Whither Indian Secularism

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Modern Asian Studies 27, 3 (1993), pp. 667-697. Printed in Great Britain.

Whither Indian Secularism?T . N . M A D A N

Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi

. . . One does not ask plain questions.There aren't such things.E. M. Forster, Howards End'When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ' i tme ans ju st wh at I choose it to mean neither m ore nor less. ''The question is', said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so manydifferent things.''Th e question is ' , said Hu m pty D um pty , 'which is to be master tha t 'sall. ' Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

The present paper seeks 'to explore the nature of Indian secularism,the difficulties it has run into, and the ways in which it may berevised'. This is a large undertaking for a short text, originally writtenas a public lecture, particularly because the issues posed do not read-ily translate into plain questions. The most that I can hope to do isto raise some doubts and make a few suggestions for rethinking theissues involved.Let me begin by suggesting that implicit in the apprehensionsabout Indian secularism having run into difficulties, widely prevalentamong concerned intellectuals and politicians, are three basicassumptions. There is, first, the assumption that secularism as ananti-religious or, at any rate, non-religious ideology has universalThis paper is an extended version of the Fourth Caparo Annual Lecture which Iwas privileged to give at the University of Hull, England, on 24 October 1991. It isbeing published simultaneously by the University.I am grateful to Bhikhu Parekh, Asghar Ali Engineer, James Bjorkman, GopalKrishna, T. P. McNeil, and Noel O'Sullivan for their comments and criticisms. Inthe preparation of the present text I have been helped by the encouragement ofseveral colleagues in Delhi, particularly Upendra Baxi, Dharma Kumar, AshisNandy, Ramashray Roy, Satish Saberwal and Jit Uberoi.oo26-74gX/g3/$5.oo + .00 tgg3 Cambridge University Press

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668 T. N. MA DANapplicability, but that it has culturally specific expressions. This ishow they consider it permissible to speak of Indian secularism. Inother words, secularism is not an Indian ideology, but there is anIndian ideology of secularism. The general ideology of secularism, itis asserted, has been historically validated by the experience andachievements of the so-called modern societies of the West in the lastfour hundred years and it should have succeeded in India too. Sec-ondly, it is assumed that secularism will be welcomed by all rightthinking persons, for it shows the way to the making of rational plansfor social reconstruction and state action, placing ultimate faith inthe adequacy of human agency. Finally, there is the assumption that,with appropriate corrective measures, secularism can still be madeto succeed in India, notwithstanding all the faltering of the last fourdecades.Personally, I believe that all three assumptions should be subjectedto critical scrutiny. I do not think that the virtues claimed for secular-ism are unquestionable or that it provides answers to all questionsabout life and living. Surely it has not been a complete success any-where nor do we know of any wholly secularized societies. Our timesare witness to the phenomena of desecularization and fundamental-ism. There are obvious limits to what the theoretical and experi-mental sciences can enable human beings to know; and there areeven more obvious limits to what technology and the bureaucraticorganization of work can enable us to do. These limits are the limitsof the historic process of 'rationalization' valorized in the ideology ofsecularism, even in the West, which is said to bring to the non-Western countries intimations of their future as modernizing societies.Let me, then, take a quick look at the experience of Western societywith secularism and secularization in order briefly to provide a com-parative perspective for a discussion of the contemporary Indiansituation.

II. Secularization and Secularism in the WestAny discussion of these issues is, I am afraid, bedevilled by terminolo-gical confusion, ethnographic diversity and ideological dissension. Ageneration ago, David Martin, a British sociologist, exasperated bythe lack of fit between the varied empirical materials from Westernsocieties and a general notion of secularization, with its roots in thecounter-religious impulse, proposed erasure of the wretched word


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WHITHER INDIAN SECULARISM? 669from the sociological vocabulary.1 But the. word is, of course, stillwith us and Martin has, since his original proposal, given us a bookoutlining, even if prematurely, 'a general theory of secularization',and presenting a fairly wide range of empirical possibilities withinthe narrow confines of the West (including Russia and the UnitedStates).2In fact, the word 'secularization' has been with us since the seven-teenth century from the years of negotiations leading up to the Treatyof Westphalia in 1648. It was then but a convenient term, describingthe transfer of church properties to the exclusive control of theprinces. It was only in the following century that this became a polit-ical programme, having its momentous expression in the FrenchRevolution a century and a half later.In our own time, secularization has acquired the status of a 'socialmyth', which contains elements of truth, namely the empirical pro-cesses that constitute it, as well as distortions of that truth, all in theservice of diverseeven contradictoryideological positions. Whilethe so-called conservatives see secularization as a threat to their con-ceptions of the good, moral, life, robbing it of its ideas of sacrednessand ultimate value, the secularists look upon it as an anti-religiousemancipatory process. The latter consider urbanization, industrial-ization and modernization as the causes and the symptoms of the'secularizing fever' that grips our societies today.3Personally, I would have thought that the word 'secularization'was reasonably precise in its connotation and, therefore, useful indescribing certain processes that are as old as human culture: theprocesses by which, step by step, human beings have reduced theirdependence upon supra-human agency and narrowed down the areasof life in which religious ideas, symbols and institutions holdsway. The point I want to stress here is not that these processes arevalue-neutral, which they are not, or good or bad, but that theyhave more or less happened everywhere. They have been describedin respect of contemporary India by many social scientists, includingM. N. Srinivas and Milton Singer.4 These accounts are by no means

1 David M artin, 'T ow ards E liminating the Concept of Secularization' in J . Gould(ed.), Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965).2 David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, Blackwell, 1978).3 See, e.g., Peter Glasner, The Sociology of Secularization (London, Routledge andKegan Paul, 1977).4 M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modem India (Berkeley, University of CaliforniaPress, 1966); Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (New York, Praeger,I972)-


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WH ITHER INDIAN SECULARISM? 67 I"Dare to know" (sapere aude): Have the courage to use your ownunderstanding; this is the motto of the Enlightenm ent'.8 It was a callfor self-emancipation. Nature had been shorn of its mysteriesinFriedrich Schiller's phrase, it had been 'disenchanted' and recon-ceptualized as 'self-supporting and self-explanatory'. The question oftranscendence had beenor so the philosophers thoughtset aside.The emphasis was no longer on things beyond, but on saecularis, orlasting worldly things judged as value, and on saeculum, or seculartime, that is 'our age', here and now. If secularism is placed within the setting of the Enlightenment, asI think it should be, it is obvious that it is better denned positivelyas a reasonable theory about human agency, rather than negativelyas an anti-religious ideology. Actually, there is more to it than justthat: scholars from Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch to Louis Dum ontand Peter Berger have in their different ways pointed to the essentiallinkages among Protestantism, individualism, and secularization. InBerger's succinct summing up, 'Protestantism cut the umbilical cordbetween heaven and earth',9 and presented secularization as a gift tohumankind. David Martin, too, proclaims 'that secularization ini-tially occurs within the ambit of Christian societies.'10The limitation of space precludes details, but let me point outbroadly that the idea of the privatization of religion, which is therecomm endation of compassionate secularists to their less enlightenedfellow human beings, owes its birth to, inter alia, the Protestant notionof the individual's assumption of responsibility for his or her ownsalvation without the aid of the Church. The general secularizationof life in the West after the Reformation is significantly, though onlypartly, an unintended consequence of a religious idea. More directly,Martin Luther strengthened the forces of secularization by main-taining that the Christian community exists solely by faith, trustingin G od's saving grace, and that the Church possesses no jurisdictionalpowers. He asserted that it is a duty laid upon all true Christians inthe New Testament that they submit to secular authorities, the rangeof whose powers he actually extended in ways that ruled out resist-ance. Similarly, Calvin recommended political dutifulness to thefaithful without regard for the character, conduct, or religion of the

8 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, N J. , Princeton U ni-versity Press, 1968), p. 163.9 Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London, Allen Lane, 1973), P- 118.10 Ma r t in , A General Theory, p. Q.


