Indian Secularism Revisted.

 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. 

India: From Secularism to Hindu Jingoism.

Many Pakistanis who embraced the view that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, wanted an Islamic Pakistan with a secular society and secular form of governance (based on his speech to the Constituent Assembly) always looked at India's progress towards a secular path with envy. In the mid 1970's Pakistan, under General Zia, nosedived into his brand of Islamic polity which eroded any semblance of a secular will as may have been expressed by Jinnah. India, one always felt, had the entrenched secular back bone, we felt, that it would in the end resist the temptations of a Hindu jingoism the target of which would be India's minorities. Prime Minister Modi and his Home Minister Amit Shah in one stroke changed that.

Through decades of India's political and social journey communal and religious tensions were there, riots and hate crimes targeted against Muslims and to some extent Christians occurred and in one way or another India managed to absorb the effect of these incidents. While India was ruled for much of the period after Independence by the more inclusive and secular Congress Party, even the right wing Hindu party BJP's earlier governments did not forcefully try to change the secular narrative of India. While the discussion on how the militant Hindu RSS thinking over took the leadership of the BJP, mostly under the leadership of PM Modi is a different debate the fact remains that India's secularism is being over run by a Hindu jingoism that has to be troubling to the souls of Mahatama Gandhi, Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

We have seen through history when the intellectual repository of the country abandons independent thought, inquiry and argument and accepts conformity it gives fuel to the forces who seek a new narrative without question. While there are voices of dissent over India's new unspoken slogan of "Hindustan only for Hindu's", the counter narrative to these voices is not  of discussion but of introducing a binary option which entails that because one cannot accept this jingoism you must be labelled a traitor. The Congress Party is no more painted as a political party in opposition to the BJP but rather as an ally of India's enemy Pakistan and its leaders as traitors.

The nationalist argument and its dogma, in its basic essence, is a difficult creed to preach on the Indian sub-continent because given the demographics, the ethnicity and the religious complexion of the people of the sub-continent, (including both India and Pakistan) a nationalist label only lends itself to the people in a political sense. Thus its the political and perhaps economic needs that define India as one nation and Pakistan as another nation. While Pakistan, having been formed on the basis of a homeland for Muslims may have a more cohesive religious complexion, it still has different ethnic groups (Sindhi, Baluch, Punjabi, and Pashtun being the main ones), and the concept of nationhood is more a religious and political concept of nationalism.

For India, this becomes more complex because unlike Pakistan where religious minorities are very tiny the dominance of Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians within Indian society is quite significant. Based on ethnicity as a factor the differences in India are enormous and this translates into social and cultural barriers within India where it was always felt a secular complexion was the only way to give India an identity that can then lend itself to a common Indian nationalism. Over 20% of its people are not Hindus and the largest group being Muslims who are about 200 million people. Under the secular complexion India could appeal to Indian Muslims for a sense of patriotism towards an Indian nationalism and in a sense was the charm to the outside world of this coexistence being a symbol of India's success. Indeed this does not imply it was always rosy and smooth and communal violence was always on the landscape of India in one form or the other. But, by and large, one could state that the experiment of a secular nationalist slogan within India was carrying some weight.

It was this thinking that was behind the reasons that Nehru agreed to a special status to Indian Kashmir. It was a Muslim majority region, disputed with Pakistan and needed this treatment in a constitutional framework to ensure that Nehru could take the sting out of the independent minded Kashmiris. Whether the dispute with Pakistan would be ever resolved or not was then considered a matter of foreign policy in the eyes of Indian governments led by the Congress Party. Indeed tensions within Kashmir remained and still remain as from a Kashmiri standpoint they always felt the arrangements that India had put in place still did not deal with the promise that Kashmiris would decide their own fate.

India's push towards a Hindu dominated narrative, at times at the expense of other religious and ethnic minorities, is spearheaded under the One India slogan and a need to 'integrate' different sections of the Indian diaspora into a national identity. Prima facia this is the narrative that Modi's BJP would like to project, supported by a section of the nationalist media. However should such actions have been a part of the Congress Party under its secular badge then chances are the minorities would have had more faith in the intent and sincerity of the Congress Party intentions. For Modi and Amit Shah to brand such 'integration' slogans there is the problem of their Hindu nationalist past, especially Modi's RSS political parentage and is more than likely to cause shivers amongst the Muslim, Sikh and Christian minorities of India.

BJP is going to extra length to convince us that its move in Kashmir has nothing to do with religion, while at the same time it has declared over 1.9 million Indians as non citizens (a large percentage of them Muslims) under its new nationality rules. So long as Kashmiris, and other minorities remember that Indian Kashmir was the only Muslim majority state it is difficult not to agree that BJP's historical wish to not have a Muslim majority state in India is the driving force behind their current policy. In a larger context Modi has opened a can of worms with his move on Kashmir because it unsettles the debate about Indian nationalism, which without its secular bias is difficult to sell under the  "India for Hindu's only" dogma.

This Hindu jingoism is approaching disturbing dimensions when the Indian head of the army states that the army is only waiting for the government to tell them to 'liberate Pakistan occupied Kashmir'. In so far as passionate jingoism is concerned that is a good line to spew out, but in reality one would ask why liberate a land where there are no curfews, no occupation by a million troops, no lock down of internet and telephone services and certainly no arrests of over 4,000 political opponents. For the international community the stark reality of such comments is that perhaps as long as India cannot subdue its part of Kashmir the chances are that it will externalize the issue by attacking Pakistan side of Kashmir to 'liberate' it.

On a broader geo strategic front the Taliban, who have been flirting with peace talks with the US in Afghanistan, would be licking their chops at the prospect of internal strife within Indian held Kashmir. It is precisely this sort of situation which is the breeding ground for them to foster a home grown Indian Kashmiri Taliban. Pakistan, given its war with its own Pakistan Taliban would be cautious to support such an adventure by the larger Taliban groups in Afghanistan. India would never admit that many of the terror attacks within Indian Kashmir are from home grown terrorists who see themselves as freedom fighters.

In essence India's departure from a secular complexion to what Modi and his allies are pushing is more worrying for India itself than anyone else. Can India afford to play this domestic card which opens the can of worms in different parts of India and not just Kashmir? To what extent will the dogma of a Hindu nationalist movement go before a return to mass communal violence, like we saw in Gujarat riots of 2002, occur again. Longer the current disenfranchisement of India's secular foundation continues the chances of the powder keg of communal tensions being set alight increase. India's strength was its secular complexion and it was the harbinger of harmony in a diverse country and was the force of unity rather than religious divisions that are encouraged by the Modi government.  Sadly that secular India is dying at the hands of a Hindu jingoism that could become a monster difficult to tame.