Indian Secularism and Its Critics: Some Reflections Author(S): Thomas Pantham Source: the Review of Politics, Vol

Indian Secularism and Its Critics: Some Reflections Author(s): Thomas Pantham Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 59, No. 3, Non-Western Political Thought (Summer, 1997), pp. 523-540 Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1408550 Accessed: 24-04-2020 17:26 UTC

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Thomas Pantham

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 modem state.

Secularism is one of the deeply problematic issues in contemporary Indian political discourse.1 The participants in this discourse include the Parliament, political parties, journalists, academics and, in a special way, the judiciary. They espouse a variety of positions, ranging from antisecularist manifestoes to campaigns for positive secularism. This discourse does call for an ethico-political assessment. Unfortunately such an assessment is not available in the writings of Indian social and political theorists. Some of them in fact are engaged in advocating models or conceptions of state-religion relationships that are clouded in ethico-political incoherence. They are a source of confusion or misguidance.

A previous version of this paper was presented to the seminar on "Fifty Years of Independence," Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 24-26 September 1996. An earlier version formed my presidential address to the 11th conference of the Gujarat Rajyashastra Mandal at Smt. Gandhi Arts and Science College, Bhavnagar, on 20 May 1996. 1. See Upendra Baxi, "The 'Struggle' for the Redefinition of Secularism in India," Social Action 44 (January-March 1994); Amartya Sen, "The Threats to Secular India," Social Scientist 21 (March-April 1993); and Rajni Kothari, "Pluralism and Secularism: Lessons of Ayodhya," Economic and Political Weekly, 19-26 December 1992.

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What then are the ethically or, rather, ethico-politically incoher- ent or untenable models of state-religion relationship that are being advocated in and for India today? How do they compare with, or depart from, the constitutional vision? Is the latter altogether flawless or does it call for some contemporary revisions? If it does in fact need to be amended and if the ethico-political incoherencies of the presently available reformulations are to be avoided, how may we proceed? This last question may be formulated somewhat differently as: What kind of relationship between the state and the religions of the citizens of India can claim ethico-political justi- fiability or soundness in its favor-some form of secular relationship or some form of antisecular or desecularized relationship? I have used the expression "some form of" advisedly because both secular and nonsecular states assume different forms in different contexts.2 For instance, secularism in the West is usually taken to be emphasizing the separation of state and religion, whereas Indian secularism stresses the equal tolerance of all religions (sarva dharma samabhava), even though it also upholds a certain differentiation or relative separation of the political and religious spheres. I shall return to these specificities of Indian secularism later on. A satisfactory answer to the aforementioned set of questions would require a large-scale study. As a step in that direction, I shall, in the present exercise, try to indicate some of the ways in which those questions are addressed, explicitly or implicitly, in the contemporary discourse on secularism in India. But first, I must turn to a brief consideration of the different meanings of "secularism" as it is used in the West and in India.

Secularism (which is often translated as dharma-nirapeksata) has its origins in Europe. When it was first used at the end of the Thirty Years' War in Europe in 1648, "secularization" referred to the transfer of the properties of the church to the princes. Similar transfer of church properties to the state also formed a part of the

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

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achievements of the French Revolution. Later, in England, George Holyoake used the term "secularism" to refer to the rationalist movement of protest which he led in 1851. In its pursuit of the project of Enlightenment and Progress through the replacement of the mythical and religious view of the world with the scientific and technological-industrial approach, Europe brought about a differentiation or separation of the political sphere from the religious sphere. This process by which "sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols" came to be variously referred to as the "secularization" or desacralization of the world.3 In addition to this idea of (1) the separation of religion and politics, "secularism-secularization" also means (2) the diminution of the role of religion; (3) this-worldly orientation rather than orientation towards the supernatural; (4) the replacement of the "sacred" or "mysterious" conception of the world with the view that the world or society is something that can be rationally manipulated or socially engineered; and (5) a view of religious beliefs and institutions as human constructions and responsibilities rather than as divinely ordained mysteries.4 While these are the meanings of "secularism" in the West, its use in India is accompanied by a significant variation. In fact, because of the variant or sui generis nature of Indian secularism, the Preamble of the Indian Constitution did not contain the word secular as a signification of the state until it was done so by a 1976 amendment. It must, however, be noted that the original constitution did contain several provisions, which left no one in doubt about the secular (i.e., nontheocratic and noncommunal) character of the Indian state and which, in 1973, made the full bench of the Supreme Court to rule that "secularism" is a constitutive feature of the basic structure of the constitution. In the West, as I noted above, secularism usually refers to the state's separation from, or indifference toward, religion. Hence, the Western antonym of "secular" is "religious." In India, by contrast, it is "communal" that is the antonym of "secular." This is so because given the pervasive religiosity of the people and the

3. See P. L. Berger,The Social Reality of Religion (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 113. 4. See Baxi, "The 'Struggle' for the Redefinition of Secularism in India," p. 17.

