Between Competitive Communalism And Suitable Secularism: Where India Stands Today

The understanding of secularism in India has changed over time with its politics and politicians. While communalism has always been the antithesis of secularism, new strands of communal identity politics have conceptually impacted the logical and lexical semantics of secularism. The current socio-political trends seem to indicate that secularism in India has perhaps failed the test of competitive communalism.

Competitive communalism predominantly refers to rivalry between groups that defined their identity primarily along religious lines and was a feature of Indian politics in the late colonial period. Neeti Nair, Associate Professor at Virginia University and author of Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia, explains that such competition coexisted with the ethic of shared living among members of different sects and religious communities. Such coexistence amid competition forms the bedrock of the Indian brand of secularism, which is not exclusive but inclusive.

“The word secularism has itself changed  meanings over the last seventy-five years,” Nair says. Yet secularism was not always part of India’s Preamble. It was only in 1976, nearly three decades after India’s independence, that it officially adopted secular into its definition. On the eve of its insertion into the Preamble of the Constitution via the 42nd Constitution Amendment Act, Nair recalls how the Chair of the Congress Committee on Constitutional Changes, Sardar Swaran Singh, had noted that although the dictionary meanings of the word were “not very complimentary,” ‘secular’ had become “part of our Indian languages.”

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Though elaborating on the extent to which secularism permeated through the Indian consciousness, Singh's words also act as a reminder of the dilemma of the framers of the Constitution, particularly Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar, who were vehemently against adding the word to the preamble when it was first framed despite being vocal adherents of secularism.

The insertion of secularism into the Preamble notwithstanding, competitive communalism became a driving force in Indian politics in the 1980s following incidents like the 1981 Meenakshipuram mass conversion, or the Babri-Ayodhya movement that eventually set the political tone of the 90s and consolidated the BJP’s position in national politics.

There is a widely held assumption in the West, especially in European political discourse, that modern states are fundamentally secular in nature and that religion does not play as central a role in politics as it perhaps did in the medieval era. In his book Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India, and the United States, Scott Hibbard argues that religion remains central to modern politics and that it does so by creating a new definition of modernity, thereby impacting modern political concepts like ‘secularism.’

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A prime example of such a shift can be seen in India where critics of the current government are increasingly accusing the BJP of systematically debasing and subverting secular philosophy in favour of majoritarian sentiments. “I call it a shift from competitive communalism to ‘everyday communalism,’” says Sudha Pai, former National Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research and professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

She cites the example of Uttar Pradesh where the BJP has managed to effectively marginalise the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), two of its main rivals, in the 2017 and 2022 assembly elections. According to her, it was the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 that marked the shift in UP and other parts of North India.

“What happened in Muzaffarnagar was a failure of all parties involved. While the BJP tried to cash in on the Hindu vote, the SP has been accused of pandering to Hindus as well as it quite deliberately failed to act in time to stop the violence. Perhaps it was the inexperience of Akhilesh Yadav as chief minister at the time or the lack of political foresight on the SP’s part. All riots are basically a question of law and order. And there was very little attempt by the SP to actually stamp out the violence.” Pai maintains that ‘everyday communalism’ helped the BJP consolidate the Hindus into a solid vote bank that the SP and BSP have not managed to infiltrate in UP.

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The BJP, however, is not the only one to blame for the decline of secularism. “In 2014, Congress, as the largest party, which for long has championed secularism, could have come out and directly attacked the BJP’s communal agenda. But it has not done it,” Pai added. Instead, parties including the Congress have now turned from competitive communalism to the more suitable secularism of pandering to the majority.

