Religious identities should be irrelevant in public life

"FAITH NO BAR"- RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND PUBLIC LIFE GYANOPROBHA

Mukul Kesavan provides yet another instance where the secularist insistence that religious identities should be irrelevant in public life fails. He argues that that when we ignore the religious identity of public figures, it desensitizes us to indices of success in overcoming religious prejudice and discrimination. When we ignore the Muslimness of Sania Mirzas and Irfan Pathans in our midst, we fail to note that "in one sphere of public life, competitive sport, religious identity is no obstacle to success".

Actually, secularists don't deny that religious identities are irrelevant in public life, but assert that they should be. For instance, secularists do not ignore the Hinduness (or the Hindutva) of the Sadhvi Rithambars, the Praveen Togadias and the Narendar Modis, nor the Muslimness of the Imam Bukharis. For secularists, it is precisely the religious identities of these public figures that provide the poisonous fuel for their political careers. This is perfectly consistent with the secularist axiom that religion is the root of all evil, and the expectation that religious motivations in politics can only do harm.

But this secularist belief in the essential harmfulness of religious motivations in public life is deeply one-sided, if not altogether mistaken, and not only in the way that Kesavan describes. Religious paradigms can be powerful resources for bringing human societies into harmony with nature, for curbing the rampant predatory greed and violence that characterizes modern economic life, and for the creation of a more socially just order. As long as secularists remain in denial about the powerful potential of religious ideology to do good rather than harm, they will continue to espouse the kind of secular idolatry that led to the pilgrimages to Lenin's mausoleum in the Soviet Union, and to the personality cult built up around Atatürk in Turkey even today. When religion is banished from the public sphere, it has a tendency to return there in pathological forms. Moreover, the critical transformative resources that religious ideologies can provide are no more available to deal with social breakdown.

I see the current intellectual ferment in the Islamic world (see discussions here, here, here, Tariq Ramadan's website, and the review by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books vol.52 no.18 - subscription required) as a welcome sign that the public role of religion in Muslim societies can be revaluated. A similar discussion should open up in India within the Hindu traditions (including Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism), because we should not let the Praveen Togadias and the Narendar Modis and the Imam Bukharis define the agenda for the public role of religion. GYANOPROBHA November 03, 2005