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! pluralism of religions, an ethico-politically appropriate pattern of relationship between religion and state had to be one that stressed the equal respect of all religions, rather than the erection of any insurmountable "wall of separation" between the state and religion.

III

Instead of blindly copying Western secularism, the framers of the Indian Constitution, as insightfully pointed out by P. K. Tripathi, "contemplated a secularism which is the product of India's social experience and genius."5 The main articles of the Constitution providing for a "secular state" may be briefly sum- marized as follows: (1) All persons have equal freedom of conscience and religion; (2) No discrimination by the state against any citizen on grounds of religion; (3) No communal electorates; (4) The state has the power to regulate through law any "economic, financial or other secular activity" which may be associated with religious practice; (5) The state has the power to provide for "social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus"; (6) Untouchability stands outlawed by Article 17; (7) Subject to public order, morality and health, every religious denomination has the right to establish and operate institutions for religious and charitable purposes; (8) All religious minorities have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice and they cannot be discriminated against by the state in its granting of aid to educational institutions;

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

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(9) No citizen can be discriminated against on grounds of religion for employment or office under the state as well as for admission into educational institutions maintained or aided by state funds; (10) Public revenues are not to be used to promote any religion. However, specified amounts of money from the Consolidated Fund of the States of Kerala and Tamil Nadu are to be paid annually to their Devasom Funds for the maintenance of Hindu temples and shrines which have been transferred to them from the state of Travancore-Cochin; (11) No religious instruction is to be provided in educational institutions which are wholly maintained out of state funds, with the exception of those state-run educational institutions, whose founding endowments or trusts require such instruction to be provided in them. Moreover, no person attending any educational institution "recognized" or "aided" by the state can be required to take part in any religious instruction or worship that may be conducted in it unless she/he or her/his guardian has given consent to it. (12) By a Constitutional amendment in 1976, all citizens are enjoined to consider it their fundamental duty to "preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture."

This constitutional framework is premised on the liberal- secular ideal of the freedom, equality and fraternity of all its citizens. It is from the perspective of such a moral-political philosophy that the constitution provides for certain state interventions against such religiously sanctioned social evils as sati, devadasi system, polygamy, child marriage, untouchability, etc. The justification for such a reformist intervention by the state rests on a differentiation or relative separation of the political and religious spheres. Such a relative separation of the religious and the secular-political is clearly seen in articles 25 and 26 of the constitution, which give to all persons equal "freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion" and which, at the same time, empower the state to make any law for the sake of "public order, morality and health" and for "regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular

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activity which may be associated with religious practice." This secularism is indeed not blind to, or acquiescent in, the social evils and discriminations that are perpetrated in the name of religion. At the same time, it is also not antireligious; it gives to all its citizens justiciable equal freedom of conscience and religion. The state, in other words, is required to give, subject to the requirements of public order, morality and health, equal respect to the religious forms of individual or social life, which some or all of its citizens may pursue from time to time.

The most important contemporary challenge to Indian secularism has been mounted by the forces of Hindu nationalism, which, in its turn, has received strong criticism in the writings of some very influential academic writers, notably Ashis Nandy, T. N. Madan and Partha Chatterjee. Interestingly, they are also severe critics of the theory and practice of the secular state in India. How, then, is the relationship between politics and religion addressed in their writings, which are critical of both secularism and communalism? Since the mid-1980s, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the "Sangh Parivar" have been insisting on a distinction between their own "positive secularism" and the "pseudo-secularism" of the Congress. According to them, "positive secularism," which would mean "justice for all and discriminations against none," should replace the prevailing "pseudo-secularism," whereby the word secularism is misused to denigrate the Hindu categories and symbols of the majority community and to justify the pampering of the minority communities.6 According to T. B. Hansen, the ideology of Hindutva and "positive" or "true" secularism amounts to the principle of rule by Hindu majoritarianism. He notes that it is a "peculiar co-articulation of brahminical ideologies of purity, romanticist notions of fullness and authenticity, and quasi-fascist organicism and celebration of strength and masculinity which characterizes the Rashtriya Swayamesvak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliated organizations."7

