Secularism and Communalism in India

A Survey of the Constitutional provisions suggests very clearly the framework of a secular
state in India However, the politics, the nature and the functioning of the Indian state seem to
suggest a drift away from this framework and rise of communal tendencies in politics. In this
context a scrutiny of the contemporary relevance Nehruvian vision of secularism has been
attempted by a number of scholars. Among them Ashsis Nandy, T.N Madan, and Bilgrami
are most prominent.

A Critique of Modernist Secularism- Ashis Nandy in Veena Das edited

Mirrors of Violence, Delhi: OUP, 1990, pp. 69-93.
Secularism chalks out an area in public life where religion is not admitted. One can have
religion in one’s private life; one can be a good Hindu or a good Muslim within one’s home
or at one’s place of worship. But when one enters public life, one is expected to leave one’s
faith behind. This ideology of secularism is associated with slogan like ‘we are Indians first,
Hindu second’ or ‘We are Indians first, then Sikh’. Implicit in this ideology is the belief that
managing public life is a science which is universal and that that only universal categories
can manage the public realm. Religion thus is perceived of as a threat to any modern polity
by virtue of not being universal. The elite view statecraft in purely secular and amoral terms
thus thinking of religion or ethnicity as hurdles to the grand project of nation-building and
state formation.

Nandy suggests that secularism as an ideology has failed because it is seen today as being a
part of a larger package that consists of a set of standardised ideological products and social
processes like development, mega science and national security. Being backed by the might
of the state they appear essentially as violent ideas, because to defend any of these ideas
including secularism, the state can justifiably use violence. Thus Nandy argues, western
concept of secularism becomes a handy adjunct to a set of legitimating core concepts;
accepting this ideology, he contend, leads to the justification and acceptance of domination
and violence perpetrated in the name of progress and modernity. This type of secularism has
been imposed on a people who never wished to separate religion from politics, this
imposition had to be made as part of the requirements needed to fulfil the creation of a
modem nation-state, this however has left the ordinary people of India very unhappy, who,
left with no choice, in their fight against the brutalities of the nation in the name of modernity
turn to the only form of religious politics that modernity would permit, namely communal
politics. Thus, it is secularism as practiced that leads to communalism. From this standpoint,
communal nationalism like Hindutva, itself a product of modernity, owes its very existence to
the oppositional but at the same time internal dialectical relation it bears to that other product
of modernity, Nehruvian secularism.

He advocates a return to the traditional concepts of inter-religious understanding and

tolerance which allowed different religious communities to live with each other. Religious
communities in traditional societies have known to live with each other. It is not modern
India but traditional India that tolerated Judaism for nearly two thousand years. As India gets
modernized religious violence is increasing. Nandy believes that we must embrace non-
western meaning of secularism which revolves around equal respect for all religions. The
traditional ways of life have over the centuries developed internal principles of tolerance and
these principles must have a play in contemporary politics.This implies that while public life
may or may not be kept free of religion, it must have a space for continuous dialogue among
religious traditions and between the religious and secular. Each major faith in South Asia
includes within it an in-house version of the other faiths, both as an internal criticism and as a
reminder of the diversity of the theories of transcendence. So state systems in South Asia
should learn about religious tolerance from everyday Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and
Sikhism rather than wish that ordinary Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Sikhs learn tolerance
from the various fashionable secular theories of statecraft.

Secularism in its Place- T. N Madan, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 46, no.
4, 1987, 747-58.
T. N Madan is also sceptical about the future of secularism in the subcontinent. According to
him it is impossible as a shared credo of life because the great majority of the people in their
own eyes are active adherents of some religious faith. It is also impracticable as a basis for
state action either because Buddhism and Islam have been declared state or state protected
religions. Moreover the stance of religious neutrality is difficult to maintain since religious
minorities do not share the majority’s view of what this entails for the state. It is also
impotent as a blueprint for the future because it is incapable of countering religious
fundamentalism. Thus secularism is a dream of a minority which wants to shape the majority
in its own image and impose its will on history but lacks the power to do so under a
democratically organized polity. Secularism is therefore, a social myth which draws a cover
over the failure of this minority separate politics from religion.

