Whither Indian Secularism

Modern Asian Studies 27, 3 (1993), pp. 667-697. Printed in Great Britain.
Whither Indian Secularism?

T. N. MADAN
Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi
. . . One does not ask plain questions. There aren't such things. E. M. Forster, Howards End 'When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.' 'The question is', said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is', said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master that's all.' Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
The present paper seeks 'to explore the nature of Indian secularism, the difficulties it has run into, and the ways in which it may be revised'. This is a large undertaking for a short text, originally written as a public lecture, particularly because the issues posed do not readily translate into plain questions. The most that I can hope to do is to raise some doubts and make a few suggestions for rethinking the issues involved. Let me begin by suggesting that implicit in the apprehensions about Indian secularism having run into difficulties, widely prevalent among concerned intellectuals and politicians, are three basic assumptions. There is, first, the assumption that secularism as an anti-religious or, at any rate, non-religious ideology has universal
This paper is an extended version of the Fourth Caparo Annual Lecture which I was privileged to give at the University of Hull, England, on 24 October 1991. It is being published simultaneously by the University. I am grateful to Bhikhu Parekh, Asghar Ali Engineer, James Bjorkman, Gopal Krishna, T. P. McNeil, and Noel O'Sullivan for their comments and criticisms. In the preparation of the present text I have been helped by the encouragement of several colleagues in Delhi, particularly Upendra Baxi, Dharma Kumar, Ashis Nandy, Ramashray Roy, Satish Saberwal and Jit Uberoi. oo26-74gX/g3/$5.oo + .00 tgg3 Cambridge University Press
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applicability, but that it has culturally specific expressions. This is how they consider it permissible to speak of Indian secularism. In other words, secularism is not an Indian ideology, but there is an Indian ideology of secularism. The general ideology of secularism, it is asserted, has been historically validated by the experience and achievements of the so-called modern societies of the West in the last four hundred years and it should have succeeded in India too. Secondly, it is assumed that secularism will be welcomed by all right thinking persons, for it shows the way to the making of rational plans for social reconstruction and state action, placing ultimate faith in the adequacy of human agency. Finally, there is the assumption that, with appropriate corrective measures, secularism can still be made to succeed in India, notwithstanding all the faltering of the last four decades. Personally, I believe that all three assumptions should be subjected to critical scrutiny. I do not think that the virtues claimed for secularism are unquestionable or that it provides answers to all questions about life and living. Surely it has not been a complete success anywhere nor do we know of any wholly secularized societies. Our times are witness to the phenomena of desecularization and fundamentalism. There are obvious limits to what the theoretical and experimental sciences can enable human beings to know; and there are even more obvious limits to what technology and the bureaucratic organization of work can enable us to do. These limits are the limits of the historic process of 'rationalization' valorized in the ideology of secularism, even in the West, which is said to bring to the nonWestern countries intimations of their future as modernizing societies. Let me, then, take a quick look at the experience of Western society with secularism and secularization in order briefly to provide a comparative perspective for a discussion of the contemporary Indian situation. II. Secularization and Secularism in the West Any discussion of these issues is, I am afraid, bedevilled by terminological confusion, ethnographic diversity and ideological dissension. A generation ago, David Martin, a British sociologist, exasperated by the lack of fit between the varied empirical materials from Western societies and a general notion of secularization, with its roots in the counter-religious impulse, proposed erasure of the wretched word
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from the sociological vocabulary.1 But the. word is, of course, still with us and Martin has, since his original proposal, given us a book outlining, even if prematurely, 'a general theory of secularization', and presenting a fairly wide range of empirical possibilities within the narrow confines of the West (including Russia and the United States).2 In fact, the word 'secularization' has been with us since the seventeenth century from the years of negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It was then but a convenient term, describing the transfer of church properties to the exclusive control of the princes. It was only in the following century that this became a political programme, having its momentous expression in the French Revolution a century and a half later. In our own time, secularization has acquired the status of a 'social myth', which contains elements of truth, namely the empirical processes that constitute it, as well as distortions of that truth, all in the service of diverseeven contradictoryideological positions. While the so-called conservatives see secularization as a threat to their conceptions of the good, moral, life, robbing it of its ideas of sacredness and ultimate value, the secularists look upon it as an anti-religious emancipatory process. The latter consider urbanization, industrialization and modernization as the causes and the symptoms of the 'secularizing fever' that grips our societies today.3 Personally, I would have thought that the word 'secularization' was reasonably precise in its connotation and, therefore, useful in describing certain processes that are as old as human culture: the processes by which, step by step, human beings have reduced their dependence upon supra-human agency and narrowed down the areas of life in which religious ideas, symbols and institutions hold sway. The point I want to stress here is not that these processes are value-neutral, which they are not, or good or bad, but that they have more or less happened everywhere. They have been described in respect of contemporary India by many social scientists, including M. N. Srinivas and Milton Singer.4 These accounts are by no means
David Martin, 'Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularization' in J . Gould (ed.), Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965). 2 David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, Blackwell, 1978). 3 See, e.g., Peter Glasner, The Sociology of Secularization (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977). 4 M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modem India (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966); Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (New York, Praeger, I972)1
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non-ideological though: their authors are generally in favour of what they see happening, but they do not exactly beat drums about it. Actually, and as is well-known, the passage from value-neutral description to evaluation in social science "writing is very short and treacherously slippery, and one cannot be too careful. To avoid the conflation of the processes of secularization and the secularization thesisa. thesis about concomitance and entailment, even inevitability we do need, I think, the word 'secularism'. As is well-known, it was first used only in the middle of the nineteenth century by George Jacob Holyoake. He inherited from the Owenite and Utilitarian movements of England a naturalistic, ethical and social Utopian rationalism. From the French Revolution he derived republicanism, anticlericalism and an aversion to theology. The Central Secular Society that he founded had for its aim, among other goals, the endeavour 'to encourage men to trust Reason throughout, and to trust nothing that Reason does not establish'. Besides, the Society was to claim 'the fullest liberty of thought' and to discourage 'worship of supposed superior beings'.5 It is obvious that the inspiration behind the ideology of secularism was derived partly from the Enlightenment. No serious scholar anywhere believes any longer that Enlightenment philosophers rejected religion completely: they only sought to bind it within the limits of reason. It has been said that the philosophers of the Age of Reason 'demolished the Heavenly City of St Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.'6 Peter Gay, too, has pointed out in his authoritative account that the age of the Enlightenment was still a religious age, and that what secularization really involved was 'a subtle shift of attention: religious institutions and religious explanations of events were slowly being displaced from the centre of life to its periphery'.7 Even so, this shift was, in Ernst Cassirer's words, a change in 'the intellectual centre of gravity', bringing about an epochal break in the Western conceptions of ontology and epistemology. He quotes Kant: 'Enlightenment is man's exodus from his self-incurred tutelage . . .
See Colin Campbell, Towards a Sociology of Irreligion (London, Macmillan, 1971), PP- 46-576 Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1932), p. 31. 7 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, Vintage Books, 1966).
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"Dare to know" (sapere aude): Have the courage to use your own understanding; this is the motto of the Enlightenment'.8 It was a call for self-emancipation. Nature had been shorn of its mysteriesin Friedrich Schiller's phrase, it had been 'disenchanted' and reconceptualized as 'self-supporting and self-explanatory'. The question of transcendence had beenor so the philosophers thoughtset aside. The emphasis was no longer on things beyond, but on saecularis, or lasting worldly things judged as value, and on saeculum, or secular time, that is 'our age', here and now. If secularism is placed within the setting of the Enlightenment, as I think it should be, it is obvious that it is better denned positively as a reasonable theory about human agency, rather than negatively as an anti-religious ideology. Actually, there is more to it than just that: scholars from Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch to Louis Dumont and Peter Berger have in their different ways pointed to the essential linkages among Protestantism, individualism, and secularization. In Berger's succinct summing up, 'Protestantism cut the umbilical cord between heaven and earth',9 and presented secularization as a gift to humankind. David Martin, too, proclaims 'that secularization initially occurs within the ambit of Christian societies.'10 The limitation of space precludes details, but let me point out broadly that the idea of the privatization of religion, which is the recommendation of compassionate secularists to their less enlightened fellow human beings, owes its birth to, inter alia, the Protestant notion of the individual's assumption of responsibility for his or her own salvation without the aid of the Church. The general secularization of life in the West after the Reformation is significantly, though only partly, an unintended consequence of a religious idea. More directly, Martin Luther strengthened the forces of secularization by maintaining that the Christian community exists solely by faith, trusting in God's saving grace, and that the Church possesses no jurisdictional powers. He asserted that it is a duty laid upon all true Christians in the New Testament that they submit to secular authorities, the range of whose powers he actually extended in ways that ruled out resistance. Similarly, Calvin recommended political dutifulness to the faithful without regard for the character, conduct, or religion of the
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, N J., Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 163. 9 Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London, Allen Lane, 1973), P- 118. 10 Martin, A General Theory, p. Q.
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ruler. Luther and Calvin thus helped usher in a modern, secular, age that they would themselves hardly approve of." The situation abounds in paradoxes. Secularization in the narrow sense of transfer of Church properties, given to it by the historians, is anti-Church and anti-God. But in more recent times, many Christian theologians have made attempts to establish peace with the broad processes of secularization. The World Council of Churches adopted in 1950 the concept of secularized society as the basis of its own affirmations and activities. Some radical theologians accept secularization as the will of God for humankind, but reject secularism as error. Friedrich Gogarten puts it thus:
So long as faith and secularization remain what they are according to their nature, the relationship between them cannot be one of contending with each other for the sphere belonging to them. If faith keeps from secularization what is seized by it, faith ceases to be faith. If secularization begins to claim for itself that which belongs to faith, secularization does not remain with secularity, but becomes secularism.12