6. See Nana Deshmukh, Our Secularism Needs Rethinking (Delhi: Deendayal Research Institute, 1990). 7. T. B. Hansen, "Globalisation and Nationalist Imaginations: Hindutva's Promise of Equality Through Difference," Economic and Political weekly, 9 March

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The ideology of "positive secularism" is also subjected to serious criticism in the writings of Partha Chatterjee, T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy, who, as I mentioned above, are also critics of secularism. I now turn to their writings. According to Nandy, Nehruvian secularism, which sepa- rates state and religion, and which has been imposed on the Indian people, is part of a larger, modern, Western package of scientific growth, nation-building, national security and development. These constitute a "modern demonology, a tantra with a built-in code of violence." Whereas secularism demands of the members of religious communities to dilute their faith so that they can be truly integrated into the nation-state, it "guarantees no protection to them against the sufferings inflicted by the state itself" in the name of its "secular, scientific, amoral" ideology of nation-building, security, development, etc.. As a handy adjunct to these "legitimating core concepts," secularism helps the state-elites

to legitimize themselves as the sole arbiters among traditional communities, to claim for themselves a monopoly on religious and ethnic tolerance and on political rationality. To accept the ideology of secularism is to accept the ideologies of progress and modernity as the new justifications of domination, and the use of violence to achieve and sustain the ideologies as the new opiates of the masses.8

According to Nandy, this modern Western rational-scientific secularism, which Nehru sought to impose on the Indian society, has failed either to eliminate religion from politics or to promote greater religious tolerance. Hence, it can "no longer pretend to guide moral or political action." Nandy therefore has no hesitation in calling himself an antisecularist. By so criticizing secularism, Nandy does not mean to privilege the communalist ideology of either the majority or minority religious communities. To the contrary, these communalist ideologies are, in his view, the pathological by-products of modernity; they are the dialectical "other" or counter-players of modernity's secu-

1996, p. 608. For a critical review of the literature on the ideology of Hindu nationalism, see Thomas Pantham, Political Theories and Social Reconstruction: A Critical Survey of the Literature on India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995). 8. Ashis Nandy, "The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance," Alternatives (1988), p. 192.

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lar state. He notes that the khaki shorts of the RSS cadres are modeled on the uniform of the colonial police. According to him, the ideology of Hindu nationalist revivalism or fundamentalism, with its borrowing of the models of semitic religions and of the modem Western nation-state, is "another form of Westernization" in the sense that it seeks

to decontaminate Hinduism of its folk elements, turn it into a classical Vedantic faith, and then give it additional teeth with the help of Western technology and secular statecraft, so that the Hindus can take on, and ultimately defeat, all their external and internal en- emies, if necessary, by liquidating all forms of ethnic plurality- first within Hinduism and then within India, to equal Western Man as a new iibemerschen.9

Crucial to Nandy's analysis is a distinction he makes between two conceptions of religion, namely, (1) religions as tolerant and accommodative faiths or folk ways of life and (2) religions as politically constructed monolithic, communalist ideologies of sectarianism and intolerance. The former, he says, characterized the premodern and preliberal way of life in India, whereas the latter is a product of modernity's nationalism, statecraft, and developmentalism. The next move in Nandy's argument is to suggest that it is the very package of modern nationalism and its statecraft and scientific developmentalism which generate and nourish religious communalisms, which the state elites combat by resorting to the use of the ideology of the secular or nonreligious nation- state. This counterposing of the tyranny of the modern secular state and the violence of modern communal organizations is, in Nandy's view, nothing but the internal dialectics of modernity's nation-state paradigm. By this reasoning, both communalism, be it the majoritarian or the minoritarian variety, and the secular state stand con- demned as the perverse gifts or, rather, the inevitable products of Western modernity. In Nandy's view, the ethico-politically appropriate alternative to them lies in the nonmodern, presecular conception of religions as accommodative, tolerant faiths or ways

