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New directions for South Asia
By T. K. Oommen
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If durable peace is to prevail in the SAARC countries, the notion of state or national religion should be abandoned by the members.
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THE SOUTH Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is not expected to discuss bilateral issues in its meetings. But most tensions and conflicts in the region are bilateral and their source is cultural. Of the two prominent dimensions of culture — language and religion — it is the latter which foments most of the persisting tensions in South Asia. Therefore, an important step to substantially reduce conflicts in the region is to de-officialise religion. Conversely, language is often a cementing force even when those of the same linguistic community are distributed across boundaries of sovereign states.
Most polities in the world today are multi-religious, the common pattern being one majority religion and a few minority ones. This holds true for South Asia too. There are three majority religions in SAARC countries — Buddhism in Bhutan and Sri Lanka (70 per cent); Hinduism in India (82 per cent) and Nepal (90 per cent); Islam in Bangladesh (86 per cent), Pakistan (97 per cent) and the Maldives (100 per cent). In all the SAARC countries except India the religion of the majority is privileged. While in Sri Lanka Buddhism is declared the `national' religion, the religion of the majority is state/official in all other SAARC countries.
Two observations are pertinent here. One, the usual tendency to perceive some religions as more accommodative, catholic and tolerant is not necessarily correct; if so, Buddhism would not have been privileged in all the Buddhist-majority countries. Two, the widely held perception that democracy is more conducive for nurturing religious pluralism is not sustainable. The first democratic nation in the world, the United Kingdom, still has an official Church. Among the SAARC countries, Sri Lanka has the best record of democracy (India's internal emergency partially tainted its record) and yet it has privileged Buddhism as national religion.
However, among the positive features of democracy are: (a) avoiding a majoritarian hegemony, (b) providing for equal citizenship entitlements to the minorities and (c) respecting the cultural specificities, identities if you will, of the minorities. While the majority does not need state patronage and protection, the urge to sustain the cultural specificity of the majority is also natural and cannot be denied either. That is, democracy willy-nilly implies the respect for the cultural specificities of all communities, including the majority. But when the values and institutions specific to the majority are privileged as official and/or national by the state, it necessarily leads to a majoritarian hegemony and alienation of the minorities. This is the danger in officialising majority religions. Therefore, if durable peace is to prevail in the SAARC countries, the notion of state or national religion should be abandoned by the members.
If religion is to be de-linked from the polity, language should be brought to centre stage. This is so because language is an inevitable feature of all societies. Religion is an optional element in human life in that one can be an atheist, agnostic, secularist and/or rationalist. That is, while there are alternatives to religion, no one can live without language. There is yet another interesting fact to be noted here. While the possibility of alternatives exists in the case of religion, it is non-accommodative of these alternatives. No one can be a "true" Hindu and a Muslim, notwithstanding widespread religious syncretism and liminality, or an atheist and a believer, at the same time. In contrast, the space for accommodation is substantial in the case of language; one can learn several languages without necessarily diminishing the importance of one's mother tongue.
It is important to recognise here that most of the cultural attributes do not have much bearing on religion although the tendency to link the two is perennially present. For example, literature, music, architecture, food, dress or language get `communalised' and pose problems only when they are identified with a religious community. This happens because of the tendency to mistake the cultural attributes of the foundational community as those of the religion wherever it spreads.
Further, when religion is the basis of constituting states the cultural attributes of the dominant religion will be projected as `national' characteristics. This necessarily alienates the minority religious communities.
To overcome these problems, South Asian polities should be visualised as multi-layered federal states, within which there would be language-based provincial states, cultural regions, zilla parishads and panchayats, each of these having a decentralised but connected system of politico-administrative arrangement.
In India, the biggest of all South Asian countries, ,there are only 91 regional-cultural-linguistic communities some of which are big and viable enough to have a provincial state, but others may have only cultural-regional or local self-governments (zilla or panchayat).
The point I am making is the need to arrive at a set of criteria to establish Governments at the appropriate levels, instead of falling an easy prey to the tactics and stratagems of unscrupulous politicians.
I must now spell out the rationale in invoking language as the major basis of politico-administrative units. All the existing/persisting secessionist movements in South Asia combine religion and language to sustain their mobilisational vitality. This is a lethal combination from the perspective of escalating conflicts in the region.
Cultural features are more common to linguistic regions than religious communities. For example, there is a greater commonality between Pakistan Punjab and Indian Punjab or Bangladesh and West Bengal in terms of food, dress, music, literature and architecture than say Pakistan Punjab and Sindh or Indian Punjab and West Bengal.
Experience the world over clearly demonstrates that in order to bring about participatory development, effective communication with people is an imperative. Adequate communication is possible through the mother tongues.
Most languages, irrespective of their graphemic status, are capable of effective communication in the context of everyday life — primary education, religious worship, transactions in the market place, expression of emotion and love.
My suggestion then is wherever it is feasible based on population size, financial viability and territorial concentration, it is desirable to establish politico-administrative units based on language. These units could be panchayats, zillas, autonomous regions and provincial states vertically layered in a federal state.
However, urban settlements, particularly metropolitan centres, are bound to be multi-lingual in some of the SAARC countries. The local self-governments of these settlements will have to be designed keeping this in mind. That is, political federalism and linguistic diversity are two sides of the same coin.
(The writer is Professor of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, JNU.)
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