More stridently, Harvey Cox maintains that, while secularization as an 'irreversible' historical process has 'its roots in the biblical faith itself, secularism is an 'ism' and a 'closed world-view' which 'menaces the openness and freedom secularization has produced'.13 The implication of such views obviously is that the basic flaw with the ideology of secularism is its holistic, non-dualistic, character, and that the separation of the domains of the 'sacred' and the 'secular' must be acknowledged everywhere and in the same manner. The problem with its acceptance is that non-Christian religious traditions either do not make this distinction or make it hierarchically, subsuming the secular under the sacred. If this dichotomy is employed by contemporary Christian theologians to protect Christianity from secularismin fact, from the erosive effects of secularization itselfit occurs in sociological writings in just the opposite sense, to put the 'sacred' in its place, which is a private place or no place at all. Both postures are, it seems to me, characterized by doubt rather than confidence, though this is rarely acknowledged. Let me elucidate the sociological attitude by briefly recalling the
" Harro Hopfl (ed. and trans.), Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12 See, Harry Smith, Secularization and the University (Richmond VA, John Knox Press, 1968), pp. 25-44. 13 Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization ahnd Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York, Macmillan, 1965).
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judgements of three prominent founding fathers of sociology on the decline of religion and on the progress of secularization in the nineteenth-century West. I consider these judgements important for our discussion because the social sciences are in a significant sense a running commentary on this process. Marx, Durkheim and Weber were, all three, convinced about the decline of institutional religion in Europe and beyond: this is for sure. Thus Durkheim maintained that, although the inroads of science into human affairs had been deep, yet it was forbidden entry into 'the world of religious and moral life'. He thought, however, that even this 'final barrier' would be overcome, and science would 'establish herself as mistress in this reserved region' also. Was it then all over? Not quite. The uncertainty and the ambiguity of the following words from the same classic text,
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, is remarkable: 'there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself.' And so, 'religion seems destined to transform itself rather than to disappear."4 But we now know that this fairly accurate prognosis errs on the side of caution. The point I want to make is perhaps best illustrated by what has been happening in North America in the years since World War Two. In a richly documented recent study, the Princeton sociologist, Robert Wuthnow, points out that a simpleminded, linear notion of secularization is wholly inadequate to capture the restructuring in our time of American religion in all its vibrancy and complexity.15 Weber, deeply influenced by Nietzsche as he was, was less confident, I think, about the future of a secularized world than Durkheim. But what he was sure of was the significance of secularization and of the decline of religion: of the fate of our times [being] characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world'. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. 'Science is meaningless', he approvingly quoted Tolstoy as saying, 'because it gives no answer to our question, the only question importEmile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York, Macmillan, 1915), pp. 462-96. 15 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1989).
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ant for us: "What shall we do and how shall we live?" " 6 Weber placed power at the very centre of a rationalized (secularized) world, but saw no evidence at all of its exercise anywhere totally divorced from religion. As he put it, 'the complete subordination of priestly to secular power . . . can nowhere be found in its pure type'.17 Maybe we can derive greater strength about the post-religious world from Marx. He was not the one to shed tears over the demise of religion, which he dismissed as 'the opium of the masses', but he had his own doubts about the future course of secularization. He wrote: 'the fact that the secular foundation [of life] lifts itself above itself, and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm, is only to be explained by the self-cleavage and self contradictoriness of the secular basis'.18 In other words, secularism can itself pretend to become a religion, not only in the sense that secular humanism is a religion, but also and more pretentiously as the ideology of the state, and that points to contemporary India. Secularism as the state ideology of India seeks to provide the moral basis of public life just as Islam supposedly does in Pakistan; the state in India is expected to protect and promote secularism in more or less the same manner in which the Sri Lankan state is expected to protect and promote Buddhism; and secularism, it is hoped, will be the prevailing ethos of modern India as Hinduism has been of traditional Nepal. If this be so, then the apprehension that it has run into difficulties merits careful study. III. A Gandhian Perspective Secularism in India is a multivocal word: what it means depends upon who uses the word and in what context. There is, therefore, no single or straight answer to the question as to why secularism in India has run into difficulties. Let me then attempt to present two possible answers which are based on my understanding of Mahatma Gandhi's
16 Max Weber, 'Science as a Vocation' in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. '55, '4317 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 1158-60. 18 See Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 49. The phrase 'opium of the masses' is from Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the reference to the dissolution of religion from The German Ideology. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy,
ed. by Lewis S. Feur (New York, Doubleday, Anchor, 1959), pp. 262-6, 246-61.
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and Jawaharlal Nehru's views on the relationship of religion, politics and the state. Needless to emphasize, I do not pretend that my answers are what Gandhi and Nehru themselves would have said, had they been alive today. Obviously, we must begin with Mahatma Gandhi because he is often referred to as the spiritual father of Indian secularism. He has even been inaccurately and unjustly called a secularist. If the essence of all varieties of secularism is the demarcation of boundaries between the sacred and secular domains per se, then Gandhi would have had no use for any such ideology. Its success would have been a moral disaster. His vision, as has been noted so often, was holistic, with religion as its constitutive principleas the source of value for judging the worth of all worldly goals and actions. Religion here means, above all, altruism (sevddharma), moral reason (atmatushti), and the putting of one's faith in the saving grace of God {Rama ndma). 'For me', Gandhi observed, 'every, the tiniest, activity is governed by what I consider my religion'.19 This was a timeless principle for him and yet he was very sensitive to the conditions and demands of particular times and places, in conformity with the kdla-desha sensitivity of Indian classical tradition. 'Every age', Gandhi wrote, 'is known to have its predominant mode of spiritual effort best suited for the attainment of moksha. . . . In this age, only political sannydsis can fulfil and adorn the ideal of sannydsd1. Consequently, 'No Indian who aspires to follow the way of true religion can afford to remain aloof from politics'.20 Now, Bhikhu Parekh asserts in an insightful and thought-provoking discussion of Gandhi's political philosophy that, 'there was hardly a Hindu religious category and practice to which [Gandhi] did not give a worldly and secular content'. In other words, 'Gandhi secularized Hinduism as much as it was possible to do within a spiritual framework'.21 The emphasis upon the word 'within' is Parekh's and it is of crucial importance. It signifies that the relationship of the sacred and the secularof dharma and artha, or religion and politicsis 'hierarchical' (in the Dumontian sense): the latter category is opposed to the former but also encompassed by it. Did Gandhi, then, secularize religion or did he sacralize politics? Both positions have strong adherents. I would rather side with Margaret Chatterji's judgement that
19 See R a g h a v a n I y e r ( e d . ) , The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi: Vol. I: Civilization, Politics, and Religion ( O x f o r d C l a r e n d o n P r e s s , 1980), p . 3 9 1 . 20 B h i k h u P a r e k h , Gandhi's Political Philosophy ( L o n d o n , M a c m i l l a n , 1989), p . 100. 21 Ibid., p . 109.
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'Gandhi seems almost a secularist', but judged by his handling of concrete issues, notably the communal (Hindu-Muslim) problem, he 'was not secularist, if by this we mean an attempt to prune away all religious considerations from political matters'.22 Gandhi was very careful with his use of words and so must we be in attempting to construct an answer to our question on the basis of first principles such as the above. Politics were sacralized by Gandhi, they became the dharma of the age (yugadharma) and, consequently not contradictorilythe state was devalorized, for its constitutive principle is power or coercion. In his conception of the moral or perfect society, Gandhi emphasized that its enduring basis can only be the moral calibre of the individuals who constitute it. He extended the principle to the relationship of the citizen to the state. As Parekh puts it, 'For Gandhi it was the citizen's sense of moral responsibility for his actions that ultimately determined the character of the state'.23 In itself, the state, in Gandhian reckoning, is amoral, impersonal, distant, coercive, and even violent. Although Gandhi's views on the state became less negative over time, he never warmed up to this institution. In Parekh's summing up, 'It took him a long time to appreciate its moral, regenerative and redistributive role and even then his acceptance of it remained half-hearted and unintegrated into his general perspective'.24 Gandhi did not set much store by Western liberal democracy either, considering it to be rooted in individual selfishness and a materialist conception of the good life.25 A Gandhian would, it seems to me, have to say that secularism has run into difficulties in India because the state is too much with us, because it intrudes into areas of life where it has no business even to peep. That state is best which governs the least. Talking with a Christian missionary in September 1946, Gandhi said: 'If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion, I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern!'26 A year later, soon after independence and a few months before his death, he said:
M a r g a r e t Chatterji, Gandhi's Religious Thought (London, M a c m i l l a n , 1983), p. 85. P a r e k h , Gandhi's Political Philosophy, p . 124. i4 Ibid,, p . 204. 25 B h i k h u P a r e k h , Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's Political Discourse ( N e w D e l h i , S a g e , 1989), p . 74. 26 I y e r ( e d . ) , The Moral and Political Writings, p . 395.
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'The state should undoubtedly be secular. Everyone in it should be entitled to profess his religion without let or hindrance, so long as the citizen obeys the common law of the land.' 27 But he was totally against the idea of a state religion or state support for any religion. 'A society or group', he said, 'which depends partly or wholly on state aid for the existence of its religion, does not deserve or, better still, does not have any religion worth the name.' 28 To the extent to which Indian secularism, even though it stands for equal respect for all religious faiths (sarvadharma sambhdva), is a state ideology, enshrined in the Constitution in which it is linked to the materialist ideology of socialismto the extent to which it has nothing to say about the individual except in terms of his or her rights, it is from the Gandhian perspective a hedonistic ideology and deserves to fail. In Judith Brown's excellent summing up, 'In Gandhi's eyes men and women were human in virtue of their capacity for religious vision. . . . [If] this was stifled by the individual or by political and economic structures then people were degraded and dehumanized. This was so strong and striking an attack on secular materialism as could be made'. 29 A Gandhian critique of secularism in terms of ultimate values and individual responsibility is in some respects similar to Max Weber's concern with the problem of value. What Gandhi and Weber are saying is that a secularized world is inherently unstable because it elevates to the realm of ultimate values the only values it knows and these are instrumental values. 'Natural science', Weber said, 'gives us an answer to the question of what we must do if we wish to master life technically. It leaves quite aside, or assumes for its purposes, whether we should and do wish to master life technically and whether it ultimately makes sense to do so.'30
IV. Nehru on Religion, Politics and Secularism

