The Threats to Secular India

Author(s): Amartya Sen

Source: Social Scientist , Mar. - Apr., 1993, Vol. 21, No. 3/4 (Mar. - Apr., 1993), pp. 5-23
Published by: Social Scientist

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3517628

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AMARTYA SEN

The Threats to Secular India**

When, some months ago, 'The Idea of India' was agreed on as the title
of my Nehru Lecture at Cambridge,l I had not imagined that the sub-
ject would be as topical as it, alas, has become since the terrible events
of recent months. The idea of a secular India, tolerant of different reli-
gions (and of people who believe in none), which had been taken for
granted since independence, has been severely damaged by extremist
Hindu political groups.
The present round of events began on December 6 with the destruc-
tion of a sixteenth-century mosque-the Babri Masjid-in the northem
city of Ayodhya, by politically organised mobs of activist Hindus,
who want to build a temple to Rama on that very spot. That outrageous
event has been followed by communal violence and riots across the
country, in which around two thousand people or more have
perished-both Hindus and Muslims, but Muslim victims have far out-
numbered Hindus. Some of the worst incidents have taken place in
Bombay. In what is usually thought to be the premier city of India, a
relatively small but thoroughly organised group of extremist Hindus
went repeatedly on the rampage; the police frequently failed to pro-
tect Muslims under attack, and were often far more violent in dispers-
ing Muslim mobs -than Hindu ones.
It took quite some time for the nationwide condemnation that fol-
lowed those events to move the government of India to take a tougher
stand on law and order, and even now the determination of the govern-
ment is far from clear. But on February 25 it did manage to prevent a
huge and dangerous Hindu political demonstration in New Delhi,
which could have easily brought communal riots to the nation's capi-
tal. Stopping the demonstration unfortunately involved suspending the
civil right of free assembly. But in view of the highly provocative
nature of the planned demonstration (for which Hindu activists had
converged from across the country), and in view of the fact that the
confrontation was managed by the police with no loss of life, the

*Harvard University, USA.

"The artide first appeared in The New York Reriew, March 11, 1993

Social Scientist, Vol. 21, Nos. 3-4, March-April, 1993

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6 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

Indian government has not had to face much criticism for these viola-
tions of civil rights, except, of course, from the Hindu parties them-
selves.
The extremist Hindu political movement that spearheaded the
present turmoil has gone on to demand an official end to Indian secular-
ism, to be replaced by the recognition of India as a Hindu state. This
proposal, if accepted, would involve a dramatic alteration of one of
the basic principles of the Indian constitution, and a radical departure
from the idea of India-a pluralist, tolerant, and secular India
which was central to the Indian nationalist movement and which was
reflected in the legal and political structure of independent India. It is
that idea and the challenges it faces that I want to discuss. I shall
argue that these challenges include quite distinct components, making
it inappropriate to analyse the emergence of Hindu extremism as a sin-
gle phenomenon: for example, the communal murders and thuggery in
Bombay are driven by rather different forces from activist religious
politics in Ayodhya; and each in turn differs from the general increase
of Hindu sectarianism among the urban middle classes. It is as impor-
tant to understand the different forces underlying the distinct compo-
nents as it is to appreciate their deep interconnections.

SECULARISM AS A PART OF PLURALISM

It may seem extraordinary that a largely passive idea like secularism

can be central to the conception of modern India. Is secularism really an
important issue, or is it just sanctimonious rhetoric? When British
India was partitioned, Pakistan chose to be an Islamic Republic,
whereas India chose a secular constitution. Does that choice make a
real difference?
The distinction is certainly important from the legal point of view,
and its political implications are also extensive, applying to different
levels of political and social arrangements, going all the way up to the
head of the state. For example, unlike Pakistan, whose constitution
requires that the head of the state be a Muslim, India imposes no com-
parable requirement, and the country has had non-Hindus (including
Muslims and Sikhs) both as presidents and in other prominent and
influential positions in government.
But secularism is, in fact, a part of a more comprehensive idea-
that of India as an integrally pluralist country, made up of different
religious beliefs, distinct language groups, divergent social practices.
Secularism is one aspect-a very important one-of the recognition of
that larger idea of heterogeneous identity. I shall argue that the sec-
tarian forces that seek to demolish Indian secularism will have to
deal not merely with the presence and rights of the many Muslims in
India, but also with India's regional, social, and cultural diversity.
Toleration of differences is not easily divisible.

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR INDIA 7

MUSLUMS N INDIA

Are Muslims marginal in the Indian population? Even though four out
of five persons in India are formally Hindu, the country still has well
over a hundred million Muslims, not much less than Pakistan has, and
rather more than Bangladesh. Indeed, seen from this perspective,
India is the third largest Muslim country in the world. To see India just
as a Hindu country is fairly bizarre in view of that fact alone, not to
mention the fact of the intermingling of Hindus and Muslims in the
country's social and cultural life.2
The religious plurality of India also extends far beyond the Hindu-
Muslim question. There is, of course, a large and prominent Sikh popu-
lation, and a substantial number of Christians, whose history goes back
at least to the fourth century AD (considerably earlier than in
Britain). India also had Jewish settlements since shortly after the fall
of Jerusalem. Parsees have moved to India from less tolerant Persia.
There are also millions of Jains, and practitioners of Buddhism, which
had been, for a long period, the official religion of many of the Indian
emperors (including the great Ashoka in the third century BC). Fur-
thermore, the number of people who are atheist or agnostic (as
Jawaharlal Nehru himself was) is large too, though census categories
do not record actual religious beliefs-atheists born in Hindu families
are classified as Hindu, reflecting their so-called 'community back-
ground'.
The framers of the Indian constitution wanted to make sure that the
state would not take a biased position in favour of any particular com-
munity or religious conviction. In view of the heterogeneity of India
and of the Indians, any alternative to secularism would be unfair.

