he Fate of Secularism in India

CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT

The political dominance of the BJP’s brand of Hindu nationalism since the 2014
election has called into question the future viability of the country’s secularist
tradition and commitment to diversity.
 Published April 04, 2019
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Religious Nationalism and India’s Future

MILAN VAISHNAV
2. The Emergence, Stagnation, and Ascendance of the
BJP
RAHUL VERMA
3. The BJP’s Electoral Arithmetic
RUKMINI S.
4. The Fate of Secularism in India
CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT
5. Hindu Nationalism and the BJP’s Economic Record
GAUTAM MEHTA
6. The BJP and Indian Grand Strategy
ABHIJNAN REJ, RAHUL SAGAR

At home and abroad, one of postindependence India’s defining characteristics is

that the nation has managed to sustain democratic governance in the face of
striking ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. In the early years after
independence, the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the
ruling Indian National Congress (or Congress Party) advocated for an Indian
brand of secularism designed to hold the country’s disparate communities
together under one roof. Indeed, Nehru often pronounced that India’s composite
culture was one of its greatest strengths. The Hindu nationalists who later came
to populate the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its various ideological affiliates
have consistently harbored a starkly different view; they envision India as a
majoritarian nation-state, not a multicultural one. The tensions inherent in these
competing visions of Indian nationhood have come to the fore in recent years,
especially since the BJP’s landmark electoral victory in 2014.

To understand these dynamics, it is necessary to define basic concepts and review

relevant history. This is because political entrepreneurs who promote
ethnoreligious identities—especially Hindu nationalist ideologues—have created
much confusion around the notion of secularism, claiming that its proponents
have endeavored to make the state hostile or indifferent to religion. That was
certainly not the intention of the architects of modern India, whose enemy was
not religion, but communalism.
Christophe Jaffrelot
Jaffrelot’s core research focuses on theories of nationalism and democracy,
mobilization of the lower castes and Dalits (ex-untouchables) in India, the Hindu
nationalist movement, and ethnic conflicts in Pakistan.
@JAFFRELOTC

Nationalist forces aside, all is not well with Indian secularism. Even before
Hindutva forces began attacking India’s secular tradition, the Congress Party had
already started undermining secularism by cynically jockeying for the support of
different voting blocs and by stoking divisive issues of social identity (a practice
known as vote banking). In parallel, the judiciary—especially at the lower levels—
has adopted a majoritarian undertone on certain controversial cases. Whether
secularism can maintain its hold as a defining ideology for the country will
depend in part on a combination of political forces—namely the BJP’s future
electoral success and the strategies the opposition adopts to counter the ruling
party.
HOW INDIAN SECULARISM DEVOLVED INTO POLITICAL PANDERING

At the dawn of India’s independence in 1947, advocates of secular nationalism

decisively won the debate over how the state should navigate the tricky terrain of
India’s religious diversity. At the time, there were two other competing visions for
how the state should handle religion, namely Hindu nationalism and Hindu
traditionalism. The Hindu nationalists held that Indian identity was embodied in
Hinduism because Hindus formed the country’s majority community and were
sons of the soil. By contrast, Hindu traditionalists were less interested in such a
stark ethnic view and paid more attention to cultural features, like the defense of
traditional Hindu (or Ayurveda) holistic medicine and the linguistic preeminence
of Hindi over Urdu, which many Indians regarded as a foreign language.

Whether secularism can maintain its hold as a defining ideology for the country
will depend in part on a combination of political forces—namely the BJP’s future
electoral success and the strategies the opposition adopts to counter the ruling
party.

