Religion and Democracy in India

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religion Violence, and India’s Future

As anyone familiar with India can attest, Indians take great delight in describing India as the world’s
largest democracy. The subtext, it seems, is often gentle reproach to the pretentions of Americans,
who generally take their own country as in all respects the measure of successful democracy. India
and the United States share more than democratic governments and large populations. Both countries
were founded with the nation conceived not in terms of shared ethnicity, culture or religion, but in
terms of shared allegiance to liberal ideals. With its profound linguistic ethnic, cultural and religious
diversity, India faced an even greater challenge in establishing a pluralistic nation than did the United
States.
India’s extraordinary success can be measured by how resoundingly it has invalidated Churchill’s
famous remark that, “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.” In
the last twenty five years or so, however, the vision of India as a pluralistic nation has faced a potent
challenge from a vivified religious nationalism. One recent result has been some of the worst
communal violence since partition.
The focal point of the Clash Within is the horrifying event in Godhra in February 2002, where fifty-
eight mostly Hindu kar sevaks (Hindu Activists) burned to death in a railway car, and the ensuing
mob violence throughout Gujrat in which at least 800, and maybe more, Muslims died. This episode is
fairly instructive because it defies both the Americans stereotype of religious violence—in this
instance Muslims are the victims, mot the perpetrators, of religious violence—in this instance it is not
militant Islam instigating conflict with the West, but rather Hindu nationalism with a European
intellectual pedigree bent on violence against Muslims. What happened in the aftermath of the fire at
Godhra is testimony to the stakes riding on the outcome of these nested clashes. It is an example “of
the bad things that can occur when a leading political party bases its appeal on a religious nationalism
wedded to ideas of ethnic homogeneity and purity.”
Because the Clash between religious nationalism and pluralism occurs between types of people and
within every individual, much of my analysis dedicates to the Indian situation to the biographies and
personalities of pertinent individuals. On recounting the views of the prominent figures in Hindu
Right, the leading figures of the Hindu right have succumbed to an anxious fear and hatred of
difference and the central figures in the creation of modern independent India, much of analysis can
be taken out.
Gandhi believes that democracy requires a psychological revolution in which individuals achieve their
inner freedom by gaining mastery of their desires for domination and aggression. Gandhi’s Strengths,
include his “passionate egalitarianism, his rhetorical brilliance and his compelling critique of the
desire of domination.” Gandhi held that all religions are one and that the essence of religion is
morality.
Nehru comes in for the sharpest criticism. Nehrus’s “disdain for religion , together with his idea of a
modernity based upon scientific rather than humanistic values, led to what was perhaps the serious
defect in the new nation: The failure to create a liberal-pluralistic public rhetorical and imaginative
culture ” whose ideas could have worked at the grassroots level to oppose those of Hindu right.” The
emotions and the imagination play a central role in political life, and that the arts and humanities, as
well as liberal religion, sustain a democratic public culture. By neglecting to wait upon and
imagination of the populace, Nehru left India prey to the Human Right.
The Indian constitution have serves to exacerbate religious discord, Firstly, as is well known, by
making a provision for formally unequal treatment of members of “socially and educationally
backward classes of citizens or…..the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes” in order to bring

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about substantive economic and social equality. This formal inequality has taken the forms of quotas
in public employment, higher education and the legislature. The unintended effects of this formal
inequality include a reinforcement of caste identities, and deepened and communal resentments.
Second, rather than instituting a uniform civil code, the India constitution recognizes several divergent
systems of religious personal law. Hindu, Muslim, Parsis and Christians in India are bound to
different codes pertaining to property and family law. This feature of the constitution in effects
amount to “a system of plural religious establishment.” This situation creates a number of problem for
a liberal state. Delegating responsibility for the content of the codes to the religious community makes
it harder to ensure sex equality, for instance. Because to give another example family property is
governed by the law of the religion to which one’s family belonged, one’s freedom to choose one’s
religion is inhibited. Additionally, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, who are legally classified as Hindus,
have no power to shape the Hindu system.
The disparities created by multiple systems of law inflame communal resentments. India need to
cultivate attachment to their pluralistic nations, but universally acceptable grounds for that attachment
are frustratingly elusive. To have the government promote a universal religion of humanity would not
succeed, and would probably do more harm than good.

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