India that is not secular does not deserve to survive

Seminar, April 2009

In defence of secular fundamentalism

by Mani Shankar Aiyar


NO word has been more bandied about in relation to the building of our modern nationhood than the word ‘secularism’, a word of non-Indian origin with non-Indian connotations that has no precise equivalent in any Indian language and is yet central to our identity as a people. The resultant confusion has been ruthlessly exploited by those with an alternative concept of our nationhood, who view India in majoritarian terms as a Hindu nation (Hindu Rashtra) on account of our being a nation of approximately 85 per cent Hindus. They see post-independence India as a nation free from not only 200 years of British rule but also from the previous 700 years of rule by Muslim potentates. Thus, for the proponents of Hindu nationalism, independent India is not about independence from colonial rule but liberation from non-Hindu rule.

Curiously, this ideological construct does not take into account the period of nearly a thousand years of non-Hindu rule from Emperor Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism in the third century BC to the last great Buddhist monarch, Harshavardhana of Kannauj, in the seventh century AD, interrupted only by three centuries of the revivalist Hindu empire of the Guptas. Neither does it account for the Jain and Buddhist kings and queens of southern lndia. By equating non-Hindu rule with rule by only Christians and Muslims, Hindu nationalism stigmatizes Christianity as a foreign creed propagated by missionaries; it is even harsher on the Muslim community, its beliefs and traditions, its history and heritage, and its contribution to the composite culture of contemporary India. Indeed, this composite character of our culture and civilization is seen as the bastardization of a pure Hindu flow; thus, ‘cultural nationalism’ becomes the preferred self-description of Hindu nationalists.

The origins of the making of contemporary India might be dated to the rise of national consciousness in the decades following the brutal suppression of the uprising in 1857, which the imperial authority described as the Sepoy Mutiny and which Indian nationalists of all hues call the First War of Independence. The clash between the exclusivist nationalist camps of the Hindus and Muslims, on the one hand, and the inclusivism of the secular nationalist camp (which included both Hindus and Muslims), on the other, is virtually as long as the making of the modern Indian nation. However, at no stage in the political evolution of contemporary India over the last century and a half have the rival conceptions of India’s nationhood been the preserve of either a particular religious community or of rival political formations. Both perceptions, however incompatible, have uneasily coexisted in all religious communities and all political parties. And far from resolving the conflict over nationhood between alternative schools of Indian thought, the partition of India has added an external dimension to the issues in dispute, complicating further its domestic aspects.

From partition and independence in 1947 to the first general elections of 1952, the nature of our nationhood was the dominant political issue. But with Jawaharlal Nehru vanquishing the soft-Hindu school within the Congress by September-October 1951 and then going on to overwhelmingly win the first general elections in February 1952 on a hard secular platform (a platform I would describe as ‘secular fundamentalism’), the secular basis of our nationhood remained virtually unchallenged for the next thirty-four years. This was largely because the first general elections of 1952 were also the first-ever elections held in India on the basis of universal adult suffrage. The results, therefore, established beyond argument that public opinion favoured a composite Indian nationhood. Moreover, although the electorate was overwhelmingly Hindu and every adult voter had a searing personal memory of the vicious communal massacres which accompanied partition, the vote was as decisive an endorsement of secular nationalism as it was a rejection of an alternative religion- or community-based majoritarian Hindu nationhood.

That national consensus on the nature of our nationhood was challenged significantly in the aftermath of the opening of the locks on the gates of the makeshift Ram Lalla temple within the precincts of the Babri Masjid complex at Ayodhya on the orders of the Faizabad district and sessions court in February 1986.

Since then, the debate between secularism and communalism has been restored to centre-stage in the making of the modern Indian nation. The arguments which had been stifled or marginalized by the influence Nehru exerted have been resurrected, detaching us from the comforting anchor of the parameters on which our nationhood was being built, including the crucial anchor of secularism. The resumption of the dispute has been accentuated by the transition the country and the world have gone through in the last decade of the last millennium and which continues into the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Let me begin by stating the obvious. In every village of India, in every basti and every mohalla, there are people of different faiths, languages and cultures, who live together as neighbours. While we are a multi-religious, multilingual, multicultural society, we are emphatically not a multinational society. We are one nation, one people. Furthermore, secularism and our nationhood are inseparable. Secularism is the bedrock of our nationhood. It is the sine qua non of our existence. A secular India alone is an India that can survive. And perhaps an India that is not secular does not deserve to survive.