While Hindu nationalists were almost completely absent from the Constituent
Assembly that was charged with drafting the country’s constitution, Hindu
traditionalists—who formed the right wing of the dominant Congress Party—were
well represented. In spite of the pressure they exerted, Nehru and the head of the
assembly’s drafting committee, B. R. Ambedkar, argued successfully in favor of a
form of “composite culture” that, in India, is called “secularism.”1 In the simplest
terms, proponents of the secular brand of Indian nationalism define the nation
politically, as comprising those who inhabit sovereign Indian territory, and as a
place where all citizens are equal.
Although the word “communalism” has largely disappeared from India’s modern
political lexicon, during the Nehru years, it was widely used to designate
ideological forces that sought to divide the Indian nation along religious lines.
Nehru believed that Indian secularism was vital because he had seen firsthand
how Muslim communalism had resulted in the division of the country (into India
and Pakistan) in 1947. For him, the Partition of the subcontinent had not only cut
Indian territory in two but had also divided a civilization. Following
independence, Nehru considered Hindu communalism to be the country’s top
enemy; his fears were heightened after Nathuram Godse—a man associated with
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological wellspring of Hindu
nationalism—murdered Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, India’s secular model seemed to work
reasonably well. Religious minorities, including Muslims, remained well-
represented in the country’s elected assemblies.2 Furthermore, communal riots
were relatively rare at this time; to combat communalism, Nehru sought to
prevent Indian politicians from exploiting religion for political gain and
sanctioned those who promoted religious polarization. Although it has been
unevenly enforced, Section 123 of the Representation of the People Act of 1951,
the law that guides the conduct of elections in India, forbids politicians from
campaigning on religious themes for this reason.3
Notably, Nehru fought against all forms of communalism (whether Hindu,
Muslim, or Sikh), not against religion per se. This is evident from the fact that he
never intended to separate politics and religion, as happened in the strongholds
of laïcité (a form of secularism that strictly forbids any government involvement
in religious affairs), including France and Atatürk’s Turkey. Nehru outlined his
views on the subject in 1961, when he said, “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. What it means is that it is a state which honors all faiths equally and
gives them equal opportunities.”4
Indeed, as political theorist Rajeev Bhargava has argued, Indian secularism has
not meant that the government abstains from intervening in religious
matters.5 On the contrary, the state has decisively intervened in religious affairs
in certain cases—by banning animal sacrifices, for instance, and by ensuring that
temples are accessible to Dalits (those who occupy the bottom rungs of the
traditional Hindu caste hierarchy, and who were once called untouchables).
But Nehru’s use of the word “equally” in the quotation above is slightly
misleading, as the state has not observed a clear-cut equidistance vis-à-vis each
religious community. This is why Bhargava terms India’s secular approach as one
of “principled distance”—not equidistance.6 Indeed, the government has
sometimes applied different standards to different religious communities. For
example, the state reformed Hindu personal laws according to a series of new
Hindu code bills without imposing similar changes on religious minorities.
Muslims, for instance, were allowed to retain sharia law.
Similarly, the Indian state subsidizes different religious pilgrimages (albeit not
necessarily to the same extent), including Sikhs going to Pakistan, Hindus
visiting Amarnath Cave in Jammu and Kashmir, and Muslims going to Mecca for
the hajj. The state also contributes financially to major religious celebrations such
as the Hindu Kumbha Mela; the 2001 festivities in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, cost
1.2 billion rupees (or approximately $25 million).7 In practice, the concept of
principled distance has not meant that the state interferes equally in all religions
or to the same degree or in the same manner in all cases.
Starting in the 1980s, Indian secularism came under more severe strain. The
Congress Party began opportunistically pandering to one religious community
after another more overtly, and Indian secularism was deeply damaged as a
result. To begin with, prime minister Indira Gandhi sought to capitalize on
religious differences in several blatantly cynical ways. Among other things, she
recognized Aligarh Muslim University as a minority institution; 8 promoted
militant, secessionist Sikhs like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to destabilize the
Akali Dal, a rival political party in Punjab; and inaugurated the Bharat Mata
Mandir, a temple constructed in 1983 with the support of the Vishva Hindu
Parishad (VHP), also known as the World Hindu Council.
Indira’s son, Rajiv Gandhi, added more fuel to the fire when he became prime
minister following his mother’s death in 1984. In the course of handling the
divisive Shah Bano case, he sought to invoke sharia as the template for Muslim
communal law in India as a way to mollify Indian Muslims.9 This political
strategy enabled Hindu nationalists to claim that the Congress Party was
indulging in pseudo-secularism—a pejorative term that connotes minority
appeasement. Having eroded India’s tradition of secularism through these
actions, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi opened the door for Hindu nationalism to gain
more widespread political salience.

