The anatomy of a riot

“I don’t like the word secularism,” declared historian and author Ramachandra Guha on Day 1 of the Times Lit Fest Delhi on Saturday. “Instead, I prefer the word pluralism,” he said at a session on the Troubled Career of Indian Secularism. It’s the word that the founding fathers preferred while framing the Constitution and it’s the quality that Guha says is under threat.
Sharing the stage with him were journalists Rahul Pandita and Akshaya Mukul and academic Ayesha Kidwai. The four spoke about the books they have written, while highlighting what it means to be secular in an India that pulls in so many directions. While Pandita has written a memoir of leaving Kashmir when Pandits were expelled in 1990, Mukul’s book traces the history of the Geeta Press, which not only disseminated cheap, high-quality editions of the epics to Hindu households but also played a role in trying to shape a right-wing discourse of what being Indian means. Kidwai’s book, In Freedom’s Shade, is a translation of her grandmother’s book on Partition. “After 2002, I wanted to understand the anatomy of a riot,” said Kidwai, explaining how she decided to translate the book, which chronicles the memories of an upper-class Muslim woman whose husband was killed during Partition and who went, on Gandhi’s advice, to work in the refugee camps in Delhi. “Whether it is 1984 or 2002 or even 19747, riots have always been organized pogroms with the complicity of the state,” she said. She pointed out that being secular in India is a question of maintaining one’s religious identity while understanding the plurality of society.
Pandita’s take was that the secular language in India is often “a language of scared quotes”, where people say things that do not offend, “but you cannot fight for secularism, which is essentially what is good, if you are scared,” he said, pointing out that there have been angry essays and protests about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the Babri Masjid demolition, the 2002 Gujarat riots, but “it is as if 1990 and the killing of Pandits never happened because the BJP and the right appropriated our struggle. So anything we said, was right-wing,” he said.