Attack on Hamid Ansari was disgraceful
Sometimes the mediocrity of a regime resents a sophisticated act of performance. It reminds it of what it is not. Such a regime would prefer a sycophantic ritual, a piece of slapstick, but when it confronts a ritual enacted with perfect finesse, it almost becomes singular in its mob rage, losing its hospitable sheen. This is precisely what happened when vice president Hamid Ansari took leave of office.
The BJP sounded relieved at his departure but it was too loud with its relief. The vice president incumbent, Venkiah Naidu, who was already promising to be a nonpartisan man, was among the first to reprimand Ansari.
All Ansari did was to articulate a warning, a doubt, an anxiety on behalf of a minority. He said that the Muslims in India are feeling insecure. Everyone in India is aware of that and yet the powers-that-be reacted as if Ansari had opened a Pandora’s box and created one of the most foul-smelling exits of a dignitary.
Spectacle
There was a crudity to the whole spectacle. Here is one of India’s most dignified citizens, who has chaired the Rajya Sabha deftly, who represents the Muslim imagination, not just its identity, a voice of democracy articulating a Cassandra-like concern, and the BJP responds to it as if it is a violation of table manners, reacting to a vice president as if he is a driver caught with a traffic violation. One insults the man, one insults the dignity of the office.
It is not just a display of crudity, it is a standing example of BJP’s bully boy illiteracy. One senses it easily from the body language of the people involved. The vice president stands dignified and the BJP officialdom responds like bouncers caught napping.
Such a kneejerk response violates the spirit of democracy and the rituals of civility. At least there should have been a response to the text, or even a line-by-line analysis of the farewell speech or his last interviews.
Ansari has always looked at events from the wider claims of political philosophy, of a Rawlsian perspective which sees justice as the prime virtue of any social institution. Ansari’s vision is a search for mutual respect among citizens, seeking a politics that does not pathologise or marginalise a minority. For Ansari, the Constitution is an embodiment of the dream.
Citizenship, to Ansari, was thus both an entitlement and an art form, a form of civility rather than ethnicity. What the BJP read in a typically Pavlovian style was Ansari’s speech as an ethnic response.
It wants Venkiah Naidu to transcend party and represent the Constitution, but it would not allow Ansari the same privilege, though he had been doing just that for two terms. The amnesia accompanying his farewell was distressing. A democracy that lacks such immediate memory is pitiable.
Ansari also made a second point. He emphasised the fact that national unity was a ritual of cohesion, of a fitting together of differences rather than a fusion that erases individual identities. He wants to emphasise the language of dignity, negotiation, diversity, plurality, difference, heterogeneity and hierarchy, words and worlds that hardly enter the world of the shakha and the BJP politician.
Civility
However, Ansari dreams of civility are not confined to the Constitution and to secular democracy but a pluralistic interpretation of an open-ended Islam. He knows its history and is well informed about debates and has been a major exponent of the open-ended nature of Indian Islam. Third, as a university intellectual, he combines the pluralism of the university, the pluralism of Islam into a muscular pluralism of democracy.
His book, his career, his intellectual life, and his sense of faith testify to this. His warning at the moment of farewell should have been read within this context of scholarship and diplomacy. The pity is that the BJP refused him his entitlements as a scholar citizen, insisting on projecting him as a minoritarian politician.
What the press failed to respond to was the fact that Ansari was pointing out that BJP today represents a narrow idea of India. It might be majoritarian in terms of numbers but it is narrow-minded in terms of perspective. Worse, it does not allow for debate, forces a closure which for an open polity is distressing.
Society
A healthy society is an open society, relaxed about critique. The BJP’s knee-jerk response revealed it is not ready for debate and that it demands from its political functionaries, a political correctness. A vice president at his moment of farewell is allowed his reflections and this reflectiveness adds to the overall traditions of wisdom. There is another point one must make.
It is the “what did you do in the war daddy” syndrome. One asks why the VP did not respond with equal clarity on a lot of other issues. One must look for a consistency of record not a tick list checking his statements. As a diplomat, a statesman, and a vice president representing a nation, Ansari has to temper his candidness to the tensions of the time.
Finally, one has to ask the obvious question. If a senior politician states his doubts with dignity, should not the reaction and the response be equally dignified? Is the policing function of the ideologists of the regime reaching up to the presidency?
Are we reaching an era where the presidency becomes an extension counter of the party? A weak President or a copycat President or vice president destroys the dignity of office. Pratibha Patil was a classic example of a wrong choice. The question is should democracy repeat such terrible errors.
One has to mention that even if party ideologies are surly in their response, media, university and civil society should have celebrated Ansari's speech. The air of caution borders almost on cowardice.
It is time to open up the debate on culture, Constitution and nationalism. Probably citizen Ansari can join these panchayats of debates showing the creativity of democracy. Thank you, Hamid sahib. May you now add more to democracy as Citizen Ansari.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)