HINDUTVA AGAINST SECULARISM: MAJORITARIAN VOTE BANK

In contrast to secularism’s political and territorial notion of India, Hindu

nationalist ideology, first codified in the 1920s by V. D. Savarkar in Hindutva:
Who Is a Hindu?, defines India culturally as a Hindu country and intends to
transform it into a Hindu rashtra (nation-state).10 Hindu nationalists view India
as a Hindu nation-state not only because Hindus make up about 80 percent of
the population but also because they see themselves as the true sons of the soil,
whereas they view Muslims and Christians as products of bloody foreign
invasions or denationalizing influences.11
The Hindu nationalist organization known as the RSS was born in 1925 in
reaction to a pan-Islamist mobilization of Indian Muslims known as the Khilafat
Movement. While the Hindu Mahasabha, the right wing of the Congress Party
until Savarkar transformed it into a separate party in 1937, engaged in electoral
politics even prior to independence, the RSS chose to focus on developing a dense
network of local branches and creating front organizations, including a student
union and a labor union. In 1951, the RSS decided it could no longer remain
disengaged from electoral politics, so it helped establish a political party, the
Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), in conjunction with former Hindu Mahasabha
leaders. The constellation of organizations that the RSS created was called the
Sangh Parivar, or “the family of the Sangh.”12 This ideological family shares a
brand of pro-Hindu cultural nationalism that deemphasizes Islamic
contributions to Indian civilization, even though the formation of India’s social
fabric and culture involved the mixing of influence from Persia and elsewhere,
including in areas like art, architecture, cuisine, and language.
Exploiting the missteps of the Congress Party, Hindu nationalists began accusing
it of playing vote bank politics with Muslims. But, at the same time, the RSS
played the same card with Hindu voters. Hindu nationalist political
entrepreneurs decided to turn the majority community into a vote bank when
secular leaders of the Janata Party accused ex-Jana Sanghis of paying allegiance
to the RSS. Anticipating the break in the Janata Party that would result in the
creation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980, Balasaheb Deoras (the RSS
chief at the time) declared in 1979, “Politicians think only of the next election and
personal gains for themselves.” He went on to say that “Hindus must now awaken
themselves to such an extent that even from the elections point of view the
politicians will have to respect the Hindu sentiments and change their policies
accordingly. . . . Once Hindus get united, the government would start caring for
them also.”13
The launch of the Ayodhya movement must be understood in light of this speech.
In the 1980s, the RSS relied on the VHP to mobilize the majority community
around the powerful symbol of Lord Ram. Sangh affiliates demanded that the
temple that once allegedly stood above Ram’s supposed birthplace in Ayodhya
should be rebuilt in place of the mosque called the Babri Masjid that had since
taken its place. The campaign around a prospective Ram mandir (temple) in 1989
resulted in a wave of riots that polarized voters along religious lines. Such
polarization helped the BJP win the 1991 state elections in Uttar Pradesh where,
in 1992, activists tore the Babri Masjid to the ground to make way for a Ram
temple.
The demolition of the mosque was a clear reflection of the Sangh Parivar’s anti-
secular agenda, which remains its core identity today. For the RSS, turning India
into a Hindu rashtra necessitates the eradication of so-called foreign influences,
as exemplified by the recent rechristening of cities that previously donned Islamic
names, like Allahabad (which is now called Prayagraj), and more importantly, the
“obliteration” of Islam and its proponents from the public sphere.14 The actions
taken in this regard range from attempts at converting Muslims to Hinduism to
preventing interreligious marriages.
A handful of years after the Ayodhya movement, the BJP briefly rose to power in
New Delhi in 1998 and won elections again in 1999. On both occasions, however,
the party was at the helm of a larger coalition, the National Democratic Alliance
(NDA), whose other members did not all share a Hindu nationalist agenda. To
keep its bloc together, the BJP had to put three of its long-standing policy
priorities on the backburner: the construction of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, the
creation of a uniform civil code (or personal law) that applies not only to Hindus
but to other religious communities as well, and the abolition of the
constitutionally derived autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only
Muslim-majority state.