It has been forcefully argued by him that institutions of secularism are inextricably linked to
dualistic conceptions internal to Christianity. Since Christian doctrines recognised the
distinction between the domains of the spiritual and the mundane, this facilitated the eventual
development of secular ideas about division of jurisdiction between the church and the state.
Models of modernization prescribe the transfer of this very notion of secularism to non-
western societies with any regard for their religious traditions. In traditional or tradition
haunted societies of South Asia such transfer can only mean loss of loss of one’s culture or
soul.

Madan argues that tolerance is a value enshrined in all the great religions. Not only that,
South Asia’s major religions are all totalizing in character, claiming all of a follower’s life, so
that religion is constitutive of society. He invokes Gandhi to argue that those who wish to
separate religion from politics understand neither religion nor politics. He suggests that
secularism must be put in place which does not mean rejecting it but of finding the proper
means for its expression. Denial of legitimacy to religion provokes fundamentalism on the
part of the zealot. On the other hand religion should not be equated with communalism and
superstition. In multi-religious societies of South Asia, it should be realized that secularism
may not be restricted to rationalism. It should be made incompatible with faith. The
alternative conception is Gandhian which offers possibilities of inter-religious understanding.

Two Concepts of Secularism: Reason, Modernity and Archimedean Ideal,

Akeel Bilgrami, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 29, No. 28 (Jul. 9,
1994), pp. 1749-1761

Bilgrami starts by stating that the contemporary critics of Nehru point out a fundamental
distinction between religion as faiths and ways of life on the one hand and constructed
ideologies on the other. This is intended as a contrast between a more accommodating, non-
monolithic and pluralist religious folk traditions of Hinduism and Islam, and the Brahmanical
BJP and Muslim League versions of them which amount to constructed ideologies that are
intolerant of heterodoxy within themselves as well as intolerant of each other. The critique’s
target is by implication modernity itself, for its claim is that it is polity in its modern concept
of nationhood and its statecraft which is the source of such ideological constructions that
distort those more innocent aspects of religion which amount to ways of life than systems of
thought geared to political advancement.
The claim is that the latter is an alien imposition upon a people who have never wished to
separate religion from politics in their every day life and thinking, and therefore leaves that
people no choice but to turn to the only religious politics allowed by modernity's
stranglehold, i e, Hindu nationalism. Thus secular tyranny breeds Hindu nationalist
resistance, which threatens Fvith the promise of its own form of tyranny. Communal
nationalism, itself a product of modernity, owes its very existence to the oppositional but at
the same time internal dialectical relation it bears to that other product of modernity,
Nehruvian secularism.
There is something convincing about this argument but its explanatory virtues are greatly
marred by its narrowing and uncritical anti-nationalism, its skewed historiography, and its
traditionalist nostalgia. First of all, though there is no gainsaying the humanism inherent in
Gandhi's politics, it is also foolish and sentimental to deny the brahmanical elements in it. He
encouraged the communal Hindu elements in the national movement by using Hindu
symbolism to mobilise mass nationalist feeling. As is also well known, his
supportofthereactionary Muslim Khilafat movement had exactly the same motives and the
same communalist effect on the Muslim population. Neither the pre-modern conception of an
innocent spiritual integra- tion of religion and politics, nor the Nehruvian separation of
r?ligion and politics can cope with the demands of Indian political life today.
Nehru's secularism was indeed an imposition. But the sense in which it is an imposition is not
that it was a modem intrusion into an essentially traditionalist religious population. It is an
imposition rather in the sense that it assumed that secularism stood outside the substantive
arena of political commitments. It did not arise as a result of creative dialogue among
different communities. The national movement did not facilitate a creative dialogue between
communities which could have ensured the emergence of a negotiated understanding of
secularism. It remained non-negotiated and archimedan.
The Congress Party, for instance never undertook such a discussion seriously. For three
decades before independence the Congress under Nehru refused to let a secular policy
emerge through negotiation between different communal interests, by denying at every step
in the various conferrings with the British, Jinnah' s demand that the Muslim League
represents the Muslims, a Sikh leader represents the Sikhs, and a harijan leader represents the
untouchable community. And, the ground for the denial was simply that as a secular party
they could not accept that they not represent all these communities." Secularism thus never
got the chance to emerge out of a creative dialogue between these different communities. It
was sui generis. As a result it could be nothing more than a holding process, already under
strain in the time of its charismatic architect. It is this archimedeanism of doctrine, and not its
statist imposition, that I think is the deepest flaw in Nehru's vision it has nothing essential to
do with modernity.
Nehru. It is possible that Nehru and the Congress leadership assumed something which to
some extent is true: that the Congress Party was a large and relatively accommodating and
(communally speaking) quite comprehensively subscribed nationalist party And on the basis
of that premise, they could draw the conclusion that an implicitly and tacitly carried out
negotiation between the component element5 in the subscription was already inherent in the
party's claims to being secular. the argument is not convincing because there is no bridge that
takes one from the idea that an anti-colonial movement and a post-colonial party is
'composite' to the idea that it stands for a substantive secularism. The mere fact of
compositeness amounts to an implicit negotiation among the compositional communal
elements does not guarantee that the compositional communal elements would yield to
substantive secularism. The fact of compositeness should not be confused with consensus on
substantive secularism. The label ‘implicit’ just serves to hide the fact that genuine
negotiation was avoided by the Congress party on the question of secularism. Secularism
should have emerged fromt he bottom up with the moderate political leadership of different
religious communities negotiating both procedures and substance of secularism. Such a
negotiated secularism would have, for instance, avoided the resentment towards the special
status of the minorities.
.

