If Srikrishna were Habibullah

Very secular attire. But my friend read great meaning into The Indian Express photo, which seemed to demand that great political and sociological meaning to be read into it.

That Srikrishna was shown as a devout swami assumed great importance after the severe indictment he had served on Bal Thackeray, the self-appointed guardian of Hindu values. Look, here is a God-fearing brahmin who doesn’t fear Thackeray.

What does the news item accompanying the photograph tell us? Asked about the Maharashtra government’srejection of his findings, Justice Srikrishna quoted from the Gita: “My job is to do the assigned work honestly and I have done it.” I have performed my karma.

Nothing personal, but if the Justice so earnestly quotes his Gita, he must be a strong believer in the caste system which the Gita upholds. And one cannot but take note of the fact that people who lay claim to the secular-liberal plank and oppose the BJP-Sena brand of Hindutva take a certain pleasure in celebrating his image as a temple-going brahmin.

This picture so warms the cockles of pseudo-secular hearts that one is more shocked than amazed. Just suppose that Justice Srikrishna were a self-proclaimed atheist who married outside his caste, stuck to cheap khadi — (but why khadi?) — and did not alternate between three-piece suits (in our weather!) and the dhoti-angavastram.

Would his indictment of Thackeray have offered less cause for celebration? What if he were a Dalit with sympathies for the Dalit Panthers?What if he were a Muslim? Yes, a Muslim inquiring into the Mumbai riots. And what if the findings of the commission had been just the same?

The Justice Habibullah Commission! Would that section of our `secular’ media have sung the same paeans to the Justice’s impartiality? The reality is that a person with a name as tell-tale as Habibullah wouldn’t have been entrusted with the job.

The picture and the pleasure it inspires are symptoms of a malaise that predates Hindutva politics. It is the story of Hinduism (which, we must remind ourselves in these times of mass amnesia, is a modern term coined in the context of British colonialism and European Orientalism), which in its earlier version was known as sanatana dharma. In reality, an adharma that consolidated its hold over `Bharat’ despite the challenges of Buddhist and Jain critiques and the Bhakti and Sufi movements.

A brahmin-centred world-view in which the Manu-ordained, Gita-legitimised caste system was rigorously practised. A Hinduismwhich was as much a part of the Congress (with no space for Ambedkarite radicalism) as it is of the BJP today. An ideology which retains such a hold over society that it makes `caste Hindus’ openly practise untouchability. (This newspaper recently reported that a brahmin judge got his official premises cleaned with gangajal because his predecessor was a Dalit).

Despite all this, the English-educated elite, hiding behind a liberal-secular veneer, would argue: no caste in the census please! It’s all so bloody evident; why do you have to make it official? Anyway, we are Bharatiya first. But please do take a look at my surname, which tells you what caste I belong to. And it’s good that Srikrishna is a brahmin. Otherwise, he would have been a dead man. No?