9. Ibid., p. 187.

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of life as was practiced, in exemplary manner, by Asoka, Akbar and Gandhi. They, he reminds us, derived their religious tolerance not from secular politics but from Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism, respectively. "Gandhi's religious tolerance," he writes, "came from his antisecularism, which in turn came from his unconditional rejection of modernity."10 Accordingly, Nandy writes: "As far as public morality goes, statecraft in India may have something to learn from Hinduism, Islam or Sikhism; but Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism have very little to learn from the Constitution or from state secular practices."1 Like Nandy, T. N. Madan maintains that religious zealots, who contribute to fundamentalism or fanaticism by reducing religion to mere political bickering, are provoked to do so by the secularists who deny the very legitimacy of religion in social life.12 According to him, because it denies the immense importance of religion in the lives of the peoples of South Asia, secularism is in this region an impossible credo, an impracticable basis for state action and an impotent remedy against fundamentalism or fanaticism. Ruling out the establishment of a Hindu state as an utterly unworkable proposition, Madan concludes that "the only way secularism in South Asia, understood as interreligious understanding, may succeed would be for us to take both religion and secularism seriously and not reject the former as superstition and reduce the latter to a mask for communalism or mere expedi- ency."13 He commends Gandhi not only for emphasizing the inseparability of religion and politics but also for opening up avenues of interreligious understanding and "of a spiritually justified limitation of the role of religious institutions and symbols in certain areas of contemporary life."14 Somewhat like Nandy and Madan, Partha Chatterjee too finds that the ideology of secularism is not an adequate or appropriate political perspective for meeting the challenge of Hindu majoritarianism. In his view, the official model of Indian secular-

10. Ibid., p. 192. 11. Ibid., pp. 185-86. 12. T. N. Madan, "Secularism in its Place," Journal of Asian Studies (November 1987). 13. Ibid., p. 758. 14. Ibid., p. 757.

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I I

ism and the present campaign of the Hindu right for setting up a "positively" secular state have brought India to a "potentially disastrous political impasse."15 According to Chatterjee, since its birth, the project of the nation-state in India has been implicated "in a contradictory movement with regard to the modernist mission of secularization." One part of this nationalist-modernist project was the secularization of the public-political sphere by separating it from religion, while another part was reformist intervention of the state in the socio-religious sphere mostly of the Hindus. Describing the contradiction between these two parts of the project of modernist secularization, Chatterjee writes that the interventionist violation, by the state, of secularism's principle of the separation of state and religion "was justified by the desire to secularize." Thus he notes that the temple-entry reforms or the reform of the personal laws of the Hindus, which served the "public interest" only of the majority religious community rather than of all citizens, cannot claim to be based on nonreligious grounds of justification. Chatterjee also points out that the enormous powers vested in the Tamil Nadu Government's Commissioner for Hindu Religious Endowments is in contradiction with the secular principle of the separation of state and religion. As another such anomaly or contradiction he mentions the fact that the principle of the equality of religions is compromised by the exclusion of persons professing certain religions from the benefits of positive discrimination given to the scheduled castes. Turning to the recent shift in the ideological articulation of Hindu nationalism, Chatterjee points out that its present championing of "positive secularism" is meant not only to deflect accusations of its being antisecular but also to rationalize, in a sophisticated way, its campaign for intolerant interventions by a modern, positively secular state against the religious, cultural or ethnic minorities in the name of "national culture" and a homogenized notion of citizenship. "In this role," writes Chatterjee, "the Hindu right in fact seeks to project itself as a principled modernist critic of Islamic or Sikh fundamentalism

