The old baul master sits among other bauls and fakirs, talking. Someone asks him about his son, who's a brilliant singer and a serious drunkard. The old baul takes a toke from the chillum and shakes his head. 'Allah bodo *****, gadhar golaay diyechhey modhu (Allah is a big ******, in a donkey's throat he has put honey). The word he uses to abuse almighty god is a casual street insult. Everyone laughs, the fakirs and bauls nod their heads in sympathy, someone starts to hum a song. No one objects, no one raises an eyebrow. If the old sage has blasphemed, it's between him and his god.

This is the India that lives outside the narrow boundaries of political parties and the hyper-organized business-religions, an India where bauls, fakirs, sadhus and pirs of all shapes have direct first-person relationships with their gods and goddesses, whom they curse and love and caress on a daily basis. When people argue that India is a humourless tinderbox where you have to tread super carefully around religion I remember these madwomen and madmen, whose ribald, scatological, luridly colourful and fearless address is not to any institution or government, nor to any temple or mosque, but directly to their saints and makers. When I heard about the murderers gunning down the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, it's these madmen I remembered. When I then read about how religion was 'a cancer of medieval irrationality', it was again these madmen I missed.

These singers and performers are also, in their own way, cartoonists, telling stories in word-pictures, asking questions, speaking truth to power. They draw their lineage from people like the great 18th-century poet, Bulleh Shah. 'O, Mullah, tell me, you who keep strict roza, you who do namaaz five times a day, have you ever actually seen Allah? Can you tell me how many hands he has, how many feet? Can you tell me what he looks like?' When Bulleh Shah asks this of the mullah, he's actually drawing a cartoon of pompous pseudo-piety with words and, simultaneously, also a word-picture of a god who cannot be portrayed, but he is drawing it via the imagination of the mullah. When he says - still addressing the mullah - that 'my dignity isn't lessened, even if I'm a prostitute', he's directly challenging the preacherman, he who also visits the town's pleasure-shops, and when he says ' mainnu maran da shaukh mitavan dey' - let me satisfy my urge to die - he means 'leave me alone to my fate, my sins are between me and God and you have nothing to do with it'.

The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists may not have had any idea of these traditions of ours. Or, being Parisians from a certain milieu, they may well have seen performances by the bauls or the Langas and Maganiars. Being dedicated atheists they may have remained unmoved, not given a damn about all this mystical claptrappery, but at a deep level they shared the same radical instinct as these performers - religion, or any other ideas and belief-systems, if they are to have any place in human society, must be based around freedom, love and equality; if the Divine exists then it resides in all of us; and in any case, all man-made hierarchies, even if they're supposed to have come from above, are perforce open to questioning and derision.

In direct contrast, the very contemporary reactionary movements rooted in different religions all have the single agenda of using so-called 'traditional tenets' of each belief to establish this or that hierarchy in this or that region. In this they share kinship with other, irreligious extremist movements that have openly declared war for political power. The Charlie Hebdo killings had as much or as little to do with Islam as the targeting of 'class enemies' - by the Naxalites here and the 'Red Army' factions and brigades in '70s Europe - had to do with Marxism. These more recent killings and outrages of al-Qaida, the Daish, Boko Haram, Taliban and others are part of a campaign by a violent fascist ideology to gain or increase political power. The aim is to replace the hierarchies of the designated enemy, and by whatever means necessary. In that sense, if Charlie Hebdo hadn't offered these men an easy target they would have found another one, a fashion show, a gay pride parade, perhaps a girl going to school in a bus, or indeed a whole high school. And in his final interview one of the killers would still have claimed 'we don't shoot civilians'. The intention, always, would have been to increase the rift between the 'Muslim' world and the 'West'. Except, neither the 'Muslims' nor the 'West' are as homogenized as is fantasized by the Islamists and their dance-partners, the white-supremacist groups in Europe and America.