Gandhian remedies are believed by modern Indians to be far-fetched and impractical, if not obscurantist. The fact that he was not a systematic thinker, attaching greater importance to action (dcdra) and
S e e N . K . Bose (ed.), Selections from Gandhi ( A h m e d a b a d , N a v j i v a n , 1948), p . 28 Ibid., p . 287. 29 J u d i t h M . B r o w n , GandhiPrisoner of Hope (Delhi, O x f o r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , I99 2 ) P- 39230 Weber, 'Science as a Vocation', p. 144.
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experience (anubhava) than to thought (victim), does not make the task of examining the contemporary relevance of Gandhi's views any easier.31 In any case, there was hardly anyone among the leaders of independent India who could be said to want to build on the basis of Gandhi's political and economic philosophy. In relation to the character of the new state, Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad were no closer to Gandhi than was Nehru, which does not mean that their notions of a strong state were identical. It is perhaps ironic that Gandhi's public designation of Nehru as his political heir added strength to and bestowed legitimacy on Nehru's own independent position as a national leader. Let us then turn to Jawaharlal Nehru for a diagnosis of the malady that has afflicted Indian secularism. Before we proceed let us look again at the words 'religion' and 'secularism' in the context of Nehru's views, abiding by the good advice that we must pay a word extra when we make it do a lot of work! By intellectual preference Nehru's concept of secularism was the same that I talked about earlier in this paper in the context of the Enlightenment. He was against institutional religion, ritual, and mysticism and did not consider himself a religious person. He was not, however, uninterested in spiritual matters. Any impressions of his boyhood experiences of Brahmanical belief and ritual were erased by his reading of the works of Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell and other similar thinkers. His study of world history and his encounters with the Indian masses in the 1920s and 1930s made him feel very negative about the role of religion in human affairs and he looked forward to a secularized society. He was an agnostic and subscribed to a rationalist, and even a historicist, worldview. Gandhi's religiosity, to put it mildly, puzzled and annoyed him. It caused him to write (in his autobiography) one of his clearest and mature statements on the subject of religion. Referring to the anguish that the news of Gandhi's fast (in September 1932) on the subject of separate electorates (in Nehru's judgement 'a side political issue') had caused him while he was in prison, Nehru wrote: 'I felt angry with him at his religious and sentimental approach to a political question, and his frequent references to God in connection with it'.32 He went on to observe:
31 I owe this framework for examining traditional Indian thought to Professor K. J . Shah, who may not, however, approve of my use of it. 32 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund/Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980).
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India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else. . . . [And yet] I have frequently condemned [religion] and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests. And yet I knew well that there was something else in it, something which supplied a deeper inner craving of human beings.33 Indian religiosity had been on Nehru's mind for quite some time, though he refused to be unduly worried about it. It was more a nuisance than a real problem. In 1928 he had declared: 'If religion, or rather what is called religion, in India continues to interfere with everything, then it will not be a mere question of divorcing it from politics, but of divorcing it from life itself.34 The Gandhian imperative of religion as the guide to all, even 'the tiniest', activities was not what Nehru believed in. As for the Gandhian notion of divine grace, Nehru considered the idea of 'a personal god' 'very odd'. 35 Like all modern intellectuals he had implicit confidence in the processes of secularization. Proclaiming this confidence in his presidential address to the Lahore (1929) session of the Congress, he said: 'I have no love for bigotry and dogmatism in religion, and I am glad that they are weakening. Nor do I love communalism in any shape or form. . . . I know that the time is coming soon when these labels and appellations will have little meaning and when our struggle will be on the economic basis'.36 Two years laterin fact again and again during the next two decadeshe reaffirmed the primacy of the economic factor: 'the real thing to my mind is the economic factor. If we lay stress on this and divert public attention to it we shall find automatically that religious differences recede into the background and a common bond
unites different groups. The economic bond is stronger than even the national
one' (emphasis added). 37 These concluding words underlined Nehru's radical position and his socialist convictions. Given this position, it is no wonder that Nehru was dismissive about the Hindu-Muslim problem: 'the question does not exist at all for us', he declared.38 Less dismissively, he said in his presidential address at the Lucknow (1936) Congress: 'First of all the Congress
Ibid., p. 374. S. Gopal (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi, O r i e n t L o n g m a n ) [hereafter SWJN], vol. 3, 1972, p . 233. 35 J a w a h a r l a l N e h r u , The Discovery of India (Bombay, Asia, 1961), p . 28. 36 SWJN, vol. 4, 1973, p. 188. 37 SWJN, vol. 5, 1973, p. 203. Ibid., p. 282.
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always put independence first and other questions, including the communal one, second, and refused to allow any other of those questions to take the pride of place'. He added: 'I am afraid I cannot get excited over the communal issue, important as it is temporarily. It is after all a side issue, and it can have no real importance in the larger scheme of things'.39 The same train of thought was given considered expression in The Discovery of India (written in prison during 1944). He wrote: 'The belief in a super-natural agency which ordains everything has led to a certain irresponsibility on the social plane, and emotion and sentimentality have taken the place of reasoned thought and inquiry. Religion, though it has undoubtedly brought comfort to innumerable human beings and stabilized society by its values, has checked the tendency to change and progress inherent in human society.'40 He confessed candidly in the same work, that religion did not 'attract' him for 'behind it lay a method of approach to life's problems which was certainly not that of science'.41 Just three years before he became the Prime Minister of India, he looked forward to the future and exhorted Indians that they face life 'with the temper and approach of science allied to philosophy and with reverence for all that lies beyond'.42 Out of prison in 1945, Nehru faced a rapidly changing political situation and, much to his chagrin, the 'side issue' moved fast to occupy the centre of the stage. He was disbelieving and appalled. 'To think in terms of Pakistan when the modern trend is towards the establishment of a world federation is like thinking in terms of bows and arrows as weapons of war in the age of the atomic bomb'.43 The viceroy, Lord Wavell, recorded in his journal on 14 July 1945: 'the theme of [Nehru's] discourse was that [Pakistan represented] a narrow medieval conception, and that the eventual cleavage when India's freedom was secured would be between poor and rich, between peasant and landlord, between labour and employer'.44 India's freedom was secured two years later, but the country was partitioned on the basis of religion. I have quoted fairly extensively from Nehru's writings, statements and speeches to highlight the consistency of his thinking over two decades and more. It is obvious that the decisive element in this thinking was, at the broadest level, an Enlightenment view of religion,