DIVERSITY WITHIN HINDUISM

The issue of religious plurality concerns not only the relationship bet-
ween Hindus and followers of other faiths (or none). It also concerns
the diversity within Hinduism itself. If it is seen as one religion,
Hinduism must also be seen as thoroughly plural in structure. Its divi-
sions are not those only of caste (though that is tremendously impor-
tant), but also of schools of thought. Even the ancient Hindu classifica-
tion of 'six systems of philosophy' acknowledged highly diverse
beliefs and reasoning. More recently, when the fourteenth-century
Hindu scholar Madhava Acharya, head of the religious order in
Sringeri in Mysore, wrote his famous Sanskrit treatise Sarvadarshana
Samgraha ('Collection of All Philosophies'), he devoted each of his
sixteen chapters to the different schools of Hindu religious postulates
(beginning with the atheism of the Carvaka school), and he discussed
how each religious school, within the capacious body of Hindu
thought, differed from the others.

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8 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

Seeing Hinduism as one religion, in fact, is a comparatively recent

development. The term Hindu was originally used mainly to signify
location and country rather than a homogeneous religious belief. The
term derives from the river Indus (the cradle of the Indus Valley civi-
lisation going back to 3000 BC), and that river is also the source of the
word India itself. The Persians and the Greeks saw India as the land
around and beyond the Indus, and Hindus were the native people of
that land. Muslims from India were at one stage called 'Hindavi'
Muslims, in Persian as well as Arabic, and there are plenty of refer-
ences in early British documents to 'Hindoo Muslims' and 'Hindoo
Christians', to distinguish them respectively from Muslims and
Christians from outside India.

RAMAYANA AND RAMA

Plurality is an internal characteristic of Hinduism as a religion; it is

not just a matter of the external relations between Hindus and non-
Hindus in the secular polity of India. The Hindu activists who last
December demolished the sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya,
wanting a temple to Rama instead, have yet to confront the fact that,
even among those who see themselves as religious Hindus, a great
many would dispute Rama's divinity (not to mention his pre-eminent
divinity).
Certainly, in parts of the country the name of Rama is identified
with divinity. Ironically, perhaps the most famous incident in recent
times in which the name of Rama (or 'Ram', as the word is pronounced
in contemporary Hindi) was invoked as synonymous with God took
place when Mahatma Gandhi was murdered on January 30, 1948, by a
Hindu extremist who belonged to a political group not entirely dissi-
milar to the ones that destroyed the mosque last December. The leader
of modern India, who was a deeply religious Hindu but whose secular
politics had earned him the wrath of the extremist zealots, fell to the
ground, hit by a Hindu bullet, and died saying 'He Ram!'
The identification of Rama with divinity is common in the north
and west of India, but elsewhere (for example, in my native Bengal),
Rama is mainly the hero of the epic Ramayana, rather than God
incarnate. Ramayana as an epic is, of course, widely popular every-
where in India, and outside India as well-in Thailand and Indonesia,
for example (even Ayutthaya, the historical capital of Thailand, is a
cognate of Ayodhya). But we have to distinguish the influence of the
epic Ramayana-a great work of literature-from the particular issue
of divinity. In fact, in that ancient epic, Rama is treated very much as
a good and self-sacrificing king rather than as God, and on one occasion
he is even lectured by a worldly pundit called Javali: 'O Rama, be
wise, there exists no world but this, that is certain! EnjoK that which
is present and cast behind thee that which is unpleasant.'

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR INDIA 9

One of the Hindu political leaders described the demolition of the

mosque, with evident reverence, as 'Hanuman's mace at work', refer-
ring to the monkey prince Hanuman who was an ally of Rama, as told
in epic Ramayana. No doubt this is how the destruction appeared to
him, but he could scarcely ignore the fact that Hanuman is not much
revered among hundreds of millions of Hindus in many other parts of
India, or the fact that in popular plays in, say, rural Bengal, Hanuman
is a riotously comic character-affable, amusing, and wholly endear-
ing, but hardly endowed with any holiness. Indeed in his Vision of
India's History, Rabindranath Tagore singles out the epic hero Rama
for special praise precisely because Rama, as Tagore put it, 'appeared
as divine to the primitive tribes, some of whom had the totem of mon-
key, some that of bear'.4
Thus, the religious differences between Hindus and Muslims cannot
be dissociated from the diversities within Hinduism and between
regions in India. That regional variation applies to modem politics as
well. Indeed, even in electoral politics, the strength of the Hindu poli-
tical party, Bharatiya Janata Party-BJP for short-is largely con-
fined to the north and west of India, with rather little support from
eastern and southern states. If the religious distinctions within the
country are striking, so are the sharp regional contrasts. Of the BJP
members of the Indian parliament chosen in the last election, more
than 90 per cent came from just eight states and union territories in the
north and west of India (more than 40 per cent from one state- the
large Uttar Pradesh-alone), out of a total of thirty-two states and
union territories spread across India (twenty of which elected no BJP
members at all).
To explain these regional contrasts, various factors have been cited:
for example, the fact that even the Mughal empire never quite
extended to the south and was relatively weak in the east, and also
that there is more of a history of battles against the Mughal empire by
Hindu rulers in the north (such as the Rajputs of Rajasthan), and in the
west (such as the Marathas of Maharashtra). However, an adequate
explanation of the contrasts has to bring in many other distinct social
and cultural factors.