Most civilizations posit nationhood and diversity as antithetical. The single greatest contribution of India to world civilization is to demonstrate that there is nothing antithetical between diversity and nationhood. Indeed, the celebration of diversity strengthens our unity, even as the imposition of uniformity gravely undermines national unity. No other civilization has as long a record as ours in evolving a composite culture. No other country has as long a record as ours of a polity based on secularism. Yet, the history of India is not the story of secularism vanquishing communalism. It is more the history of a kind of dialectic between the forces of secularism, tolerance and compassion, on the one hand, and the forces of communalism, fundamentalism and fanaticism, on the other. It is this never-ceasing battle that we are now called upon once again to fight.

First, Indian secularism cannot be anti-religious or irreligious, for the bulk of our people are deeply religious. There is a rich vein of spirituality that runs through our culture, history and civilization. It is the source of most of our natal values. Therefore, unlike in Christendom, where the word originated, secularism in India is not about pitting the state against the religious authority but about keeping matters of faith in the personal realm and matters of state in the public realm.

Second, in a nation of many faiths, where people take their faith seriously, secularism must be based on the principle of equal respect for all religions (and for those who choose not to follow any religion). As Nehru once said, ‘[Secularism] means freedom of religion and conscience, including freedom of those who may have no religion. It means free play of all religions. subject only to their not interfering with each other or with basic conceptions of our state.’

However, in regard to affairs of state, secularism translates not into equal involvement of the state in matters pertaining to each religion but rather the separation of the state from all religions. In secular India, the state must have no religion. For the state, whatever religion an Indian professes or propagates must remain a private and personal matter of the citizen. The state should concern itself not with religion but with protection for all, equal opportunity for all, equitable benefits for all. No religious community should be singled out for favours; no religious community should be subjected to any disability or disadvantage.

Third, these two principles are reconciled in the Indian Constitution by making criminal law, and much of civil law, uniform for all citizens, but leaving personal law in the domain of each religious community. In the Directive Principles of State Policy is inscribed a direction to move towards a ‘uniform civil code’, but it is recognized that this can be done only with the consent of all the communities concerned. As the customs and usages, rites and rituals, traditions and practices of different communities are the very basis on which religious communities distinguish themselves from each other, the prospect of actually securing a uniform civil code is distant. The state has, therefore, provided through legislation such as the Special Marriage Act of 1954 and other such legislation the option of a personal law not based on religion, for any Indian who wishes to take advantage of it. The citizen who does so is not required to sacrifice his or her religion to come within the ambit of the civil personal law; so it is a law that is secular without being anti-religious.

Yet, the Hindu communalist is not satisfied.

It is not as if only the minorities have a personal law and the majority does not. Indeed, Hindu personal law was codified after, not before, the civil legislation was enacted. Moreover, even fiscal law provides for a Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) without a similar provision for a joint family for any other religious community although most other communities do, in fact, have joint families. Significantly, no minority community has opposed either a personal law for the Hindus or the provisions pertaining to the HUF in our fiscal law; it is only Hindu extremists who, in the name of enacting a uniform civil code, insist on amending the personal laws of other communities without the consent of that community. The insulting argument, sometimes left unsaid but often loudly asserted, is that Muslim personal law tramples on fundamental freedoms and basic human rights, and as Muslims are incapable of humane treatment of their own kind, others have to do it for them. As this is a surrogate way of asserting the superiority of the majority way of life, Hindu communalists have made the question of a uniform civil code the centrepiece of their agenda.