39 41 43
SWJN, vol. 7, 1975, p- 190. Ibid., p. 26. SWJN, vol. 14, 1981, p. 187.
42
* Nehru, The Discovery, p. 543. Ibid., p. 547. ** Ibid., p. 46.
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which was against revelation and dogmatism rather than religion as such, if it did not offend against reason, and, more specifically, the Marxian position on religion, though considerably diluted. It is thus that we find Nehru attacks the bigotry and dogmatism of religion, but acknowledges that religion stands for higher things of life too. He wrote of the comfort that religion had brought to innumerable people and did not dismiss the phenomenon as 'the opium of the people' as Marx had done. But the idea of economic issues having precedence over even the question of independence from colonial rule is in accordance with the Marxian position. As is well known, in their discussion of the role of ideologies, Marx and Engels observed in The German Ideology that any attempt to understand an epoch of history in terms of political and religious issues is to 'share the illusion of the epoch'.45 Similarly, Engels in his graveside summary of Marx's thought, had said that Marx had 'discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc.' 46 Actually, Marx believed that religion had already been dissolved by the circumstances prevailing in Europe in his own time.47 And Lenin had affirmed that even while the socialists must fight against religion, doing so did 'not mean that the religious question must be pushed into the foreground where it does not belong'. 48 Nehru acknowledged his indebtedness to the teachings of Marx and Lenin in his autobiography, The Discovery of India and elsewhere; but he was too much of a liberal to be called a copybook Marxist. In short, Nehru's position on religion, religious conflict and the significance of the processes of secularization was what would be called rational and modern, whether one sees it derived from Marxian or Lockean roots. It was also idealist in the sense that it reflected more the ideals of the European Enlightenment than the hard facts of society, culture and politics in India. The latter generated compulsions at variance with these ideals. It is remarkable that it was Nehru who in the same year, 1931, in which he gave the hopeful message of the recession of religious differences (quoted above) persuaded the All-India Congress Committee (at its Karachi session) to insert in
M a r x a n d Engels, Basic Writings, p . 259. Quoted in H. B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (London, Cohen and West, 1955), p. 143. 47 Marx and Engels, Basic Writings, p. 260. 48 V. I. Lenin, Religion (Calcutta, Burmon Publishing House, n.d.), p. 16.
46 45
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the resolution on fundamental rights 'Freedom of conscience and of the profession and practice of any religion'.49 Further, all citizens of free India would be equal before the law", irrespective of religious (and similar other) differences, and the state would observe neutrality in regard to all religions (dahrma nirpekshatd). 'This', Nehru's biographer S. Gopal tells us, 'was the first breakdown, in concrete terms, of the concept of secularism in the Indian context and formed the basis of the [relevant] articles in the constitution many years later'.50 The Constitution did not, however, contain the words 'secular' or 'secularism' anywhere. The addition of the words 'secular' and 'socialist' to the description of India as a 'sovereign republic' in the Preamble of the Constitution came through the 42nd Amendment in 1976 (during Indira Gandhi's Emergency rule). Was such specific reference to secularism considered unnecessary earlier, when the Constitution was being framed (1946-49)? Or was it too controversial? Perhaps both; which exactly would depend upon whom one has in mind. The transcript of the debate in the Constituent Assembly reveals that there was considerable difference of opinion on the right of propagation of one's religion, in addition to its profession and practice, but it was ultimately approved. The following statement by the well-known Congressman, H. V. Kamath, perhaps represented the general feeling of the members of the house: 'the State represents all the people who live in its territories, and, therefore it cannot afford to identify itself with any particular section of the population. . . . We have certainly declared that India should be a secular State. But . . . a secular state is neither a Godless State nor an irreligious, nor an anti-religious, state'.51 Already, one can see, the notion of the secular state, and of secularism, were being enveloped in ambiguity, meaning what one wished the terms to mean. More about the Constitution below. Let me first recall how Nehru, having seen his confidence in the primacy of the economic over the religious factor proven premature, if not wholly misplaced, looked to the future after partition and independence. A few months after these events he posed the question: 'Do we believe in a national state which includes people of all religions and shades of opinion and is essentially a secular state, or do we believe in the religious, theocratic conception of the state?' His answer was unequivocal: 'we shall proceed on secu49
50
SWJN, vol. 4, 1973, P- 5'*.
S. Gopal, 'Nehru and Secularism', Occasional Papers, No. 42 (Mimeo), New Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1987, p. 12. 51 Constituent Assembly of India Debates, 6 December 1948, p. 825.
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lar and national lines'.52 This then became the guiding principle that animated the Constitution (then on the anvil) and became the basis of state policy in all relevant areas of action. The great Indian experiment of nation building, or national integration, had thus entered its most crucial phase. It, however, suffered from a critical moral flaw. Given Nehru's lifelong aversion to religion as practised by common peoplethe socalled popular religion he could not have suddenly begun to see virtues in it. Moreover, within the western liberal tradition, the modern state had emerged as secular in the specific sense that the maintenance of the 'true faith', or any faith, was none of its concerns.'53 Nehru's definition of the secular state in terms of religious pluralism (quoted above) was, it seems obvious to me, a compromise, a strategy to deal with an awkward problem, viz. the all-pervasive influence of religion in society, that would not go away. Nehru had made such compromises more than once in his political career: on one historic occasion (the 1936 presidential address to the Congress) he had called them 'temporary expedients of a transition rather than as solutions of our vital problems'. 54 Like his attitude to khadi denned thus on this occasion, religious pluralism was, it seems to me, an arrangement ad interim. The infirmity of the experiment of nation-building lay not only in that religious pluralism was meaningless in the absence of a positive attitude to religion, but equally significantly in the idiom of its articulation which was modern. Nehru had written that ideas like 'socialism' and (I should think) 'secularism' must be communicated to the people in 'the language of the mind and the heart, . . . the language which grows from a complex of associations of past history and culture and present environment'. 55 Needless to add, this could not have been the language of India's westernized educated elite, whom Gandhi had called 'hard hearted'. Eleven years after independence, and eight years after the adoption of the Constitution, Nehru was visited by Andre Malraux in Delhi and asked what his greatest problem had been during his years of power. Nehru replied: 'Creating a just state by just means', and, after a pause, 'Perhaps, too, creating a secular state in a religious society.'56
52
S. G o p a l ( e d . ) , Selected Works of Jawaharlal Q u e n t i n S k i n n e r , The Foundations
Nehru, Second Series ( N e w D e l h i , J a w a The Age of Reformation
harlal Nehru Memorial Fund) [hereafter SWJN-o], vol. 5, 1987, p. 26.

