Ashis Nandy - Politics of Secularism PDF
Ashis Nandy - Politics of Secularism PDF
Ashis Nandy - Politics of Secularism PDF
ASHISNANDY*
*Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054,
India. This paper was presented at the Workshop on New Dimensions of Ethnic Violence,
organized by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, at Kathmandu, 15-17 February
1987. The second section of the paper draws on a lecture given at the Candhi Peace Foundation
in the series ‘Religion, Theocracy and Politics’, 12 December 1985 and from an essay, ‘The
Fate of Secularism’, published in the Forum Gazette, 1 and 16 July 1986.
03O4-3?~4/aa/02/0 1 77- 18/$03.00 0 1988 Alternatives
178 The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery ofReligious Tolerance
Four trends in South Asia
T h e first and the most important of these trends is that each religion in South
Aiia, perhaps all over the southern hemisphere, has split into two: faith and
ideology. Both are inappropriate terms but I give them, in this paper, specific
meanings to serve my purpose. By faith I mean religion as a way of life, a
tradition which is definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural. I
say ‘definitionally’ because, unless a religion is geographically and culturally
confined to a small area, religion as a way of life has to in effect turn into a
confederation of a number of ways of life, linked by a common faith having
some theological space for the heterogeneity which everyday life introduces.
Witness the differences between Iranian and Indonesian Islam, two cultures
divided by the same faith. The two forms of Islam are interlocking, not
isomorphic in relation to each other.
By ideology I mean religion as a sub-national, national or cross-national
identifier of populations contesting for, or protecting non-religious, usually
political or socioeconomic interests. Such religions-as-ideologies are usually
identified with one or more texts which, rather than the ways of life of the
believers, then become the final identifiers of the ‘pure’ forms of the religions.
T h e texts help anchor the ideologies in something seemingly concrete and
delimited and in effect provide a set of manageable operational definitions.
T h e modern state always prefers to deal with religious ideologies rather
than with faiths. I t is wary of both forms of religion but it finds the ways of life
more inchoate and, hence, unmanageable, even though it is faith rather than
ideology which has traditionally shown more pliability and catholicity. I t is
religion-as-faith which prompted 200,000 Indians to declare themselves as
Mohammedan Hindus in the census of 1911; and it was the catholicity offaith
which prompted Mole-Salam Girasia Rajputs to traditionally have two
names for every member of the community, one Hindu and one Muslim.’ It is
religion-as-ideology, on the other hand, which prompted a significant
proportion of the Punjabi-speaking Hindus to declare Hindi as their mother
tongue, thus bringing the politics of language to bear on the differences
between Sikhism and Hinduism and sowing the seeds for the creation of a new
minority. Likewise it is religion-as-ideology which has provided a potent tool
to the Jumuut e Islumi to disown the traditional, plural forms of Islam in the
Indian subcontinent and to disjunct official religion from everyday life.
Second, during the past two centuries or so, there has grown a tendency to
view the older faiths of the region through the eyes of evangelical European
Christianity and its various off-shoots-such as the masculine Christianity
associated with 19th-century missionaries like Joshua Marshman and
William Carey, or its mirror image in the orthodox modernism vended by the
likes of Friederich Engels and Thomas Huxley. Because this particular
Eurocentric way of looking at faiths gradually came to be associated with the
dominant culture of the colonial states in the region, it subsumes under it a set
of clear polarities: centre versus periphery, true faith versus its distortions,
civil versus primordial, and great traditions versus local cultures or little
traditions.
I t is part of the same story that in each of the dyads, the second category is
ASHISNANDY 179
set up to lose. I t is also a part of the same story that, once the colonial concept
of state was internalized by the societies of the region through the nationalist
ideology, in turn heavily influenced by the Western theories and practice of
statecraft,2 the nascent nation-states of the region took on themselves the
same civilizing mission that the colonial states had once taken on vis-Bvis the
ancient faiths of the subcontinent.
Third, the idea of secularism, an import from 19th-century Europe into
South Asia, has acquired immense potency in the middle-class cultures and
‘state sectors’ of South Asia, thanks to its connection with and response to
religion-as-ideology. Secularism has little to say about cultures-it is
definitionally ethnophobic and frequently ethnocidal, unless of course
cultures and those living by cultures are willing to show total subservience to
the modern nation-state and become ornaments or adjuncts to modern
living-and the orthodox secularists have no clue to the way a religion can
link up different faiths or ways of life according to its own configurative
principles.
T o such secularists, religion is an ideology in opposition to the ideology of
modern statecraft and, therefore, needs to be contained. They feel even more
uncomfortable with religion-as-faith claiming to have its own principles of
tolerance and intolerance, for that claim denies the state and the middle-class
ideologues of the state the right to be the ultimate reservoir of sanity and the
ultimate arbiter among different religions and communities. This denial is
particularly galling to those who see the clash betweep two faiths merely as a
clash of socioeconomic interests, not as a simultaneous clash between
conflicting interests and a philosophical encounter between two metaphysics.
The Westernized middle classes and literati of South Asia love to see all such
encounters as reflections of socioeconomic forces and, thus, as liabilities and
as sources of ethnic violence.