UNRESOLVED ISSUES

Given the diversity and contrasts within India, there is not, in the
comprehensive politics of the country, much alternative to secularism
as an essential part of overall pluralism. This does not, however, mean
that the secular approach is without its problems. Secularism can
indeed take different forms, and there is much scope for discussing
which form it should take. One of the problems with secularism as it is
practised in India is that it reflects the sum of the collective feelings
of intolerance of the different communities and is not based on combin-

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10 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

ing their respective capacities for tolerance. Any statement or action

that causes the wrath of any of the major communities in India tends to
be seen as something that should be banned. This trigger-happiness in
the use of censorship sits uncomfortably with India's otherwise good
record of tolerating freedom of expression.
For example, India was the first country to outlaw the distribution
of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, reacting well before the Iranian
authorities took notice of the book and issued their murderous fatwa.
Other examples could be cited of eagerness on the part of the authori-
ties to take repressive action whenever any religious community claims
that it has been offended. This does not lead to a tolerant society. The
situation might be compared with the issue of blasphemy in modern
Britain. The United Kingdom remains formally Christian in having an
anti-blasphemy law only for Christian beliefs. There are demands in
Britain to extend these blasphemy provisions to cover the beliefs of
other religions as well. One way of having a symmetrical position
toward the different religions practised in modern Britain would be to
do just that. But another would be to scrap the blasphemy laws alto-
gether. A secular state could choose to move in either of the two direc-
tions, but those who believe that a modern society that respects free
speech should prefer doing away with anti-blasphemy laws in gen-
eral, instead of making them apply to all religions, must base their
claims on arguments more substantial than the demand for symmetry.
These issues remain to be more fully addressed in modern India-and
also, I might add, in modern Britain.
A second question concerns the fact that the Indian interpretation of
secularism includes some legal differences among the various communi-
ties that have to do with their respective personal laws. For example,
while a Hindu can be prosecuted for polygamy, a Muslim man can have
up to four wives, following what is taken to be the Islamic legal posi-
tion (although, in practice, that provision is very rarely invoked by
Indian Muslims). There are also other differences, for example, bet-
ween the provision made for wives in the event of a divorce, where
Muslim women-according to a certain reading of Islamic law-have
less generous guarantees than Hindu women do.
These differences have been cited again and again by Hindu politi-
cal activists to claim that Hindus, as the majority community, are dis-
criminated against in India. This is of course a ridiculous charge, since
the discrimination, in so far as it exists, is against Muslim women
rather than Hindu men; the sexist male point of view is writ large in
such Hindu political complaints. Nor is there any serious empirical
basis for the often repeated claim that polygamy contributes to a
higher growth rate of the Muslim population compared with that of
the Hindus. But the general issue of asymmetric treatment is an impor-
tant one, and there would be nothing non-secular or sectarian in trying

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR INDIA 11

to make the provisions of Indian civil laws apply evenhandedly to

individual members of all the communities.

CHALLENGES TO SECULARISM

What are the sources of the challenge that secularism and pluralist
tolerance are facing in India now? We can, I think, distinguish between
three different-though not unrelated-tendencies: (1) communal
fascism, (2) sectarian nationalism, and (3) militant obscurantism.
The term fascism is frequently employed indiscriminately as a word
of abuse. It is certainly no part of my claim that the entire movement of
Hindu politics is fascist in any sense. There are, however, specific
political characteristics that are generally associated with fascist
movements,5 and these elements are certainly present among some
those identified with Hindu extremist politics in India today: the use
of violence and threat to achieve sectarian objectives, the victimising
of members of a particular community, mass mobilisation based on fren-
zied and deeply divisive appeals, and the use of unconstitutional and
strong-arm methods against particular groups.
Hindu organisations in Bombay, in particular, have revealed some
clearly fascist tendencies. In addition to general riots, the killing of
many Muslims in the city was well-organised by extremist Hindu
groups. Much of the attack was coordinated by a militant organisation,
powerful in Bombay, called Shiv Sena, named after Shivaji, a
seventeenth-century Hindu king of the Marathas from Maharashtra
who waged several successful campaigns against the Mughal empire.
The violence in Bombay had features other than those of communal
conflicts. For example, some landlords have evidently taken the
opportunity to organise the destruction of unauthorised slums and shel-
ters set up by the homeless. In order to eliminate competition, some
trading interests paid these violent groups to destroy their rivals'
shops. And so on. Fascist operations are frequently accompanied by
such activities, in a general atmosphere of the survival of the fiercest.
Most of the victims of the recent Bombay riots were Muslims; they
were primarily poor and frequently helpless people living in
ramshackle slums.6 But some members of well-to-do urban groups th
are traditionally immune to violence were also murdered. In an inter-
view, Mr Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sena, has explained
that the mobs that carried out the violence were under his 'control',
that his party did not mind extorting protection money from civilians
for political use, and that if Muslims 'behaved like Jews in Nazi
Germany', there would be 'nothing wrong if they are treated as Jews
were in Germany'.7
Shiv Sena is a local phenomenon, confined to the state of
Maharashtra and largely to the city of Bombay. Even in Bombay, the
electoral support of Shiv Sena, though substantial, is limited, and in