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W HITHE R INDIAN SECULARISM? 673judgements of three prominent founding fathers of sociology on thedecline of religion and on the progress of secularization in the nine-teenth-century West. I consider these judgements important for ourdiscussion because the social sciences are in a significant sense arunning commentary on this process. Marx, Durkheim and Weberwere, all three, convinced about the decline of institutional religionin Europe and beyond: this is for sure. Thus Durkheim maintainedthat, although the inroads of science into human affairs had beendeep, yet it was forbidden entry into 'the world of religious and morallife'. He thought, however, that even this 'final barrier' would beovercome, and science would 'establish herself as mistress in thisreserved region' also. Was it then all over? Not quite. The uncertaintyand the ambiguity of the following words from the same classic text,The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, is remarkable: ' there is some-thing eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particularsymbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself.'And so, 'religion seems destined to transform itself rather than todisappear."4 But we now know that this fairly accurate prognosis errson the side of caution. The point I want to make is perhaps bestillustrated by what has been happening in North America in the yearssince World W ar Two. In a richly documented recent study, thePrinceton sociologist, Robert Wuthnow, points out that a simple-minded, linear notion of secularization is wholly inadequate to cap-ture the restructuring in our time of American religion in all itsvibrancy and complexity.15

Weber, deeply influenced by Nietzsche as he was, was less confid-ent, I think, about the future of a secularized world than Durkheim.But what he was sure of was the significance of secularization and ofthe decline of religion: ofthe fate of our times [being] characterized by rationalization and intellec-tualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world'. Preciselythe ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life eitherinto the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of directand personal human relations.'Science is meaningless', he approvingly quoted Tolstoy as saying,'because it gives no answer to our question, the only question import-

14 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York, M acmil lan,1915), pp. 462-96.15 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, N.J., Prince-ton University Press, 1989).


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6 7 4 T. N. MADANan t for us: "W ha t shall we do and how shall we live?" "6 Weberplaced power at the very centre of a rationalized (secularized) world,but saw no evidence at all of its exercise anywhere totally divorcedfrom religion. As he put it, 'the complete subordination of priestly tosecular power . . . can nowhere be found in its pure type'.17Maybe we can derive greater strength about the post-religiousworld from Marx. He was not the one to shed tears over the demiseof religion, which he dismissed as 'the opium of the masses', but hehad his own doubts about the future course of secularization. Hewrote: 'the fact that the secular foundation [of life] lifts itself aboveitself, and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm, isonly to be explained by the self-cleavage and self contradictoriness ofthe secular basis'.18 In other words, secularism can itself pretend tobecome a religion, not only in the sense that secular humanism is areligion, but also and more pretentiously as the ideology of the state,and that points to contemporary India. Secularism as the state ideo-logy of India seeks to provide the moral basis of public life just asIslam supposedly does in Pakistan; the state in India is expected toprotect and promote secularism in more or less the same manner inwhich the Sri Lankan state is expected to protect and promote Buddh-ism; and secularism, it is hoped, will be the prevailing ethos of modernIndia as Hinduism has been of traditional Nepal. If this be so, thenthe apprehension that it has run into difficulties merits careful study.

III. A Gandhian PerspectiveSecularism in India is a multivocal word: what it means dependsupon who uses the word and in what context. There is, therefore, nosingle or straight answer to the question as to why secularism in Indiahas run into difficulties. Let me then attempt to present two possibleanswers which are based on my understanding of M ahatm a Gandhi's

16 Max Weber, 'Science as a Vocation' in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds),From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), pp.' 5 5 , ' 4 3 -17 Max Weber , Economy and Society, ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 1158-60.18 See Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1949), p. 49. The phrase 'opium of the masses' is from Toward the Critique of Hegel'sPhilosophy of Right and the reference to the dissolution of religion from The GermanIdeology. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy,ed. by Lewis S. Feur (New York, Doubleday, Anchor, 1959), pp. 262-6, 246-61.


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6 7 6 T. N . MADAN'Gandhi seems almost a secularist', but judged by his handling ofconcrete issues, notably the communal (Hindu-Muslim) problem, he'was not secularist, if by this we mean an attempt to prune away allreligious considerations from political matters'.22Gandhi was very careful with his use of words and so must we bein attempting to construct an answer to our question on the basis offirst principles such as the above. Politics were sacralized by Gandhi,they became the dharma of the age (yugadharma) and, consequentlynot contradictorilythe state was devalorized, for its constitutiveprinciple is power or coercion. In his conception of the moral orperfect society, Gandhi emphasized that its enduring basis can onlybe the moral calibre of the individuals who constitute it. He extendedthe principle to the relationship of the citizen to the state. As Parekhputs it, 'For Gandhi it was the citizen's sense of moral responsibilityfor his actions that ultimately determined the character of the state'.23In itself, the state, in Gandhian reckoning, is amoral, impersonal,distant, coercive, and even violent. Although Gandhi's views on thestate became less negative over time, he never warmed up to thisinstitution. In Parekh's summing up, 'It took him a long time toappreciate its moral, regenerative and redistributive role and eventhen his acceptance of it remained half-hearted and unintegrated intohis general perspective'.24 Gandhi did not set much store by Westernliberal democracy either, considering it to be rooted in individualselfishness and a materialist conception of the good life.25A Gandhian would, it seems to me, have to say that secularismhas run into difficulties in India because the state is too much withus, because it intrudes into areas of life where it has no business evento peep. That state is best which governs the least. Talking with aChristian missionary in September 1946, Gandhi said: 'If I were adictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion,I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing todo with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health,communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not youror my religion. That is everybody's personal concern!'26 A year later,soon after independence and a few months before his death, he said:

22 M a r g a r e t C ha t t e r j i , Gandhi's Religious Thought ( L ondon , M a c m i l l a n , 1983), p. 85.23 P a r e k h , Gandhi's Political Philosophy, p . 1 2 4 .i4 Ibid,, p . 204.25 B h i k h u P a r e k h , Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's PoliticalDiscourse (New Delh i , Sage , 1989) , p . 7 4 .26 Iye r ( ed . ) , The Moral and Political Writings, p . 395 .