53
of Modem Political Thought:
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 352.

54 36
55 SWJN, vol. 7, 1975, p. !82. Ibid., p. 562. Andre Malraux, Antimemoirs (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1968), p. 145.
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I detect a sense of defeat in Nehru's observations on the subject in his later years. Sorrowfully he wrote in 1961, just three years before his death: 'We talk about a secular state in India. It is perhaps not very easy even to find a good word in Hindi for "secular". Some people think it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. . . . It is a state which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities.' Having written this, he proceeded more in line with his earlier thinking on the subject:
Our constitution lays down that we are a secular state, but it must be admitted that this is not wholly reflected in our mass living and thinking. In a country like England, the state is . . . allied to one particular religion . . . Nevertheless, the state and the people there function in a largely secular way. Society, therefore, in England is more advanced in this respect than in India, even
though our constitution may be in this matter more advanced.57 (emphasis added)
It is clear from this that Nehru had not given up his trust of the processes of secularization and of the secularization thesis. The chasm between him and Gandhi was deep. For Gandhi secularism in the sense of religious pluralism entailed interreligious understanding and mutual respect: it was the strength of Indian society while communal politics tied to statism could be its bane. For Nehru, however, religiosity and the attendant conflicts were the badge of social backwardness. Secularism in the sense of neutrality as state policy was a strategy to cope with a difficult situation. And the state was potentially a very important instrument of public welfare and social advancement, very much on the lines J. S. Mill and other liberals had advocated.58 I am puzzled by those intellectuals who speak of a hyphenated GandhiNehru view of secularism or, for that matter, of development. It is high time we accepted the authoritative verdict of B. R. Nanda: 'The working partnership of Nehru and Gandhi lasted till the end, but their philosophies of life never really converged'.59 A Nehruvian answer to the question why Indian secularism has
57 See S. G o p a l (ed.), Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980), p p . 33of. 58 ' I n m a n y parts of t h e world, the people can d o nothing for themselves which requires large m e a n s a n d combined actions; all such things a r e left undone, unless done b y t h e state': J o h n Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, I I , p p . 6 0 2 - 3 , quoted in Karl de Schweinitz, Jr., The Rise and Fall of British India: Imperialism as Inequality ( L o n d o n , M e t h u e n , 1983), p. 125. (I a m grateful to D r R a m a s h r a y Roy for drawing m y attention to t h e passage from which I have quoted t h e above sentence.) 59 B. R. Nanda, Gokhale, Gandhi and the Nehrus: Studies in Indian Nationalism (London, Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 103.
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run into difficulties would, then, be that the people of India are not yet ready for it. It requires a level of general education that is yet beyond them, and a liberal outlook on life and scientific temper which unfortunately they lack. Religious intolerance has, in fact, intensified in recent years and fundamentalisms of various names and hues stalk the land today. The question that strikes one is that, if Nehru understood what India's problem in this regard was, why did he not strive harder than he did to remove the obstacles that stood in the way of a modern, secular, society? One can never be sure, but I could venture a reasonable guess. In the early years after independence Nehru remained firmly wedded to the belief that state-sponsored economic growth was the key to social development. Hence, in his eyes, dams and factories were India's new temples. In believing so in the 1950s he was in excellent company. Confessional statements by economists on the 'sins' of a narrow concept of the contents of the growth basket and of the quantitative approach to development were not to come before another decade would pass. By the time this approach to development ran into a crisis Nehru was a sick man and he died soon afterwards in 1964. He had bet on what had seemed a sure winner, but it turned out to be a lame horse. The most serious failure of the 1950s from the point of view of the present discussion was the shocking neglect of radical educational reform. Gunnar Myrdal delivered his magisterial verdict to this effect in 1968, four years after Nehru's passing, in his
Asian Drama.60
V. Secularism and the Constitution Nehru also put his faith in the Constitution and in the legislative process, and this turned out to be the sin of 'excess' rather than 'neglect'. I am not a jurist any more than I am an economist, but I find certain contradictions in the Constitution. An examination of Articles 13 to 17, 19, 23, 25 to 30 (all from Part III dealing with 'Fundamental Rights'), and of Articles 44, 48 and 51 (from Part IV on Directive Principles) brings these out clearly. Thus, Articles 25 to 30, which are the most crucial in this regard, guarantee 'freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion' (25), 'freedom to manage religious affairs' (26), 'freedom as to pay60
Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, 3 vols (New York, Pantheon, 1968), vol. 3, ch.
29-
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ment of taxes for promotion of any particular religion' (27), and 'freedom as to attendance at religious instruction or religious worship in certain educational institutions' (28). They protect the 'interests of minorities' (29), including their 'right . . . to establish and administer educational institutions' (30). Article 44 directs that 'the State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout . . . India'. The way things have proceeded reveals the contradiction between Articles 25 to 30 and Article 44. The jurists may well argue that Directive Principles do not have the same force as Fundamental Rights and, therefore, the question of contradiction does not arise. The point I want to make is that the former have contributed enormously to the strengthening of inward-looking communal feelings and attitudes and obstructed the spread of modern, secular, education and attitudes among the minorities. It is not at all surprising that the state has so far failed to implement the constitutional directive of evolving a uniform civil code. The greatest resistance has come from Muslims, some of whose leaders claim that their social life cannot be governed by any laws other than the sharia. This in spite of the fact that the Constituent Assembly had, by a resolution in 1948, rejected the contention that Muslim personal law was inseparable from Islam and, therefore, protected against legislative interference. The British rulers of India had had greater success in this regard as the Criminal Procedure Code that they enactedit is still largely in force in India, but has been modified in Pakistanoverrode traditional laws and conventions. The framers of the Constitution, it seems to me, failed to realize that in a democratic polity the state will reflect the character of the society, and that a communally divided society and a secular state are mutually contradictory. One is reminded of Karl Marx's perceptive observation, in his tract on 'The Jewish Question', that 'the emancipation of the state from religion is not the emancipation of the real man from religion';61 needless to add that the real man he spoke of is the socially situated person. There are other contradictions in the Constitution that bear upon the present discussion. I mentioned Articles 17 and 48. Now, the former was a triumph for what Gandhi would have called moral reason: it abolished the practice of untouchability 'in any form'. This was aimed to promote the cause of the so-called low caste Hindus, who had been exploited and humiliated by upper caste Hindus for
61 Karl Marx, 'On the Jewish Question' in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 14674.
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as long as anyone could remember, actually for centuries. But Article 48 represented a concession to high caste Hindu sentiment, 'prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle', though the reason given is a secular one, namely the organization of'agriculture and animal husbandry on modern scientific lines'. The record of the debate on this issue in the Constituent Assembly reveals that Nehru had to threaten resignation in order to have this ban given a secular character. The Hindu lobby, which had the informal patronage of the President, Dr Rajendra Prasad, had wanted a general ban, and Nehru none of it. As early as 1923, when he was the Mayor of Allahabad, he had persuaded the municipal Board to reject a proposal to prohibit cow slaughter.62 It may be argued that the ban on cow slaughter is no more Brahmanical than Article 47, which includes a directive about prohibition on the consumption of intoxicants, is Islamic. This would be legal quibbling, for we know the strong sentiment against cow slaughter, generated among Hindus generally during the last one hundred years, to be a politically explosive issue. It is noteworthy that, in the furtherance of the objectives of a secularized society and the establishment of a secular state, Nehru showed a much greater willingness to oppose what he considered reactionary elements among the Hindus than among the other communities. This was best illustrated by his stand on the Hindu Code Bill. The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, and the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956, were enacted by the Parliament, despite opposition by conservative Hindu leaders, including President Prasad, mainly because of Nehru's insistence. I agree with Bhikhu Parekh's insightful observation that 'Nehru's state acted as, and claimed all the rights of a Hindu state in its relation to the Hindus . . . because he and his colleagues were and thought of themselves as Hindus . . . they [thus] both dared take liberties with the Hindus and dared not take them with respect to the Muslims and even Sikhs'.63 VI. The MajorityMinority Conundrum Nehru's firm stand apparently contrasts with the vacillating attitude of the Rajiv Gandhi government, which rushed through Parliament