Although the party diluted its ideology somewhat while in power, the BJP could
not hold its coalition intact as some of its NDA partners resented the anti-Muslim
pogrom that took place in Gujarat in 2002 during Narendra Modi’s tenure as
chief minister. The BJP lost the 2004 general elections, and the Congress-led
coalition that took over from the NDA, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA),
returned to a more secular brand of politics, as evident from the appointment of
the Sachar Committee to assess the socioeconomic conditions of the Muslim
community,15 which the report demonstrated was pitiable.16 While the BJP
quickly dismissed the committee report, which recommended specific policy
measures to improve the status of the country’s Muslim minority, the UPA won
national elections again in 2009.
In 2014, for the first time, the BJP won an absolute majority in the lower house of
the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha. Having tasted political power on the
national stage for the first time in a decade, the party chose not to resuscitate the
three controversial issues mentioned above, but it did pursue actions intended to
marginalize Muslims through unofficial channels. For instance, groups of Hindu
vigilantes tried to discipline minorities (Muslims and Christians) with the
blessing of the state apparatus using a form of cultural policing that had
previously been restricted to BJP-ruled states.17 Indeed, this form of vigilantism
has prevailed more in BJP-ruled states like Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh, India’s
largest state, where Yogi Adityanath (a priest and the head of a Hindu sect)
became chief minister in 2017 after the BJP’s electoral triumph. But it has also
spread beyond them.
Such Hindu vigilantism has manifested in a variety of ways. Since 2014, vigilante
groups have targeted Muslims accused of seducing and marrying young Hindu
women to convert them, a phenomenon some have labeled love jihad. This
campaign was followed by the ghar wapsi (or homecoming) movement, which
aimed to (re)convert Muslims and Christians to the Hindu faith as a reaction to
Muslim and Christian proselytism. The issue of cow protection was an even more
effective way of organizing activists, who formed a new movement called Gau
Raksha Dal. This militia patrolled highways to ensure that Muslims were not
taking cows to slaughterhouses; the group was related to the Sangh Parivar and
functioned much like the Bajrang Dal—a powerful militia that was created in
1984 during the heyday of the Ayodhya movement.18
For all these groups, the BJP’s rise to power in 2014 was an inflection point: they
no longer needed to fear police retribution and, in some cases, even became
incorporated into the state apparatus.19 In the state of Haryana, Gau Raksha Dal–
affiliated groups—armed with field hockey sticks—patrol the highway linking
Chandigarh and New Delhi, where they inspect trucks (often with the blessing of
the state police) likely to be transporting cows.20 In Maharashtra, the government
has created a new civil service position, called honorary animal welfare officers,
in each district. All of the applicants for these posts (whose files have been made
public) are gau rakshaks from various militias that regularly intercept alleged
traffickers and burn their cargo.21 In several cases, these vigilantes have
intercepted and brutally killed Muslim truck drivers who are ferrying cattle. 22 Not
only have the police rarely arrested the guilty parties (even when witnesses have
provided testimony), but even when they have done so, trials have often gone
nowhere.
The cultural policing of Hindu vigilante groups, who pay allegiance to the RSS,
shows that India has, to some extent, become a de facto Hindu rashtra. The
influence of the Sangh Parivar at the grassroots level grows with the tacit support
of the BJP-dominated state apparatus: while Hindutva forces may indulge in
illegal actions, they are often viewed as the legitimate embodiment of
majoritarian rule.

HAS SECULARISM BECOME A DIRTY WORD?