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W HITHE R INDIAN SECULARISM? 677'The state should undoubtedly be secular. Everyone in it should beentitled to profess his religion without let or hindrance, so long asthe citizen obeys the common law of the land.'27 But he was totallyagainst the idea of a state religion or state support for any religion.'A society or group ' , he said, 'which depends partly or wholly onstate aid for the existence of its religion, does not deserve or, betterstill, does not have any religion worth the name.'2 8To the extent to which Indian secularism, even though it stands forequal respect for all religious faiths (sarvadharma sambhdva), is a stateideology, enshrined in the Constitution in which it is linked to thematerialist ideology of socialismto the extent to which it hasnothing to say about the individual except in terms of his or herrights, it is from the Gandhian perspective a hedonistic ideology anddeserves to fail. In Judith Brown's excellent summing up, ' InGandhi's eyes men and women were human in virtue of their capacityfor religious vision. . . . [If] this was stifled by the individual or bypolitical and economic structures then people were degraded anddehumanized. This was so strong and striking an attack on secularmaterialism as could be made'. 2 9A Gandhian critique of secularism in terms of ultimate values andindividual responsibility is in some respects similar to Max Weber ' sconcern with the problem of value. What Gandhi and Weber aresaying is that a secularized world is inherently unstable because itelevates to the realm of ultimate values the only values it knows andthese are instrumental values. 'Natural science', Weber said, 'givesus an answer to the question of what we must do if we wish to masterlife technically. It leaves quite aside, or assumes for its purposes,whether we should and do wish to master life technically and whetherit ultimately makes sense to do so. '30

IV. Nehru on Religion, Politics and SecularismGandhian remedies are believed by modern Indians to be far-fetchedand impractical, if not obscurantist. The fact that he was not a sys-tematic thinker, attaching greater importance to action (dcdra) and

27 S e e N . K . Bose (ed.) , Selections from Gandhi ( Ahm e da ba d , Na v j i va n , 1948 ) , p .256. 28 Ibid., p . 287.29 J u d i t h M . B r o w n , GandhiPrisoner of Hope (De lh i , Oxford Univ er s i ty P res s ,I99 2) P- 392-30 Weber, 'Science as a Vocation', p. 144.


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6 7 8 T. N. MADANexperience (anubhava) than to thought (victim), does not make thetask of examining the contemporary relevance of Gandhi's views anyeasier.31 In any case, there was hardly anyone among the leaders ofindependent India who could be said to want to build on the basisof Gandhi's political and economic philosophy. In relation to thecharacter of the new state, Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad wereno closer to Gandhi than was Nehru, which does not mean that theirnotions of a strong state were identical. It is perhaps ironic thatGandhi's public designation of Nehru as his political heir addedstrength to and bestowed legitimacy on Nehru's own independentposition as a national leader. Let us then turn to Jaw aharlal Nehrufor a diagnosis of the malady that has afflicted Indian secularism.Before we proceed let us look again at the words 'religion' and 'secu-larism' in the context of Nehru's views, abiding by the good advicethat we must pay a word extra when we make it do a lot of work!By intellectual preference Nehru's concept of secularism was thesame that I talked about earlier in this paper in the context of theEn lightenm ent. He was against institutional religion, ritual, and mys-ticism and did not consider himself a religious person. He was not,however, uninterested in spiritual matters. Any impressions of hisboyhood experiences of Brahmanical belief and ritual were erased byhis reading of the works of Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell and othersimilar thinkers. His study of world history and his encounters withthe Indian masses in the 1920s and 1930s made him feel very negativeabout the role of religion in human affairs and he looked forward toa secularized society. He was an agnostic and subscribed to a rational-ist, and even a historicist, worldview.Gandhi's religiosity, to put it mildly, puzzled and annoyed him. Itcaused him to write (in his autobiography) one of his clearest andmature statements on the subject of religion. Referring to the anguishthat the news of Gandhi's fast (in September 1932) on the subject ofseparate electorates (in Nehru's judgement 'a side political issue')had caused him while he was in prison, Nehru wrote: 'I felt angrywith him at his religious and sentimental approach to a politicalquestion, and his frequent references to God in connection with it'.32He went on to observe:

31 I owe this framework for examining traditional Indian thought to Professor K.J. Shah, who may not, however, approve of my use of i t .32 Jawahar l a l Nehru , An Autobiography (New Delhi , Jaw aha rlal Nehru Mem orialFund/Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980).


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WH ITHER INDIAN SECULARISM? 679India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else. . . . [Andyet] I have frequently condemned [religion] and wished to make a cleansweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction,dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation ofvested interests. And yet I knew well that there was something else in it,something which supplied a deeper inner craving of human beings.33

Indian religiosity had been on Nehru's mind for quite some time,though he refused to be unduly worried about it. It was more anuisance than a real problem. In 1928 he had declared: 'If religion,or rather what is called religion, in India continues to interfere witheverything, then it will not be a mere question of divorcing it frompolitics, but of div orcing it from life itself.34 The Gandhian imperat iveof religion as the guide to all, even 'the tiniest', activities was notwhat Nehru believed in. As for the Gandhian notion of divine grace,Nehru considered the idea of 'a personal god' 'very odd'.3 5 Like allmodern intellectuals he had implicit confidence in the processes ofsecularization.Proclaiming this confidence in his presidential address to theLahore (1929) session of the Congress, he said: ' I have no love forbigotry and dogmatism in religion, an d I am glad that they areweakening. Nor do I love communalism in any shape or form. . . . Iknow that the time is coming soon when these labels and appellationswill have little meaning and when our struggle will be on the eco-nomic basis' .36 Two years laterin fact again and again during thenext two decadeshe reaffirmed the primacy of the economic factor:'the real thing to my mind is the economic factor. If we lay stress onthis and divert public attention to it we shall find automatically thatreligious differences recede into the background and a common bonduni te s d i f fe ren t g roups . The economic bond is stronger than even the nationalone' (emphasis added).37 These concluding words underlined Nehru'sradical position and his socialist convictions.Given this position, it is no wonder that Nehru was dismissiveabout the Hindu-Muslim problem: ' the question does not exist at allfor us', he declared.38 Less dismissively, he said in his presidentialaddress at the Lucknow (1936) Congress: 'First of all the Congress33 Ibid., p . 3 7 4 .34 S . G o p a l ( e d . ) , Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru ( N e w D e l h i , O r i e n t L o n g m a n )[ h e r e a f t e r SWJN], v o l . 3 , 1 9 7 2 , p . 2 3 3 .35 J a w a h a r l a l N e h r u , The Discovery of India ( B o m b a y , A s i a , 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 2 8 .36 SWJN, vol. 4, 1973, p . 188.37 SWJN, vol. 5, 1973, p. 203. Ibid., p . 282 .


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68O T. N . MAD ANalways put independence first and other questions, including the com-munal one, second, and refused to allow any other of those questionsto take the pride of place'. He added: ' I am afraid I cannot get excitedover the communal issue, important as it is temporarily. It is afterall a side issue, and it can have no real importance in the largerscheme of things'.39The same train of thought was given considered expression in TheDiscovery of India (written in prison during 1944). He wrote: 'Thebelief in a super-natural agency which ordains everything has led toa certain irresponsibility on the social plane, and emotion and senti-mentality have taken the place of reasoned thought and inquiry. Reli-gion, though it has undoubtedly brought comfort to innumerablehuman beings and stabilized society by its values, has checked thetendency to change and progress inherent in human society.'40 Heconfessed candidly in the same work, that religion did not 'attract'him for 'behind it lay a method of approach to life's problems whichwas certainly not that of science'.41 Just three years before he becamethe Prime Minister of India, he looked forward to the future andexhorted Indians that they face life 'with the temper and approachof science allied to philosophy and with reverence for all that liesbeyond'.42Out of prison in 1945, Nehru faced a rapidly changing politicalsituation and, much to his chagrin, the 'side issue' moved fast tooccupy the cen tre of the stage. He was disbelieving and appalled. 'Tothink in terms of Pakistan when the modern trend is towards theestablishment of a world federation is like thinking in terms of bowsand arrows as weapons of war in the age of the atomic bomb'.43 Theviceroy, Lord Wavell, recorded in his journal on 14 July 1945: 'thetheme of [Nehru's] discourse was that [Pakistan represented] anarrow medieval conception, and that the eventual cleavage whenIndia's freedom was secured would be between poor and rich,between peasant and landlord, between labour and employer'.44India's freedom was secured two years later, but the country waspartitioned on the basis of religion.

