On 25th August, Dr. Ram Puniyani has completed 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 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 the tough challenges of a time when secularism has not found favour with a ruling regime that follows a Hindu nationalist ideology. Ram has been chairing CSSS’s important public functions and events and serving as 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 their functioning and growth. He donated the entire amounts he received as awards to grassroots activists. He would supply activists with stocks of his books, which they could sell and keep the proceeds for their sustenance. He encouraged generations of activists to speak at events and write their thoughts. I have always found him to be a patient listener, attentive to the issues and problems faced by activists.
Dr. Ram’s strength lay in developing a deep understanding of the root causes of communal conflict and violence and explaining them even to grassroots activists in a language and manner they could easily understand. His central point would be that what appears superficially as violence between followers of two religions has deeper roots and causes.
Communal identities and conflicts emerged in India during the colonial period as a result of colonial exploitation and the British policy of divide and rule. India was transitioning from feudalism to the introduction of a capitalist mode of production controlled by the colonial power. Religion-based communal identities emerged in this context and were encouraged by the British rulers. The communal elite supported the British rulers and sought their patronage for a greater share vis-Ã -vis rival communities. This struggle for a greater share within the colonial governance framework resulted in the deepening of communal identities and violent conflicts.
To simplify this complex process while addressing workshops organised by the CSSS, Dr. Ram would enact, through his word power, the feudal rulers and their culture, and the transition to colonial rule through his typical “rail, mail and jail” allegory. Dr. Ram argued in the workshops that the feudal classes, which were increasingly weakened by the introduction of the capitalist mode of production by the colonial rulers, resorted to communal identity politics.
He used humour and constantly engaged the participants in a conversational mode. The participants would leave with an enriched understanding of the root causes of communalism and communal nationalism. He would end his two-day presentation by discussing India’s shared and composite culture and the idea of shared secular nationalism.
The rise of the Sangh Parivar’s fascist ideology, he argued, was not just against minorities but also against all socially and economically marginalised communities, including Dalits, women, the working class and farmers. Dr. Ram travelled extensively to address these workshops.
In the last decade or more, Dr. Ram took to social media and began recording his video lectures in the same engaging style. They became a tremendous hit on social media as well, now reaching millions of audiences. As he became very popular on social media, he attracted the attention of the Hindu nationalist troll army. How could a Hindu, and one born into an upper-caste family, question the caste hierarchy, Hindu communal politics and the interests of the upper castes?
He was threatened with violence and subjected to unabated abuse. His family and fans were worried. For a while, he had to take police security to be able to move around and continue doing his work tirelessly.
Dr. Ram has been awarded several prestigious awards—the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration, the Communal Harmony Award awarded by the National Foundation for Communal Harmony under the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Mukundan Menon Award for Journalism, to name just a few.
He has written more than 20 books. He writes popular weekly columns on several websites. Among his books is one extensively illustrated with cartoons and sketches to make it even easier for activists to understand. His books have soSld out quickly, and several editions of many of them have been published.
In spite of so much fame and so many achievements, Dr. Ram remains, at his core, a humble and very approachable human being.
On his 81st birthday, let us wish him: “Tum jiyo hazaron saal; saal ke din ho pachaas hazaar.”
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*Contact: forirfanengineer@gmail.com
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