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12 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

last year's election for the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the group
won considerably fewer than one-third of the seats. But its members
have managed to channel the frustrations of the urban Maharashtrian
poor in a destructive direction, and have tried to increase their politi-
cal impact through violence, intimidation, and strategically organised
mass hysteria.
Among the Bombay residents-Hindus as well as Muslims-there
were many who risked their lives to save others. Some were praised
internationally (the bravery of Sunil Gavaskar, the great cricketer,
was reported widely in newspapers in England), but there were many
others. However, the record of the Bombay police in preventing these
riots is fairly dismal, and the extent of communal fascist thought
among the police has been exposed by the Indian press. Journalists of
Business India even managed to tape partisan pro-Hindu instructions
radioed on a special frequency by some senior officers to policemen at
trouble spots; and on that basis, the Indian courts have instructed the
Bombay police to seal the official tapes of their conversations, pend-
ing a judicial inquiry.
Muslims have not been the only victims of Shiv Sena's wrath, or
indeed its first target. Shiv Sena has a long record of attacking unions
and preventing them from organising. It has also been a major force in
promoting regional sectarianism. Indeed, it came to prominence in the
early 1970s because of its agitation against the non-Maharashtrian
people of Bombay, particularly South Indian migrants, whom the
Shiv Sena leaders wanted to drive out of the city. Only more recently
have they singled out Muslims for attack.
I have concentrated on Shiv Sena's violence in Bombay both because
a very large proportion of those recently killed lived there (the total
number of murders in the city has exceeded eight hundred), and also
because this form of communal fascism-though so far largely concen-
trated in Bombay-could arise elsewhere in India. Fascist movements
tend typically to thrive when less determined political groups are
willing to tolerate or appease them. In this case, the leading Hindu
political organisation, the BJP-not a fascist party itself-refused to
condemn the violent activities of Shiv Sena and has treated it, in
effect, as an ally.
There would be nothing particularly surprising in such complicity on
the part of the extreme right wing of the Hindu movement, for exam-
ple the now-banned RSS-the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(National Volunteer Corps)-which was implicated in the assassina-
tion of Mahatma Gandhi as well. But on this occasion even the more
moderate Hindu leaders, such as Atal Behari Vajpayee, failed to
denounce the barbarity that Shiv Sena had unleashed in Bombay.
Perhaps more important, the Congress Party, which runs the govern-
ments of the Indian union and the Maharashtra state, as well as the
Bombay municipality (including the police), did not make a serious

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR INDIA 13

attempt to stamp out Shiv Sena's violence. The dog that did not bark is
an important part of the tragedy that occurred in Bombay, and in the
rest of India.
The Congress Party controls a minority government in India with 245
seats in a parliament of 545. On matters of economic policy
(particularly measures to liberalise government regulation), it is often
opposed by the parties to the left (the Janata Dal has 59 seats and the
two Communist parties hold 49 seats between them). But on matters
involving secularism the Congress can count on their support and also
that of nearly all the other-mostly regional-parties in confronting
the Hindu BJP, which has 119 seats, and Shiv Sena, which has 4. So
the Congress Party is not threatened in parliament on this issue, and
indeed many of the other parties have expressed disapproval -ven
disgust-at the Congress's failure to take a stronger position against
Hindu political violence. Occasionally, Congress leaders have acted
with sudden force: for example, after the demolition of the Ayodhya
mosque they used a somewhat dubious constitutional provision to dis-
miss the BJP governments in the four states they controlled. But they
have not consistently challenged the actions of Hindu political parties
or provided effective leadership in defending national unity against
communal politics.
The Congress seems inhibited not only by the mild and rather retir-
ing nature of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao but also by the Congress
politicians' obsessive fear of losing votes to sectarian Hindu parties,
particularly in the north of India. There are disagreements within the
party, and some newspapers report that the stronger actions it has
taken-dismissing BJP state governments, banning extremist organisa-
tions such as the RSS, and preventing the BJP demonstration in New
Delhi on February 25-came mostly at the insistence of cabinet mem-
bers who are drawn to confrontation. The strong and efficient action by
the police to stop the BJP's demonstration on February 25 seems to have
raised hopes that Rao still might be capable of stronger leadership.
Still, the measures he took that day were mostly negative. Little was
done to appeal to the public or organise mass opposition, and Rao
relied almost entirely on the police force to prevent Hindu political
activists from converging on the capital.

SECTARIAN NATIONALISM

Promoting a sectarian view of Hindu nationalism is not new in the sub-

continent, though the Hindu Mahasabha-the party that represented
Hindu nationalism in British India-was far less successful among the
Hindus than the Muslim League was among the Muslims. While the
leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha never formally endorsed the propo-
sition of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the head of the Muslim League, that
Hindus and Muslims were 'two nations'-an idea that was part of the

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14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

League's campaign for partition and the creation of Pakistan-their

own approach was not entirely at odds with that view. As it turned
out, Hindu Mahasabha failed miserably in Indian electoral politics
both before and after independence, and most Hindus remained loyal to
secular parties.
The BJP is the successor to that Hindu nationalist movement, and
unlike the Hindu Mahasabha (and later the Jan Sangh Party), the BJP
is now very successful. It has grown rapidly in recent years, from only 2
seats in the Indian parliament in the election of 1984 to 85 seats in 1989
and to 119 in 1991, out of a total of 545 seats. It is true that even in the
last elections more than three-quarters of the Hindus in India have, in
effect, voted against the BJP since they voted for secular parties. But a
quarter of the popular vote is a large proportion, and the recent agita-
tion seems to have accelerated this growth, at least in the west and
north of India. And central to BJP's approach to Indian politics is some
variant or other of Hindu nationalism.