15. Partha Chattejee, "Secularism and Toleration," Economic and Political Weekly,, 9 July 1994.

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I and to accuse the 'pseudo-secularists' of preaching tolerance for religious obscurantism and bigotry."'6 The quandaries generated by the career of the secular state in India and the potentially disastrous nature of the new politics of "positive secularism" lead Chatterjee to the conclusion that the theory and practice of the secular state cannot bring about what, according to him, is really needed in India, namely, the toleration of religious, ethnic and cultural differences. In so denouncing secularism, Chatterjee is in agreement with Nandy. They share the view that the politics of interventionist secularization is part of the same practices of the modern state which promotes religious communalism or religious intolerance. They, however, differ from each other in what they take to be the desirable and feasible alternative to the standard and positive versions of secularism. While Nandy's "antisecularist manifesto" of religious tolerance is couched in terms of the nonmodern, preliberal philosophy, symbolism and theology of tolerance in the everyday faiths of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism, Chatterjee's search is for a "political" conception of tolerance as part of a non-Western form of modernity in India. Finding that the liberal-democratic state can only recognize individual rights, and not the collective rights of cultural or religious groups, Chatterjee directs his intellectual efforts not to secularize the state in the name of any universalist framework of reason, but to defend minority cultural rights and to underscore "the duty of the democratic state to ensure policies of religious toleration." Chatterjee seems to me to be saying that for a proper relationship between the state and the religious, ethnic and cultural groups, we need to go beyond the "state sovereignty vs. individual rights" discourse of liberalism. Following Foucault, he maintains that the specifically modern form of power, which cuts across "the liberal divide between state and civil society," exercises itself through forms of representation and through technologies of governmentality, that is, the self-disciplining of its subjects. He notes that this modern form of power is characterized by "an immensely flexible braiding of coercion and consent." Hence, according to him, the secularization of the state cannot be taken as a noncoercive or power-free politics of pure

16. Ibid., p. 1768.

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(secular) rationality. Rather, under modernity, the religious, cultural and ethnic communities as well as the secular state are to be seen as institutional sites or strategic locations of the politics of identity and difference. This being so, according to him, arguments for a universal framework of governance based on so-called pure secular-rational grounds (e.g., the principle of the equal rights of all regardless of their religion or caste) are just "pious homilies," which ignore their context of cognitive-political struggles over issues of identity and difference. In other words, the conflict between the claims of secular-rational universalism and the claims for the autonomy of, and respect for, religious or ethnic minorities is not a simple conflict between reason and faith; it is a cognitive-political conflict over issues of identity and difference. Hence, he calls for a conception of tolerance which recognizes that

there will be political contexts where a group could insist on its right not to give reasons for doing things differently provided it explains itself adequately in its own chosen forum. In other words, toleration here would be premised on autonomy and respect for persons, but it would be sensitive to the varying political salience of the institutional contexts in which reasons are debated.17

Deliberately pursuing the obverse of the implications of Nandy's nonmodern, religious conception of tolerance, Chatterjee directs his search to finding "a 'political' conception of tolerance which will set out the practical conditions I must meet in order to demand and expect tolerance from others."18 According to him, if a religious community seeks to gain or preserve its autonomy and respect from other groups or from the state, it must conduct its own affairs through representative public institutions insofar as those affairs are not confined to simple matters of innocent beliefs or holy rituals. Those affairs or practices of any religious group which have a regulative power over its members must rest on the publicly secured consent of those members. "In other words," writes Chatterjee, "even if a religious group declares that the validity of its practices can only be discussed and judged

17. Ibid., p. 1775 (emphasis added). 18. Ibid., p. 1777, n34.

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in its own forums, those institutions must have the same degree of publicity and representativeness that is demanded of all public institutions having regulatory functions."19

Several critics of Indian secularism, especially Nandy and Madan, 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 imposition, by the modernist elite, of an alien ideology on the Indian society. This seems to me to be a misreading of the Indian Constitutional vision or framework of the relationship between religion and politics. That framework or vision does not seem to me to be envisaging any absolute or rigid separation of politics and state from religion. True, the atheists and agnostics, including Nehru at several stages in the evolution of his thought, believed in the desirability of a strict separation of religion from politics. But that was not the view which the Constitution adopted. The Constitution did not envisage the state institutions to be religious or antireligious; rather they were to observe the principle ofsarva dharma samabhava. Acknowledging this, Nehru wrote in 1961:

We talk about a secular state in India. It is perhaps not very easy even to find a good word in Hindi for "secular." Some people think it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct.... It is a state which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities.2

What this principle of the equal tolerance of all religions presupposes is a nonabsolute or relative separation of politics and religion. It is a model that is clearly different from both the theocratic or fundamentalist models of the state and the principle of a "wall of separation" between the state and religion, which is followed in some Western countries. Enjoined by the constitution to be equally tolerant of all religions, the Indian state is required to steer clear off antireligiosity and communalism.