I have quoted fairly extensively from Nehru's writings, statementsand speeches to highlight the consistency of his thinking over twodecades and more. It is obvious that the decisive element in thisthinking was, at the broadest level, an Enlightenment view of religion,39 SWJN, vol. 7, 1975, p- 190. * Nehru , The Discovery, p. 543.41 Ibid., p. 26. 42 Ibid., p. 547.4 3 SWJN, vol. 14, 1981 , p. 187. ** Ibid., p. 46.


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W HITHER INDIAN SECULARISM? 68 lwhich was against revelation and dogmatism rather than religion assuch, if it did not offend against reason, and, more specifically, theMarxian position on religion, though considerably diluted. It is thusthat we find Nehru attacks the bigotry and dogmatism of religion,but acknowledges that religion stands for higher things of life too. Hewrote of the comfort that religion had brought to innumerable peopleand did not dismiss the phenomenon as ' the opium of the people' asMarx had done.But the idea of economic issues having precedence over even thequestion of independence from colonial rule is in accordance with theMarxian position. As is well known, in their discussion of the role ofideologies, Marx and Engels observed in The German Ideology that anyattempt to understand an epoch of history in terms of political andreligious issues is to 'share the illusion of the epoch'.45 Similarly,Engels in his graveside sum m ary of M arx 's though t, had said tha tMarx had 'discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an over-growth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, haveshelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion,art, etc. '46 Actually, Marx believed that religion had already beendissolved by the circumstan ces p revailing in Eur ope in his own tim e.47And Lenin had affirmed that even while the socialists must fightagainst religion, doing so did 'not mean that the religious questionmust be pushed into the foreground where it does not belong' .48Nehru acknowledged his indebtedness to the teachings of Marx andLenin in his autobiography, The Discovery of India and elsewhere; buthe was too much of a liberal to be called a copybook Marxist .

In short, Nehru's position on religion, religious conflict and thesignificance of the processes of secularization was what would becalled rational and modern, whether one sees it derived from Marxianor Lockean roots. It was also idealist in the sense that it reflectedmore the ideals of the European Enlightenment than the hard factsof society, culture and politics in India. The latter generated compul-sions at variance with these ideals. It is remarkable that it was Nehruwho in the same year, 1931, in which he gave the hopeful messageof the recession of religious differences (quoted above) persuaded theAll-India Congress Committee (at its Karachi session) to insert in

45 M a r x a n d Enge l s , Basic Writings, p . 2 5 9 .46 Quoted in H. B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophi-ca l Creed (London, Cohen and West, 1955), p. 143.47 Marx and Engels, Basic Writings, p. 260.48 V. I. Lenin, Religion (Calcutta, Burmon Publishing House, n.d.), p. 16.


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682 T. N. MADANthe resolution on fundamental rights 'Freedom of conscience and ofthe profession and practice of any religion'.49 Further, all citizens offree India would be equal before the law", irrespective of religious(and similar other) differences, and the state would observe neutralityin regard to all religions (dahrma nirpekshatd). 'This', Nehru's bio-grapher S. Gopal tells us, 'was the first breakdown, in concrete terms,of the concept of secularism in the Indian context and formed thebasis of the [relevant] articles in the constitution many years later'.50The Constitution did not, however, contain the words 'secular' or'secularism' anywhere. The addition of the words 'secular' and'socialist' to the description of India as a 'sovereign republic' in thePreamble of the Constitution came through the 42nd Amendment in1976 (during Indira Gandhi's Emergency rule). Was such specificreference to secularism considered unnecessary earlier, when the Con-stitution was being framed (1946-49)? Or was it too controversial?Perhaps both; which exactly would depend upon whom one has inmind. The transcript of the debate in the Constituent Assemblyreveals that there was considerable difference of opinion on the rightof propagation of one's religion, in addition to its profession andpractice, but it was ultimately approved. The following statement bythe well-known Congressman, H. V. Kamath, perhaps representedthe general feeling of the members of the house: 'the State representsall the people who live in its territories, and, therefore it cannot affordto identify itself with any particular section of the population. . . . Wehave certainly declared that India should be a secular State. But . . .a secular state is neither a Godless State nor an irreligious, nor ananti-religious, state'.51 Already, one can see, the notion of the secularstate, and of secularism, were being enveloped in ambiguity, meaningwhat one wished the terms to mean.More about the Constitution below. Let me first recall how Nehru,having seen his confidence in the primacy of the economic over thereligious factor proven premature, if not wholly misplaced, looked tothe future after partition and independence. A few months after theseevents he posed the question: 'Do we believe in a national state whichincludes people of all religions and shades of opinion and is essentiallya secular state, or do we believe in the religious, theocratic conceptionof the state?' His answer was unequivocal: 'we shall proceed on secu-

49 SWJN, vol . 4, 1973, P- 5'*.50 S. G o p a l , ' N eh ru a n d Secularism' , Occasional Papers , N o. 42 ( M i m e o ) , N e wDelh i , Nehru Memoria l Museum a n d Library, 1987, p . 12.51 Constituent Assembly of India Debates, 6 Decem ber 1948, p. 825.


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W HITH ER INDIAN SECULARISM? 683lar and national lines'.52 This then became the guiding principle thatanimated the Constitution (then on the anvil) and became the basisof state policy in all relevant areas of action. The great Indian experi-ment of nation building, or national integration, had thus entered itsmost crucial phase.It, however, suffered from a critical moral flaw. Given Nehru'slifelong aversion to religion as practised by common peoplethe so-called p opu lar religion he could not have sudd enly begu n to seevirtues in it. Moreover, within the western liberal tradition, themodern state had emerged as secular in the specific sense that themaintenance of the ' true faith', or any faith, was none of its con-cerns. '53 Nehru's definition of the secular state in terms of religiouspluralism (quoted above) was, it seems obvious to me, a compromise,a strategy to deal with an awkward problem, viz. the all-pervasiveinfluence of religion in society, that would not go away. Nehru hadmade such compromises more than once in his political career: onone historic occasion (the 1936 presidential address to the Congress)he had called them 'tem po rar y expedients of a transition ra the r th anas solutions of our vital pro blem s'.54 Like his attitude to khadi dennedthus on this occasion, religious pluralism was, it seems to m e, anarrangement ad interim.The infirmity of the experiment of nation-building lay not only inthat religious pluralism was meaningless in the absence of a positiveattitude to religion, but equally significantly in the idiom of its articu-lation which was modern. Nehru had written that ideas like 'social-ism' and (I should think) 'secularism' must be communicated to thepeople in ' the language of the mind and the heart, . . . the languagewhich grows from a complex of associations of past history and cul-ture and present environment ' .55 Needless to add, this could not havebeen the language of India's westernized educated eli te, whomGandhi had called 'hard hearted' .Eleven years after independence, and eight years after the adoptionof the Constitution, Nehru was visited by Andre Malraux in Delhiand asked what his greatest problem had been during his years ofpower. Ne hru replied: 'C rea ting a jus t state by ju st m ea ns ', an d, aftera pause , 'Perh ap s, too, creating a secular state in a religious society. '56

5 2 S . G o p a l ( e d . ) , Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series ( N e w D e l h i , J a w a -harlal Nehru Memorial Fund) [hereafter SWJN-o], vol. 5, 1987, p. 26.5 3 Q u e n t i n S k i n n e r , The Foundations of Modem Political Thought: The Age of Reformation(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 352.54 SWJN, vol. 7, 1975, p. !82. 55 Ibid., p. 562.36 Andre Malraux , Antimemoirs (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1968), p. 145.


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684 T. N. MADANI detect a sense of defeat in Nehru's observations on the subject inhis later years. Sorrowfully he wrote in 1961, just three years beforehis death: 'We talk about a secular state in India. It is perhaps notvery easy even to find a good word in Hindi for "secular". Somepeople think it means something opposed to religion. That obviouslyis not correct. . . . It is a state which honours all faiths equally andgives them equal opportunities.' Having written this, he proceededmore in line with his earlier thinking on the subject:Our constitution lays down that we are a secular state, but it must beadmitted that this is not wholly reflected in our mass living and thinking.In a country like Eng land, the state is . . . allied to one particular religion. . . Nevertheless, the state and the people there function in a largely secularw a y . Society, therefore, in England is more advanced in this respect than in India, eventhough our constitution may be in this matter more advanced.57 (emphasisadded)

It is clear from this that Nehru had not given up his trust of theprocesses of secularization and of the secularization thesis. The chasmbetween him and Gandhi was deep. For Gandhi secularism in thesense of religious pluralism entailed interreligious understanding andmutual respect: it was the strength of Indian society while communalpolitics tied to statism could be its bane. For Nehru, however, religios-ity and the attendant conflicts were the badge of social backwardness.Secularism in the sense of neutrality as state policy was a strategy tocope with a difficult situation. And the state was potentially a veryimportant instrument of public welfare and social advancement, verymuch on the lines J. S. Mill and other liberals had advocated.58 I ampuzzled by those intellectuals who speak of a hyphenated Gandhi-Nehru view of secularism or, for that matter, of development. It ishigh time we accepted the authoritative verdict of B. R. Nanda: 'Theworking partnership of Nehru and Gandhi lasted till the end, buttheir philosophies of life never really converged'.59A Nehruvian answer to the question why Indian secularism has

57 S e e S. G opa l ( e d . ) , Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (De lh i , Oxford Univers i tyPress, 1980), p p . 33of.58 ' I n m a n y p a r t s of t h e world, t h e pe op l e c a n d o n o t h i n g for themselves whichrequi res l a rge means a n d combined ac t ions ; all such things a r e left undone, unlessdone by th e s ta te ' : J o h n S tuar t Mi l l , Principles of Political Economy, I I , pp . 6 0 2 - 3 ,quoted in Kar l de Schweinitz, Jr. , The Rise and Fall of British India: Imperialism asInequality ( L ondon , M e t hue n , 1983) , p . 125. (I a m grateful to D r R a m a s h r a y R o y ford r a w i n g m y a t t e n t i o n to t h e passage from which I ha ve quo t e d t h e above sentence. )59 B. R. Na n d a , Gokhale, Gandhi and the Nehrus: Studies in Indian Nationalism (London,Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 103.


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WHITHER INDIAN SECULARISM? 685run into difficulties would, then, be tha t the people of India are notyet ready for it. It requires a level of general education that is yetbeyond them, and a liberal outlook on life and scientific temper whichunfortunately they lack. Religious intolerance has, in fact, intensifiedin recent years and fundamentalisms of various nam es and hues stalkthe land today. The question that strikes one is that , if Nehru under-stood what India's problem in this regard was, why did he not striveharder than he did to remove the obstacles that stood in the way ofa m ode rn, secular, society? One can never be sure, but I could venturea reasonable guess.

In the early years after independence Nehru remained firmlywedded to the belief that state-sponsored economic growth was thekey to social development. Hence, in his eyes, dams and factorieswere India's new temples. In believing so in the 1950s he was inexcellent company. Confessional statements by economists on the'sins' of a narrow concept of the contents of the growth basket andof the quantitative approach to development were not to come beforeanoth er decade would pass. By the time this approach to developmentran into a crisis Nehru was a sick man and he died soon afterwardsin 1964. He had bet on what had seemed a sure winner, but it turnedout to be a lame horse. The most serious failure of the 1950s fromthe point of view of the present discussion was the shocking neglect ofradical educational reform. Gunnar Myrdal delivered his magisterialverdict to this effect in 1968, four years after Nehru's passing, in hisAsian Drama.60

V. Secularism and the Constitution

Nehru also put his faith in the Const i tut ion and in the legislativeprocess, and this turned out to be the sin of 'excess' rather than'neglect' . I am not a jurist any more than I am an economist, but Ifind certain contradictions in the Const i tut ion. An examinat ion ofArticles 13 to 17, 19, 23, 25 to 30 (all from Part I I I dealing with'Fundamenta l Rights ' ) , and of Articles 44, 48 and 51 (from Part IVon Directive Principles) brings these out clearly. Thus, Articles 25 to30, which are the most crucial in this regard, guarantee 'freedom ofconscience and free profession, practice and propagat ion of religion'(25), 'freedom to manage religious affairs' (26), 'freedom as to pay-

60 Gunnar Myrdal , Asian Drama, 3 vols (New York, Pantheon, 1968), vol. 3, ch.29-


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68 6 T. N. MAD ANment of taxes for promotion of any particu lar religion' (27), and 'free-dom as to attendance at religious instruction or religious worship incertain educational institutions' (28). They protect the 'interests ofminorities' (29), including their 'right . . . to establish and administereducational institutions' (30). Article 44 directs that 'the State shallendeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout. . . India'. The way things have proceeded reveals the contradictionbetween Articles 25 to 30 and Article 44. The jurists may well arguethat Directive Principles do not have the same force as FundamentalRights and, therefore, the question of contradiction does not arise.The point I want to make is that the former have contributed enorm-ously to the strengthening of inward-looking communal feelings andattitudes and obstructed the spread of modern, secular, educationand attitudes among the minorities.It is not at all surprising that the state has so far failed to implementthe constitutional directive of evolving a uniform civil code. Thegreatest resistance has come from Muslims, some of whose leadersclaim that their social life cannot be governed by any laws other thanthe sharia. This in spite of the fact that the Constituent Assemblyhad, by a resolution in 1948, rejected the contention that Muslimpersonal law was inseparable from Islam and, therefore, protectedagainst legislative interference. The British rulers of India had hadgreater success in this regard as the Criminal Procedure Code thatthey enactedit is still largely in force in India, but has been modifiedin Pakistanoverrode traditional laws and conventions. The framersof the Constitution, it seems to me, failed to realize that in a demo-cratic polity the state will reflect the character of the society, andthat a communally divided society and a secular state are mutuallycontradictory. One is reminded of Karl Marx's perceptive observa-tion, in his tract on 'The Jewish Q uestion', that 'the emancipation ofthe state from religion is not the emancipation of the real man fromreligion';61 needless to add that the real m an he spoke of is the sociallysituated person.There are other contradictions in the Constitution that bear uponthe present discussion. I mentioned Articles 17 and 48. Now, theformer was a triumph for what Gandhi would have called moralreason: it abolished the practice of untouchability 'in any form'. Thiswas aimed to promote the cause of the so-called low caste Hindus,who had been exploited and humiliated by upper caste Hindus for

61 K arl M arx , 'On the Jewish Ques tion' in K. M arx and F . Engels, Collected Works,vol. 3 (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 14674.


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W HITH ER INDIAN SECULARISM? 687as long as anyone could remember, actually for centuries. But Article48 represented a concession to high caste Hindu sentiment, 'prohibit-ing the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draughtcattle', though the reason given is a secular one, namely the organiza-tion of'agricu lture and animal husbandry on modern scientific lines'.The record of the debate on this issue in the Constituent Assemblyreveals that Nehru had to threaten resignation in order to have thisban given a secular character. The Hindu lobby, which had theinformal patronage of the President, Dr Rajendra Prasad, had wanteda general ban, and Nehru none of it. As early as 1923, when he wasthe Mayor of Allahabad, he had persuaded the municipal Board toreject a proposal to prohibit cow slaughter.62 It may be argued thatthe ban on cow slaughter is no more Brahmanical than Article 47,which includes a directive about prohibition on the consumption ofintoxicants, is Islamic. This would be legal quibbling, for we knowthe strong sentiment against cow slaughter, generated among Hindusgenerally during the last one hundred years, to be a politically explos-ive issue.

It is noteworthy tha t, in the furtherance of the objectives of a secu-larized society and the establishment of a secular state, Nehru showeda much greater willingness to oppose what he considered reactionaryelements among the Hindus than among the other communities. Thiswas best illustrated by his stand on the Hindu Code Bill. The HinduMarriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, and the HinduAdoption and Maintenance Act, 1956, were enacted by the Parlia-ment, despite opposition by conservative Hindu leaders, includingPresident Prasad, mainly because of Nehru's insistence. I agree withBhikhu Parekh's insightful observation that 'Nehru's state acted as,and claimed all the rights of a Hindu state in its relation to the H indus. . . because he and his colleagues were and thought of themselves asHindus . . . they [thus] both dared take liberties with the Hindus anddared not take them with respect to the Muslims and even Sikhs'.63

VI. The MajorityMinority ConundrumNehru's firm stand apparently contrasts with the vacillating attitudeof the Rajiv Gandhi government, which rushed through Parliament

62 See Gopal, 'Nehru and Secularism', p. 24.63 Bhikhu Parekh, 'Nehru and the National Philosophy of Ind ia ' , Economic andPolitical Weekly, 5-12, J a n . 1991, p. 42.


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68 8 T . N . MAD ANthe Muslim Women (Protection of Rights) Act in 1986, to nullify theSupreme Cou rt's verdict in the famous Shah Bano case upholding thelegal liability of a Muslim male to provide maintenance support forthe wife he divorces. The new law was a concession to the conserva-tive Muslim lobby according to which Muslim society is subject tosharia everywhere and for all time.64 But there is a sense in which RajivGandhi was simply continuing with the Congress legacy of providingspecial treatment and protection to religious minorities in accordancewith their own wishes. This had been endorsed by both Gandhi andNehru, and represented 'the benign elder brother' mentality. In anycase, the 1986 happenings could hardly be cited as the best way ofusing the legislative process as an instrum ent of secularization. This isparticularly regrettable in view of the directive incorporated in Article51 (by Amendment in 1976) 'to promote scientific temper' (5i-A[a])and to 'preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture ' (51-AU]).One could, however, well argue that these two additions to Article 51are so vague and trite that those responsible for their inclusion in theConstitution could have hardly been serious about them.

Why did Nehru treat Hindus and Muslims differently? Why havesuccessive governments at the Centre since Nehru's death in 1964 andup to date done so? Should not non-discrimination between differentreligious communities be one of the first principles of the policies of asecular state? The answer, it seems to me, lies largely in the majority-minority conundrum which has acquired near-pathological propor-tions in India today. This calls for some elucidation.In a dem ocratic polity being in a majority betokens public approvaland signifies legitimate success for the group concerned. Such majorit-ies represent interest groups and ideological positions. In ThomasJefferson's celebrated phrase, 'the will of the majority' is 'the Naturallaw of every society', 'the only sure guardian of the rights of man'.65Nobody is in a majority, so conceived, or out of it, because of ascribed,or near-ascribed, attributes of race, gender, language or religion.Majorities based on such attrributes are rightly judged to be unfairwinners in political games. A questionable assumption, however,underlies the existence of majorities of this kind, namely that they

64 S e e Upendra Bax i , 'Secu lar i sm: Real a n d Ps eu d o ' , i n M . M . Sankhder (ed . ) ,Secularism in India ( N e w Delhi , Deep a n d Deep, 1992), p . 9 5 . Also see S. P . Sathe ,'Secu l a r i s m , L a w a n d th e Cons t i tu t ion of I n d i a ' , in M . S. Gore (ed . ) , Secularism inIndia (Al l ah ab ad , V id h y a P rak as h an , 1 9 9 1 ) , p p . 3 9 - 5 9 .65 N o b l e E . C u n n i n g h a m , J r . , In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson ( N e wDelhi, Affiliated East-West Press, 1991), p. 133.


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W HITH ER INDIAN SECULARISM? 689are internally undifferentiated in terms of social customs, economicinterests and political loyalties, and are, therefore, able to appear andeven act as monoliths, as it were. No religious community of Indiais, however, internally so undifferentiated, the H indus least of all. Somuch so, indeed that, as a sociologist, I find little warrant for usingthe word 'community' in referring to the Hindus. But politicallymotivated Hindus have learnt its immense usefulness and non-Hindus never let go of it, whether in reference to themselves or theHindus. The majority-minority differentiation has thus become anintegral part of the Indian political calculus.

We need to go back a little in time to appreciate how things havecome to such a pass. It is perhaps ironic that primordially definedmajorities and minorities entered the Indian political idiom in thecontext of granting representation to people in local self-governance.The best known critics of the introduction of western liberal notions ofelective representation in the 1880s, when the viceroy, Lord Ripon,brought forward his Local Self-Government Bill (1883), were SayyidAhmad Khan and Amir Ali, who maintained that such a measurewould be unsuitable to a heterogenous society such as the Indian,characterized as it was by not only differences of race and religion,caste and creed, but also of numbers. Arguments were backed byaction: for instance, the influential ulama of the newly founded semin-ary at Deoband (in north India) issued fatwas discouraging social andeconomic contacts between Muslims and Hindus. The notion of aMuslim minority, threatened by a socially mobile and politicallyassertive Hindu majority was thus born. It accorded well with theofficial British perception of India as a country of discordant religiouscommunities, castes and tribes.Moreover, several historians have argued that, at the core of theMuslim opposition to western-style political representation lay sev-eral religious and political convictions. Thus, Muslims are said to beever conscious of belonging to a divinely constituted religious brother-hood, entitled to wield political power over non-Muslims by virtueof their moral superiority. In India, in the late nineteenth century,they also considered themselvesat least the immigrants and thearistocrats among them did sothe legatees of the Mughal empire.Finally, the political arena is seen by Muslims as the arena par excel-lence of the expression of religious values, and not a domain apart.66

6 6 S e e F a r z a n a S h a i k h , Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation inColonial India, 1860-igtf (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989).


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69O T . N . MAD ANUnable to stop the idea of representative government, even in itsmost limited form, in its tracks, Sayyid Ahmad put forward the notion

of 'separate electorates' , based on religious identity, towardsthe end of the nineteenth century. The idea of 'weightage' also wasmooted to overcome the disadvantage of numbers. The new principlethat came to dominate the thinking of certain sections of Muslimpolit ical leadership in the twentieth century was that of 'parity ' . Thisnotio n w as finally emb raced by M . A. Ji n n a h in the crucial final yearsleading to partition and independence in 1947. Had the principle ofparity at the federal level been conceded, treating Muslims on a parwith Hindus, and providing safeguards for the others, some historiansthink, partition might have been avoided.67 In its absence, emphasisup on the char acter of M uslims as a 'minority ' , or as a sep arate'na t io n ' , depen ding upon the context, was Jin na h's t rum p card.

Addressing the All-India Muslim League in Lahore in 1940 atthe Lahore session, which later adopted the separate Muslim statesresolution, Ji nn ah ridiculed G an dh i 's protestations of brotherly feel-ings towards non-Hindus and M r J in na h himself: 'The only differenceis this, that brother Gandhi has three votes and I have only onevote' .6 8 This was, of course, a reference to the arithmetic of Hinduand Muslim populations in the 1941 census.A decad e later, the Constitution of Ind ia acknowledged the conceptof minorities, but did not define it precisely, leaving a good deal tobe inferred. Thus, Articles 29 and 30 specifically refer to the rights(in fact, Fundamental Rights) of 'minorities' to make efforts to con-serve their languages, scripts and cultures, have free access to state-aided educational insti tutions, and to establish and administer theirown educational institutions. Although it seems perverse to me toplace an interpretation on these constitutional provisions to the effecttha t only minorities have such rights, mischievous politicians have notbeen reluctant to cite them as evidence of 'minorityism'. The forth-right views of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, hailed as ' the father of the IndianConstitution' , do not exactly help in removing such doubts. Theminorities, he said in the Constituent Assembly, 'have loyallyaccepted the rule of the majority which is basically a communalmajority and not a political majority. It is for the majority to realizeits duty not to discriminate against minorities. Whether the minorities

67 A y e s h a J a l a l , The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand forPakistan (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985).68 Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1988), p.181.


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6 9 2 T . N . M ADANdictated by 'uti l i tarian expediency' . Many other Muslim organiza-tions and leaders took up the same position. 73 Similarly, fundamental-ist Sikh leadership used to say that the Sikh religious tradition doesnot permit the separation of religion and politics and that, unless thisright is recognized, the state in India is not truly secular but underHindu domination. They have of course now opted for the demandfor an autonomous theocratic Sikh state.74

The notion of minority status as privilege is not slander in today'sIndia, but a social and political fact. How far people will go in theabuse of this idea was well illustrated by the successful effort of theR am ak rish na M ission people in Calcu tta to get themselves recognizedas a non-Hindu minori ty. Meanwhile the Hindu-Musl im problemwhich had eased, more than somewhat, in the years following inde-pendence has become salient again. While the aggressive elementsamong the leaders of the so-called minorities raise cries of alarm thatIndia is fast degenerating into a Hindu country, their counterpartsamong the Hindus cry ' foul ' and accuse the government of 'minor-ityism'. Addressing the 1923 session of the Congress at Delhi, itsPresident, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, had observed about the thenpre va iling po litical differences an d slogan s: ' "S av e the Hin du fromMuslims", says one group, "Save Islam from Hinduism", saysanother. When the order of the day is , "Protect Hindus" and "Pro-tect Muslims", who cares about protecting the nation?'75 That wassaid seventy years ago, but could have been said today.W ithin th is overa ll framework of m ajority -m inor ity politics, thereare variations and ramifications. Thus the violent student agitationof 1990 against reservations (vide Articles 330 and 332 of theConstitution) being sought to be raised to the level of nearly 50 percent was the protest of a minoritythose classified neither as sched-uled caste or scheduled tribe nor as 'other backward classes'againsta majority of allegedly uniformly non-privileged people, althoughmany among them are by no means economically deprived. Limita-tions of space do not, however, allow me to speak about the thornyissue of reservations, which deserves detailed discussion. But I should

73 See Mushi r-u l -Haq, Islam in Secular India (Simla, Institute of Advanced Study,'9 72)> PP- 6 ~ 2 1 -74 See T. N. Madan, 'The Double-edged Sword: Fundamentalism and the SikhReligious Tradition' in M. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), FundamentalismsObserved (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).75 Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (ed.), India's Maulana (New Delhi, Indian Council ofCultural Relations/Vikas, 1990), vol. 2, p. 145.


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W HITHE R INDIAN SECULARISM? 693point out that, although the exploitation of certain castes and commu-nities at the hands of others over the centuries down to this day,cannot be denied, the idea of reservat ion quotasnotwithstandingthe fact that it was intended to be a temporary protective measurefor thirty yea rs only (Article 3 34) does not fit well with the idea ofsecularism, particularly if it threatens to become a permanent vestedinterest.Ironically, Nehru anticipated the danger. Speaking on the subjectin the Constituent Assembly, he warned:I would like you to consider this business, whether it is reservation or anyother kind of safeguard for the minorities objectively. There is some pointin having a safeguard of this type . . . when there is autocratic or foreignrule. As soon as you get . . . political democracy, then this kind of reserva-tion, instead of helping the party to be safeguarded or aided, is likely to turnagainst it. . . . [In] a democracy . . . it is the will of the majority that willprevail. . . . Frankly, I would like . . . [to] put an end to such reservationsas there still remain.76Nehru was obviously thinking of the 'majority' in the Jeffersoniansense.Another critical issue for Indian secularism that I will only men-tion, but not discuss, is the problem of the Kashmir Valley. ThroughArticle 370, the Con stitution gave to Ja m m u and K ash m ir a specialstatus, making it impossible for the Parliament to make laws for thisstate without the concurrence of its legislature in respect of subjectsother tha n those me ntioned in the Ins tru m en t of Accession or corres-ponding to them. This too was intended as a temporary measure, asthe future of the state had become an international dispute by India'sappeal for UN intervention to end Pakistani aggression. This specificcontext was soon overgrown by other considerations: the KashmirValley with its Muslim majority was vital to secular India's interestsas a token of the repudiation of the two-nation theory which was thebasis of Pakistan. But a special status was needed for retaining thestate within the union. Article 370 is said to protect 'Kashmiriat ' orKashmiri identity. Why Kashmiri identity needs special protectionany more than, say, Bengali or Tamil identity is difficult to under-stand unless it is taken to m ean K as hm iri Muslim identity and broughtunder the rubric of minority rights and privileges.

T he way to hell, it has been well said, is paved with good inten tions;and so it has been in Kashmir. Although the state has been ruled76 SWJN,vo\. 11, 1991, p- 54-


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69 4 T . N . MAD ANsince 1947 by a succession of governments, headed by Muslim chiefministers, and the representation of Muslims in the bureaucracy andthe professions has very considerably improved, yet a secessionistmovement has erupted there which has turned violent during the lastthree years. Well-trained and heavily armed militants are beingfought by the security forces and there is blood-letting on both sides.Innocent people of all communities are caught in the crossfire, liter-ally and figuratively, and suffer. What the turbulent elements areasking for is, in effect, another partition, and this fans the fires ofHindu reaction elsewhere in the country, resulting in such politicallybizarre happenings as the 'unity march' {ektdydtra) of the BharatiyaJa na ta Party president, Dr Murli Man ohar Joshi, in January 1992.In the Valley itself, the Hindus were a three percent minority ofabout 180,000 people, a couple of thousand of whom have beenreportedly killed or critically injured, and many of whose propertieshave been plundered or burnt. Most of them have fled their homesand live in refugee camps, or with relatives, outside the Valley. Theyare another example of a non-privileged minority. Not only Hindus,but those Muslims too, who do not seem to be in full agreement, arethe targets of fundamentalists and secessionists. In fact, about threetimes as many Muslims as Hindus are reported to have been killed.77The silence of Muslim political leadership in India about the hap-penings in Kashmir underscores the tragic fact that all is not wellwith Indian secularism. For Jaw aharlal Nehru, K ashmir had beenIndia's answer to communalism, the shining token of her secularism;he had been encouraged in this belief by the leaders of the Muslimmasses of Kashmir, including the tallest of them all, Sheikh Abdullah.Today Abdullah's is a hated name in the Valley and his grave hasto be guarded by police to prevent its desecration by his own people,whom he had led in a liberation struggle that had been conspicuouslysocialist and secular in its ideological stance and action programmesand which had been actively supported by Nehru.

VII. Concluding RemarksTo conclude. I began by saying that secularism as an explicitly formu-lated ideology was born of the dialectic of religion and science, of

77 These estimates are based on newspaper reports which are the only figuresavailable now.


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WH ITHER INDIAN SECULARISM? 695Christianity and the Enlightenment, and was not simply anti-religious, though many intellectuals have desired and even believedit to be so. There is much rethinking these days about the standardaccounts of the Enlightenment, about their distorting preoccupationwith its 'sunny side', to the neglect of its dogmatism and of the nar-rowing of rational debate by seventeenth-century scientists.78 Atten-tion has also been drawn to the fact that the notion of the self-emancipation of man implied the sacralization of the secular.79 Suchreconsiderations are bound to affect our appreciation of secularismalso, for it was, as already pointed out, partly an expression of theEnlightenment.It is also important to recognize that one of the major reasons forthe rise of religious fundamentalism all over the world today is theexcesses of secularism, its emergence as dogma, even as a religion,even as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and some other social theoristsanticipated. By subverting religion as generally understood, secular-ism sets off the reaction of fundamentalism, which usually is a perver-sion of religion, and has less to do with the purity of faith and morewith the acquisition of political power. The temple and the mosquelovers of today's India are, first and foremost, power hungry politi-cians. In their hands religion is reduced to being its own 'shadow', a'sign of distinction' between political groups, and no longer is con-cerned with value but only with instrumentalism.80If secularism is not essentially anti-religious, but only against rev-elation and unreason, Indian secularism would be much less so; thenwhy did Nehru complain to Malraux that it was difficult to establisha secular state in a religious country such as India? In an earlierpaper entitled 'Secularism in its Place' I had attempted an answerto this question, which could hardly have been Nehru's own answer,though it did perhaps come within recognizable distance of a Gandh-ian position. My main argument was that neither India's indigenousreligious traditions nor Islam recognize the sacred-secular dichotomyin the manner in which Christianity does so and, therefore, themodern processes of secularization (in the sense of expanding humancontrol over human lives) proceed in India without the support of an

78 S e e , e . g . , S t e p h e n T o u l m i n , Cosmopolis, The Hidden Agenda of Modernity ( N e wYork, The Free Press, 1990).79 S e e , e . g . , S t e p h e n A . M c k n i g h t , Sacralizing the Secular, The Renaissance Origins ofModernity (Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, ig8g).80 See, Louis Dumont, 'Nationalism and Communalism' in Hom o Hierarchies: TheCaste System and its Implications (Chicago, U niversity of Ch icago Press, 1980; 1st edn,1970), PP- 3i5- J 6 -


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69 6 T . N . MAD ANideology that people in general may warm to. What exists empirically,but not also ideologically, I had then said, exists but weakly.81

Not that India is entirely lacking in its own resources to cope withthe processes of secularization in the midst of much religiosity andto find support for its own notion of secularism as interreligiousunderstanding.82 What I have in mind is not so much the medievalreligious syncretism about the significance of which there are sharpdifferences of opinion,83 as the more important fact that none ofIndia's indigenous religions has been considered by its traditionalthinkers as a revealed religion in the strict sense in which the Abrah-amic religions are so. All the Indian religions are more or less opento questioning from within and reformulation through interpretation.The strength of India's hermeneutic traditions is, I believe, widelyacknowledged. Also, Indian religions have been subject to consider-able pressure from outside, producing a flexibility of attitudes if notalways religious liberality.84 In our own time, Gandhi showed thatreinterpretation through questioning and receptiveness to outsideinfluences was still possible.

But for these resources to be turned into strength we will have toabandon a narrow, crippling, view of secularism as anti-religion andwe will have to overcome our distrust of India's indigenous religioustraditions, which are, whether some people like it or not, membersof one family. They share crucial metaphysical presuppositions about'being' 'knowing' and 'value', contribute significantly to theencompassing cultural ambiance of the country, and provide the founda-tion for India's regional composite cultures. Their followers sharemany attitudes and have many social practices in common.At the same time, we have to recognize the real dangers of Hinducommunalism, of the insensitivity of many Hindus to the feelings ofthose who consider themselves non-Hindus. It has been complainedthat these non-Hindus are treated as permanent outsiders if they

81 T. N. Madan, 'Secularism in its place', The Journal of Asian Studies 46, 4 (1987),pp . 747-59- also see, T. N. Madan, 'Religion in India', Daedalus 118, 4 (1989), pp.115-46.82 S e e A s h i s N a ndy , ' T h e Polit ics o f Secula r i sm a n d t h e Re c ove r y of ReligiousT o l e r a n c e ' , Alternatives 13, 2 (1988) , p p . 177-94 .83 F o r a r i c h l y doc ume n t e d a c c oun t , s e e A s i m Roy , The Islamic Syncretistic Traditionin Bengal (Prin ceton , N. J., Princeton U niversity Pre ss, 1983). A sceptical assessmentwill be found in Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford,Clarendon Press, 1964).84 S e e , e . g ., H . V o n S t i e t e nc r on , ' H i ndu i s m: O n t h e P r o p e r U s e o f a Decept iveT e r m ' , i n G . D . S o n t h e i m e r a n d H . Kulke (eds ) , Hinduism Reconsidered (De lh i , Mano-har, 1991)) P P - 1 1 - 2 8 .


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W HITHER INDIAN SECULARISM? 697hap pen to be Christians or M uslims , or are denied a sense of separateidentity if they are ' tribals ' or Sikhs."3 Hindus do not have, I think,to appear in sack-cloth and ashes as penitents before the others; theydo not have to disfigure their faces with war-paint either, as some ofthem are doing now in newly found fundamentalist fervour. Gandhino less than Nehru was conscious of the greater harm that majoritycommunalism will do in India though they could not be said toapprove of minority communalism. As Ashis Nandy has insightfullyargued, Gandhi was the sterner foe of Hindu communalism and paidfor it with his life.86 But things have come to such a pass today thatthe Congress Party at its 1992 session at Tirupati has considered itnecessary to warn against all brands of communalism.

If India is to be saved from religious discord and the resultantpolitical divisivenesswe really do not have a choicewe needrethinking and action. What is at stake is the very survival of theIndian state. Apart from the profound ideological implications of anacknowledgement of the limited instrumental character of science andtechnology, and of the reconsideration of the place of religion as thesource of value, meaning and legitimacy in social life, we need, first,critical re-examination of the character and role of the state in theculturally and historically specific Indian setting; second, carefulreview of the relevant provisions of the Constitution, with particularreference to minority-versus-majority rights, for these have causedmuch confusion; and third, radical educational reform. A decentral-ized polity, a positive attitude towards cultural pluralism, and a genu-ine concern and respect for human rights would be, perhaps, thebest guarantors of Indian secularism, understood as interreligiousunderstanding in society and the state policy of non-discriminationand of equal distance {not equal proximity) from the religious con-cerns of the people. Precious timethe span of two generationshasbeen lost, but one can learn from one's mistakes. Minerva's owl, theGreeks told us, flies out only at dusk, and so it does; but, then, thereis always the next dayand the next.

8 5 See , e .g . , T . K . O o m m e n , State an d Society in India: Studies in Nation-Building ( N e wDelhi, Sage, 1990), p. 11.86 Ashis Nandy, 'Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi ',in At the Edge of Psychology (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 70-98.

Whither Indian Secularism

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