The Hindu : Effort to impose uniformity will destroy nation, says Sitaram Yechury

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 03, 2003

National

National

Effort to impose uniformity will destroy nation, says Sitaram Yechury

By Our Special Correspondent

Photo: N. Sridharan

R. Champakalakshmi, historian, Sitaram Yechury, CPI (M) politburo member, and Aijaz Ahmed, cultural scholar, at a seminar on `The Making of India' at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai on Sunday.

CHENNAI NOV. 2. It is time everyone took a position on the `making of India.' The contours of the emerging nation would depend on the stand that people take against communalism and the majoritarian agenda, speakers at a seminar said here today.

"The idea of India is the celebration of its diversity. Any effort to impose a uniformity on this diversity will destroy the India that we know of today. India can only survive by strengthening the bonds of unity amongst the diversity," said the CPI(M) politburo member, Sitaram Yechury. "The communal offensive that we are subjected to today seeks precisely the opposite. They seek to impose a uniformity, pursuing a political objective which is to metamorphose the secular democratic Indian republic into a rabidly intolerant Hindu Rashtra," he added.

The seminar was organised by SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust) and Swaralaya, a New Delhi-based forum for the promotion of art and culture of India, at the Asian College of Journalism here. "The endeavour to identify the Vedic culture alone as the main and even exclusive source of Indian culture/identity, in the name of `cultural nationalism', stands in direct contradiction to the concept of Indian culture as a composite one," the organisers said in an announcement note.

Historian R. Champakalakshmi said that if the historical processes were better understood, the march towards the unmaking of India would be halted.

She cautioned historians not to forget the context in which changes — the formation of community, regional, linguistic identities — took place. "Each individual or group carries multiple identities at the same time, which finds expression in their appropriate realm in different situations. Regional identity is only one among the many such overlapping identities. The question of cultural identity can never be satisfactorily settled. The consciousness of distinction among the participants of a common religious culture is an important constituent in the formation of the identity of a region," she said.

Cultural scholar Aijaz Ahmed said that the Sangh Parivar outfits which were now wooing Dalits across the country and trying to unleash them against the minorities, sought to undercut the anti-Brahmin movement. "Resistance against it (the forces seeking to impose the majoritarian agenda in the country) cannot be on a piecemeal basis.

This can be resisted only by a comprehensive project; a new struggle for national liberation," he said, adding that the making of India had a profound orientation towards the future.

Prof. Ahmed noted that not all social reform movements were progressive or modernising. "A great many of them were deeply conservative, communal and sectarian; in some, `modern' education was deeply connected with social conservatism, caste and religious identity; and quite a few fed powerfully into the rise of a variety of communalisms, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh; even the RSS considers itself a reform movement."

The Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, N. Ram, said that applauding or criticising the power of the media depended on which side of the issue one was on. "In recent decades, the public perception of media power and its use has been largely negative in countries like the United States," he said. There was clearly accumulated distrust of the news media, scepticism of the ethics of journalists and, a resentment of what was seen as media power. "Media power tends to be viewed, in India as elsewhere in the world, largely in isolation from larger, complex, contradictory and very difficult to fathom tendencies in society," he said.

The media in India was like a bazaar, though not in a negative sense. The development was uneven and diverse, showed enormous gaps, but at the same time the Indian media had a certain richness to it, he said.

"Two traditions stand out in the great Indian media bazaar. The older tradition of a relatively diverse, pluralistic and relatively independent press and the younger tradition of manipulated and misused media," he added.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National