COMMENTARY december 6, 2014 vol xlIX no 49 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 16 The Politics of Secular Sectarianism Ajay Gudavarthy, Nissim Mannathukkaren The rise of right-wing politics in India is built on the fragmented nature of the struggles waged by the oppressed who constitute the vast majority of the population: “lower” castes, adivasis, working classes and peasants, women, religious minorities, etc. Countering right-wing political imagination would mean a dismantling of caste-, class-, gender- and religion-based oppressions. This cannot happen without forging a commonality among the oppressed which is at once non-patronising as well as self-critical. P olitical imagination in India has come to a standstill, aiding and abetting the construction of a homogenised cultural and political sphere. The roots of this exist not merely in the right-wing political imagination of a Hindu rashtra but also in the secular sectarianism pursued by secular, demo- cratic and progressive political formations. Secular sectarianism of the feminists, dalits, the Left and religious minorities has, over a period, ghettoised communi- ties and advanced a sectarian political imagination, leading to a political dead- end that they now find difficult to nego- tiate with. Cumulatively, they all seem to have contributed to a shrinking politi- cal imagination that has in turn hand- somely contributed to the rise of right- wing politics. Feminist politics in India was silenced after the Shah Bano Case with right- wing forces demanding a uniform civil code. As a result, it was unable to negoti- ate the competing demands between women’s rights and that of religious minorities. It is puzzling why it did not proceed along the lines of equating gendered practices in all religions. For instance, whether the Hadith or the Manusmriti or the Bible, all consider women to be impure during the men- strual cycle, along with many other similar sanctioned practices that place women as less than equal to men. In fact, it was Ambedkar who argued that it is only dalits and women who face un- touchability due to religious sanctions. Similarly, sections of dalit politics in India, especially vibrant on social media networks, have adopted a proprietary attitude towards Ambedkar in recent times. This has resulted in an excessive focus on “trivial and emotive issues” centred around the symbol of Ambedkar rather than on structural issues of dalit emancipation. Such “sensational and farcical attempts by Dalit groups” make it also easier for the ruling elites and mainstream caste society to trivialise Ambedkar’s ideas and the question of dalit emancipation (Wankhede 2012). Again, if earlier the idea was that all dispossessed social groups are dalits, irrespective of their caste, today even individuals seeking to annihilate caste are reduced to the caste into which they are born Ǣ     homo sacer Ȃ    Ǥ In seeking to construct an authentic standpoint for dalit oppression, there is also an igno- rance of oppressions like gender within certain strands of dalit activism. There is a lack of internal critique and this is justified, as Gopal Guru and V Geetha argue, “on the ground that it is not advisable to attack a dalit self which has not even emerged” (2000: 130). Identitarian Politics It is this prison of identitarian politics that becomes the breeding ground for right-wing politics. This shift to a narrower interpretation of anti-caste imagery also led to social justice shrinking to mere political representation, most clearly ex- emplified by the biggest force in dalit politics, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party ( BSP ). If Kanshi Ram gave birth to a movement that is an unprecedented and astounding advancement of the politics of the oppressed in India’s postcolonial history, its later trajectory has focused on the “politics of recognition” based on symbolic empowerment alone rather than one which adds to it the “politics of redistribution” based on material empowerment, a tendency which has reached its apogee under Mayawati. 1 While the BSP governments have done an excellent job in ensuring communal peace, the original radical agenda of building a bahujan samaj uniting dalits, Other Backward Classes ( OBCs), adiva- sis and religious minorities has been sacrificed at the altar of electoral expe- diency. The resultant new imaginations of sarvjan samaj including the savarna castes has ironically reduced the impor- tance of dalits themselves (Teltumbde 2014: 29). The argument that the BSP remains the third largest party in the country (in terms of vote share) and thus faces no threat from right-wing forces is A shorter version of this article appeared in The Hindu. Ajay Gudavarthy (gajay99@rediffmail.com) is with the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Nissim Mannathukkaren (nmannathukkaren@ dal.ca) is with the Department of International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada.