Secular India will always remain an Utopian concept
“What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spare? Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her fetus and slaughtered it before her eyes.”
“What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity?”
“What can you say about the gang rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw-driver6?”
The above tales of macabre violence -“masses of pus released by slitting open large festering wounds9” – are accounts by an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, who is a key eye witness to the Gujarat riots. Gujarat 2002, sadly, is not a one-off occurrence. In the past two decades - India, the land of Gandhi and the Buddha, has been ravaged by so many acts of inter-communal violence that peace is an intermittent, temporal period of uneasy co-existence waiting to be disrupted by the next round of hatred. These acts have metamorphosed the collective Indian mindset so much that communal tension and religious bigotry, shockingly, have been accepted as a way of life. Surely this was not what the founding fathers of Independent India had in mind when they adopted secularism as a constitutional and political ideal. Who is to be blamed for this – the Indian political elite who are blissfully disconnected from reality, or the broader Indian society and its inherent anarchy? When we proudly proclaim that we are a secular society, do we really understand what we mean?
SECULARISM AND THE STATE
Secularism in India, right from the days of Nehru when it got its most virulent and articulate political expression, has been understood as a political ideology that seeks to protect and guard equally the rights of individuals belonging to all religions to profess, practice and proselytize their religion. This is in stark contrast to how secularism evolved in Europe and America in the eighteenth century – it was a child of the age of enlightenment that sought to separate all the activities of the state from religious influences. There are historical reasons for why this is so.
On one hand, all the major political transformations in the 18th century western world came about as a direct or indirect consequence of grievances created by organized religion (the Church). Hence, these political transformations consisted of an element which sought to limit the power of religion over society and the law making process. For example, it must be noted that when Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Virginia Statuette for religious freedom, coined the famous phrase “wall of separation between church and state5”, he was trying to reassure the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of state protection from the religious persecution threatened by the Danbury Congregationalists.
On the other hand, majority of the nationalistic and social reform movements of 19th and 20th century India were spearheaded by men and women who sought to find a basis for social transformation within the religious doctrines and texts of India. This could have been considered essential to unite a vast segregated population and to facilitate the process of accepting the liberal values of the west, which was then perceived as an agent of political dominance trying to push a “foreign culture” down the throats of Indians. Hence, a serious critique of religion was largely absent in the social reform movements in India, with the exception of the rationalist political movements of Tamil Nadu. Added to this is the problem of identifying a strict definition of organized religion in India- with is myriad belief systems, practices and heritages – which made it impossible for such a critique to gather steam. Hence, even the best strains of Secularism one finds in India’s past – such as those during the reigns of Asoka and Akbar – have limited themselves to upholding plurality in public life and ensuring communal harmony than in divorcing religion completely from the body of politics 4.
SECULARISM – EATING ITS OWN LIMBS?
The tumultuous days of Partition and the blood bath that ensued did not give rise to an immediate and concrete shift in the political outlook of the nation. It was one instance when the terrible human cost of religious intolerance was clearly evident and the political will for adopting a form of government which is religion-blind was the strongest. Yet, this opportunity was lost due to the simultaneous creation of an ‘Enemy State’, which was theocratic and predominantly Muslim. This demonized the Muslims of India in the eyes of the Hindu majority, forcing the founding fathers to formulate a state which assumed a patronizing role in protecting and appeasing the minority communities. With this attitude extending to its treatment of the majority, the state has continued on a trajectory that is farther and farther away from the secular ideal. Today, after more than 2 generations, when the memories of the civil war with which the nation began its existence are slowly fading away, a strong impetus which can overcome this social impasse is lost. This is in contrast with the governments of post-Nazi Germany, which proactively educated their people about the dangers of bigoted ideologies and brought in a permanent shift in the German national psyche for generations to come.
One of the many consequences of this distortion of the idea of secularism in India is absence of a common civil law even after 60 years of the republic’s formation. The governments at various levels require citizens to disclose their religious affiliations while religious conversions need to be registered and are subjected to various state laws, most of which have been enacted to favor vested religious interests 1. Even the most progressive sections of the society today are in favor of Sharia – many of whose tenets are highly regressive- for the Muslims in India, preventing social reform within the Indian Muslim community3. All these have further prevented the emergence of an atmosphere for the gradual adoption of secularism as a social ideology.
SECULARISM AND THE MAJORITY
At the core of a secular heart is an affirmation of the equality of the goals of all religious traditions. Secularism, as it stands today, can then be understood as a manifestation of this belief in the daily lives of ordinary people. However, the Hindu social life had long been festered with unimaginable inequities, limiting to a huge extent the participation in mainstream religious activities by a huge section of the populace. Consequently, it has cultivated a mindset that rejects the rights of others to cultural and religious expression within its own sect. With the existence of such a mindset, extending similar rights to other religions remains unthinkable in modern India. References to Muslims as “outsiders” or those with a “non-indigenous/wrong faith” are numerous in popular Hindu discourse and such notions are further stoked by the Hindu Nationalist party, the BJP. The emergence of this party from the sidelines to the mainstream in the last two decades is a testimony to that fact that things are only getting worse. Moreover, this party has proceeded to build religious orthodoxy upon a vilified Muslim population unlike traditional conservative politics which derives its strength from absolutist values. With this party remaining the only political alternative to the current ruling coalition, the future does look bleak for Indian secularism9.
OLD HOPES AND NEW FEARS
Contrary to popular belief, there seems to be almost no correlation between the level of education or economic prosperity and the tendency to accept secular and humanistic ideals in the Indian society. Major instances of religious intolerance resulting in social unrest have happened post-liberalization in India, with the exception of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. The religious bigotry that found its fullest expression in Gujarat in 2002 had grown out of the affluence of the state’s nuovo rich middle class and their passive but discontent coexistence with the Muslim minority there. In fact, most of post-independent India’s communal riots and bomb blasts have happened in the 1990s and 2000s indicating the ability of home-grown religious bigotry to feed from the new-found prosperity of the middle classes.
A recent poll of young urbanites in India also shows a lack of openness to religious conversion12. The behavior of Supreme Court judges in the Kanchi Mutt murder case is also a testament to the existence of religious orthodoxy among people professing to uphold the secular values of the Indian constitution. For long considered the secular bulwarks of the country, the fast developing southern states have begun to show worrying trends of religious intolerance. The attack on Christian minorities in Karnataka and Kerala, the riot in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and the blasts that followed it are testimonies to this. Higher Urbanization has been accompanied by riots that had their epicenter in the cities. In the last fifty years, 96% of all riot deaths have occurred in cities, even though these cities are home to less than 30% of the total population of the country8. Home to the social, cultural and economic elite of the country, Mumbai has been the victim of many such communal tensions post the Babri Masjid demolition7.
The tribal people of Orissa, who had for long led a life of harmonious coexistence with nature, are now active and willing participants in the violence against Christian missionaries and converts2. Kashmir, with its sizeable Muslim population and endemic violence has proved to the most striking example of the failure of Indian secularism. The communists, who are self-avowed atheists, contributed their bit to stifling secularism by banning the book of Tasleema Nasrin11. Army officers Lieutenant Col. Purohit and Major (Retd.) Upadhayay were arrested in connection with the Malegaon blasts of 2008, indicating that religious bigotry has entered even the Indian army.
CONCLUSION
These failures to learn from the past coupled with an ignorance of our own realities have made secularism a distant utopia to be just dreamt about. With secular ideals taking a back seat and losing to other priorities across social, cultural, economic and ideological groups and the visibly increasing tendency to get polarized along communal lines, secularism remains an unfulfilled promise and an unrealized hope.
