Download PDF Version This article underlines the need to move beyond the exhausted notion of all religions preaching peace to studying the specific manner in which violence is legitimised in each religion. This is the first step liberal secularists need to take if they plan to mount a successful challenge to the dominance of the Hindu right.
The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the increasing assertiveness of the various branches of the Hindu right (Sangh Parivar) over the past two years has left secularists in India and abroad deeply concerned about the trajectory of Indian society and its politics. The long hoped for “de-sectarianisation” of Indian politics and society now seems as distant as it has ever been. Secularists in India and indeed around the world have tended to dismiss religious politics and especially violence as being prime examples of unscrupulous politicians exploiting sectarian divisions for their own narrow selfish interests (and at the expense of the greater good).
Furthermore, in adhering to the “bad politician” thesis, secularists tend to portray the religious traditions of Hinduism and Islam as being fundamentally pacific and advancing similar if not identical ethical positions on appropriate social and political behaviour, and above all, on violence. This attitude towards religious politics (and violence) is widely seen in the popular media as well as in the hallowed halls of academia.
In viewing the problem of religious politics in this manner, however, secularists have failed to take seriously the underlying phenomenon that is the cause of the patterns of politics and violence that they fear and whose disappearance they so intensely desire. More specifically Indian secularists have failed to directly confront the underlying “theological” and “ethical” systems of Hinduism and Islam, especially with regards to the problem of violence. Rather than holding that either both religions are equally pacific or that they are fundamentally advocating similar ethics with regards to political behaviour, it would be better to re-examine these two religious systems on their own terms and to thereby develop a more appropriate vocabulary with which to advocate for a secular state and politics. Indeed, liberal secularists will need to develop a far more direct way for advocating the virtues of their system of social and political relationships if they are to have any hope of blunting the rising tide of the Hindu right in India. Essential to doing this is taking the religious content of these movements seriously.
Dharma of Violence
Both Hinduism and Islam have theological strands that confront head-on the problem of violence. They do so, however, in very different ways and generate very different strictures on the legitimacy of violence. The clearest theological statement on violence within Hinduism comes in the Gita. Whatever the historical significance of the Gita in ancient and medieval worlds, it is clear that by the modern period the Gita had become the principal condensed articulation of Hindu ethics.
The basic message of the Gita, refined in long conversation with Buddhist and Jain rivals, is that the principal source of legitimate action lies in the concept of dharma. What the Gita advocates, defiantly and unapologetically in opposition to Buddhist doctrine, is that the fundamental source of an individual’s dharma is the network of social obligations in which an individual is embedded. It is, therefore, an ethical system that is entirely positional. The rightness or wrongness of an action is entirely dependent upon the exact position occupied by the agent at a precise moment in relationship to the broader framework, to kin and to social relations. The dharma of a child is different than the dharma of an adult; the dharma of a warrior, as the poet of the Gita has Krishna state in his sermon so clearly to Arjun, is different from the dharma of a peasant, a merchant or a priest; and so and so forth.
The key point is that the righteousness of action (including violence) is entirely a function of social obligations and not the ultimate purposes to which action is being applied. The rightness or wrongness of violence, in this tradition, is entirely disconnected from the ultimate purposes to which it is being deployed. A warrior’s action could be entirely legitimate even if the cause in which he fights is not. In this sense, the ethics of action within Hinduism is very narrowly conceived and the politics of violence (“the ends” in Clausewitzian terms) is entirely absent. Indeed, theGita states that these are of no concern of an individual assuming that they could even comprehend it (who are we, after all, to pretend to know the ends to which the Gods are working?).
Hinduism, therefore, is not pacific in any sense. It takes violence for granted and instead focuses on the question of legitimate violence in a very narrow and highly contextualised context of individual obligation (itself understood in a social sense). Furthermore, and worth highlighting, is the detachment of action from the legitimacy of the causes of action. Put in slightly different language, Hinduism, as articulated in the Gita, has remarkably little to say about politics in any modern understanding of the term. And searching through much of what constitutes popular or devotional Hinduism since the classical period, the sheer ubiquity of violence in the great epics, the Puranas, and the general corpus of mythology belies any attempt to classify Hinduism as “pacific” let alone “Gandhian,” notwithstanding the seeping into Hinduism of the Buddhist and, above all, Jain concept of ahimsa.
Politics of Violence
Islam, on the other hand, is in some sense all about politics and could not, therefore, be more different from Hinduism in this matter. It has become common for liberal secularists to assert that Islam is a pacific religion that has been hijacked by misguided individuals seeking to mobilise politically on the basis of the legitimacy provided by Islam. Indeed, Western (and Indian) politicians routinely make statements that assert that Islamic fundamentalists have gotten Islam wrong. Instead of this liberal and secular essentialising of Islam, it would be more productive to take Islam’s deep reflection on the nature of legitimate action seriously.
Islam, as represented both by the life of its Prophet and the Koran, has a great deal to say about legitimate and ethical violence. My purpose here is not to enter the highly contested debate over the precise meaning of jihad. It is instead to note that Islam does not inherently reject violence. Instead, the emphasis is on the precise boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate violence. While it is possible for reasonable people to disagree about where those precise boundaries lie, that there is in fact legitimate and ethical forms of violence within Islam cannot be denied or ignored. For the present purposes it is worth emphasising that legitimate violence within Islam is entirely political (in the sense of defence of the community of believers and their political rights in this world).