Communalism thrives on denigration of the Other. Secularism, on the other hand, thrives on respect for the Other. The only religion-based social practices that Mahatma Gandhi criticized and reformed were his own. He left it to the good sense of other communities to reform what was obsolescent or offensive in theirs. He was not concerned with asserting the superiority of his religion over those of others, but of learning, with respect, from the spiritual and moral traditions of the Other, with a view to building on his own. Majoritarianism treats such an approach as ‘appeasement’ or tushtikaran. Tushtikaran means, in essence, a Hindu reading the Koran, as Gandhi did, without insisting that a Muslim reciprocally read the Gita. But, tushtikaran is alleged every time a privilege or protection is extended to a minority in the interests of preserving its identity. So, tushtikaran has become the favourite hate word of the communalist.

The Unesco Charter famously says that war begins in the minds of men. So does communalism. It is above all in the mind that communalism is to be challenged and secularism asserted. And if in the mind, secularism is not fundamental, in practice, particularly state practice, tactical compromises are effected on the grounds of political expediency which, sooner rather than later, and usually much sooner, undermine the secular order and set the precedent for using kid gloves, rather than the sharpest instruments in the state’s armoury, to worst the communal menace.

In the mind, secular fundamentalism imposes three levels of commitment. First, clarity regarding the rationale of the secular ethic. Second, secular answers to communal questions, so that secular principles are not left in disarray before the communal challenge, as has so often been happening in the electoral fray and in the democratic dialectic, especially over the past two decades. Third, seamlessly merging the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ of secularism so that secularism is transformed from an intellectual conviction to a moral imperative.

It is easier to reject the repulsive communalism of a missionary and his son being burnt alive as they slept in their open jeep in tribal Orissa than it is to meet the challenge of insidious communalism. When some of the best minds of contemporary India can so artlessly slide into dressing up prejudice as ratiocination, secular fundamentalism calls for a secular riposte. For, it is from the ball of such prejudice that is spun the yarn of communal ideology and communal politics that not only forages for reasons to ‘explain’, that is, effectively, to justify the carnage of Gujarat 2002 but then contrives through such reasoning to keep the perpetrators in office. Gujarat was lost to communalism because communal thinking led to communal action; and secularists lost Gujarat because they tried to accommodate ‘majority sentiment’ and temporized over the issue of secularism.

Yet, remember, India was won back from the horrors of partition because Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru profoundly understood, even in the midst of the bestiality overtaking the subcontinent, that ‘majority sentiment’ is not communal. They remained unflinchingly secular when even their closest colleagues were getting infected with the virus of communal thinking. They recognized that the ‘majority’ in ‘majority sentiment’ does not refer to the ‘majority community’ but to the majority of Indians drawn from all communities. Sarva dharma sambhava is not the preserve of Hindus alone; Muslims are no more swayed by fatwas than Hindus are by the injunctions of Sankaracharyas; ‘godmen’ abound in every community.

Indians are secular not because someone has misled them into being so but because the whole course of our millennial civilization has been that of a mighty river which, while Hindu in its origins, has been fed over the centuries, ever since its first encounter with pre-Hindu Indians, by so many tributaries of other origins, that as we step into that mighty river in the twenty-first century, we are bathed in the waters of not a Hindu, but a composite, Indian heritage.

We are secular because we are Indian, not because we are Hindu. And so, preserving, protecting and promoting our Indianness, or Bharatiyata, does not mean preserving, protecting or promoting Hindutva. The Hindu religion coexists with the other religions of India, superior in numbers but equal in all other respects, and as part of the Indian dispensation – precisely because that dispensation is Indian not Hindu, and is designed for all, not some, of us.

It is above all in the teaching and propagation of popular history that the battle is first joined between the secular and communal forces. It is, therefore, in understanding the eternal verities of our history that secularism must be anchored. This calls for translating the academic rigour of historical research into the everyday currency of the discourse in the roadside dhaba. The university professor is unlikely to sip his tea in the dhaba. So, it is for the rest of us, and primarily for the political class, to render the abstruse findings of the professional historian into the idiom of the dhaba.

To do so, however, requires a presence both in the seminar room and the dhaba. The politician by his calling is obliged to frequent the dhaba. The politician by his privilege is also welcomed at the round table. Yet, too few of our politicians combine calling with privilege to press the secular case. In contrast, the communalist spans the dhaba and the symposium. That is one reason the secularist school has lost ground.

