India's Democracy at 70: Toward a Hindu State?
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India’s Democracy at 70: Toward a Hindu State? Christophe Jaffrelot Journal of Democracy, Volume 28, Number 3, July 2017, pp. 52-63 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0044 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/664166 [ Access provided at 11 Dec 2020 03:02 GMT from Cline Library at Northern Arizona University ] Jaffrelot.NEW saved by RB from author’s email dated 3/30/17; 5,890 words, includ- ing notes. No figures; TXT created from NEW by PJC, 4/14/17 (4,446 words); MP ed- its to TXT by PJC, 4/19/17 (4,631 words). AAS saved by BK on 4/25/17; FIN created from AAS by PJC, 5/26/17 (5,018 words). FIN saved by BK on 5/2/17 (5,027 words); PJC edits as per author’s updates saved as FINtc, 6/8/17, PJC (5,308 words). PGS created by BK on 6/9/17. India’s Democracy at 70 TOWARD A HINDU STATE? Christophe Jaffrelot Christophe Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris, and director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). His books include Religion, Caste, and Politics in India (2011). In 1976, India’s Constitution of 1950 was amended to enshrine secular- ism. Several portions of the original constitutional text already reflected this principle. Article 15 bans discrimination on religious grounds, while Article 25 recognizes freedom of conscience as well as “the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.” Collective as well as indi- vidual rights receive constitutional recognition. Articles 26 and 30, for instance, stipulate that each religious denomination has the right to es- tablish charitable and educational institutions, and that these are eligible to receive state aid. These communities also have the right to manage their “own affairs in matters of religion,” which in particular amounts to recognizing customary and personal laws such as Islamic shari‘a. Clearly, the Indian version of secularism does not imply the seculariza- tion of the society within which it applies.1 On the contrary, India publicly recognizes religions in its basic law. Yet for the past three decades at least, pillars of this brand of secularism have been undergoing de facto demoli- tion. Without overtly challenging any constitutional clause that upholds secularism, well-organized Hindu nationalists have mounted a massive ethnoreligious mobilization and effectively “Hinduized” the public sphere. The ideological roots of Hindu nationalism go back to 1923, when V.D. Savarkar published Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? In this charter of what was to become known as the doctrine of Hindutva, Savarkar de- fined the Hindus as the “sons of the soil,” for whom India was not only a motherland, but also a sacred land. Muslims and Christians, by con- trast, he presented as outsiders who had attacked Hinduism in the past and should now swear allegiance to key symbols of Hindu identity in order to become true Indian nationals. This equation between Hindu Journal of Democracy Volume 28, Number 3 July 2017 © 2017 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press Christophe Jaffrelot 53 civilization and Indian identity reflects an ethnic definition of the nation that is at odds with the vision found in the Constitution of 1950. That document, which enshrines the views of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawa- harlal Nehru (the first prime minister), treats anyone born in India as a legitimate citizen of the country, whose “composite culture,” moreover, combines different religious traditions. Yet the party of Gandhi and Nehru, the Indian National Congress (INC or simply Congress), has never fully endorsed this conception. There have always been holdouts among Congress notables at the level of the states—especially the ones in northern India, where party bosses have tended to promote Hindu traditions at the expense of minorities. And even more significantly, Nehru’s own daughter and grandson—In- dira and Rajiv Gandhi—during their respective turns as prime minister during all but three of the 23 years between 1966 and 1989, tended to instrumentalize religion. They played the Muslim and Hindu “cards” in turn. Indira accorded Aligarh Muslim University status as a minority educational institution under Article 30 of the Constitution, for instance, while Rajiv sought to cater to traditionalist-Muslim sensitivities during the Shah Bano affair (a dispute over whether a Muslim woman had a right to alimony after her husband had divorced her under Islamic law). In 1989, facing a national election, Rajiv turned to wooing Hindus. He launched his campaign by invoking the divine figure of Rama, whom Hindu nationalists had begun promoting, in the town of Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh. Close by is Ayodhya, which many Hindus hold to be Rama’s birthplace. It was there, said Hindu nationalists, that