Our secularism: lonely or lost?

Indian secularism is the loneliest orphan of our times. Nobody’s baby, it wanders without hope, looking for shelter. Once adored and pampered, now it finds itself banished to a wilderness where its cries do not even return to it.

The rise of majoritarian politics in India has led to a deepening of doubts about the efficacy of the notion that we thought was the living principle of Indian nationhood. There is a strong view that it was in fact the adoption of secularism as the founding principle which helped communal politics to gain ground. Even those who firmly believe in it seem to have developed a kind of guilt about it and there is a call to revisit the idea.

It has faced severe attacks in the past but fought back each time; but this time the blow to secularism seems to be existential when an Indian Prime Minister mocks secularism on foreign shores and an Indian home minister imperiously brushes it aside and calls it redundant.

Yet voices of protest are barely heard. The erstwhile ‘secularists’ believe that the more we speak of secularism, the more hate it generates in society. Let us talk about real bread and butter issues instead and gain the confidence of our people first, they have begun to suggest. This diffidence is perhaps typically Indian and in sharp contrast to the brave resistance that the seemingly unstoppable wave of nationalism had to face in Germany, Holland, Austria, France and even in a country closer to us, South Korea.

With Brexit and Trump, we have entered a new era of nationalism, we were told. But the fight back in Europe and the US has been nothing less than spectacular. Leader after leader warned their people of the evil of hyper nationalism. We need to ask why the leaders in these countries did not leave their posts and responsibility when the tide was high, why they did not give in to populism and from where they derived the courage to argue with their people that outsiders were not their enemies and nationalism was a limiting idea which would diminish their collective identity.

Secularism has often been accused of being foreign to Indian ethos, an import from Europe. It is interesting that the blame of imposing this supposedly alien way of thinking is put on the head of a single individual, Jawaharlal Nehru. It is said that Nehru, a western educated man, did not understand the traditional Indian society and therefore drove the sword of secularism into the soul of India, creating a deep schism in it.

Scholars like Ashis Nandy and TN Madan have argued that Nehru, an irreligious man, did not have Gandhi’s wisdom in not trying to separate religion from politics, a view writers like Nirmal Verma also hold. It is interesting that scholars who have used western thought to understand and analyse Indian society would hold the foreignness of this concept as a reason for its unsuitability on the soil of India.

Gandhi knew his English well. On more than one occasion, when asked to define what kind of state India would be, he unequivocally said that it had to be secular. Nehru, the able disciple and friend of Gandhi was well aware that translating the word and concept of secularism was problematic, especially so in India with a multiplicity of languages and dialects.

Writing the preface of a book in Hindi, Dharm Nirpeksh Rashtra by Raghunath Singh, Nehru talks about the difficulty of translating Secularism to an Indian language. “It is perhaps not very easy to even find a good word in Hindi for ‘secular’. Some people think that it means something opposed to religion. That, obviously, is not correct. What it means it that the state honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities; that as a state, it does not allow itself to be attached to one faith or religion, which would then become the state religion.

Nehru does not discard the role of religion in people’s life, but he, like Lala Lajpat Rai, underscores the need to go beyond ‘Hindu nationalism, Muslim nationalism, Sikh nationalism or Christian nationalism’. Secularism is a constitutional value. Nehru like Ambedkar felt that the fact that the Constitution of India was more advanced than its masses, it was incumbent for leaders to live up to the constitutional ideal. The challenge before the Indian masses was whether they would be able to rise in equal measure to the intellectual genius which could imagine secularism as the first national principle. The courage behind this imagination must also be acknowledged. India was coming into being as a secular country in the geo-political neighborhood of religious nationalism. It was difficult but Indian leaders did not waver.

Nehru quoted “an intensely religious man’ Vinoba Bhave saying that in place of narrow religion or debased politics, the world needed science and spirituality. Secularism, in this sense was a ‘broadening and uniting’ factor. It was good simply because by broadening our vision it increased ‘our stature’ and made us ‘creative’.

One must say that secularism got clarity and sharpness in the bloody and noisy days of Partition. Gandhi, an avowed Sanatani and devotee of the cow, by rejecting the plea of his pious Hindu friend Dr Rajendra Prasad to legally prohibit cow-slaughter, made it very clear that ‘Rule of law in India’ was not to be influenced by the ‘way of living’ of the Hindus, which formed the majority of the Indian population.

Nehru echoed Gandhi when he, disagreeing with the demand of ban on cow slaughter to honour Hindu sentiments, wrote to Rajendra Prasad, “It should be remembered that the stoppage of cow slaughter means stopping non-Hindus from doing something they might do. For economic reasons steps can always be taken because they are justified on economic grounds. But if any such step is taken purely on grounds of Hindu sentiments, it means that the governance of India is going to be carried out in a particular way…”

Gandhi, calling for protection and dignity for the Muslims sat on his last fast in January, 1948. He was immediately charged with siding with the Muslims. He confessed of the crime by making it even more clear that his fast was for the Muslims in India and therefore against its Hindus and Sikhs, similarly it was on behalf of the Hindus in Pakistan and against the Muslims of that country. Gandhi, in his inimitable style, had resolved the incommunicability of the very complex concept of secularism by saying that for being secular all you had to do was to stand up to majoritarianism.

The author is a professor of Hindi at Delhi University