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The Secularism Debate in India

 

-- Lawrence Liang

 

 

1.         Introduction

 

Secularism is perhaps the most resurrected term in India. It has been declared dead on a number of occasions, and recently after the carnage in Gujarat it was declared to be conclusively dead. And yet we know that it will have many more occasions to mourn the demise of secularism in India. There are two instances when one must adopt a healthy skepticism towards any idea or concept. The first  is when the concept claims for itself universal history and applicability irrespective of any context and the second instance is when a concept claims for itself, despite its historical origins, chameleon like powers of adaptability, where it redefines itself within different social and political contexts.

 

The story of secularism in India is a complex one which oscillates between heavy criticism against the relevancy of the idea one the one hand, and equally strong support who from people who see secularism as being an integral part of the democratic experience in India. This article seeks to provide a survey of some of the debates on secularism in India. It does not in any manner purport to represent the range of complexity involved in speaking about secularism, nor does it provide any conclusive answers to the problems posed by a concept like secularism. Instead what it seeks to do is to summarize some of the key positions in India on the secularism debate in light of a few questions and examine the manner in which these questions have been addressed by the different positions.[1]

 

 

The first question is with respect to whether a term / concept like secularism makes sense in the Indian context and if it does, then in what manner has it been made sense of. Why is it that certain scholars feel that the term that can have no value in India for the simple reason that there is no corresponding concept that answers to the call of secularism in India. I would also like to point to Skinner’s caution about the difference between a term and a concept. He says” It cannot be a sufficient condition of my possessing a concept that I understand the correct application of a corresponding term. There is still the possibility that I may believe myself to be in possession of some concept when this belief is in fact mistaken. Consider for example the difficulties raised by certain highly general terms such as being or infinity. A whole community of users may be capable of applying the terms with perfect consistency. Yet it might be possible to show that there is simply no concept which answers to any of the agreed usages”.[2] In what manner can we state that Skinner’s statement is applicable to the debate on secularism in India. Is it true that there might exist an entire set of academics and scholars who use the word without really possessing an underlying concept?

 

What then for Skinner is the relationship between concepts and words? He says that “If our aim is to illuminate ideological disputes through the study of linguistic disagreements, the first issue we need to clarify is this: what exactly are we debating through a word when we find ourselves debating whether or not it ought to be applied as a description of a particular action or state of affairs?” There is no doubt that in India the term secularism is used in an everyday sense in a wide manner , from academics to practitioners, and from political parties to the layman. What then is the manner in which it is used and what are the problems with such usage? I remain an agnost on the issue and shall abscond my burden of having to decide in favour or against the idea of secularism, and instead play the role of chief witness and leave the judgment to the reader. The debate that I shall be considering is the academic one, between broadly the critics on the one hand ( Ashish Nandy, T N Madan, Partha Chatterjee etc)[3] and those who support the doctrine, (Rajeev Bhargava, Akeel Bilgrami etc).

 

There are various levels at which the debate is pitched and contested. The first disagreement is at the conceptual level, where critics of secularism feel that that the very idea of secularism is flawed. The second level of disagreement is at the level of the explanatory, that is under what conditions does secularism become mandatory or under what conditions does it emerge as a useful political concept? And finally there is disagreement at the level of the normative, in terms of what is the desired ideal and ho we get there. The disagreement on this front includes a critique of normativity itself, and the question of whether normative frameworks are desirable at all.

 

 

2.1 The western history of the concept

 

The first objection to the idea of secularism and its applicability to India is the argument that secularism has a very thick history which emerged in the context of the crisis in Europe between the church and the state. It is then argued that concomitant idea of the necessity of the separation between the church and the state does not have a parallel in non western societies. Secularism in the west implied a process of the removal of religion form the various domains of public life and an impossibility in a country like India for three primary reasons:

 

1. Indians are deeply religious people and religion is a shared credo which is an intrinsic part of the lives of people. Any attempt to remove aspects of religious behavior form the lives of people would prove to be futile

2. It is an impossibility as the basis of state action because it has been impossible to maintain equidistance in India where the state is involved in almost every aspect of religious behavior, from the management of temples to Wakfs.