the first Mughal emperor, Babur, had centuries earlier razed the temple marking the birth site in order to erect a large mosque on the spot. Their demand was that this temple be rebuilt. Instead of remaining loyal to secular values by resisting this push, Rajiv Gandhi tried to benefit from it. He lost the election, however, and Congress has never fully recovered.2 While Congress has diluted the secular discourse of the state in a way that has given the Hindu-nationalist idiom a new legitimacy, there is still more than a difference of degree between the party and the Hin- du-nationalist movement. This movement has given rise to a myriad of organizations that are known collectively as the Sangh Parivar.3 The trunk of the Hindu-nationalist tree is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps or RSS), founded in 1925. The branches that it has sprouted include the highly successful Bharatiya Janata Party (In- dian People’s Party or BJP). As the events related to the Ayodhya affair were unfolding, the BJP was gaining at the polls. In 1998, it arrived in power at the head of a co- alition government. Restrained by partners that did not hold with Hindu- nationalist ideology, the BJP shelved those elements of its agenda that were most openly hostile to secularism. Its watch, however, did see the outbreak of an anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002. 54 Journal of Democracy Yet the erosion of secularism continued, aided by judicial rulings such as a December 1995 Supreme Court decision which endorsed the idea that Hindutva (the Hindu-nationalist ideology) is a secular concern with the Indian ethos or “way of life.”4 This has meant that Hindutva- based election campaigning—which would be banned were Hindutva construed as religious in nature—has been able to go on unchecked. After ten years in opposition, the BJP returned to power in 2014. Currently, it has a majority in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s bicameral Parliament) where it holds 282 of the chamber’s 545 seats (its actual governing coalition is larger, totaling 339 seats). The BJP’s lead- er, Narendra Modi, had been chief minister of Gujarat between 2001 and 2014, a period that included the 2002 anti-Muslim riots there. He made the promotion of economic development the centerpiece of his 2014 campaign, but exploited religious issues too. Since coming to power, the BJP has not directly challenged official secularism at either the national or the state level—though it has passed highly controversial laws in some states—but vigilantes acting on behalf of Hindutva have subjected citizens from minority groups to acts of ruthless cultural policing, with physical violence not seldom involved. Lacking a majority in the Rajya Sabha (Parliament’s upper house), the BJP has not sought to change federal law in this area. Modi did promise during his campaign to amend the Citizenship Act of 1950 to grant au- tomatic Indian citizenship to any Christian, Hindu, Jain, Parsee, or Sikh refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan—conspicuously omitting Muslim migrants—but he has yet to bring forward such a bill. States in which the BJP has passed laws hostile to religious minori- ties include Maharashtra, whose capital Mumbai has long been a model of cosmopolitanism. The BJP won control of the state in 2014 after al- lying with Shiv Sena, a regional Hindu-nationalist party. The resulting state government quickly scrapped positive-discrimination measures meant to aid Muslims. In 2015 came legislation making the sale and possession of beef a crime punishable by a fine and up to five years in jail. This measure, reflecting the sacredness of the cow in Hinduism, has primarily penalized Muslims, many of whom are butchers by trade. (The BJP-run state of Haryana also passed a “beef ban” in 2015.) Finally, Maharashtra passed a law making religious conversion ex- tremely difficult. Hindu nationalists had become alarmed by the find- ing of the 2011 national census that the Hindu share of the population had fallen below 80 percent for the first time since 1947. Maharashtra’s law was modeled on anticonversion statutes already in force in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The aim in each case is to thwart the activities of Christian missionaries and to a lesser extent the movement by certain groups (tribes or lower castes) to adopt Islam. In addition to legal changes, the dominant discourse has taken an ethnoreligious turn as high officials promote Hindu identity. External Christophe Jaffrelot 55 Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has publicly supported the naming of the Bhagavad Gita as India’s “national scripture.”5 In 2015, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma removed the name of Aurangzeb—a Mughal emperor despised by Hindu nationalists—from a Delhi street and named it instead after the recently deceased former president A.P.J.