The Prophet himself engaged in violence with his own hands and led armies into battle (and lest Hindus feel smug about this, it is worth pointing out that Rama, Krishna, and the list goes on, are all deeply implicated in the exercise of violence in the epics and the Puranas). What is different between Hindu and Islamic religious attitudes towards violence is that in one case the righteous of the cause is central and in the other it is the righteousness of the social obligation. One is political and the other is social. One is communal and the other individual. But neither has an inherent problem with violence: only with the ways in which it is exercised.
Exhausted Notion
Secularists will need to abandon Gandhi’s exhausted notion of the inherently pacific of the inherently pacific nature of religion: neither Hinduism nor Islam is theologically pacific. Instead, secularists, as will be explored below, need to return to the traditional liberal position of separating religion from politics and removing communalism from the arena of the state. Religious violence is not, pace Gandhi, inherently incompatible with religious theology. Therefore, the liberal response to religious violence needs to start with the assumption that the question is not whether or not religion is inherently pacific but what role ought it play, in a pluralistic society, at the level of politics.
Secularism’s Challenge
In a deep sense, secularism in India has always been an elite phenomenon and its success has always been tied to the fate of that elite in maintaining control over the state. From the very beginning of the independent Indian state, Indian secularism has been compelled to govern a society in which liberal values had penetrated but little and whose basic vocabulary (derived above all from kinship and communitarian identities) are decidedly “aliberal” if not always explicitly “anti-liberal.” As the secular elite’s grip on power within the state has faded (first electorally and then within the administration itself), it has retreated further into its bastions within the intelligentsia. Ever diminishing portions of political parties and administrative organs of the state are unable to speak to, let alone counter, the tide of Hindu politics on their own terms.
Part of this is a consequence of organisation as my colleague Tariq Thachil has so ably demonstrated in his book (Elite Parties, Poor Voters: How Social Services Wins Voters in India); but part of this is a consequence of the fact that the secular elite in India have never viewed the active missionising of liberalism to be a part of their writ. For much of the post-independence period they controlled the state after all and so there was no perceived need to do so since the state itself was supposed to, through education and social policy, generalise their values. This neglect of the burden of propagating liberal secularism also generated a lazy detachment from the deeper currents of Indian society that were generating enormous newly organised communal and regional political movements that are explicitly anti-secular and anti-liberal.
Liberal secularism has never had an easy time in India but it does appear that the challenge to it has deepened and become much more fundamental. The standard bearer of Indian secular politics, the Indian National Congress, is in disarray and may even disappear as a major alternative to the BJP entirely. The dismissiveness of Hindu politics that comes so naturally to secularists is giving way to deep and legitimately so, apprehension, about the direction that the Indian state and society are taking. Indian liberal secularists will need to “missionise” and persuade the majority of the Indian population of the correctness of their programme for reform of social organisation and the state because if liberal secularism were ever self-evident to the majority of the Indian population, that is clearly no longer the case.
For what it is worth, liberal secularism, too, is a religion (in the sense that it has a set of first order principles that it seeks to apply to the organisation of the state and its relationship to its society). Like all religions, liberal secularism needs its adherents to engage with its opponents on terms by which it may persuade others that some form of salvation can be achieved through its programme. Liberal secularists can no longer stand above the fray sticking their noses up at the deluded cadres of the Hindu right. Doing this will mean taking religious politics, including the secular liberal variant, seriously.
Secularism in India, as elsewhere, offers a legitimate path to moving past communalism (and hence communal- based violence) by emphasising the fundamentally individual nature of religious adherence and the need to keep religious identity, as far as is possible, outside of the formal structures of the state. The founders of India Republic had wisely seen that liberal secularism was the only legitimate basis for a pluralistic society to coexist with a modern state focused on development. This is an argument, as the past few decades have made abundantly clear, that is not self-evident to the majority of the Indian population for whom communal mobilisation has become increasingly the norm.
In Conclusion
Liberal secularism in India needs activism beyond the salons of the elite and ways need to be found to participate, as one ideology among many, in the public market of ideas. Ultimately, most Indians, as do most people around the world, care about immediate welfare questions and so liberal secularists in India need to make the argument as to why secularism is a better path to development than is religious politics. But none of this will happen if liberal secularists continue to hold lazy views of religion and the sources of communal violence.
Simply dismissing religious violence as a phenomenon generated by “bad agents” will not do any more. Engaging in platitudes about the universality of religions’ message(s) of peace will also not do. Liberals will not be able to properly speak to the underlying causes of communalism without first understanding what religion really is and what its theological positions on violence really are. Platitudes about the universality of the peace message inherent in all religions, aside from being false, only generate smug detachment from a society in which the message of religious communalism is persuasive because it actually does strike legitimate cords. Looking to the state to uphold secularism in the absence of a general consensus in the citizenry of the republic on its virtues, and indeed necessity, given India’s extreme religiously plural society, can no longer suffice. The argument must be made directly, actively and consistently as to why secular liberalism offers the best path for India’s developmental aspirations.