TWO NATIONS AND LESSER TALES

How can a religious group within a nation see itself as a separate

nation by virtue of that religious identity? In proposing that there
were 'two nations' in undivided India, some of the leaders of the
Muslim League argued that the Indian Muslims came from countries
further west and were not natives of India. In an odd turn in the history
of political rhetoric, this 'two nation theory' is now favoured-expli-
citly or implicitly-by many Hindu spokesmen. In fact, there is
scarcely any truth in that theory, since the overwhelming proportion
of Muslims in the subcontinent come from indigenous families that con-
verted to Islam and not from outside the country.
Another argument used by exponents of Hindu nationalism is based
on the hypothesis that Indian Muslims are loyal to Pakistan rather
than to India, but there is no serious evidence for this thesis either. On
the contrary, a great many Muslims, instead of going to Pakistan,
stayed on in post-partition India, making a deliberate decision to
remain where they felt they belonged. In the armed forces, the diplo-
matic services, and government administration, Muslims have been just
as loyal to India as have Hindus and other Indians.

MUSLIM KINGS AND INDIAN HISTORY

The Hindu nationalists try to draw on Indian history, pointing out that
the Muslim kings in North India destroyed or mutilated many Hindu
temples; and certainly between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries
the early Muslim invaders and rulers were extremely destructive. For
example, Sultan Mahmud who came from Ghazni, in what is now
Afghanistan, repeatedly invaded north and west India in the
eleventh century, and devastated cities as well as temples, including

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR INDIA 15

famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and what is now Kathiawar. But as

the Islamic rulers became more assimilated to India, such destruction
clearly decreased. Most of the great Mughals who ruled over much of
north and central India from the sixteenth century onward could
hardly be called destroyers of Hindu buildings and institutions.
Much is made by Hindu political groups of the intolerance toward
Hinduism of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb during the late seven-
teenth century, when he destroyed some temples and imposed for a
period special taxes on the Hindus, among other measures. All this is
true of Aurangzeb, but to see him as the typical Muslim monarch in
India would be to falsify history. Indeed, none of the other Mughals
showed anything like Aurangzeb's intolerance, and some made a great
effort to treat the different religious communities in an evenhanded
way. Of course, Akbar-the best remembered of the Mughal emperors,
who reigned between 1556 to 1605-was particularly friendly to Hindu
philosophy and culture. He attempted to establish something like a
synthetic religion, drawing on the different faiths in India; he filled
his court with Hindu as well as Muslim intellectuals, artists, and
musicians, and in other ways tried to be thoroughly non-sectarian.
Even Aurangzeb's brother, Dara Shikoh, was greatly interested in
Hindu philosophy and, with the help of scholars, prepared a Persian
translation of some of the Upanishads, which he compared, in some
respects favourably, with the Koran. Dara was the eldest and the
favourite son of Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal and
Aurangzeb became king only after fighting and defeating Dara, whom
he tortured and beheaded, and he also imprisoned Shah Jahan for life.
Whether or not Aurangzeb's antagonism to Hindus owed something to
his hatred for his eclectic and somewhat Hinduised brother is hard to
tell; but to take him to be a typical Muslim emperor in India is a tra-
vesty of history.
Even Aurangzeb's own son, also called Akbar, who had revolted
against his father, had allied himself with Hindu Rajputs in battling
against Aurangzeb's imperial power. In response to Aurangzeb's letter
to him denouncing the Rajputs, Akbar wrote eloquently on the excel-
lence of his allies. Later on, when Aurangzeb drove Akbar away from
Rajputana, he joined up with Shivaji's son Raja Sambhaji, making a
united front against Aurangzeb.
Hindu extremist groups have been recently busy 'reconstructing'
Indian history; they have made repeated attempts to revise school
textbooks to include doctored accounts of what happened in India's
past, playing down the Muslim contribution to Indian history. Their
accounts are very different from the earlier assessments of more
detached and less political Hindu religious leaders. For example, the
Hindu religious leader Sri Aurobindo, who established the famous
ashram in Pondicherry, saw the history of Muslim rule in India in a
very different light:

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16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

The Mussulman domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign rule.

. . . The Mogul empire was a great and magnificent construction and
an immense amount of political genius and talent was employed in
its creation and maintenance. It was as splendid, powerful and
beneficent and, it may be added, in spite of Aurangzeb's fanatical
zeal, infinitely more liberal and tolerant in religion that any
medieval or contemporary European kingdom or empire. . .8
If the Hindu middle classes in some parts of India have suddenly
become more aware of alleged misdeeds of Muslim rulers in the past,
this is not because new historical facts have just been discovered. It is
because Hindu political activists have been trying to re-create a myth-
ical past, mixing fact with fantasy. The idea that retributive justice
can be sought now for the past misdeeds of Muslim kings, by compromis-
ing the civil status of contemporary Indian Muslims, is not only ethi-
cally grotesque, it is also historically preposterous.

MUSLIMS AND INDIAN CULTURE

It is hard to find any basis in Indian literature and culture of a 'two

nations' view of Hindus and Muslims The heritage of contemporary
India combines Islamic influences with Hindu and other traditions, as
can easily be seen in literature, music, painting, architecture, and many
other fields. The point is not simply that so many major contributions
to Indian culture have come from Islamic writers, musicians, and
painters, but also that their works are thoroughly integrated with
those of Hindus. Indeed, even Hindu religious beliefs and practices
have been substantially influenced by contact with Islamic ideas and
values.9 The impact of Islamic Sufi thought, for example, is readily
recognisable in parts of contemporary Hindu literature. Religious poets
such as Kabir or Dadu were born Muslim but transcended sectional
boundaries (one of Kabir's verses declares: 'Kabir is the child of Allah
and of Ram: He is my Guru, he is my Pir').10 They were strongly
affected by Hindu devotional poetry and in turn deeply influenced it.
No communal line can be drawn through Indian literature and arts,
setting Hindus and Muslims on separate sides, and the tradition of
integrated Muslim and Hindu work continues in modern art forms, such
as the movies, a large industry in India. Even films on Hindu themes
frequently rely on Muslim writers or actors. Rahi Masoom Raza wrote
the script for the hugely successful Mahabharata, made for Indian
television, in which the actor Feroz Khan identified himself so
closely with his role as the hero Arjun that he renamed himself after
him.
In fact, Islam itself, practised in India for may generations, must
now be seen as an Indian religion, much as the religion of the Parsees or
of the Syrian Christians is accepted as Indian. While it is well known