See Gopal, 'Nehru and Secularism', p. 24. Bhikhu Parekh, 'Nehru and the National Philosophy of India', Economic and Political Weekly, 5-12, Jan. 1991, p. 42.
63 62
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the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights) Act in 1986, to nullify the Supreme Court's verdict in the famous Shah Bano case upholding the legal liability of a Muslim male to provide maintenance support for the wife he divorces. The new law was a concession to the conservative Muslim lobby according to which Muslim society is subject to sharia everywhere and for all time.64 But there is a sense in which Rajiv Gandhi was simply continuing with the Congress legacy of providing special treatment and protection to religious minorities in accordance with their own wishes. This had been endorsed by both Gandhi and Nehru, and represented 'the benign elder brother' mentality. In any case, the 1986 happenings could hardly be cited as the best way of using the legislative process as an instrument of secularization. This is particularly regrettable in view of the directive incorporated in Article 51 (by Amendment in 1976) 'to promote scientific temper' (5i-A[a]) and to 'preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture' (51-AU]). One could, however, well argue that these two additions to Article 51 are so vague and trite that those responsible for their inclusion in the Constitution could have hardly been serious about them. Why did Nehru treat Hindus and Muslims differently? Why have successive governments at the Centre since Nehru's death in 1964 and up to date done so? Should not non-discrimination between different religious communities be one of the first principles of the policies of a secular state? The answer, it seems to me, lies largely in the majorityminority conundrum which has acquired near-pathological proportions in India today. This calls for some elucidation. In a democratic polity being in a majority betokens public approval and signifies legitimate success for the group concerned. Such majorities represent interest groups and ideological positions. In Thomas Jefferson's celebrated phrase, 'the will of the majority' is 'the Natural law of every society', 'the only sure guardian of the rights of man'.65 Nobody is in a majority, so conceived, or out of it, because of ascribed, or near-ascribed, attributes of race, gender, language or religion. Majorities based on such attrributes are rightly judged to be unfair winners in political games. A questionable assumption, however, underlies the existence of majorities of this kind, namely that they
See U p e n d r a Baxi, 'Secularism: Real a n d Pseudo', in M . M . Sankhder (ed.), Secularism in India (New Delhi, Deep a n d Deep, 1992), p . 95. Also see S. P . Sathe, 'Secularism, L a w a n d the Constitution of India', in M . S. Gore (ed.), Secularism in India (Allahabad, V i d h y a Prakashan, 1991), p p . 39-59. 65 N o b l e E . C u n n i n g h a m , J r . , In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson ( N e w Delhi, Affiliated East-West Press, 1991), p. 133.
64
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are internally undifferentiated in terms of social customs, economic interests and political loyalties, and are, therefore, able to appear and even act as monoliths, as it were. No religious community of India is, however, internally so undifferentiated, the Hindus least of all. So much so, indeed that, as a sociologist, I find little warrant for using the word 'community' in referring to the Hindus. But politically motivated Hindus have learnt its immense usefulness and nonHindus never let go of it, whether in reference to themselves or the Hindus. The majority-minority differentiation has thus become an integral part of the Indian political calculus. We need to go back a little in time to appreciate how things have come to such a pass. It is perhaps ironic that primordially defined majorities and minorities entered the Indian political idiom in the context of granting representation to people in local self-governance. The best known critics of the introduction of western liberal notions of elective representation in the 1880s, when the viceroy, Lord Ripon, brought forward his Local Self-Government Bill (1883), were Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Amir Ali, who maintained that such a measure would be unsuitable to a heterogenous society such as the Indian, characterized as it was by not only differences of race and religion, caste and creed, but also of numbers. Arguments were backed by action: for instance, the influential ulama of the newly founded seminary at Deoband (in north India) issued fatwas discouraging social and economic contacts between Muslims and Hindus. The notion of a Muslim minority, threatened by a socially mobile and politically assertive Hindu majority was thus born. It accorded well with the official British perception of India as a country of discordant religious communities, castes and tribes. Moreover, several historians have argued that, at the core of the Muslim opposition to western-style political representation lay several religious and political convictions. Thus, Muslims are said to be ever conscious of belonging to a divinely constituted religious brotherhood, entitled to wield political power over non-Muslims by virtue of their moral superiority. In India, in the late nineteenth century, they also considered themselvesat least the immigrants and the aristocrats among them did sothe legatees of the Mughal empire. Finally, the political arena is seen by Muslims as the arena par excellence of the expression of religious values, and not a domain apart.66
66
See Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in
Colonial India, 1860-igtf (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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Unable to stop the idea of representative government, even in its most limited form, in its tracks, Sayyid Ahmad put forward the notion of 'separate electorates', based on religious identity, towards the end of the nineteenth century. The idea of 'weightage' also was mooted to overcome the disadvantage of numbers. The new principle that came to dominate the thinking of certain sections of Muslim political leadership in the twentieth century was that of'parity'. This notion was finally embraced by M. A. Jinnah in the crucial final years leading to partition and independence in 1947. Had the principle of parity at the federal level been conceded, treating Muslims on a par with Hindus, and providing safeguards for the others, some historians think, partition might have been avoided.67 In its absence, emphasis upon the character of Muslims as a 'minority', or as a separate 'nation', depending upon the context, was Jinnah's trump card. Addressing the All-India Muslim League in Lahore in 1940 at the Lahore session, which later adopted the separate Muslim states resolution, Jinnah ridiculed Gandhi's protestations of brotherly feelings towards non-Hindus and Mr Jinnah himself: 'The only difference is this, that brother Gandhi has three votes and I have only one vote'. 68 This was, of course, a reference to the arithmetic of Hindu and Muslim populations in the 1941 census. A decade later, the Constitution of India acknowledged the concept of minorities, but did not define it precisely, leaving a good deal to be inferred. Thus, Articles 29 and 30 specifically refer to the rights (in fact, Fundamental Rights) of 'minorities' to make efforts to conserve their languages, scripts and cultures, have free access to stateaided educational institutions, and to establish and administer their own educational institutions. Although it seems perverse to me to place an interpretation on these constitutional provisions to the effect that only minorities have such rights, mischievous politicians have not been reluctant to cite them as evidence of 'minorityism'. The forthright views of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, hailed as 'the father of the Indian Constitution', do not exactly help in removing such doubts. The minorities, he said in the Constituent Assembly, 'have loyally accepted the rule of the majority which is basically a communal majority and not a political majority. It is for the majority to realize its duty not to discriminate against minorities. Whether the minorities
67 A y e s h a J a l a l , The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985). 68 Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1988), p.
181.
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will continue or will vanish must depend upon this habit of the majority. The moment the majority loses the habit of discrimination against the minority, the minorities can have no ground to exist.'69 The majority and the minorities thus stood defined, though in a somewhat Humpty Dumpty fashion. Without any regard for the social reality of the multiplicity of economic interests and political opinion among Hindus, among Muslims, and among Sikhs, imagined majorities and minorities were said by these political leaders to be pitted against each other in a life-anddeath struggle, in which the majority was stigmatized as the bully if not the villain. For Jinnah, who claimed to be 'the sole spokesman' on behalf of the Muslims, the Congress was a Hindu organization and Maulana Azad its 'show-boy' President; Gandhi was merely the leader of the Hindu 'community', an opinion which he reiterated in his condolence message on Gandhi's death, ignoring the circumstances of the assassination. And for Ambedkar, Gandhi was a usurper who unjustly claimed to speak on behalf of low caste Hindus. Not everybody, however, agreed, then or later, with such views of dominant and dominated majorities and minorities. Frank Anthony, at that time the acknowledged leader of the Anglo-Indians, repudiated, on the floor of the Constituent Assembly itself, the allegation that the minorities were being deprived of their rights and otherwise oppressed. On the contrary, he said, the minorities had made demands that were not tenable.70 But he did not abandon the concepts of majority and minority. Professor V. V.John, a distinguished Indian intellectual who happened to be a Christian, and many others like him, have done precisely this, and asked for the protection of human rights rather than minority rights. He complains that the leaders of the so-called minority communities practice 'selective secularism' and demand from Hindus what they do not themselves practice.71 One ingenious argument in this regard is that minority communalism is the half-way house to secularism.72 It will be recalled that, after the Partition, the Muslim fundamentalist organization, Jama'at-i-Islami (Hind), through a series of pronouncements, accepted 'in the present circumstances', which meant conditionally, 'the secular form of government', but rejected secularism as an ideology. It described its decision quite explicitly as one