The sickening murders in Paris throw up many questions, but one of the main themes on the muddy battleground social media has become over the last week is the ifs and buts about the supposed racism and Islamophobia of Charlie Hebdo and the murdered cartoonists. One French political scientist of Algerian background speaks about 'power in different contexts' and argues that one must speak up against attacks against minorities in all arenas while making sure not to ever deride the powerless: in the French context of rising far-Right targeting immigrants in general, and Muslims in particular, racist, sexist, Islamophobic cartoons by white privileged men...is pro-status quo at best, reactionary at worst. This argument is echoed by a senior Indian journalist: cartoons should lampoon those in power. Why should cartoons kick a religious minority in the context of war?

If only power could be located that simply. 'Those in power' in the case of the Islamists caricatures that Charlie Hebdo has published are: the self-appointed gate-keepers of the minorities, the fundo mullahs, the 'community leaders'. These are the France-based counterparts of Choudhury Moinuddin and others in the United Kingdom who are accused of killing innocent Muslims in their countries of origin before coming to the West and managing to claim special ethnic and religious treatment. The platforms provided to these men allow them to oppress people within their 'own' communities in European societies, especially the women and LGBT people, and to brainwash young men with poisonous versions of religion. France has a very different mix of religious groups from the Anglosphere, but exactly these types of men can also be found among the Vishwa Hindu Parishad/ Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh shakha leaders and Khalistani leaders in Britain, the United States of America and Canada. The fact that there are resurgent white-supremacist movements in these structurally still racist societies, and the fact that people of certain skin colours would all be undifferentiatedly seen as 'Arabs' or' 'P**is' by the neo-Nazis and many of the police, does not take away from the fact that these 'religious leaders' a) have power, lots of it, b) have access to the political establishment and c) can often manipulate the cynical State and its security services for their own ends. These purveyors of poison all need to be countered and lampooned and caricatured.

The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists understood this very well in the French context. If you look at their cartoons, the mullahs in their turbans, beards and flowing gowns, the ultra-orthodox rabbis in their caps, beards and curling hair-locks, and the Christian priests in their tall hats and cassocks are all lampooned mercilessly. If there are certain repeated visual tropes for the priest and mullah there are also equally recognizable ones for the oafish white Frenchman, the crooked white politician, the psychopathic white military man. For a magazine accused of racism, the most viciously funny treatment is reserved for the Le Pen father and daughter, leaders of the white-supremacist Front National. There is no cartoon that I can find in Charlie Hebdo that lampoons the ordinary Maghrebi or African immigrant man or woman. This begs the hard question: is it actually subconsciously racist of all those who subscribe to the 'CH is racist' line of argument to visually equate wild-eyed mullahs with ordinary French Muslims? As a (possibly secular) Indian, think of it this way: if a UK satirical paper made fun of some Hindu sect for their crazy revulsion of women ( pace some orthodox Jews in Israel), or some chaddi-wearing Brit-Pracharak, and caricatured them with their tilaks, trishuls, bhagwa robes or khaki tent-half-pants, would you say they were racistically attacking all British Hindus? I don't think so. You'd immediately point out how much money this pseudo-holy bunch was getting from the Hindu Asian business class to build their temples and shakha-centres - eminently comparable to Wahabbi money being pumped into Islamist centres all over Europe. Ultimately, these 'but-but' attacks on Charlie Hebdo are nothing but an extension of an utterly ridiculous failure: the inability of large sections of the international Left to recognize the cross-continental cluster of militant Islamisms as a highly-funded, fascist, anti-people force.

Post Paris, the irony for many of our homegrown lefties is that their so-called 'analysis' of Charlie Hebdo's 'racism' puts them in the same argumentatory bed as the sangh parivar homogenizers, them who would also have us all 'exercise caution' and conservatively limit free expression, 'given the situation' in India. Just when Indians opposing the obscurantist forces in power need to raise their game and make their public wit sharper and more courageous, platoons of our dimwitted avant-garde are falling into formation alongside the Hindutwattoos. It's a scene worthy of a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. It's a scene that should draw the massed derision of all our sane, marginal madmen.