Fourth, the imported idea of secularism has become increasingly
incompatible and, as it were, uncomfortable with the somewhat fluid
definitions of the self with which many South Asian cultures live. Such a self,
which can be conceptually viewed as a configuration of selves, invokes and
reflects the configurative principles of religions-as-faiths. It also happens to be
a negation of the modern concept of selfhood acquired partly from the West
and partly from a re-discovery of previously recessive elements in South Asian
traditions. Religion-as-ideology, working with the concept of well-bounded,
mutually exclusive religious identities, on the,other hand, is more compatible
with and analogous to the definition of the self as a well-bounded,
individuated entity clearly separable from the non-self. Such individuation is
taking place in South Asian societies at a fast pace and, to that extent, more
exclusive definitions of the self aIso are emerging in these societies as a
by-product of seculari~ation.~
A more fluid definition of the self is not merely more compatible with
religion-as-faith, it also has-and depends more on-a distinctive set of the
non-self and anti-selves (to coin a neologism analogous to anti-heroes). O n
one plane, these anti-selves are similar to what psychologist Carl Rogers used
to call, infelicitously, the ‘not-me’-and some others call rejected selves. O n
another plane, they, the anti-selves, are counter-points without which the self
180 The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery ofRcligious Tolerance
just cannot be defined in the major cultures of South Asia. I t is the self in
conjunction with its anti-selves and its distinctive concept of the non-self
which define the domain of the self. Religion-as-faith is more compatible with
such a complex self-definition; secularism has no inkling of this distinct,
though certainly not unique, form of self-definition in South Asia. For
everything said, secularism is, as T.N.:Madan puts it, a gift of Christianity, by
which he presumably means a ‘gift of post-medieval, European Christianity’
to this part of the world.4
I t is in the context of these four processes that I now discuss the scope and
limits of the ideology of secularism in India and its relationship with the new
forms of ethnic violence we have been witnessing.
analysis, each major faith in the region 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 theory of transcendence.
Recently, Ali Akhtar Khan has drawn attention to the fact that George
Jacob Holyoake, who coined the word ‘secularism’ in 1850, advocated a
secularism accommodative of religion, a secularism which would moreover
emphasize diversities and co-existence in the matter of faith. His
contemporary, Joseph Bradlaugh, on the other hand, believed in a secularism
which rejected religion and made science its deity.5 Most non-modern
Indians (that is, Indians who would have reduced Professor Max Weber to
tears), pushed around by the political and cultural forces unleashed by
colonialism still operating in Indian society, have unwittingly opted for the
accommodative and pluralist meaning, while India’s Westernized intellec-
tuals have consciously opted for the abolition of religion from the public
sphere.
I n other words, the accommodative meaning is more compatible with the
meaning a majority of Indians, independently of Bradlaugh, have given to the
word ‘secularism’. This meaning has always disconcerted the country’s
Westernized intellectuals. They have seen such people’s secularism as
adulterated and as compromising true secularism. This despite the fact that
the ultimate symbol of religious tolerance for the modern Indian, Gandhi,
obviously had this adulterated meaning in mind on the few occasions when he
seemed to plead for secularism. This is clear from his notorious claim that
those who thought that religion and politics could be kept separate,
understood neither religion nor politics.
The saving grace in all this is that, while the scientific, rational meaning of
secularism has dominated India’s middle-class public consciousness, the
Indian people and, till recently, most practising Indian politicians have
depended on the accommodative meaning. The danger is that the first
meaning is supported by the accelerating process of modernization in India.
As a result, there is now a clearer fit between the declared ideology of the
modern Indian nation-state and the secularism that fears religions and
ethnicities. Sociologist Imtiaz Ahmed euphemistically calls this fearful,
nervous secularism the new liberalism of the Indian Clites.6
Collapse of secularism
Fortunately for some modern Indians, the embarrassment has been resolved
by the fact that this classification is not working well today. It is not working
well because it has led neither to the elimination of religion and ethnicity from
politics nor to greater religious and ethnic tolerance. This is not the case only
with us; this is the case with every society which has been put up to the
Indians, some time or another, as an ideal secular society.
Thus, problems of ethnicity and secularization haunt today not merely the
twin capitals of the world, Washington and Moscow, they even haunt the
country which the older South Asians have been trained to view as
remarkably free from the divisiveness of ethnicity and religion. For instance,
for some 150 years the Indians have learnt, as part of their political
184 The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance
socialization, that one of the reasons Britain dominated India and one of the
reasons why the Indians were colonized was that they were not secular,
whereas Britain was. That was why the Indians did not know how to live
together, whereas Britain was a world power, perfectly integrated and fired by
the true spirit of secular nationalism. Now we find that after nearly 300 years
of secularism, the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh together are creating as
many problems for Britain as some of the religions or regions are creating for
us in India.
Why is the old ideology of secularism not working in India? There are
many reasons for this; I shall mention only a few, confining myself specifically
to the problem ofreligion as it has become entangled with the political process
in the country.