69 70 71 72
Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. 7, I, p . 3 9 . Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. 8, pp. 333-8, 346-9. Auditor's notes at a lecture given in New Delhi, 28 Nov. 1979. M. R. A. Baig, In Different Saddles (New Delhi, Vikas, 1967), pp. 164-80.
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dictated by 'utilitarian expediency'. Many other Muslim organizations and leaders took up the same position.73 Similarly, fundamentalist Sikh leadership used to say that the Sikh religious tradition does not permit the separation of religion and politics and that, unless this right is recognized, the state in India is not truly secular but under Hindu domination. They have of course now opted for the demand for an autonomous theocratic Sikh state.74 The notion of minority status as privilege is not slander in today's India, but a social and political fact. How far people will go in the abuse of this idea was well illustrated by the successful effort of the Ramakrishna Mission people in Calcutta to get themselves recognized as a non-Hindu minority. Meanwhile the Hindu-Muslim problem which had eased, more than somewhat, in the years following independence has become salient again. While the aggressive elements among the leaders of the so-called minorities raise cries of alarm that India is fast degenerating into a Hindu country, their counterparts among the Hindus cry 'foul' and accuse the government of 'minorityism'. Addressing the 1923 session of the Congress at Delhi, its President, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, had observed about the then prevailing political differences and slogans: ' "Save the Hindu from Muslims", says one group, "Save Islam from Hinduism", says another. When the order of the day is, "Protect Hindus" and "Protect Muslims", who cares about protecting the nation?' 75 That was said seventy years ago, but could have been said today. Within this overall framework of majority-minority politics, there are variations and ramifications. Thus the violent student agitation of 1990 against reservations (vide Articles 330 and 332 of the Constitution) being sought to be raised to the level of nearly 50 per cent was the protest of a minoritythose classified neither as scheduled caste or scheduled tribe nor as 'other backward classes'against a majority of allegedly uniformly non-privileged people, although many among them are by no means economically deprived. Limitations of space do not, however, allow me to speak about the thorny issue of reservations, which deserves detailed discussion. But I should
See Mushir-ul-Haq, Islam in Secular India (Simla, Institute of Advanced Study, '972)> PP- 6 ~ 2 1 74 See T. N. Madan, 'The Double-edged Sword: Fundamentalism and the Sikh Religious Tradition' in M. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). 75 Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (ed.), India's Maulana (New Delhi, Indian Council of Cultural Relations/Vikas, 1990), vol. 2, p. 145.
73
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point out that, although the exploitation of certain castes and communities at the hands of others over the centuries down to this day, cannot be denied, the idea of reservation quotasnotwithstanding the fact that it was intended to be a temporary protective measure for thirty years only (Article 3 34) does not fit well with the idea of secularism, particularly if it threatens to become a permanent vested interest. Ironically, Nehru anticipated the danger. Speaking on the subject in the Constituent Assembly, he warned: I would like you to consider this business, whether it is reservation or any other kind of safeguard for the minorities objectively. There is some point in having a safeguard of this type . . . when there is autocratic or foreign rule. As soon as you get . . . political democracy, then this kind of reservation, instead of helping the party to be safeguarded or aided, is likely to turn against it. . . . [In] a democracy . . . it is the will of the majority that will prevail. . . . Frankly, I would like . . . [to] put an end to such reservations as there still remain.76 Nehru was obviously thinking of the 'majority' in the Jeffersonian sense. Another critical issue for Indian secularism that I will only mention, but not discuss, is the problem of the Kashmir Valley. Through Article 370, the Constitution gave to Jammu and Kashmir a special status, making it impossible for the Parliament to make laws for this state without the concurrence of its legislature in respect of subjects other than those mentioned in the Instrument of Accession or corresponding to them. This too was intended as a temporary measure, as the future of the state had become an international dispute by India's appeal for UN intervention to end Pakistani aggression. This specific context was soon overgrown by other considerations: the Kashmir Valley with its Muslim majority was vital to secular India's interests as a token of the repudiation of the two-nation theory which was the basis of Pakistan. But a special status was needed for retaining the state within the union. Article 370 is said to protect 'Kashmiriat' or Kashmiri identity. Why Kashmiri identity needs special protection any more than, say, Bengali or Tamil identity is difficult to understand unless it is taken to mean Kashmiri Muslim identity and brought under the rubric of minority rights and privileges. The way to hell, it has been well said, is paved with good intentions; and so it has been in Kashmir. Although the state has been ruled
76
SWJN,vo\.
11, 1991, p- 54-
694
T. N. MAD AN
since 1947 by a succession of governments, headed by Muslim chief ministers, and the representation of Muslims in the bureaucracy and the professions has very considerably improved, yet a secessionist movement has erupted there which has turned violent during the last three years. Well-trained and heavily armed militants are being fought by the security forces and there is blood-letting on both sides. Innocent people of all communities are caught in the crossfire, literally and figuratively, and suffer. What the turbulent elements are asking for is, in effect, another partition, and this fans the fires of Hindu reaction elsewhere in the country, resulting in such politically bizarre happenings as the 'unity march' {ektdydtra) of the Bharatiya Janata Party president, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, in January 1992. In the Valley itself, the Hindus were a three percent minority of about 180,000 people, a couple of thousand of whom have been reportedly killed or critically injured, and many of whose properties have been plundered or burnt. Most of them have fled their homes and live in refugee camps, or with relatives, outside the Valley. They are another example of a non-privileged minority. Not only Hindus, but those Muslims too, who do not seem to be in full agreement, are the targets of fundamentalists and secessionists. In fact, about three times as many Muslims as Hindus are reported to have been killed.77 The silence of Muslim political leadership in India about the happenings in Kashmir underscores the tragic fact that all is not well with Indian secularism. For Jawaharlal Nehru, Kashmir had been India's answer to communalism, the shining token of her secularism; he had been encouraged in this belief by the leaders of the Muslim masses of Kashmir, including the tallest of them all, Sheikh Abdullah. Today Abdullah's is a hated name in the Valley and his grave has to be guarded by police to prevent its desecration by his own people, whom he had led in a liberation struggle that had been conspicuously socialist and secular in its ideological stance and action programmes and which had been actively supported by Nehru.
VII. Concluding Remarks To conclude. I began by saying that secularism as an explicitly formulated ideology was born of the dialectic of religion and science, of
These estimates are based on newspaper reports which are the only figures available now.
77
695
Christianity and the Enlightenment, and was not simply antireligious, though many intellectuals have desired and even believed it to be so. There is much rethinking these days about the standard accounts of the Enlightenment, about their distorting preoccupation with its 'sunny side', to the neglect of its dogmatism and of the narrowing of rational debate by seventeenth-century scientists.78 Attention has also been drawn to the fact that the notion of the selfemancipation of man implied the sacralization of the secular.79 Such reconsiderations are bound to affect our appreciation of secularism also, for it was, as already pointed out, partly an expression of the Enlightenment. It is also important to recognize that one of the major reasons for the rise of religious fundamentalism all over the world today is the excesses of secularism, its emergence as dogma, even as a religion, even as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and some other social theorists anticipated. By subverting religion as generally understood, secularism sets off the reaction of fundamentalism, which usually is a perversion of religion, and has less to do with the purity of faith and more with the acquisition of political power. The temple and the mosque lovers of today's India are, first and foremost, power hungry politicians. In their hands religion is reduced to being its own 'shadow', a 'sign of distinction' between political groups, and no longer is concerned with value but only with instrumentalism.80 If secularism is not essentially anti-religious, but only against revelation and unreason, Indian secularism would be much less so; then why did Nehru complain to Malraux that it was difficult to establish a secular state in a religious country such as India? In an earlier paper entitled 'Secularism in its Place' I had attempted an answer to this question, which could hardly have been Nehru's own answer, though it did perhaps come within recognizable distance of a Gandhian position. My main argument was that neither India's indigenous religious traditions nor Islam recognize the sacred-secular dichotomy in the manner in which Christianity does so and, therefore, the modern processes of secularization (in the sense of expanding human control over human lives) proceed in India without the support of an
78
See, e.g., S t e p h e n T o u l m i n , Cosmopolis, See, e.g., S t e p h e n A . M c k n i g h t , Sacralizing
The Hidden Agenda
of Modernity
(New
York, The Free Press, 1990).