Intellectual secularism needs to be reinforced by secular activism. Personal conviction is never enough; the message has to be spread, others have to be carried along, the challenge has to be met as much on the battleground of the communalist’s choosing as in dragging the communalist to the battleground of the secularist’s choosing. And this has to be done both when inter-communal relations are stable as well as when they are disturbed. It was in the long Nehruvian calm from the early 1950s to the mid-1990s that secular somnolence left open the space for creeping communalism. As we have seen, that Nehruvian calm was the consequence of a principled commitment to secularism that elevated secular principle above the heat and dust of the political battle – and in consequence won the political battle.

The point is important because it makes little sense to win the argument and lose the government. Nehru showed that we can win the government by winning the argument. Faint hearts after him let the argument go in the hope that the government might be kept. By the mid-1990s, the secularists ended up losing both the argument and the government. By taking up the argument, the secularists can win – and indeed have won – the government. Secular fundamentalism is, therefore, as much a political strategy as it is a moral choice, an intellectual conviction, and a preferred way of life.

A considerable body of secularists advises against meretricious secularism, that is, against wearing one’s secularism on one’s political sleeve. Secularism is said to offend the majority because secularism is perceived as favouring the minority at the expense of the majority. If that were indeed so, India would have gone down the majoritarian way long ago, and because the majority is so overwhelming, it would have done so definitively. But secularism is not about disadvantaging or disenfranchising or delegitimizing the majority. It is about not disadvantaging or disenfranchising or delegitimizing the minorities.

A majority of the majority has not been taken in by the tushtikaran argument because Indian secularism denies neither religion nor community identity. There is a majority and there are the minorities – but this mathematical fact does not detract from equality of treatment. Indeed, recognition of minority status reassures the minorities that their identity is not under threat and that their special problems will be attended to. Similarly, the promotion of community interest is not incompatible with secularism provided such community interest does not infringe the interests of any other community. Thus, there is nothing non-secular about government improving pilgrimage facilities to Vaishno Devi for the same reason that there is nothing non-secular about government building a Haj Manzil in Mumbai. Muslims do not go to Vaishno Devi and Hindus do not go on Haj, but that is no reason for Hindus to be denied state help or for Muslims to not be extended it.

A more subtle trap into which non-fundamentalist secularists are apt to fall is equating ‘majority communalism’ with ‘minority communalism’ and denouncing both in the same breath so as to escape the charge of tushtikaran. The argument thus gets shifted from relations between communities – which is what secularism is about – to modernizing retrograde social practices within communities – which is what liberalism is about.

The distinction is important. Liberalism, under our Constitution, works through liberals in each community persuading their co-religionists to abandon obsolete and reactionary practices. Secularism, on the other hand, is a constitutional obligation cutting across communities. Put another way, in our constitutional order, liberalism in personal law matters is an intra-community issue, while secularism is an inter-community issue.

By confusing issues of liberalism with issues of secularism, communalists succeed in shifting attention from their lack of secularism to the secularists’ lack of liberalism. And since nothing so characterizes a liberal as a disturbed conscience, the liberal is stung into proving his or her liberal credentials instead of rebuking the communalist for justifying his reactionary communal mindset by invoking the reactionary social practices of the other.

Mahatma Gandhi exemplified the reconciliation of the secular objective with the liberal objective. He remained rock solid on secularism as the fundamental principle of inter-community relations but directed all his liberalism at reform within his own community. His zeal for social reform – which took up much more of his attention and energies than political questions – was directed entirely at his own community, not in hectoring other communities to reform their ways. He left it to the abundant good sense available in every community to reform their respective ways instead of seeking to impose reform on others from without.

The way forward for the secular fundamentalist is the Gandhian way – secularism in inter-community matters and liberalism in intra-community matters, without confusing the one with the other. What is reprehensible in the Other is for the Other to rectify. He will. For liberalism is hardly the preserve of only one community. But it is unacceptable that reproaching triple talaq be the justification for launching a pogrom against the mian and his mullah.