19. Ibid., p. 1775. 20. S. Gopal, ed., Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 330.

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Partha Chatterjee is indeed right in pointing out the numer- ous operative departures of the Indian state and its governing elites from this constitutional vision. However, the case he makes out-very persuasively indeed-for the duty of the democratic state to ensure policies of religious tolerance seems to me to be in keeping with the constitutional vision. So is the case with the principles of respect for persons and of the consent of the gov- erned, which he rightly takes to be the basis for the toleration of religious differences. The activity or policy of giving equal tolerance to all religions is not a strictly religious activity or policy. It is also not an amoral political activity in which the end is taken to justify any means adopted for its realization. It is rather a moral-political activity or policy, which is predicated on the relative autonomy of the political and the religious from each other. It assumes not only that a pluralism of religious and/or nonreligious beliefs is ineradicable under the conditions of modernity but also that political institutions and political policies can be constructed and operated in different ways and for different purposes from those of religious institutions or religious doctrines. Despite its variant or sui generis character, Indian secularism cannot be said to be situated entirely outside the problematic and thematic of the Western discourse on secularism. The problematic relationship between religion and politics in the West had its analogies in India too. What I mean is that despite important philo- sophical or metaphysical differences between them, both European Christianity and Indian Hinduism legitimized, in their own ways, analogous systems of social inequalities during the premodem pe- riod. The latter was complicit in the "social construction" of the social evils mentioned above, namely, sati, untouchability, etc. Hence, an ethico-political reform of the socio-religious sphere was taken to be an integral part of the Indian movement for swaraj and sarvodaya. That Indian citizens like Shah Bano do regularly seek secular interventions by the state against injustices that are sanctioned by religious practices undermines the validity of the presently fashionable sweeping condemnations of Indian secularism.21 As

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

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rightly pointed out by Upendra Baxi, "we do not need to exuber- antly enfeeble the state and law, in their meandering attainments of 'secularism,' in order to deactivate enmity, and activate mu- tual toleration, in civil society."22 Turning to Nandy's alternative to Nehruvian secularism, I find it somewhat flawed. In arguing for a return from modern Indian secularism to the religious tolerance of premodern times, he seems to me to be underemphasizing the implications of the fact that religious life in India before the onslaught of Western post-Enlightenment modernity was not free from tyrannical Brahminism and other forms of religious intolerance, on some of which, he has indeed written insightfully. There can of course be no denying of the historicity of the premodern forms of religious tolerance, which, as correctly pointed out by Nandy, was practiced in exemplary manner by Asoka and Akbar. That there have been such periods or instances of exemplary religious tolerance in India's past is indeed a positive factor or strand in the "effective history" of Indian society today. But that "effective history" is constituted in a much more important way by the distinctly modern form in which power is exercised in the society. To simplify the matter, it can be said that modernity has trans- formed the premodern, arbitrary way of exercising power (for instance, by the kings) into codified, disciplined ways of life and thought for the various sections of the society. This Foucauldian reading of the pervasive nature of modern power/knowledge is indeed in evidence in the writings of Nandy and of such other critics of Indian secularism as Chatterjee and Bilgrami.23 However, the point I wish to stress is that Nandy's espousal of some traditional forms of religious tolerance as an alternative to the politics of the modern secular state can have emancipatory or transformative relevance only if it is the case that the people living under or with the modern form of power/ knowledge can simply exit from it and return to the past. Unfor-

22. Baxi, "The 'Struggle' to Redefine Secularism," p. 28. See also Joseph Tharamangalam, "Indian Social Scientists and Critique of Secularism," Economic and Political Weekly, 4 March 1995; and Rajeev Bhargava, "Giving Secularism Its Due," Economic and Political Weekly, 9 July 1994. 23. Akeel Bilgrami, "Two Concepts of Secularism: Reason, Modernity and Archimedean Ideal," Economic and Political Weekly, 9 July 1994.