3. Finally Secularism is a normative impossible because it is incapable of countering the rise of right wing fundamentalism

 

The critics of secularism argue that in India there has never been a need for any such separation, best exemplified by Gandhi, and as with all western theories there is an assumption of universal applicability behind secularism which is false. What then is the problem with adopting this form of a ‘western ‘ doctrine. For Nandy the argument goes that the adoption of western ontology will always result in a displacement of theories of knowing and living that have preexisted modern tradition, which may have more to offer in terms of resolving forms of social conflict. Critics would argue that under colonialism, certain forms of social conflicts were seen to matters of religious conflict as that the only available category of experience for the west, and hence you had the mass scale transformation of local dispute into a clash between sects ands communities and ethnic groups into a mass scale conflict between religious communities. Nandy would also argue that secularism says very little or nothing about culture and is generally incompatible with different concepts of selves. At the ground level for Nandy it is not a term like secularism which makes any sense in the lives of people but a tradition of toleration which needs to be understood and revived.

 

The second level of critique against secularism is against the ontological possibilities of secularism. The argument goes that there are three conditions for a secular state to exist and none of the three can be satisfied in India. Firstly, a secular state is premised on the idea of liberty with respect to religion but this liberty is often curtailed and there is no absolute freedom of religious. Secondly, it is supposed to treat all religions with equality but again this principle is not one that can be satisfied because the principle of reservations negates the possibility of the equality principle and most importantly India has never been able to follow the principle of neutrality as the state is involved in all aspect of religious practices from administration of temples etc. The contradiction therefore lies in the fact that while India consistently reiterates a desire to be secular, it is a self defeating claim as it also constantly redefines what secularism itself consists of in practise.

 

2.2  Can Secularism work in India?

 

For Nandy, the question is only possible if one were to see secularism and communalism as the anti thesis of each other. But his argument is that communalism and secularism are not avowed enemies but inevitable aspects of each other. Like secularism, Hindu nationalism is also a modern phenomena that seeks to use Hinduism as a national ideology and shape Hindus into a proper nationhood. There are two religion in India, the idea of Religion as faith or a way of life and the idea of religion as an ideology. What secularism has allowed is the emergence of the use of religion as ideology rather than as faith and this has displaced the tradition of toleration. There is therefore a necessity to recover a tradition of toleration. The argument further goes that secularism can only survive in a highly non secular domain; and thus if faiths are in decline , then people search for ideologies linked to faith. Every account of a riot in India or any account of communal conflict according to Nandy is also at the same time been about stories of communal harmony or about individuals crossing the boundaries of faith to help each other, and the idea of secularism does not in any manner provide for an account of these instances.

 

Partha Chatterjee fails to see any utility in the idea of secularism, because in his view it is inadequate to face the challenge of the far right. The far right has never had a problem with secularism, and the Hindu right in India in facts accuses its critics of being pseudo secularists without ever challenging the idea of secularism itself. Furthermore it is unlike to pit itself against the secular state and according to Chatterjee the far right is  perfectly at ease with the idea of the western or the modern state. It in fact often potrays itself possessing the true spirit of secularism and in Vajpayee’s new year musings he states that there has never been a contradiction between Hindutva and seculairsm.  The question then is secularism enough to challenge the right or should the attack be fought where the challenge is being made namely the duty of the state to ensure religious toleration.

 

Chatterjee ascribes the rise of the right wing in India to a number of reasons including the back door entry of religion into politics as a result of the failure of the modern nation state  to negotiate with the religious identities of people within the limitations of a modern liberal state. Communalism is then, a response from those who see secularism as the cause for the marginalization of religion in India. For Chatterjee, the opposite of religious intoleration is not secularism but toleration. But when citizens are uprooted from their traditional lifestyles secularism can become the counter point against religious chauvinism because both begin to contest for the allegiance of the decultured, the atomized. He advocates a similar return to traditions of toleration outside of the narrative of the secular citizen subject as a more fruitful venue of facing the challenge of the right.