Aam Aadmi Party chief, Arvind Kejriwal, ruffled many feathers in the run up to the 2022 Legislative Assembly elections in Gujarat by suggesting that the image of Mahatma Gandhi on the nation’s currency notes be replaced with the image of the Hindu deity, Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and prosperity. It would please the money gods and help India recover from its dodgy economy, he and other party leaders claimed during packed press conferences that were broadcast across the nation’s news channels. The overtures to Gods by a party that had traditionally positioned itself as a secular crusader for social justice and a vocal critic of Hindutva politics did not sit well with either side. While those dubbed ‘sickular’ and ‘Aaptards’ by belligerent supporters of the ruling dispensation called out the party’s obvious attempts at ‘soft Hindutva,’ the Hindu Rashtra brigade sneered at AAP’s last ditch efforts to woo the formidable Hindu vote. “All parties are playing to the gallery now. No party is playing in the secular half of the Indian political spectrum,” explains journalist and author of The RSS: Icons of the Hindu Right, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay. “Under the garb of secularism, everyone is trying to ensure they don’t end up on the wrong side of the Hindu vote bank,” Mukhopadhyay tells Outlook.

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In India, where identity politics often trumps social justice in elections, alienation of minorities and majoritarian muscle flexing is not new and has led to much bloodshed.

Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the subsequent anti-Sikh violence were unintended consequences of her manipulation of religious politics. Her wooing of Hindu votes in Jammu in the 1983 Jammu & Kashmir Assembly elections had a decisive, insalubrious impact on the state’s politics. Incidentally, it was the BJP which accused the Congress of vilifying the Muslim community in the aftermath of the Muzaffarnagar riots after Rahul Gandhi rather myopically claimed that Pakistan’s ISI was trying to recruit victims of the riots.

In West Bengal, Trinamool Congress leader, Mamata Banerjee, has been accused of ‘blatant Muslim appeasement’ by the state’s former Governor, Jagdeep Dhankar, even though Muslims continue to occupy unequal space in government offices and the literacy rate among the community remains low. But is taking care of minorities a bad thing? Mukhopadhyay refuses to use the word ‘appeasement’ as a legitimate term. “In a secular nation, the majority is supposed to take care of the minorities and work for their development,” he said.

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Historian Dharma Kumar, who in her 1994 article for Economic and Political Weekly titled ‘Left Secularists and Communalism’, noted that since Hindus are in majority, “It is for the Hindus to be secular and thereby help the minorities to become secular. For it is the majority community alone that can provide the sense of security.”

But what does it even mean to be ‘secular’ in India? While the broad understanding of secularism appears to be inspired in theory by the form in which it is followed in liberal Western democracies, one that dictates the complete separation of state and religion, secularism has played out differently in the Indian context.

If India had followed the state and religious separation as prescribed by liberal secularism, would it be able to grant reservations to weaker sections or minorities on the basis of religion or caste, which is essentially a byproduct of religion? Would it be able to issue legislations to protect cows or religious personal laws? Would it have been able to make right to freedom of religion a fundamental right?

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It is perhaps in this dichotomy between the definition of ‘secularism’ in the broader Western tradition and its functional implementation in multiculturalist India that the seeds of present-day competitive communalism and religious pandering lie.

Competitive communalism, however, need not necessarily be averse to secularism and may even strengthen it. In a 2016 paper titled ‘Com­munalism Sans Violence: A Keralan Excep­tionalism?”, Nissim Mannathukkaren, Associate Professor in the Department of International Development Studies at Dalhousie University in Canada, uses the example of Kerala to explore a different form of competitive communalism characterised by a consciousness of collective material and symbolic interests seen as different and distinct from other communities but without animosity or anger between communities. Unlike a full-blown form of communalism where the interests of each community are perceived as antagonistic to, and threatened by, other communities, this liberal, non-antagonistic form of communalism is focused on peaceful competition, Mannathukkaren claims. “One of the key factors here is the political representation of religious minorities in an equal manner, say in the Assembly or the Cabinet. Religious minorities are not excluded from political power,” Man­nathukkaren points out, stating that Kerala is the only state in India where the Muslim minority, for instance, has an equal share of pol­itical power. “This is a critical aspect of political empowerment and secularism which is lacking in the North,” he tells Outlook, adding that such non-antagonistic communalism has only hel­ped in making Kerala’s secularism more robust. Historian Bipan Chandra had once argued, “Majority communalism inevitably leads to fascism, while minority communalism leads to sep­aratism or separatist sentiments.”  Could a new brand of secularism rise above communalism and adopt competitive communalism to lead us in the direction of peaceful coexistence?

(This appeared in the print edition as "Spoke In The Wheel")