First, in the early years of independence, when the national tlite was small
and a large section of it had face-to-face contacts, one could screen people
entering public life, especially the upper levels of the public services and high
politics, for their commitment to secularism. Thanks to the growth of
democratic participation in politics-India has gone through eight general
elections and innumerable local and state elections-such screening is no
longer possible. We can no longer make sure that those who reach the highest
levels of the army, police, bureaucracy or politics believe in old-style secular
politics.
To give one example, two ministers of the present central cabinet in India
and a number of ‘high-ups’ in the ruling party have been accused of not only
encouraging, organizing and running a communal riot, but also of protecting
the guilty and publicly threatening civil rights’ workers engaged in relief
work. One chief minister has been recently accused of importing rioters from
another state on payment of professional fees to precipitate a communal riot
as an antidote to violent inter-caste conflicts. Another allegedly organized a
riot three years ago so that he could impose a curfew in the state capital to
stop his political opponents from demonstrating their strength in the
legislature.
Such instances would have been unthinkable only ten years ago. They have
become thinkable today because India’s ultra-tlites can no longer informally
screen decision makers the way they once used to; political participation in
the country is growing, and the country’s political institutions, particularly
the parties, are under too much of a strain to allow such screening. Religion
has entered public life but through the backdoor.
Second, it has become more and more obvious to a large number of people
that modernity is now no longer the ideology of a small minority; it is now the
organizing principle of the dominant culture of politics. The idea that
religions dominate India, that there are a handful of modern Indians fighting
a rear-guard action against that domination, is no longer convincing to many
semi-modern Indians. These Indians see the society around them-and often
their own children-leaving no scope for a compromise between the old and
new and opting for a way of life which fundamentally negates the traditional
concepts of a good life and a desirable society. These Indians have now come
to sense that it is modernity which rules the world and, even in this
sub-continent, religion-as-faith is being pushed into a corner. Much of the
ASHISNANDY 185
fanaticism and violence associated with religion comes today from the sense of
defeat of the believers, from their feelings of impotency, and from their
free-floating anger and self-hatred while facing a world which is increasingly
secular and de-sacralized.
This issue has another side. When the state makes a plea to a minority
community to be secular or to confine itself to only secular politics, the state in
effect tells the minority to ‘go slow’ on its faith, so that it can be more truly
integrated in the nation-state. Simultaneously, the state offers the minority a
consolation prize in the form of a promise that it will force the majority
community also to ultimately dilute its faith. What the state says to a religious
community, the modern sector often indirectly tells the individual: ‘You give
up your faith, at least in public; we also shall give up our faiths in public and
together we shall be able to live in freedom from religious intolerance’. I need
hardly add that however reasonable the solution may look to people like us,
who like to see themselves as rational non-believing moderns, it is not an
adequate consolation to the faithful, to whom religion is what it is precisely
because it provides an overall theory of life, including public life, and because
life is not worth living without a theory, however imperfect, of transcendence.
Third, we have begun to find out that, while appealing to the believers to
keep the public sphere free of religion, the modern nation-state has no means
of ensuring that the ideologies of secularism, development and nationalism
themselves do not begin to act as faiths intolerant of other faiths. That is,
while the modern state builds up pressures on citizens tp give up their faith in
public, it guarantees no protection to them against the sufferings inflicted by
the state itself in the name of its ideology. In fact, with the help of modern
communications and the secular coercive power at its command, the state can
use its ideology to silence its non-conforming citizens. The role of secularism
in many societies today is no different from the crusading and inquisitorial
role of religious ideologies. In such societies, the citizens have less protection
against the ideology of the state than against religious ideologies or theocratic
forces, Certainly in India, the ideas of nation-building, scientific growth,
security, modernization and development have become parts of a left-handed
technology with a clear touch of religiosity-a modern demonology, a tantra
with a built-in code of violence.
This can be put another way. To many Indians today, secularism comes as
a part of a larger package consisting of a set of standardized ideological
products and social processes-development; mega-science and national
security being some of the most prominent among them. This package often
plays the same role vis-8-vis the people of the society-sanctioning or
justifying violence against the weak and the dissenting-that the church, the
ulemu, the sungha, or the Brahmans played in earlier times.
Finally, the belief that values derived from the secular ideology of the state
would be a better guide to political action and to a more tolerant and richer
political life (as compared to the values derived from the religious faiths) has
become even more untenable to large parts of Indian society than it was a
decade ago. We are living in times when it has become clear that, as far as
public morality goes, statecraft in India may have something to learn from
Hinduism, Islam or Sikhism; but Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism have very
186 The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery ofReligious Tolerance
little to learn from the Constitution or from state secular practices. And the
hope that the Indian state would give a set of values to guide a Hindu, a
Muslim or a Sikh in his daily public behaviour lies splintered around us. The
ideology of the Indian state and, for that matter, the deification of the state
may go well with modern and semi-modern Indians, but both pall on a large
number of decent Indians wholare outside the charmed circle of the state
sector.
In sum, we are at a point in time when old-style secularism can no longer
pretend to guide moral or political action. All that the ideology of secularism
can do now is to sanction the absurd search for a modern language of politics
in a traditional society which has an open polity. Let me spell this out.
TABLE
1. Classification of violence