Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T09:37:10.733Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Indian Secularism and Its Critics: Some Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Thomas Pantham
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Several critics of Indian secularism maintain that given the pervasive role of religion in the lives of the Indian people, secularism, defined as the separation of politics or the state from religion, is an intolerable, alien, modernist imposition on the Indian society. This, I argue, is a misreading of the Indian constitutional vision, which enjoins the state to be equally tolerant of all religions and which therefore requires the state to steer clear of both theocracy or fundamentalism and the “wall of separation” model of secularism. Regarding the dichotomy, which the critics draw between Nehruvian secularism and Gandhian religiosity, I suggest that what is distinctive to Indian secularism is the complementation or articulation between the democratic state and the politics of satya and ahimsa, whereby the relative autonomy of religion and politics from each other can be used for the moral-political reconstruction of both the religious traditions and the modern state.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , Summer 1997 , pp. 523 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Baxi, Upendra, “The ‘Struggle’ for the Redefinition of Secularism in India”, Social Action 44 (01–04 1994)Google Scholar; Sen, Amartya, “The Threats to Secular India”, Social Scientist 21 (03–04 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kothari, Rajni, “Pluralism and Secularism: Lessons of Ayodhya,” Economic and Political Weekly, 19–2612 1992.Google Scholar

2 For a convenient classification, see Mitra, S. K., “Desecularising the State: Religion and Politics in India after Independence,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (1991).Google Scholar

3 See Berger, P. L., The Social Reality of Religion (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 113.Google Scholar

4 See Baxi, , “The ‘Struggle’ for the Redefinition of Secularism in India,” p. 17.Google Scholar

5 Tripathi, P. K., “Secularism: Constitutional Provisions and Judicial Review”, in Secularism: Its Implications for Law and Life in India, ed. Sharma, G. S. (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi Pvt. Ltd., 1966), p. 193Google Scholar. For two different treatments of the secular character of the Indian state, see Smith, D. E., India as a Secular State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Luthera, V. P., The Concept of the Secular State and India (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

6 See Deshmukh, Nana, Our Secularism Needs Rethinking (Delhi: Deendayal Research Institute, 1990).Google Scholar

7 Hansen, T. B., “Globalisation and Nationalist Imaginations: Hindutva's Promise of Equality Through Difference,” Economic and Political weekly, 9 04 1996, p. 608.Google Scholar For a critical review of the literature on the ideology of Hindu nationalism, see Pantham, Thomas, Political Theories and Social Reconstruction: A Critical Survey of the Literature on India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995).Google Scholar

8 Nandy, Ashis, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” Alternatives (1988), p. 192.Google Scholar

9 Ibid.,, p. 187.

10 Ibid.,, p. 192.

11 Ibid.,, pp. 185–86.

12 Madan, T. N., “Secularism in its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies (11 1987).Google Scholar

13 Ibid.,, p. 758.

14 Ibid.,, p. 757.

15 Chatterjee, Partha, “Secularism and Toleration” Economic and Political Weekly, 9 07 1994.Google Scholar

16 Ibid.,, p. 1768.

17 Ibid.,, p. 1775 (emphasis added).

18 Ibid.,, p. 1777, n34.

19 Ibid.,, p. 1775.

20 Gopal, S., ed., Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 330.Google Scholar

21 See Pathak, Zakia and Sunderrajan, Rajeswari, “Shahbano”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Baxi, , “The ‘Struggle’ to Redefine Secularism,” p. 28.Google Scholar See also Tharamangalam, Joseph, “Indian Social Scientists and Critique of Secularism,” Economic and Political Weekly, 4 03 1995Google Scholar; and Bhargava, Rajeev, “Giving Secularism Its Due,” Economic and Political Weekly, 9 07 1994.Google Scholar

23 Bilgrami, Akeel, “Two Concepts of Secularism: Reason, Modernity and Archimedean Ideal,” Economic and Political Weekly, 9 07 1994.Google Scholar

24 That for an emancipatory political agency we need to fashion countercodes of criticism and resistance from out of what our “own history” offers us is insightfully brought out by Akeel Bilgrami (“Two Concepts of Secularism,” p. 1758). Similarly, Sudipta Kaviraj argues that “the logic of modernity pervades the map of identities” in that it leaves no identity untouched. What this view implies is that under modernity any notion of emancipatory or transformative agency has necessarily to be political. See his “Crisis of the Nation-State in India,” in Contemporary Crisis of the Nation-State, ed. Dunn, John (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), p. 118.Google Scholar

25 See Parekh, Bhikhu, Cobnialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's Political Discourse (New Delhi: Sage, 1989).Google Scholar

26 See Dalton, Dennis, Mahatma Gandhi: Non-violent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

27 It is instructive to compare my idea of the Gandhi-Nehru complementarity in the Indian approach to religious harmony with Akeel Bilgrami's preferred notion of negotiated, suhstantive secularism. He contradistinguishes that notion from the notion of the non-negotiated, Archimedean secularism, which he says was imposed on the society by Nehru. Bilgrami however does not rule out the likelihood that Nehruvian secularism might perhaps have been based on an implicit or tacit negotiation among some of the religious communities. My reading of the Gandhi-Nehru complementarity implies that some real or genuine interreligious negotiation did take place. Cf. Bilgrami, “Two Concepts of Secularism.”

28 In his earlier writings, however, Nandy did recognize, and rightly so, that Gandhi was “willing to criticize some traditions violently” and “to include in his frame elements of modernity as critical vectors.” See, for instance, Nandy, , “Cultural Frames for Transformative Politics,” in Political Discourse, ed. Parekh, B. and Pantham, T. (New Delhi: Sage, 1987), pp. 240–41.Google Scholar

29 See Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

30 See Pantham, Thomas, “Postrelativism in Emancipatory Thought: Gandhi's Swaraj and Satyagraha,” in The Multiverse of Democracy, ed. Sheth, D. L. and Nandy, Ashis (New Delhi: Sage, 1996).Google Scholar