Ram Puniyani: Teaching Common People to be Secular
Irfan Engineer
Ram Puniyani: Teaching Common People to be Secular
Irfan Engineer
On 25th August, Dr. Ram Puniyani will be completing his 81 years. After its founding chairperson – Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer – he has been the longest serving Chairperson of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS), an organisation that was established to promote communal harmony. After the sad demise of Dr. Engineer, Dr. Ram has been guiding and supporting the CSSS through its difficult period facing tough challenges of the time when secularism has not been carrying any favours with the ruling regime that follows Hindu nationalist ideology. Ram has been chairing CSSS’s important public functions and events and being its public face.
Dr. Ram has nurtured many activists and organisations like the CSSS that work for communal harmony, lending his support in every way necessary and facilitating its functioning and growth. He donated entire amounts he received as awards to grass roots activists. He would supply them with stock of his books published by him to activists, which they could sell and keep the sale proceeds for their sustenance. He encouraged generations of activists to speak at events and write their thoughts. I always found him to be a patient listener – listening to the issues and problems faced by the activists.
Dr. Ram’s strength was that developing a deep understanding about the root causes of communal conflict and violence, he could explain it even to the grassroot activists in a language and manner they could easily understand. His central point would be that what appears superficially as violence between the followers of two religions has deeper roots and causes. Communal identities and conflicts appeared in India during colonial period and as a result of colonial exploitation of India and their divide and rule policy. India was transitioning from feudalism to introduction of capitalist mode of production controlled by the colonial power. Religion based communal identities emerged as a result, and were encouraged by the British rulers. The communal elite supported the British rulers and sought their patronage for a greater share vis-à-vis the rival community. This struggle for greater share within the colonial governance framework resulted in deepening communal identities and in violent conflicts. To simplify this complex process, while addressing workshops organised by the CSSS, Dr. Ram would enact with his word power the feudal rulers and their culture, the transition to colonial rule by his typical “rail, mail and jail” allegory. Dr. Ram argued in the workshops that the feudal classes, which were getting increasingly weakened due to introduction of capitalist mode of production by the colonial rulers resorted to communal identity politics. He used humour and constantly engaged the participants of the workshop in a conversational mode. The participants would go with enriched understanding of the root causes of communalism and communal nationalism. He would end his two-day presentation with the shared and composite culture of India and shared secular nationalism. The rise of Sangh Parivar’s fascist ideology was just not against the minorities, but also against all the socially and economically marginalised communities, viz. the Dalits, women, the working class, and the farmers. Dr. Ram travelled extensively to address these workshops.
In the last over a decade, Dr. Ram took to social media and recorded his video lectures in the same engaging style and they became a tremendous hit on social media too! Now addressing millions of audiences. As he became very popular on the social media, he attracted the attention of the Hindu nationalist troll army. How could a Hindu, that too whose birth was in an upper-caste family, question the caste hierarchy and Hindu communal politics and the interests of upper-castes? So, they threatened his life and hurled abandon abuses. His family and his fans were worried. He had to take police security for a while to be able to move around and continue doing his work tirelessly.
Dr. Ram has been awarded several prestigious awards – Indira Gandhi Award for national integration, the Communal Harmony Award, which is awarded by National Communal Harmony Foundation under the Ministry of Home Affairs, Mukundan Menon Award for Journalism, just to name a few. He has written more than 20 books. He writes popular weekly columns on several websites, including “The Scroll”, “Counter Currents”. Among them is also a book that is extensively illustrated with cartoons and sketches to make it even easier for the activists to understand. His books sold out quickly and several editions were published of many of them. In spite of so much fame and achievements, Dr. Ram remains a humble and very approachable human being at the core. On his 81st Birthday, let us wish “tum jiyo hazaro saal; saal ke din ho pachaas hazaar”.