Since the 2014 election, surging Hindu nationalism has put the Congress Party—
and secularism, more generally—on the back foot. Many Indian scholars have
concluded that the BJP is now the new hegemon of Indian politics. The growing
consensus seems to be that Hindu nationalism has gained traction at the expense
of secularism to the point of being viewed as the only legitimate stance an
electorally successful nationwide political party can take.23 The attitude of the
Congress Party lends itself to such an interpretation too, at least up to a point, as
the party at times has sought to downplay its secularist roots and embrace pro-
Hindu sentiments.
Over the last two years, the Congress Party has indulged in what some observers
derisively have called “soft Hindutva,” emulating the kind of religiosity that is
typically associated with the BJP.24 During recent state election campaigns in
Gujarat (2017) as well as Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan (2018), Rahul Gandhi
took the unusual step (for him) of visiting dozens of temples. 25 He presented
himself as a Shiv bhakt (disciple of the Hindu god Shiva), displayed
his janewara (a sacred thread worn by upper caste Hindu males across their
torso), and let his entourage discuss his Brahmin background as well as
his gotra (clan) in response to BJP leaders who repeatedly brought up the Italian
heritage of his mother, former Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi. 26
Beyond optics, Congress has begun flirting with some of the BJP’s favorite
campaign themes. For instance, the party manifesto in Madhya Pradesh
promised to build gaushalas (cow shelters); develop the commercial production
of gaumutra (cow urine) and cow dung—the former is used in traditional Hindu
medicine while the latter is used as fuel or fertilizer; promote the Ram Van
Gaman Path (the path that Lord Ram took during his exile from Ayodhya); pass
laws that would conserve India’s sacred rivers; and promote Sanskrit. 27 The
deputy speaker of Madhya Pradesh’s Vidhan Sabha (state assembly) and
manifesto committee chair, Rajendra Singh, admitted that the Congress Party
was adopting this platform in response to BJP pressures: “The BJP used to brand
us as [a] Muslim party. It’s a conscious decision to shed that tag thrust on us by
our rivals.”28
As a result, the Congress Party’s state manifesto differed vastly from the previous
iteration issued in 2013. Five years ago, the party devoted a whole section to the
“minority community,” (a reference mainly to Muslims), a section in which it
promised to furnish special economic assistance for madrasas, a new law to curb
communal violence, and the implementation of the Sachar Committee
recommendations.29
The Congress Party’s pro-Hindu trend is reinforced by the party’s strategy in
terms of ticket distribution. At first glance, the Congress Party seems to be
fielding few Muslim candidates in elections. In the 2014 general election, it
nominated only twenty-seven Muslim candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, a
paltry 5.6 percent of its total candidates.30
But this underrepresentation of Muslim candidates needs to be qualified at the
state level: the Congress Party has nominated very few Muslims to vie for state
assembly seats in critical states such as Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka,
Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, and Tamil Nadu (see table 1).
But in other states, the proportion of Congress-affiliated Muslim candidates
approximated or exceeded the proportion of Muslims in the general population,
including in Assam (23 percent), Bihar (24 percent), Kerala (16 percent), Uttar
Pradesh (19 percent), and West Bengal (33 percent).31
In all these states, with the exception of Assam, the percentage of Muslim
candidates fielded by the Congress Party has increased recently. In fact, it is only
in two-party states where the Congress Party faces off against the BJP that the
party seems to have made a strategic decision to nominate fewer Muslims on the
grounds that the minority community has no other choice but to vote for the
Congress Party if it hopes to defeat the BJP.

The underrepresentation of Muslims among Congress candidates needs to be

qualified in at least two other ways. First, the BJP’s underrepresentation of
Muslims is far more significant.32 Second, historically speaking, the Congress
Party has never nominated many Muslim candidates, even under Nehru and
Indira Gandhi, largely because of the steady influence of Hindu traditionalists
within the party at the state level.33 But under Nehru and Indira Gandhi (at least
until the 1970s), this did not significantly undermine the Congress Party’s secular
identity.
In fact, over the years, the Congress Party has retained its secular image for
several reasons: the secular credentials of many of its top leaders (who often have
been more secular than the party cadres and state-level figures); the party’s
propensity to nominate a large number of Muslims in certain states; and its
concern—especially at the top levels—with the socioeconomic conditions and
physical security of minority populations. The acid test for measuring the
Congress Party’s commitment to secularism today has less to do with symbolic
gestures (like temple visits) or the representation of Muslims in assemblies than
with concrete public policy. To date, the party has not moved decisively to
implement the Sachar Committee report, at least partially due to pressure
emanating from the Sangh Parivar. Whether Congress-led governments at the
state level will draw inspiration from this report will be one important indicator
of how resilient the Congress Party’s attachment to secularism actually is.

A second benchmark is the actual well-being of Muslim citizens. In many BJP-

ruled states, minorities have felt threatened because of the slayings of Muslims
accused of mistreating cows and, to a lesser extent, the harassment of Christian
priests or nuns. Whether Congress-run state governments provide security to
minorities and restore their trust in state institutions, including the police, will be
an important measure of the party’s secular credentials. On this front, again, the
situation varies from one Congress-ruled state to another, according to the
capacity of state leaders to resist pressure from Hindu nationalists.

