INDIAN SECULARISM

 INDIAN SECULARISM

RESPECT AND CRITIQUE

Constitutional secularism is marked by at least two features

1) Critical respect for all religions, unlike the secularism of predominantly single religious societies, respects no one but all religions

However, given the virtual impossibility of distinguishing the religious from the social, B.R.Ambedkar famously observed, that every aspect of religious doctrine or practice cannot be respected. Respect for religion must be accompanied by critique.

It follows that our state must respectfully leave religion alone but also intervenes whenever religious groups promote communal disharmony and discrimination on grounds of religion or are unable to protect their members from the oppression they perpetuate. For instance, it cannot tolerate untouchability or leave all personal laws as they are. Equally, it may non –preferentially subsidies schools run by religious communities. Thus, it has to constantly decide when to engage or disengage, help or hinder religion depending entirely on which of these enhances our constitutional commitment to freedom, equality and fraternity

This constitutional secularism cannot be sustained by governments alone but requires collective commitment from an impartial judiciary, scrupulous media, civil society activists, and an alert citizenry.

ADVENT OF OPPORTUNISM

• Opportunistic alliance with religious communities, particularly for the sake of immediate electoral benefits. Indifferent to freedom and equality-based religious reform, it has removed critical from the term critical respect and bizarrely interpreted “respect” to mean cutting deals with aggressive or orthodox sections of religious groups-unlocking the Babri Masjid/Ram temple for Puja, and forsaking women’s rights in the Shah Bano case
• This party's political secular state, cosying up alternatively to the fanatical fringe of the minority and the majority, was ready-made for takeover by a majoritarian party. This was accomplished by removing the word” all “ and replacing it with “majority”: respect only the majority religion, never criticize it, but recklessly demonise others and ridding the state of the corrupt practice of opportunistic distance not by resorting principled distance but magically abolishing distance altogether
• This is untrammelled majoritarianism masquerading as secularism, one that opposes pseudo-secularism without examining its own equally unethical practices.
• Today, Indian constitutional secularism is swallowed up by this party's political secularism, with not a little help from the opposition, media and judiciary.

TWO CRUCIAL MOVES

• First, the shift of focus from a politically –led project to a socially –driven movement for justice
• Second, a shift of emphasis from inter-religious to intra -religious issues
• R.Ambedkar dispassionately observed that when two roughly equal communities view each other as enemies, they get trapped in a majority-minority syndrome, a vicious cycle of spiralling political conflict and social alienation
• Today, feeling extremely vulnerable, Indian Muslims appears to have opted out of this syndrome. When this happens the syndrome implodes.
• R.Ambedkar also claimed that when communities view each other as a menace, they tend to close ranks. This has another debilitating impact: all dissent within the community is muzzled and much-needed internal reforms are stalled.

EUROPE‘S EXAMPLE

• The fight against the oppression of the church was as much a popular struggle as it was driven by the state. Europe’s secularism provided a principle to fight intra -religious oppressions.
• Nehru understood this, for him, secularism was not only a project of civic friendship among religious communities but also opposition to religion-based caste and gender oppressions -an endeavour at the heart of our socially-driven freedom and equality-oriented reform movements in the 19^TH century
• For the moment, the state-driven political project of secularism and its legal constitutional form appears to have taken a hit.
• But precisely this setback can be turned into an opportunity to revitalize the social project of secularism.
• Since the Indian state has failed to support victims of oppression sanctioned by religion, peaceful and democratic secularism from below provides a vantage point from which to carry out a much-needed internal critique and reform of our respective religions, to enable their compatibility with constitutional values of equality, liberty and justice.
• Those who most benefit from upholding these constitutional values, the oppressed minorities, Dalits, women, and citizens sick to death with zealotry or crass commercialization of their faiths must together renew this project.

INTER-COMMUNITY RELATIONS

• The Political project of secularism arose precisely because religious toleration no longer worked.
• Needed today are new forms of socio-religious reciprocity, crucial for the business of everyday life and novel ways of reducing the political alienation of citizens, a democratic deficit whose ramifications go beyond the ambit of secularism.
• If a critique of religion is to come at least partly from within, then its idiom must also draw from local religions and the multiple languages in which they find expression. A critique purely from outside, one which is not partly immanent will not work.