79
the Secular, The Renaissance Origins of
Modernity (Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, ig8g). 80 See, Louis Dumont, 'Nationalism and Communalism' in Homo Hierarchies: The Caste System and its Implications (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980; 1st edn, 1970), PP- 3i5- J 6-
696
T. N. MAD AN
ideology that people in general may warm to. What exists empirically, but not also ideologically, I had then said, exists but weakly.81 Not that India is entirely lacking in its own resources to cope with the processes of secularization in the midst of much religiosity and to find support for its own notion of secularism as interreligious understanding.82 What I have in mind is not so much the medieval religious syncretism about the significance of which there are sharp differences of opinion,83 as the more important fact that none of India's indigenous religions has been considered by its traditional thinkers as a revealed religion in the strict sense in which the Abrahamic religions are so. All the Indian religions are more or less open to questioning from within and reformulation through interpretation. The strength of India's hermeneutic traditions is, I believe, widely acknowledged. Also, Indian religions have been subject to considerable pressure from outside, producing a flexibility of attitudes if not always religious liberality.84 In our own time, Gandhi showed that reinterpretation through questioning and receptiveness to outside influences was still possible. But for these resources to be turned into strength we will have to abandon a narrow, crippling, view of secularism as anti-religion and we will have to overcome our distrust of India's indigenous religious traditions, which are, whether some people like it or not, members of one family. They share crucial metaphysical presuppositions about 'being' 'knowing' and 'value', contribute significantly to the encompassing cultural ambiance of the country, and provide the foundation for India's regional composite cultures. Their followers share many attitudes and have many social practices in common. At the same time, we have to recognize the real dangers of Hindu communalism, of the insensitivity of many Hindus to the feelings of those who consider themselves non-Hindus. It has been complained that these non-Hindus are treated as permanent outsiders if they
T. N. Madan, 'Secularism in its place', The Journal of Asian Studies 46, 4 (1987), pp. 747-59- also see, T. N. Madan, 'Religion in India', Daedalus 118, 4 (1989), pp. 115-46. 82 See Ashis N a n d y , ' T h e Politics of Secularism a n d the Recovery of Religious T o l e r a n c e ' , Alternatives 13, 2 (1988), p p . 177-94. 83 F o r a richly d o c u m e n t e d account, see A s i m Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1983). A sceptical assessment will be found in Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964). 84 See, e.g., H . V o n Stietencron, ' H i n d u i s m : O n t h e Proper U s e of a Deceptive T e r m ' , in G. D . S o n t h e i m e r and H . Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered (Delhi, M a n o har, 1991)) PP- 11-28.
81
697
happen to be Christians or Muslims, or are denied a sense of separate identity if they are 'tribals' or Sikhs."3 Hindus do not have, I think, to appear in sack-cloth and ashes as penitents before the others; they do not have to disfigure their faces with war-paint either, as some of them are doing now in newly found fundamentalist fervour. Gandhi no less than Nehru was conscious of the greater harm that majority communalism will do in India though they could not be said to approve of minority communalism. As Ashis Nandy has insightfully argued, Gandhi was the sterner foe of Hindu communalism and paid for it with his life.86 But things have come to such a pass today that the Congress Party at its 1992 session at Tirupati has considered it necessary to warn against all brands of communalism. If India is to be saved from religious discord and the resultant political divisivenesswe really do not have a choicewe need rethinking and action. What is at stake is the very survival of the Indian state. Apart from the profound ideological implications of an acknowledgement of the limited instrumental character of science and technology, and of the reconsideration of the place of religion as the source of value, meaning and legitimacy in social life, we need, first, critical re-examination of the character and role of the state in the culturally and historically specific Indian setting; second, careful review of the relevant provisions of the Constitution, with particular reference to minority-versus-majority rights, for these have caused much confusion; and third, radical educational reform. A decentralized polity, a positive attitude towards cultural pluralism, and a genuine concern and respect for human rights would be, perhaps, the best guarantors of Indian secularism, understood as interreligious understanding in society and the state policy of non-discrimination and of equal distance {not equal proximity) from the religious concerns of the people. Precious timethe span of two generationshas been lost, but one can learn from one's mistakes. Minerva's owl, the Greeks told us, flies out only at dusk, and so it does; but, then, there is always the next dayand the next.
85
See, e.g., T . K . O o m m e n , State and Society in India: Studies in Nation-Building
(New
Delhi, Sage, 1990), p. 11. 86 Ashis Nandy, 'Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi', in At the Edge of Psychology (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 70-98.

Whither Indian Secularism

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Modern Asian Studies 27, 3 (1993), pp. 667-697. Printed in Great Britain.

Whither Indian Secularism?

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IV. Nehru on Religion, Politics and Secularism

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* Nehru, The Discovery, p. 543. Ibid., p. 547. ** Ibid., p. 46.

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SWJN, vol. 4, 1973, P- 5'*.

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S. G o p a l ( e d . ) , Selected Works of Jawaharlal Q u e n t i n S k i n n e r , The Foundations

Nehru, Second Series ( N e w D e l h i , J a w a The Age of Reformation

harlal Nehru Memorial Fund) [hereafter SWJN-o], vol. 5, 1987, p. 26.

of Modem Political Thought:

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 352.

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See Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in

Colonial India, 1860-igtf (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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11, 1991, p- 54-

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See, e.g., S t e p h e n T o u l m i n , Cosmopolis, See, e.g., S t e p h e n A . M c k n i g h t , Sacralizing

The Hidden Agenda

York, The Free Press, 1990).

the Secular, The Renaissance Origins of

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WHITHER INDIAN SECULARISM?

See, e.g., T . K . O o m m e n , State and Society in India: Studies in Nation-Building

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