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tunately, modernity cannot be cast off so easily. It has to be wrestled with or resisted from within by those who are hurt or victimized by it and this has to be done through cognitive- political resignifications and struggles.24 A wholesale rejection of modernity and a nostalgic yearning for the so-called nonpolitical religious tolerance of the past may inhibit us from finding or constructing emancipatory or transformative practices from within our effective, modern history. Nandy claims that Gandhi showed us a way of rejecting modernity in favor of a nonmodern way of tolerant religious living. The latter's conception of religious tolerance, we are told, came from his antisecularism, which in its turn is said to have come from his "unconditional rejection of modernity." This does not seem to me to be a valid interpretation of Gandhi's approach to religious tolerance. In his satyagraha way of bringing about religious tolerance, Gandhi, far from making any wholesale rejection of modernity, did rely on the civil liberties and democratic rights components of moder liberal democracy as well as on the institutions of the moder democratic state. This can be seen, for instance, in his Vykomsatyagraha campaign against untouchability25 anid, very poignantly, in his Calcutta satyagraha of 1947 for bringing about harmony between the Hindus and the Muslims.26 I would say that Gandhi undertook this Calcutta satyagraha not in opposition to or as an escape from, but as a necessary complement to, the then emerging modern democratic state or parliamentary swaraj, for which he had led the nationalist movement. I would claim, in other words, that Nehru's so-called New Delhi

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. John Dunn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), p. 118. 25. See Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's Political Discourse (New Delhi: Sage, 1989). 26. See Dennis Dalton,Mahatma Gandhi: Non-violent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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experiment in setting up modern democratic state structures and Gandhi's simultaneous Calcutta experiment of bringing about religious harmony through the politics of satya and ahimsa were necessarily complementary to each other. For a specific substantiation of this claim, I can only mention the fact that during Gandhi's Calcutta fast for communal harmony (2-4 September 1947), the policemen on duty in the city undertook a one-day sympathy fast with Gandhi. Some of them, it may be noted, had saved Gandhi a couple of days earlier when he was seriously wounded by a violent mob. Hence, if one has to speak of the distinctively Indian approach to religious tolerance in our times one has to refer to it as the Gandhi-Nehru complementation or articulation of the democratic state withsatyagraha.27 It is incorrect, I feel, to speak of Nehruvian secularism and Gandhian religiosity in dichotomous terms. Such a reading denies us the advantages of the richer, more enabling moral-political legacy which I feel is of continuing relevance to us today. As insightfully acknowledged by Nandy, Gandhi maintained that interreligious harmony can be secured without requiring the people to become irreligious or antireligious. In fact, during the 1947 Calcutta satyagraha for communal harmony, Gandhi held regular prayer meetings in which passages from the texts of the different religions were read and commented upon in the discourses which followed the prayers. In these discourses and practical, moral-political experiments, Gandhi tried to show that all the religions have within them an inherent universal or shared quest or yearning for an ethics of toleration, or in other words, an ethics of satya (truth) and ahimsa (nonviolence). He showed, moreover, that such an ethics can be arrived at through the satyagraha way of moral-political action, of which an important

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, substantive 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."

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component is the democratic-political engagements with the teachings and practices of the different religions. This democratic- political engagement on the part of Gandhi is not given its due importance in Nandy's recent reading of the Gandhian approach as a preliberal, nonmodern, religious approach.2 The critics of Indian secularism seem to me to be misdescrib- ing the Gandhian perspective either as a premodern, preliberal, antisecular approach to religious tolerance (Nandy) or as a traditional peasant-communal moralism that has been re-done either for subserving the bourgeois-liberal project of modernity in India (Chatterjee29) or for promoting communalism among both Hin- dus and Muslims (Bilgrami). Against these interpretations, I am suggesting that Gandhi pioneered a way of moral-political ex- perimentation in which the relative autonomy (or, in other words, the nonabsolute separation) of religion and politics from each other is used for the reconstruction of both the religious traditions and the modern state.30 For Gandhi, as it seems to me, the reformist intervention of the modern democratic state in the socio-religious sphere had to have as its complementary side some form of moral-political intervention for transforming the modern state by integrating its institutions and practices with the principles of satya and ahimsa. The significance of the former part of the Gandhian approach is missed out by the traditionalist critics of Indian secularism, while the latter part of the Gandhian approach is misperceived by the modernist-political redefiners of Indian 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. B.Parekh and T. Pantham (New Delhi: Sage, 1987), pp. 240-41. 29. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). 30. See Thomas Pantham, "Postrelativism in Emancipatory Thought: Gandhi's Swaraj and Satyagraha," in The Multiverse of Democracy, ed. D. L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy (New Delhi: Sage, 1996).

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