There is another important consideration to note, a consideration which is a running theme in Jawaharlal Nehru’s post-independence secular discourse, but which has since virtually slipped out of the vocabulary of political secularism – the distinction between ‘majority communalism’ and ‘minority communalism’. As a secular fundamentalist, I abhor all communalisms but regard majority communalism as by far the greater danger. For, majority communalism can undermine the very character of our secular nationhood precisely because the majority is an overwhelming majority. Minority communalism cannot, precisely because it is such a small minority. A Hindu communalist in independent India can work towards a Hindu India. It would require an advanced form of insanity for a Muslim communalist to work towards a Muslim India. Hindu fundamentalism is directed against other communities. Minority fundamentalism is inner-directed – against members of the same minority.

On the other hand, as a liberal, I would want to see all harmful, discriminatory social practices, especially gender-based discrimination which is rampant in all communities, removed as expeditiously as possible. But as a secularist, I recognize that such social reform must come from within, not without. And, therefore, I reject the argument that my priority should be to end polygamy among Muslims. I regard that as the priority for the Muslim liberal to take up, while I get on with crusading against Hindu polygamy, which is much more rampant, as the Gopal Singh Committee established decades ago.

There is a biblical injunction to refrain from pointing to the mote in the other’s eye without considering the beam in one’s own. In a similar manner, our Constitution prescribes that each community reform itself on the best liberal principles. So, the conscience-stricken liberal’s first task is to attend to the warts in his own community, trusting that his fellow liberals in the other community will do the same. At the same time, as a liberal constitutionalist, I would urge wider resort by all – Hindus as much as the minorities – to the voluntary civil code embodied in the Special Marriage Act and related legislation.

There are two other points to be stressed. One relates to special provisions in the Constitution and law for the minorities. If there can be special provisions for the minorities – as in respect of education – why not for the majority? How is such discrimination compatible with the basic secular principle of non-discrimination?

The essential secular answer is that if any such special provision infringes the rights of the majority, it certainly needs a fresh look. But there is no incompatibility if a special provision does not abridge or abort a right available to other citizens. A madrasa does not stop a Hindu parent from sending their child to a shishu niketan (although they would be well advised not to!). Second, affirmative action (such as state aid to minority educational institutions) does not amount to discrimination because it is designed to compensate for historical disadvantage. In any case, the secular order must respect the personal law of the minorities as much as it does the personal law of the majority – hence the multiple legislation which has gone into the codification of Hindu laws, a set of personal laws which are in no way incompatible with a secular order – for the good reason that the personal laws of the minorities are also not incompatible with a secular order!

Secularism also does not deny the legitimacy of communitarian interest. Communalism does – except for the majority community. This is best illustrated in the case of the IUML or Syed Shahabuddin’s magazine, Muslim India. The IUML is avowedly concerned with the Muslim community. That makes it communitarian, not communal. For communitarianism to spill over into communalism, the pursuit of community interest has to be at the expense of another community – as when a masjid is deliberately despoiled to make way for an alternative place of worship.

The IUML has never uttered a word against another community or advocated a single transgression of a majority community right. Indeed, the IUML broke from the original Muslim League in protest against the Pakistan branch instigating and colluding in discrimination against the minorities in Pakistan. It has actually sent a Hindu to the Kerala state assembly. The Sangh Parivar, on the contrary, spends a great deal of its energies on denigrating other communities, thwarting their interests and deprecating their identity.

Communalism seeks to absorb the other community by eliminating its separate identity. Communitarianism defensively seeks to preserve that identity. Secularism seeks to synthesize both without dissolving either. Applying these criteria to Muslim India one finds that while the magazine insistently and almost exclusively deals only with the plight of the Muslim community, there is never any word of denigration of the beliefs and practices of any other community. Look at Panchajanya or Organiser (the house magazines of the Sangh Parivar), on the other hand, and one finds an almost hysterical obsession with the minority communities to the virtual exclusion of any other consideration. Muslim India is communitarian; Organiser is communal. Secular fundamentalism recognizes the distinction.


* Extracted with permission from the author’s book, Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2004.