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 THE THREAT1S TO SECULAR INDIA 17

that Hindu and Buddhist influences were disseminated from India to

Southeast Asia, and Hindu activists take pride in the grandeur of such
shrines as Angkor Wat, dedicated to Vishnu, it is also the case that
Islam, too, spread from India to the same region, particularly in what
is now Indonesia and Malaysia.1" To sustain the thesis of Hindu
nationalism, it is necessary to depreciate the Indianness of Indian
Muslims. But there is no reasonable basis-racial, political, histori-
cal, cultural, or literary-for taking such a view.

MILITANT OBSCURANTISM

The third component in the anti-secular movement is militant obscu-

rantism-the political use of people's credulity in unreasoned and
archaic beliefs in order to generate fierce extremism. Religious gullibi-
lity can certainly be exploited to work up a political frenzy on the
basis of obscure convictions. If the events in Bombay indicate the influ-
ence of communal fascism, the attacks on the Ayodhya mosque show
how the force of militant obscurantism can be exploited as a political
weapon.12 The hundreds of thousands of Hindus who were mobilised in
and around Ayodhya were ready to accept their leaders'
unestablished historical claims that a temple to Rama had once stood
on the precise location of the mosque and that it had been destroyed by
one of the Mughal kings. They were also willing to accept both the
extraordinary ethical proposition that this claim justified the des-
truction of the mosque now in order to 'rebuild' a temple there and the
grand revelation that Lord Rama, the incarnation of God, was bom
5000 years ago at precisely that spot.
The low level of elementary education in that part of India surely
contributes to this gullibility. India still has a shocking rate of adult
literacy-only about 52 per cent-but in the 'Hindi belt', stretching
across the north and central India where Hindi is the dominant lan-
guage, the proportion is the lowest in India; in fact, the very low lite-
racy rates in the Hindi belt drag down the Indian average substan-
tially. It was here that the Rama agitation assumed such force, and in
fact, most of the Ayodhya agitators came from three states in the
Hindi belt: Uttar Pradesh, where Ayodhya is located, Madhya
Pradesh, and Rajasthan. All of these states have disproportionately
low adult literacy rates (between 39 and 43 per cent according to the
1991 census).*While illiteracy may not be a central feature of communal
fascism or of sectarian nationalism in general, its role in sustaining
militant obscurantism can be very strong indeed.

AN ELEVENTH-CENTURY ACCOUNT

Obscurantism is, of course, not a new problem in India, and Mahatma

Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru all wrote
extensively about it. Interestingly enough, one of the earliest descrip-

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18 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

tions of the phenomenon can be found in the eleventh-century account in

Arabic of the mathematician and scientist Alberuni, who wrote what
was for many centuries the most authoritative book on Indian intellec-
tual traditions, including mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.
Alberuni came to India first with the rampaging invader Mahmud
of Ghazni, and he wrote about the destruction caused by Mahmud's
raids in a way that even the BJP might approve:

Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed

there wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of
dust scattered in all directions.... Their scattered remains cherish,
of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.13

That alleged 'aversion', however, was evidently not enough to pre-

vent Alberuni from having a large number of Hindu collaborators and
friends, with whose help he mastered Sanskrit and studied contempo-
rary Indian treatises on mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, sculp-
tire, and religion. His work had great influence in continuing the
Arabic studies (well established by the eighth century) of Indian
science and mathematics, which reached Europe through the Arabs.
Alberuni provided a closely argued account of why philosophical
Hindu positions are not idolatrous. He then wrote at length on how
idols were, in fact, made for the followerg of popular Hinduism, and
discussed what were thought to be the appropriate sizes of idols,
including that of Rama-like the ones in the Ayodhya dispute
today-conduding:

Our object in mentioning all this mad raving is to teach the reader
the accurate description of an idol, if he happens to see one, and to
illustrate what we have said before, that such idols are erected
only for uneducated low-class people of little understanding; that
the Hindus never made an idol of any supernatural being, much less
of God; and, lastly, to show how the crowd is kept in thraldom by
all kinds of priestly tricks and deceits.14

The recent crowds in Ayodhya who have been kept in what can easily
be described as 'thraldom' have certainly experienced a fair share of
'tricks', both from politically active priests and politicians who
exploit religion. Elsewhere, Alberuni speaks of the odd beliefs of
people deprived of education, especially 'of those castes who are not
allowed to occupy themselves with science'.15
Nearly a thousand years after he made them, Alberuni's points
about the extreme gullibility of the uneducated, and the effectiveness
of deliberately manipulating the 'crowd', have peculiarly contempo-
rary relevance. While the failures of successive Indian governments
(beginning with Nehru's own) to expand mass education have done
much to make these groups vulnerable to militant obscurantism, that

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR INDIA 19

vulnerability has also been thoroughly exploited by extremist Hindu

political leaders.
It would, of course, be a mistake to see illiteracy as the cause of
nationalist Hindu politics generally. Illiteracy may not be particu-
larly important in encouraging the kind of communal fascism we have
seen in Bombay, or in the general spread of Hindu sectarian national-
ism. But in recruiting candidates for obscurantist agitation, as in the
Ayodhya movement, widespread illiteracy and gullibility have cer-
tainly been exploited by skilful political leaders

