to a specific
sectarian corner in the revealingly named "Federal Structure Committee."
Gandhi resented the fact that he was being depicted primarily as a spokesman
for Hindus, in particular "caste Hindus," with the rest of the
population being represented by delegates, chosen by the British prime
minister, of each of the "other communities."
Gandhi insisted that while he himself was a Hindu, the political movement that
he led was staunchly secular and not a community-based movement. It had
supporters from all the different religious groups in India. While he saw that
a distinction can be made along religious lines, he pointed to the fact that
other ways of dividing the population of India were no less relevant. Gandhi
made a powerful plea for the British rulers to see the plurality of the diverse
identities of Indians. In fact, he said he wanted to speak not for Hindus in
particular, but for "the dumb, toiling, semi-starved millions" who
constitute "over 85 percent of the population of India." He added
that, with some extra effort, he could speak even for the rest, "the
Princes ... the landed gentry, the educated class."
Gender, as Gandhi pointed out, was another basis for an important distinction
that the British categories ignored, thereby giving no special place to
considering the problems of Indian women. He told the British prime minister,
"You have had, on behalf of the women, a complete repudiation of special
representation," and went on to point out that "they happen to be
one-half of the population of India." Sarojini Naidu, who came with Gandhi
to the Round Table Conference, was the only woman delegate at the conference. Gandhi
mentioned the fact that she was elected the president of the Congress Party,
overwhelmingly the largest political party in India (this was in 1925, which
was exactly fifty years before any woman was elected to preside over any major
British political party). Sarojini Naidu could, on the Raj's
"representational" line of reasoning, speak for half the Indian
people, namely Indian women; and Abdul Qaiyum, another delegate, pointed also
to the fact that Naidu, whom he called "the Nightingale of India,"
was also the one distinguished poet in the assembled gathering, a different
kind of identity from being seen as a Hindu politician.
In a meeting arranged at the Royal Institute of International Affairs during his
visit, Gandhi insisted that he was trying to resist "the vivisection of a
whole nation." He was not ultimately successful, of course, in his attempt
at "staying together," though it is known that he was in favor of
taking more time to negotiate to prevent the partition of 1947 than the rest of
the Congress leadership found acceptable. Gandhi would have been extremely
pained also by the violence against Muslims that was organized by sectarian
Hindu leaders in his own state of Gujarat in 2002. But he would have been
relieved by the massive condemnation that these barbarities received from the
Indian population at large, which influenced the heavy defeat, in the Indian
general elections that followed in May 2004, of the parties implicated in the
violence in Gujarat.
Gandhi would have taken some comfort in the fact, not unrelated to his point at
the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, that India, with more than 80
percent Hindu population, is led today by a Sikh prime minister (Manmohan
Singh) and headed by a Muslim president (Abdul Kalam), with its ruling party
(Congress) being presided over by a woman from a Christian background (Sonia
Gandhi). Such mixtures of communities may be seen in most walks of Indian life,
from literature and cinema to business and sports, and they are not regarded as
anything particularly special. It is not just that a Muslim is the richest
businessman--indeed the wealthiest person--living in India (Azim Premji), or
the first putative international star in women's tennis (Sania Mirza), or has
captained the Indian cricket team (Pataudi and Azharuddin), but also that all
of them are seen as Indians in general, not as Indian Muslims in particular.
During the recent parliamentary debate on the judicial report on the killings
of Sikhs that occurred immediately after Indira Gandhi's assassination by her
Sikh bodyguard, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, told the Indian
parliament, "I have no hesitation in apologising not only to the Sikh
community but to the whole Indian nation because what took place in 1984 is the
negation of the concept of nationhood and what is enshrined in our
Constitution." Singh's multiple identities are very much in prominence
here when he apologized, in his role as prime minister of India and a leader of
the Congress Party, to the Sikh community, of which he is a member (with his
omnipresent blue turban), and to the whole Indian nation, of which he is a
citizen. All this might be very puzzling if people were to be seen in the
"solitarist" perspective of only one identity each, but the
multiplicity of identities and roles fits very well with the fundamental point
Gandhi was making at the London conference.
Much has been written concerning the fact that India, with more Muslim people
than almost every Muslim-majority country in the world (and with nearly as many
Muslims--more than 145 million--as Pakistan), has produced extremely few
homegrown terrorists acting in the name of Islam, and almost none linked with
Al Qaeda. There are many causal influences here, including the influence of the
growing and integrated Indian economy. But some credit must also go to the
nature of Indian democratic politics, and to the wide acceptance in India of
the idea, championed by Gandhi, that there are many identities other than
religious ethnicity that are relevant to a person's self-understanding, and
also to the relations between citizens of diverse backgrounds within the
country.
I recognize that it is a little embarrassing for me, as an Indian, to claim
that, thanks to the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and others (including the
clearheaded analysis of "the idea of India" by Rabindranath Tagore,
the greatest Indian poet, who described his family background as "a
confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan, and British"), India has
been able, to a considerable extent, to avoid indigenous terrorism linked to
Islam, which currently threatens a number of Western countries, including
Britain. But Gandhi was expressing a very general concern, not one specific to
India, when he asked, "Imagine the whole nation vivisected and torn to
pieces; how could it be made into a nation?"
That query was motivated by Gandhi's deep worries about the future of India. But
the problem is not specific to India. It arises for other nations too,
including the country that ruled India until 1947. The disastrous consequences
of defining people by their religious ethnicity and giving priority to the
community-based perspective over all other identities, which Gandhi thought was
receiving support from India's British rulers, may well have come, alas, to
haunt the country of the rulers themselves.
In the Round Table Conference in 1931, Gandhi did not get his way, and even his
dissenting opinions were only briefly recorded, with no mention of where the
dissent came from. In a gentle complaint addressed to the British prime
minister, Gandhi remarked, "In most of these reports you will find that
there is a dissenting opinion, and in most of the cases that dissent
unfortunately happens to belong to me." Yet Gandhi's farsighted refusal to
see a nation as a federation of religions and communities did not
"belong" only to him or to the secular India he was leading. It also
belongs to any country in the world that is willing to see the serious problems
to which Gandhi was drawing attention.
Amartya Sen received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. His new book,
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, will be published by W.W.
Norton this spring.
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