The Hindu : Pseudo-secularism

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jan 20, 2003

Opinion

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Pseudo-secularism — I

By Gail Omvedt

The subtraction of Hindutva from Hinduism has proved impossible for the defenders of secularism to make, since their arguments remain at an abstract level without an analysis of the historical construction of Hinduism itself.

OUT OF the agony that most progressive forces in the country are feeling about the results of the Gujarat elections have come many analyses, many musings about what lies ahead.

At one level, the BJP has proved its point about the uselessness of "pseudo-secularism". It has proved it over the bodies of thousands of Muslims and Hindus who have been victims of the communal hatred and fanaticism of both sides; it has proved it through appealing to Gujarati pride and anger at being targeted by "outside" forces; it has proved it through an appalling poisoning of the political culture of a whole linguistic region, a poisoning which it has been attempting to whip up and use throughout India. It is no use any more having any confidence in the moderate tones occasionally used by Atal Behari Vajpayee, L. K. Advani or even Narendra Modi himself; these are plays in the game, indeed they are responses to that same external pressure which has apparently angered many Gujaratis. Gujarat's face, and India's face, stands blackened in the world today, even more so with Mr. Modi's victory, and the ruling party feels the necessity to whiten it a bit. We should be grateful if that leads to a little slowing down on the chauvinism and the terrorism.

It is hard to have sympathy for the claims of Hindutva's followers of being defenders of religion; they have shown they are ready to kill for what they consider to be their religion, but not to die for it. But who has shown any resolve against them? Only one Congress leader, Digvijay Singh, has consciously sought to build on forces firmly opposed to Hindutva, and he was not to be seen in Gujarat. Instead, in campaigning in Gujarat, the Congress truly showed its secularism to be pseudo. The details of the way in which its leaders became "Hindutva's B team" are rather appalling. Publicising a different election manifesto in Gujarati and English; having Sonia Gandhi start her campaign from a temple; refusing to even put up a significant number of Muslim candidates or try to consolidate the Muslim and Dalit vote; Congress activists running after Mr. Modi's Gaurav Yatra to cleanse it with cow dung chanting Vedic hymns all the while — and so on. The Congress somehow expected that it could win by combining this soft Hindutva with an appeal to development and caste vote banks. This has proved a disastrous strategy.

Voters no longer take any party at face value on development issues, and caste vote banks are not enough. A political party needs a vision; the Congress failed to show it in Gujarat. Had the Congress stood up for its Nehruvian-Gandhian secular ideals it might still have been defeated — but at least it would have gone down with some honour, and it would have paved the way for some restoration of a sane political culture in Gujarat, rather than adding to the poison. It might even have won it a few more votes, since — it should not be so surprising after all — voters like integrity.

However, we should also be ready to admit that something may be wrong with Nehruvian-Gandhian secularism or at least with the way secularism has been projected as an ideal. Editorial and analytical discussions following the elections have shown a kind of desperation on the part of most defenders of secularism. The following decades will see "a frontal attack on the concept of secularism", writes K. K. Katyal (The Hindu, December 30); but he does not acknowledge that the frontal attack has been going on for some time or attempt to evaluate the successes of varying strategies of dealing with it. Dipankar Gupta, in turn, writing in the Economic and Political Weekly (November 16), calls for an "intolerant secularism," meaning that the state must be ready to forthrightly enforce the rights of citizens against violence and terror, regardless of the religious rhetoric used to justify this. But without any suggestion as to how to convince or pressure the state to do so, this remains a pious hope.

The dominant Left analysis today of the growth of violent Hindutva and other forces of religious nationalism attributes it to capitalism and globalisation. This is also a council of despair because it does not analyse why some capitalist and globalised countries are significantly more tolerant and non-violent than others; it thus prescribes no action other than to fight globalisation and capitalism. The distinction that Marxists had once made between advanced and backward capitalism, or democratic capitalism and fascism, has almost vanished. Thus, Father Nathan can lament in The Hindu open pages (December 31) that "the voice of reason is powerless against the myth" projected by the Hindutva forces — the powerlessness is itself a demonstration of desperation. His talk of building as an alternative "people's movements on people's issues" does not suggest what these movements might be. The Left parties which have in the past built such movements have been conspicuously unsuccessful in recent years; the strongest mass movements, those of farmers and Dalits, have been outside the Left framework, while the most decisive political steps on Dalit issues have been taken by a Congress leader who is a liberal of the Amartya Sen type.

Secularism, meaning simply the neutrality of the state towards religious communities, may well be necessary in today's plural society — but it still requires a foundation, a moral vision to make such a state possible. The theoretical attack on the Left-Gandhian-Nehruvian version of secularism has been a strong one. It has come not from the virulent Hindutva crowd but from leading, sophisticated intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee and others. Their argument has been that the concept of secularism has been "western" (i.e. European, Christian-influenced) in the way it presumes the possibility of separating religion from politics. They argue that, in contrast, religion has been so intertwined with all aspects of life in India that this is impossible (or, as Lata Mani has poetically put it, "is a dewdrop sacred or secular?"). Their alternative is to argue that Indian tradition was inherently tolerant, that it is rather the modernising state, homogenising and interventionist, requiring a monolithic "national culture" to back it up, which has been the root cause of the rise of the various forms of violence and growing alienation of religious groups seen in India today. Mr. Nandy and Mr. Chatterjee differ in various ways, and neither would like to have his position identified with that of the Hindutva ideologues. Yet, since neither says anything concrete about Islamic tolerance, we are left with the position that it is above all Hinduism that is tolerant. The progressives want to say that Hinduism is not Hindutva; the Hindutva people say that they are the same. But the subtraction of Hindutva from Hinduism has proved impossible for the defenders of secularism to make, since their arguments remain at an abstract level without an analysis of the historical construction of Hinduism itself.

This position ends by giving a theoretical foundation to the charges of virulent Hindutva: the state needs a religious foundation and this can only be provided by Hinduism, the majority religion (or "true religion") of the Indian people. Hinduism is tolerant, Islam is not; the Congress and Left who proclaim secularism are ignoring the cultural and historical realities of India and so are "pseudo-secularists." Unless these theses can be dealt with at a theoretical and ideological level, it seems to me to be very difficult to deal practically with the Hindutva ideological challenge.

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