What can be done now to defend secularism in India? The different

components of Hindu extremism call for a variety of responses. The
threat of communal fascism can be dealt with only through determined
opposition by the public as well as the government. The political
authorities, in particular, have to stop appeasing such organisations
as Shiva Sena. It is terrible to watch responsible political leaders
who, instead of leading public opinion, wait for it to shift. The lesson
of Bombay is mainly a negative one: catastrophic horrors occur when
organised terror in the form of communal violence is not directly con-
tested and when responsible authorities drift rather than govern. In
the short run, this is mainly a matter of 'law and order', but in the
longer run, the need to confront the ideology of Shiv Sena and other
such groups is clear.
In doing so it will be important to reassert India's old traditions of
tolerance and the acceptance of heterogeneity. In fact, even the
seventeenth-century Hindu military leader Shivaji, after whom the
strong-armed Shiv Sena is named, was quite respectful of other reli-
gions. Some historians (such as the respected Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the
author of Shivaji and His Times, published in 1919) attribute to him a
forceful letter on religious tolerance sent to Aurangzeb. The letter con-
trasts Aurangzeb's intolerance with the policies of earlier Mughals
(Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan), and continues as follows:

If Your Majesty places any faith in those books by distinction called

divine, you will there be instructed that God is the God of all
mankind, not the God of Muslims alone. The Pagan and the Muslim
are equally in His presence ..... In fine, the tribute you demand from
the Hindus is repugnant to justice.16

That letter may or may not have been actually written by Shivaji,17
but it would not be contrary to his attitude to religious differences. In
fact the Mughal historian Khafi Khan, who was very critical of
Shivaji in other respects, nevertheless had the following to say about
his treatnent of Muslims:

[ShivajiJ made it a rule that wherever his followers were plunder-

ing, they should do no harm to the mosques, the book of God, or the

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20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

women of any one. Whenever a copy of the sacred Quran came into
his hands, he treated it with respect, and gave it to some of his
Mussalman followers.18

The tradition of religious toleration in India needs to be discussed more

extensively in confronting today's problems; and in doing so it is impor-
tant to show that respect for other religions can be found even among
those historical leaders who are seen as a source of inspiration for
today's intolerant Hindu organisers.
When it comes to dealing with militant obscurantism, we must
clearly distinguish its special features from communal fascism as well
as from the general threat of Hindu nationalism. Obscurantism thrives
on educational backwardness and gullibility. A much more determined
effort is certainly needed to overcome this backwardness especially in
those regions in the north of India where basic literacy is extremely
deficient, where school education is most limited, and where it has
proved easy to recruit passionate masses of destructive volunteers in
the name of Rama's birthplace and Hanuman's mace.
In addition to expanding education, attention must now be paid to
the content of education. In recent years, to the traditional problem of
illiteracy has been added the danger of deliberately slanted instruc-
tion, including distorted versions of history and the cultivation of sec-
tarian jingoism. The problem is particularly serious in those northern
states in which BJP has been politically powerful, and where consi-
derable revision of school textbooks has apparently taken place. This
is where the specific threat of militant obscurantism has become
coupled with the general movement of sectarian nationalism.

CASTE AND INEQUALITY

The political exploitation of militant obscurantism depends not merely

on the presence of potentially exploitable masses, but also on the
actual policies of sectarian political leaders in dealing with them. If
the BJP had tried to become a truly national party which sought
support even among the Muslims (as it certainly wanted to do at one
stage), the situation would be quite different now. But that statesman-
like move was abandoned, and BJP is now concentrating on becoming
powerful through sectarian support. So the prevention of this exploit-
ation must come now from other parties and other social and political
grups.
That this type of political exploitation can in fact be prevented is
borne out by the experience of the state of Bihar, which, like the rest
of the states in the Hindi belt, has an extremely low rate of literacy
and basic education (only 39 per cent of its adults were literate in 1991),
but whose citizens did not take much part in the Ayodhya agitation in
neighbouring Uttar Pradesh and managed to avoid communal riots fol-
lowing it. The Bihar state government showed determination and

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR NDIA 21

leadership in preventing chaos and killing which can be fruitfully

emulated by others.
Underlying the situation in Bihar is also the fact that its main
political leaders come from the backward castes; the government and
the ruling parties have tended to channel the energy of rural agitation
into movements attacking the dominance of high-caste Hindus. In fact,
very little obscurantist agitation and remarkably fewer cases of com-
munal violence have occurred in those states in which organised chal-
lenges to the political domination of the high castes have been promi-
nent and successful. Among them, the southern states-such as Tamil
Nadu or Kerala-have much higher levels of education than all those
in the Hindi belt. But even in Bihar, which is solidly in the Hindi belt
and has just as much illiteracy as the other states there, it appears
that serious attention to such fundamental issues as economic and social
inequality has succeeded in restraining those who want to exploit the
potential for militant obscurantism.