 

 

 

3. In support of secularism

 

Akeel Bilgrami begins with the question of whether Nehruvian secularism has been a failure or whether it only partially succeed only as a holding process. Starting from a critique of Nandy’s position that secularism was an imposition upon people who did not want to separate religion form politics, because it was an intrinsic part of the nationalist modernizing project of modernity, Bilgrame argues that Nandy’s analysis is marked by a narrow and uncritical anti nationalism marked by traditionalist nostalgia. According to him, Nandy misses the actual fault line which nothing to do with modernity. In fcat the mistake that both Nandy and the Hindu nationalists make is that they share a common presumption that nationalism is a single entity that can be transparently grasped. Bilgrame argues that nationalism is a complex phenomena beyond the possibility of a singular narrative and the real shift that needs to be understood is not with respect to nationalism per se but with respect to various practices of exclusionism within nationalism.

 

Nationalism often creates exclusions by totalizing traditions. For instance the monolithic bhraminical hindiusm displaces smaller little traditions but it is not accurate to characterize modernity as the transformative movement that causes these exclusions. What colonial modernity does is to bring to this pre existing construction a mass element and industrialization as it seeks to co opts various castes through electoral process within a larger monolithic rubric of Hinduism. Bilgrami argues that instead of a blanket constructionist argument it might make more sense to divide constructionist arguments into grades of constructivism to see how particular constructions get entrenched as consciousness.

 

For him the mere recognition of a phenomenon as a construction does not render it any more malleable or erasable and these are often real and entrenched into the polity and sensibilities. For instance electoral politics is now well entrenched and precisely for that reason the sense in which religion is relevant in today’s context cannot any longer be purely spiritual or quotidian in the selective use that nandy makes of Gandhi. It is therefore inaccurate to describe the desire to bring religion into poltics as innocent protest against the imposition of secularism.

 

For Bilgrami secularism was an imposition but not in the Nandy sense of as modern imposition, rather, it was assumed that secularism lay outside the arena of substantive politics or political commitments. It was never seen as one among many political commitments to be negotiated through a process of dialogue. What was imposed then was not an outcome of negotiation between different communities. But this is not the same as a critique of statehood; the congress assumed that as a secular party they could represent all communities and secularism never emerged out of a creative dialogic process and this gave it procedural priority but never substantive authority .

 

The problem was that Nehru saw secularism as a transcendental idea and the implementation of a socialist program would allow the nation to bypass issues of communalism. He assumed that the mere fact of representation or composition would address or include implicit negotiation. The mistake is however to attempt to revert back to some kind of a pre modern alternative vision of secularism since the failure was not to do with modernity rather with the absence of negotiation especially through the codification of law. An alternative substantive secularism is itself one amongst many other competing doctrines including Hinduism and Islam and secularism must therefore start in the political arena with its substantive commitments. Secularism then does not emerge from an ahistoric transcendent liberal fantasy but from a commitment to a  substantive political commitment.

 

4. What is secularism for?

 

Rajev Bhargava attempts to construct a normative political theory which satisfactorily answer the critics of secularism, while at the same time making a strong argument for the political relevancy of the project of secularism itself. He takes on the three major criticism against secularism, namely the fact that it is a western construct that is not a part of Indian culture, the allegation that secularism is deeply insensitive to the religious traditions of people and finally that while secularism is supposed to be neutral but it never is.

 

According to Bhargava any theory of secularism should be able to answer three questions

1.         Is it possible to ever split and separate religion from politics

2.         Why must there be a separation between religion and politics

3.         After such separation how do they relate to each other

 

He then argues that in India separation in the first sense is not possible; and secularism as a political concept would  be a non starter if it attempted to do that; Is it then possible instead to argue for separation of some religious and non religious institutions; so the issue is then not about separating religion and politics but posed more in the sense of the separation of institutionalized forms.

