RANDOM MUSINGS

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THE MUDDLED SECULARISM OF INDIA

Secularism has become extremely complicated in India. Secularism was a philosophy which worked for the Western world of Christianity, as Jakob De Roover points out in his classic book, ‘Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism’. It was a natural outcome of the problems faced by the predominantly Christian world. The Catholic world; then the Protestant Reformation; and then the Enlightenment finally led to a secularism of separating the public political sphere from the private religious sphere. It is another matter that definitions of each sphere remain slippery; and more so, is the defining of the boundary between the two.
It was necessary in the Western context, but its import to a cultural context like India was grossly inappropriate. It has become dangerous too as religious frictions seem to be increasing ironically, despite including the word ‘secular’ in the Constitution preamble. As Dr SN Balagangadhara at the University of Ghent says repeatedly, there are no religions in India, but only traditions. All the so-called religions in India are a creation of the Western and colonial lenses. In Western culture, religion is the root model of learning and hence their experience of India made them see and construct a lot of religions. The conversion of traditions to religions has been the biggest colonial misadventure; and which is almost impossible to shake-off today in our intellectual discourses.
It is a tragedy that the West confronted the tree of Indian traditions by taking hold of the branches and making them different religions. This was in trying to make sense of the tree. The individual branches fought or agreed with each other depending on the levels of scholarship. Thus, Western, and colonial scholarship created the sometimes even antagonistic religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, and so on, when none existed. This internalisation of a discourse, in a classic case of colonial hangover in post-Independent India, has consequences far deadlier than we can imagine.
Indian traditions span over rituals, mythology, and philosophies of the most varied kind ranging from atheism to non-dualism. There is no dichotomy when a space scientist breaks a coconut in the temple before the launch of a rocket or when a surgeon prays to a higher power before operating. These do not surprise or bother us too. It does now, with the secularism discourse. Roover goes on to say emphatically that Hindu fundamentalism and revivalism is a consequence of the inappropriate application of a liberal secularism policy, in fact!
The dualistic philosophies with Bhakti at its core have its resemblances to the Semitic religions; but apart from that, it is a metaphysical and sociological impossibility that there are religions in India. In Indian culture, rituals are the root model of learning; and it is different from the Western model of learning. It is a truly accepted and an acknowledged fact that rituals and traditions unites societies, whereas religion has always divided people, say Dr Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover.
 Religion and rituals are two separate root models of learning; and this essential difference between the West and the East needs a clear understanding. For reasons we do not understand, these scholars say, even Islam and Christianity took the form of traditions in India.
India’s pluralism and multi-cultural diversity has been much more than Europe has ever seen or handled anytime in its history. We have handled pluralism far better for thousands of years without any gross genocides in the name of religion. The peculiar application of secularism now allows our courts, who have taken the previous role of the Churches in assessing pagan rituals, to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential (secular/ superstitious) ‘religious’ practices in India.The solution to handle the problem of pluralism and handling multi- cultural diversity is within us. We should look for alternative solutions already inside us, instead of seeking solutions which were appropriate for a certain place at a certain period of time.

LETTER ON SECULARISM: PARADOXICALLY GENERATING HINDU FUNDAMENTALISM

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The text of the above letter:

The polemical piece by Payam Sudhakaran was stunning, to say the least. It is a straight and standard narrative of the colonial times progressing without a break in the post-colonial independent India. There is a belief that all civilized countries ought to be liberal secular democracies abiding by the norms of neutrality, toleration, religious freedom, and the separation of politics from religion. This worked well in the non-plural Western societies for some time, but problems arose when applied uniformly to all societies. First, liberal secularism could not deliver its goods in non-Western societies like India. Second, the influx of Islam into Europe has shown cracks in this model. The third problem is that certain conceptual problems plague the liberal model. What counts as religion? No state or court possesses an impartial scientific conception that identifies and delimits the sphere of religion in a manner neutral to all religions.

Different cultures have different solutions to their problems. Western conceptions of Asian cultures (internalised by Indians) tend to transform the latter into deficient variants of Western culture. Asian communities accommodated a variety of religious, ethnic, and cultural groups much greater than Europe at any point of history. For over a millennium, India had presence of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions living with Zoroastrian Parsis, Muslims, Jews, and Christians of various denominations in mostly peace. Indian society never disintegrated despite the diversity; hence it must have known successful practices and mechanisms of coexistence.

Unfortunately, Indian descriptions of ‘Hindu religion’ and ‘the caste system’ fixed deeply in the same framework of liberal secularism- severe obstacles in looking at India to develop a better model. An asymmetry of cultures allowed successful injection of the Western model into Indian society where the most inappropriate discussions now take place. Colonial consciousness stays intact after the colonials have long gone.

Secularism as conceived by our Constitution framers is bound to fail. The colonial state had an unremitting hostility towards the Hindu traditions. The colonial representation of India (caste, priests, and social discrimination) became the guiding mantra of the ‘secular’ politicians of India; quite simply, a negative attitude towards Hindu traditions. There was nothing ‘neutral’, in any sense of the word.

Such policies are bound to have their impact on society. The defence of Hindu traditionalists took the inevitable form of a militant defence of the Hindu traditions against the ‘secular’ state of the Nehruvian variety. When looked at from a pagan perspective, there is no religious rivalry between the Hindu traditions and the Semitic religions. However, the opposite is the case when viewed from the perspective of the Semitic religions. The fundamental philosophies of the Semitic religions and the pagan traditions—for example, proselytization and non-interference—are bound to collide in a society where the Semitic religions encounter pagan traditions as a living force. This is exactly what is happening in India today.

When the Indian state assumes a Semitic theological claim that religion is matter of truth, then it actively creates and promotes the religious rivalry between the majority (that is, those who belong to the Hindu traditions) and the minority (Muslims, Christians, and so on), where there is none. As a matter of state policy, it paradoxically but inevitably creates and sustains opposition between religions and traditions. It is precisely this coercive straitjacket of liberal ‘secular’ conception that generates ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ in the pagan Indian culture. The dominant conception of the liberal state— ‘neutral’ and ‘secular’—does not allow space to pagan traditions, which do not conceive of religious diversity as a rivalry of truth claims. When the epistemic premises of the liberal state prevent it from accommodating cultural traditions that form the majority in India, it is time to re-examine the limitations of the mantra of secularism.

SECULARISM IN INDIA 

LETTER ON SECULARISM DATED 13 THE OCTOBER 2019