HINDU NATIONALISM AND THE RELLANCE ON IGNORANCE

As for the third factor, Hindu nationalism, we have to distinguish

between the small, hard-core of firm believers and the large, some-
what amorphous, group of partial recruits. The hard-core is certainly
not new-Mahatma Gandhi was shot by a member of it forty-five
years ago-but what has given Hindu nationalism a boost in recent
years is a huge increase in the number of partial converts. Their degree
of commitment varies, but, as was argued earlier, they have been
attracted to a sectarian Hindu view by the use of a systematically dis-
torted reading of Indian history and culture. The success of the strategy
has depended on such distortions not being challenged with appropri-
ate force.
A remarkable aspect of recent Hindu politics is not only its manipu-
lative reliance on ignorance-about the Ayodhya mosque, about the
origins of the Indian Muslims, about the capacious nature of Hinduism
itself-but the neglect by the Hindu leaders of the more major
achievements of Indian civilisation, even the distinctly Hindu contri-
butions, in favour of its more dubious features. Not for them the sophis-
tication of the Upanishads or Gita, or of Brahmagupta or Sankara, or
of Kalidasa or Sudraka; they prefer the adoration of Rama's idol and
Hanuman's image. Their nationalism also ignores the rationalist tra-
ditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in
algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal sys-
tem emerged, where early philosophy-secular as well as religious-
achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games
like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic
study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to
present India--explicitly or implicitly-as a country of unquestioning

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22 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious mur-

derers.
This is, of course, James Mill's imperial view of India, elaborated in
his famous 'history' (written without his having visited India and
without learning any Indian language)-an India that is intellec-
tually bankrupt but full of outrageous ideas and barbarious social cus-
toms. Indian nationalists in the past had disputed the authenticity of
that image; the Hindu nationalists of the present are bent on proving
James Mill right.19
Anti-secular sectarians are having their day in India right now. But
their strength is ultimately limited. Their weakness does not lie only
in the fact that even now a great majority of Indians-Hindus as well
as Muslims-continue to stand opposed to those ideas (and do so with-
out much leadership from the top). Their weakness arises also from
reliance on exploiting one particular division among Indians, that of
religion, while other national differences and traditions, as I have
tried to suggest, pull in other directions.
First, there are regional differences between forms of Hinduism and
what is or is not taken as sacred. (For example, in assessing the reli-
gious politics of Rama's birthplace in Ayodhya, it is useful to recall
that one of the most popular Bengali epic-poems of the nine-teenth
century-Meghnadbadhkabya-portrays Rama as a coward and his
enemy Indrajit as a magnificent hero.) Second, there are social as well
as regional variations in the interpretation of Indian history and also
in the resistance to deliberate distortions presented by sectarian
politicians. Third, the rationalist heritage of India has force of its
own and cannot be easily dismissed by appealing to violent religiosity
Fourth, the grievances of lower castes lead to a political confrontation
very different from what the Hindu political leaders want.
The deepest weakness of contemporary Hindu politics lies, how-
ever, in its reliance on ignorance at different levels-from exploiting
credulity in order to promote militant obscurantism to misrepresenting
India's past in order to foster factional nationalism and communal
fascism. The weakest link in the sectarian chain is this basic depend-
ence on both simple and sophisticated ignorance. That is where a con-
frontation is particularly overdue.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. For helpful suggestions, I am most grateful to Sudhir Anand, Peter Bauer,

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Akeel Bilgrami, Sugata Bose, G.A. Cohen, Edward
Desmond, Keith Griffin, Ayesha Jalal, Kurnari Jayawardena, Azizur Rahman
Khan, V.K. Ramachandran, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Emma Rothschild, and
Antara Dev Sen.
2. On the importance of anthropological understanding in seeing the need for secu-
larism, see the powerful analysis of Nur Yalman, On Secularism and Its Critics:

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 THE THREATS TO SECULAR INDIA 23

Notes on Turkey, India and Iran', Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 25,
1991.
3. English translation from H.P. Shastri, The Ramayana of Valmiki Shanti
Sadan, London, 1952, P. 389.
4. Rabindranath Tagore, A Vision of India's History (Calcutta: Visva Bharati,
1951, reprinted 1952, p. 32.
5. On this see S.J. Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism (Vintage, 1969), and Walter
Laqueur, editor, Fascism: A Reader's Guide (University of California Press,
1976).
6. See V.K. Ramachandran, 'Reign of Terror: Shiv Sena Pogrom in Bombay,'
Frontline, February 12, 1993.
7. Time Magazine, international edition, January 25, 1993, p. 29.
8. Sri Aurobindo, The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity (Calcutta: Arya Publishing
House, 1947), pp. 86-89.
9. On this see Kshiti Mohan Sen, Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). He
discusses the interrelations in greater detail in his Bengali book Bharate
Hindu-Mushalmaner jukta sadhana (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1949 .
10. See See One Hundred Poems of Kabir, translated by Rabindranath Tagore
(London: Macmillan, 1915), Verse LXIX. See also Kshiti Mohan Sen, Hinduism,
Chapters 18 and 19.
11. See Brian Harison, South-east Asia (London: Macmillan 1954), p. 43.
12. On this subject and on related issues, see the important collection of papers
edited by S. Gopal, Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ramajanma-
bhumi Issue (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1991).
13. Alberuni's India, translated by Edward C. Sachau, edited by Ainslie T. Embree
(Norton, 1971), Chapter 1, p. 22.
14. Alberuni's India, Chapter 11, p. 122.
15. Alberuni's India, Chapter 2, p. 32.
16. Quoted in Vincent Smith, The Oxford History of India, fourth edition, edited by
Percival Spear (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 417-18.
17. It is suggested that Nil Prabhu Munshi was the scribe of this letter (Shivani
could not write). An alternative hypothesis attributes the authorship to Rana
Raj Sigh of Mewar/Udaipur.
18. Quoted in Smith, The Oxford History of India, p. 412.
19. In my Lionerl Trilling Lecture at Columbia University ('Indian and the West'), I
discuss the role played by foreign observations of India in influencing the self-
perception of Indian themselves.

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