Time To Separate The ‘Liberal’ From The ‘Left’

The time has come to become clear about the difference between ‘liberal’ and ‘left’. The political left has so effectively hijacked the ‘liberal’ label that self-described liberals long ago stopped thinking about the true meaning of liberalism, and indeed now often empower illiberal, intolerant, undemocratic forces, primarily practitioners and proponents of fundamentalist Islam. The left is, in fact, not liberal at all.

We have just witnessed the appalling spectacle of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) declaring its intention to set up hundreds of Sharia courts in the secular republic of India and the left roll out a public relations blitz arguing that it was not second-track law to supplant the constitutional courts, but merely “community mediation” and “arbitration” on family matters as per the norms of the community on such matters.

Even as this was going on, we saw news about the woman who was divorced by triple talaq immediately after having a baby girl, with the husband agreeing to take her back only if she brought money that she did not have. We also heard of the woman who was forced to marry and have sex with her father-in-law, so that her husband, who had given her triple talaq, could take her back according to the nikah halala practice. We saw triple talaq campaigner Nida Khan ostracised from Islam by fatwa. We saw Maulvi Ejaz Arshad Qasmi hit a Muslim woman on live television, Supreme Court lawyer Farah Faiz, who is involved in the triple talaq case. And, we saw the AIMPLB tell the Supreme Court that nikah halala is a Quranic practice and cannot be challenged.

How many women, or men, for that matter, in conservative Muslim households will dare declare that they will not submit to Quranic injunction? And how can the left support the case that Muslims subject to Sharia court are as free as any other Indian to appeal to the civil courts, and that their rights, protections, and freedoms as citizens of the Republic are not reduced by Quranic courts? How does the left make the case that it does on fundamentalist Islam when we are witness to what happens to women under Sharia norms, and how they’re treated if they happen to defy or oppose them?

The simple answer is that the left is not liberal and it is not secular.

Liberalism, at its core, is the idea of the fundamental inalienable freedom of the human individual. Freedom to think, believe, speak, and act without oppression or compulsion by any force external to that individual. The left, it appears, doesn’t care about the individual at all. It cares about groups. A defence of liberalism, the core idea of the freedom of the individual, is not a value of the left, and is easily dispensed with for the “greater good of the group”.

We are at a critical point for our republic now because the left has betrayed the very idea of a liberal, secular democracy. Indeed, this is true for nearly every major liberal, secular democracy in the world. We have to go back to basics on what democracy is and explore why it must be liberal and secular. Democracy is not merely the trading of political power by controlling votes. Democracy is the right of the people to choose those who make their laws and administer them. Laws made by the people for the betterment of the people, according to the changing conditions and needs of the people.

This requires answering what the rights of the people are and what the source of those rights is. If a society already has the answers and they are fixed by religious texts and political ideology, then legislators are not free to ask what the rights of people are or should be, and are not free to look for the best answers outside of their religion and political ideology. You can always have elections in one form or another, but democracy cannot function if it’s constrained by religion and ideology. Democracy must be secular and liberal, because only when it guarantees equal rights of freedom to every citizen, free of religious injunction, can the society have a discussion about what is good or best for everyone.

That was the objective of the Republic of India. But it has not been met. The left has failed to bring secular liberal law to our Republic. It first submitted to the demand for a separate family law for Muslims, and then it fell into craven appeasement of Islamist maulvis for the sake of votes, accelerating the fundamentalists’ project to isolate India’s Muslims from its secular democracy, into the custody of conservative, anti-democracy, anti-liberal, anti-kafir maulvis and imams.

The question we face is whether it is reasonable to expect that the secular, democratic republic’s Muslims be integrated into a universal social and legal framework of the country, or whether it is time to accept that the ummah is impervious to the advance of democratic liberal progress, and that harmony requires just letting Muslims, or any other community, run their societies in their own way.

If it is the latter, we have a serious problem. If Muslims are exempt from having to come into step with India’s secular liberal principles, then why should any other community accept anything else? Why should Hindus not demand to have Hindu courts run according to values and moral instructions of the Ramayana? And what will you do when Hindus argue in the Supreme Court for some Ramayanic practice on the grounds of it being Ramayanic? Is the answer that India is to be preserved by “civilising” the Hindus and leaving the Muslims be?

That certainly seems to be the left’s answer. The Jawaharlal Nehru University folks are full of outrage against Hindu society and armed for all kinds of a socio-cultural war against the ‘high-caste Hindu hegemony’, but still insisting on not permitting courses on Islamic terrorism. Rahul Gandhi lectures the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the freedom of speech while having nothing to say about The Satanic Verses or Lajja (by Salman Rushdie and Tasleema Nasreen respectively).

Is the left’s answer the correct ‘liberal’ one? It is not. Either India aspires to democracy, where each citizen is free and subject only to the secular laws made by his or her member of Parliament, that are the same for every citizen, or India is a hodgepodge leftover from the colonial era, stitched together by the British with a bunch of laws whose purpose was to let the British administer their Indian colony and its patchwork of religions and ethnicities, not to birth a great secular, liberal republic. The left has unfortunately ensured that it is the latter.

The fight for the rights of Muslims is in a critical state. The political left has shown around the world that it will make deals with maulvis for political support, selling out the freedoms of Muslim women, homosexuals, artists, and poets.

India is an oasis of freedom, liberalism, tolerance, and pluralism in a world largely consumed by religious, military, or ideological autocrats, and that is something for liberals to celebrate, to fight for, to preserve and develop.

Triple talaq, nikah halala, Sharia courts, Muslim family law are all fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy and its promise of freedom and equality to all citizens. The left is in alliance with the maulvis, but true liberals need to figure out quick where they stand. And if it’s not with the maulvis, they need to get serious about who is going to fight the battle for a liberal, secular democracy against the betrayal of the left.