Others have however put up a strong defence of the Nehruvian framework. Bhargava argues
that to avoid a Bosnia-like inferno in India, secular institutions are necessary, that is, they are
necessary not only to check religious fanaticism but also to ensure that conflicts between
religious communities that are not necessarily of a religious character, do not cross a certain
threshold. He further contends that the critics fail to see that India developed a distinctively
Indian and differently modern variant of secularism. Indian secularism did not erect a strict
wall of separation, but proposed instead a ‘principled distance’ between religion and state,
not strict neutrality. Indian secularism was based on the idea that the state would maintain a
principled distance from religion but would address itself to matters rising out of religious
concerns when the need arises. This is evident from the state’s intervention in Hinduism and
some of its oppressive social practices. However, the cardinal rule would be that the
considerations for both keeping away and for interfering would always be non-sectarian.
Thus, it embodies a model of contextual moral reasoning. This meaning of secularism is
different from western conception of secularism illustrated by Donald Smith. For Donald
Smith, the secular state involves three distinct but interrelated relations concerning the state,
religion and the individual. The first relation concerns individuals and their religion, from
which the state is excluded. Individuals are thereby free to decide the merits of the respective
claims of different religions without any coercive interference by the state – the libertarian
ingredient in secularism. The second concerns the relation between individuals and the state,
from which religion is excluded. Thus, the rights and duties of citizens are not affected by the
religious beliefs held by individuals - the egalitarian component in secularism. Finally, for
Smith, the integrity of both these relations is dependent on the third relation, between the
state and different religions. Here he argues that secularism entails the mutual exclusion of
state and religion. Therefore, it is not the function of the state to promote, regulate, direct or
interfere in religion. Thus, in the western conception of secularism the state is disconnected
from religion at the level of ends (first-level), at the level of institutions (second-level) and
the level of law and public policy (third-level). Indian model of secularism accepts a
disconnection between state and religion at the level of ends and institutions,but does not
make a fetish of it at the third level of policy and law due to ethical considerations.Article
30(2) of Indian Constitution commits the state to give aid to educational institutions
established and administered by religious communities. Also permitted is religious
instruction in educational institutions that are partly funded by the state. These are significant
departures from the western view of the secular state. Even more significant are Articles 17
and 25(2) that require the state to intervene in religious affairs. Article 25(2) (b) states that
‘nothing in Article 25(1) prevents the state from making a law providing for social welfare
and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all
classes and sections of Hindus.’ Article 17 is an uninhibited, robust attack on the caste
system, arguably the central feature of Hinduism, by abolishing untouchability and by
making the enforcement of any disability arising out of it an offence punishable by law.