 

There may be different arguments for why there should be a separation for distance. On the one hand there is the argument of the value of autonomy (since both are very powerful institutions, if they mixed they will thwart autonomy), Equality (No person by virtue of membership in one institution should be guaranteed membership in another)  and finally there is also the argument of the necessity for the separation of power in a democracy ( to curb religious or political absolutism). Apart from these there may exist two other kinds of reasons may exist:

 

1.         Instrumental rationality

2.         argument from ordinary life

 

According to Bhargava the first three arguments are grounded in perfectionism and a separation is required for a better life while the latter two are grounded in an anti perfectionist stand and they do not depend on any perfectionism but seek form the state a practice of restraint and toleration. He calls the first set of reasons ethical secularism (based on some ultimate ideal) while the last two are political secularism ( merely towards making a more livable polity). Separation cal also be differentially characterized as:

 

1.         separation as exclusion- absolute separation for e.g. state must be anti religion

2.         separation as the maintenance of boundaries- this isn’t absolute but based on an idea of a principled distance, and it entails that there be political neutrality or the boundaries between religion and politics be respected as distinct spheres

 

So there are four versions of secularism:

1. ethical secularism- that excludes all religions from the affairs of the state

2. ethical secularism- that requires principled distance of state from all religions

3. political secularism- excludes all ultimate ideals including religious ones from the affairs of the state

4. Political secularism- that demands that the state be primarily distanced from all religious and non religious principles

 

Political secularism

 

Ethical sec espouses the cause of separation by referring to some ultimate ideal for e.g equality or democracy s ethical sec can be critiqued if it can be shown that the cause of equality is better served nor by a separation but by a relationship. Can people who then have faiths reconcile themselves with ethical sec- the prima facie answer seems to be no because there in a conflict between ethical sec and religion and ethical sec. through state intervention seeks to exclude from politics all religious beliefs. So what does political secularism do; it justifies the separation not based on any ultimate ideal but by an appeal to political neutrality. Ethical sec demands that believer give up everything of significance while political sec demands that they give up a little of what us of exclusive importance to sustain what is generally valuable

 

For instance the conflict over collective rituals in society – if secularism. is delinked from ethical conceptions and given a political character; then the philosophy of secularism would state that such a state accommodates all kinds of religious orthodoxy and tradition because it does not presuppose a high degree of autonomy, full blooded egalitarianism or mandatory and intense political participation. Thus far secularism has always been narrated in terms of the church /state divide but it also needs to be narrated as the struggle of the state to make itself independent of deeply conflicting religious groups. At every stage in history there has been a conflict over the ultimate ideals which often conflict with each other and political secularism should be seen as a part of the various practices that arose in response to these crises. There may be two kinds of exclusion of religion from politics - strong and weak exclusions. While strong exclusion entails a abolishment of every ideal from politics, weak exclusion is satisfied with banning only ultimate ideals; it abandons ultimate ideals for the sake of the protection of ordinary life. Furthermore it is not necessary that life will be impoverished by the abolition of ultimate ideals because political secularism need not be hostile to ultimate ideals and it merely dislodges them in terms of primary importance.

 

5. Conclusion

                 

What we see clearly in the debate in India between the critics and supporters of secularism is the fact that it is difficult to find consistent lines for the disagreement. While some disagree on a conceptual plane, others may disagree on a descriptive or normative one, while some may even disagree for purely instrumental reasons. Do we have a way out, or do we hold on to our leaky umbrella because it is the only one that we have?

 


[1] This article will summarize the debate as best represented in Rajeev Bhargava’s anthology on secularism. See, Rajeev Bhargava, Secularism and its critics, (New Delhi: OUP, 1999) which contains articles by all the scholars summarized in this paper.

 

[2] Quentin Skinner, Language and political change, in Ball et al., Political innovation and conceptual Change, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press)

[3] It is only fair to note that I classify all these various thinkers in the rather easy binary of supporters and critics only for the purpose of convenience while in reality their reasons for supporting or criticizing the idea of secularism may be very different from each other.

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Lawrence Liang, researcher at the Alternative Law Forum, currently working on a research project on the politics of intellectual property and the public domain.

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