India prides itself as secular state where numerous religions, ethnic groups and languages have coexisted in a largely Hindu country. The secular status of the country is enshrined in the constitution and over the past seven decades India has had presidents from different minorities. However secularism was seen in 1940's as not only a sensible option for a newly emerging country it was also nourished by a sense of political opportunism to tape together the aspirations of the Muslim, Sikh, and other religious groups. The rally call of secularism was an essential tool to also bring together ethnic groups of the south where not only a plethora of languages (divorced from the national language Hindi) were spoken but cultural and social differences were obvious.
From the outset of Indian Independence the tussle between the need for a secular India and the need for a Nationalist Indian ethos began. During the many years of Congress rule these competing forces remained uncomfortably married where being a South Indian who could not speak Hindi coexisted with a North Indian who expected his South Indian compatriot to one day catch up with the 'Indianess" that New Delhi espoused. As the tide of political preferences moved away from the Congress thought process of the Nehru political philosophy the emerging BJP, with its grass root support from the Hindu ultra nationalists the challenge to the secular complexion of India become more acute.
While communal violence was always sporadically appearing on the Indian landscape it was always seen as a localised incident with little if any repercussions on the national scene. Under Congress the likes of RSS (the Hindu nationalists) could foment trouble against the minorities but lacked a national platform or support to move their Hindutva extremism forward. The emergence of the BJP and more specifically Mr Modi as its leader galvanised the Hindu extremists to a point where today one can argue that Indian secularism is seriously questioned.
However, this state of affairs has not happened overnight. Secularisms failures in India has been the failure to integrate the religions, traditions, languages and culture of the many minorities into a national body of what India seeks as its secular blueprint. India sought a modernity through defining a politics that tried to marry religion into politics through an idiom of unity. However, it was always evident that when religion was an idiom in the politics of secularism in sense it created its own dichotomy and nourished communalism rather than unity. Every effort by successive governments to connect to the traditions and ethos of different religions through say a law making process resulted in not only failure but also highlighted that in a secular country having a religious polity just cannot work.
If there was a lesson from the Partition of India, where millions died in communal violence, it was the you cannot include religion in the political vocabulary of a country. For Pakistan, which its founder desired a secular complexion to an Islamic state, it was quick to set aside any pretensions of a secular state and instead talked of protection of minorities. For India such a stance so soon after independence was not possible as it would have hacked away at the cornerstone of Indian nationhood; Secularism. Since Indian independence the political leadership of the Congress took pains not to make religion the subject of public conversation more so as it struggled to create a legislative framework to cater the communal traditions of different groups. It was felt in the end a modern India, through education and demands of nationhood would absorb the demands of tradition from religious groups.
However as much as there was a galvanising effect of this thrust towards modernity and most Hindus were comfortable with the emerging idiom of a secular India there were other forces at work. To these 'nationalist' forces the BJP afforded the opportunity to recast India under a new narrative of modernity by a revisionist dogma which implied rewriting India's history. It started with a move to remain cities, Madras became Chennai, Bombay became Mumbai and so forth. As benign an act of rewriting history, (way or five decades of independence) it spelled bigger issues.
The Hindutva dogma also sought to rewrite Indian history and recast the 200 odd years of Muslim rule. Side by side the hundreds of years old problem of religious sites and the contest of their origin came to the forefront bringing with it a sense amongst the Muslims of India (the largest minority) that they were being marginalised. Sanitising history is a political sense is inevitable and India is not the first country to do this. However, when this sanitisation begins to define what one religions sees as right then a sense of marginalisation is the obvious result. In a general sense any religious complexion that overtake the political ethos of a country by its nature then defines who, in a religious sense, is a good person and who is not. (This is the essential struggle in Pakistan, of which a separate blog will appear).
In fairness in India there are a multitude of political participants, Hindus. Muslims, Sikhs, who have played the religious card in their politics. In some cases this has been play to religious and communal similarities, in other cases, it has been a message of discord and fear. Invariably where the fear card has been played it has resulted in communal hate and exclusion and in some cases even violence. Even Mr Modi, the current Prime Minister, in one period of his political journey used the communal hate card with good effect. However, to use these episodes as a pretext for exclusion of minorities is nothing but a pretext for furthering the larger agenda of Hindutva.
There is no denying today within India secularism and nationalism, as defined by the Hindu extreme nationalists, are locked in battle. It is not possible that a polity defined by a nationalist Hindu agenda can sit side by side with the semblance of secularism. For secularism to gain ground will mean a reversal of the religious sanitisation that has been going on, for both the Mahabharata and the Muslim, Sikh and Christian teaching to be a part of the school curriculum , for Indians to take pride in their collective history rather than only segments of it. To acknowledge that secularism in India and secularism in a democracy have divide that needs to be bridged, which implies the rolling back of the religious narrative in politics and the emergence of individuals and their own choices to be the determinants of the complexion of a nations secular ethos.
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