The right to dissent is a core principle of democracy and the State must acknowledge the validity of this right, said historian Romila Thapar on Friday.
“In a true democracy, the right to dissent and the demand for social justice are core concepts. Since it includes all citizens, its inclusiveness requires it to be secular,” she said, delivering the 12th V.M. Tarkunde memorial lecture on the topic — Renunciation, Dissent and Satyagraha. She said the lecture was also being held on the anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, “an important symbol of our civilisation reduced to rubble. The rubble remains as a reminder”.
Having tracked the continuity of dissent and counterculture through Indian history and linked it to the overwhelming response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call for satyagraha , Prof. Thapar said the right to dissent remains important in modern times. “It remains open to the citizen immersed in the ideology of secular democratic nationalism to articulate this new relationship by reiterating the right to dissent,” she said.
Drawing examples from ancient India onward, she made the argument that Indian society, including religious society, has always made space for dissenting voices and renouncers who often questioned social ethics and caste systems as well.
Apart from creating a wide range of loosely connected sects, Buddhism and Jainism, the Bhakti and Sufi movements, Prof. Thapar noted that much of popular religion and folk literature has also come from this continuing counterculture of dissenters to the mainstream.
It was the British who lumped so many streams of thoughts and sects together, so that by colonial times, almost all non-Muslim groups on the sub-continent were simply identified as Hindu, said Prof. Thapar, adding that “the geographical identity had mutated into a religious identity”.
Two-nation theory
Thus, the two-nation theory, which is the basis of both forms of religious nationalism – those who call for the Hindu rashtra as well as the Islamic state – is, in fact, a colonial reading of history. It was anti-colonial nationalism which rejected the colonial understanding of Indian history and instead practiced the satyagraha that echoed earlier historical concepts of dissent such as the dharna, she said. “Anti-colonial nationalism saw India as a nation of citizens, who irrespective of origins, and with a substantially similar identity, were all of equal status and were coming together in the demand for independence,” she said.
She added that the effectiveness of the dharna in an earlier era came because it was carried out by the “keepers of history”, those with moral authority who posed a threat to the rulers with their fasts. “The fast subsumed the protests and prevented it from becoming violent,” said Prof. Thapar.
She talked about her one brief meeting with Gandhi ji when she was a schoolgirl and “young, budding nationalist” in Pune in the early 1940s. Having signed her autograph album, he asked her why she was wearing a silk salwar-kameez and asked her to wear khadi instead. A lifetime later, she placed that exhortation to wear handloom cloth within the context of satyagraha as a symbol of the dissent that was key to anti-colonial nationalism.