One notable example of a state where the Congress Party has sometimes
succumbed to majoritarian pressures is Madhya Pradesh. After the Congress
Party won the 2018 state assembly elections there, the BJP immediately accused
the incoming state government of discontinuing the mass recitation of “Vande
Mataram” (a patriotic anthem often referred to as India’s national song) at the
Madhya Pradesh Secretariat on the first day of every month—a practice the BJP
had introduced in 2005. The new Congress-affiliated chief minister, Kamal Nath,
responded by announcing a “bigger Vande Mataram event” after the BJP
president, Amit Shah, had denounced the Congress Party’s stance, which he
claimed was aimed at “pleasing a particular community” (namely Muslims).34
More importantly, the Madhya Pradesh police arrested three Muslims accused of
cow slaughter under the National Security Act, a stringent federal law that allows
the state to detain people for up to one year without formal judicial
proceedings.35 Interestingly, the officer in charge of the local police station
admitted candidly that one of the accused was arrested because of pressure
brought to bear by Hindu nationalists: “There was a possibility of communal
tension because the Bajrang Dal [an organization of the Sangh Parivar]
threatened to take to the street if he was not also arrested. The arrest brought the
situation under control.”36
But not all Congress Party political figures nationwide share this view. The
Congress-affiliated deputy chief minister in Rajasthan, Sachin Pilot, disagreed
openly with this attitude, arguing: “It is fine to protect animals that are sacred
and I believe in that too, but I think we could have done a better job by
prioritising those issues first [including “the dignity of fellow human beings”] and
then taken on the cow issue.”37 Such discordant voices offer a good illustration of
the traditionally multifaceted character of the Congress Party regarding
secularism.
While the ideological stances of Congress Party officials have often differed state
by state, the contrast between the secular attitude of the top leadership of the
Congress Party and the Hindu traditionalism of local party bosses has been
evident since the 1950s. This dichotomy was well illustrated by divergent views
within the Congress Party on the Sabarimala controversy. In September 2018, the
Supreme Court decided to lift the ban on women of any age entering the
Sabarimala temple in Kerala.38 Prior to the court’s ruling, women of reproductive
age could not enter the temple because Lord Ayyappa (the god to whom the
temple is dedicated) had made a vow of celibacy.
Congress Party leaders in Kerala opposed the court’s ruling, much like the BJP
did, in the name of defending Hindu traditions. At first, Rahul Gandhi openly
contradicted his state party’s stance in the name of equality. 39 After several
months of agitation—mainly by BJP leaders in Kerala40—however, Gandhi diluted
his position, saying that he was not “able to give an open and shut position on
this [question],” as he could “see validity in the argument that tradition needs to
be protected . . . and that women should have equal rights.”41
Whether the Congress Party leadership will impose a coherent line remains to be
seen, but its ambivalence toward secularism will not only depend on the
popularity of Hindu nationalism. Indira Gandhi indulged in similar ambiguity,
and the current iteration of the Congress Party is probably not compromising its
secularism any more than Indira Gandhi did in the early 1980s.

While the extent of the Congress Party’s commitment to secularism needs to be

qualified, regional parties—which have generally represented one out of every
two voters in Indian general election for decades42—follow contrasting (and
sometimes complicated) trajectories. For instance, leaders of regional
heavyweights like the Janata Dal (United), the Biju Janata Dal, the Lok Janshakti
Party, and the Telugu Desam Party have oscillated between secular discourse and
not-so-secular practices. Some of them left the BJP-led NDA coalition after
violence surfaced against Muslims and Christians, but these parties have rejoined
the BJP alliance when it has suited them politically. Other regional parties—such
as the Communist Party of India (Marxist),43 the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the
Samajwadi Party, the All India Trinamool Congress, and the Bahujan Samaj Party
continue to strenuously defend minority rights and nominate Muslim candidates
in large numbers in the name of secularism.44 That said, the records of many of
these parties are not unambiguous either: witness the Samajwadi Party’s
mismanagement of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh, in which
dozens of locals lost their lives.45

JUDICIAL FORAYS INTO MAJORITARIANISM

In addition to the Congress Party, another major institution that has defended
secularism in the past but whose operations deserve fresh scrutiny is the
judiciary, whose attitudes in recent years have also become more ambivalent. The
delicate balance of secularism in India can only be maintained if the rule of law
prevails and enables every citizen to feel equal to others, irrespective of
community. For that to be true, a watchful judiciary without the taint of religious
bias or motivation is required. While the Supreme Court remains the most
important Indian institution in this respect, its sometimes contradictory
decisions and the communal overtones espoused by some lower judiciary officials
have contributed to the erosion of secularism.

The Ayodhya affair is perhaps the best illustration of this dynamic. After the
Babri Masjid was destroyed in 1992, the Indian government appointed a one-man
commission led by former Supreme Court justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan.
The resulting report, which took seventeen years to complete and whose contents
were finally leaked to the media, assigned responsibility for the demolition of the
mosque to clearly identified Hindu nationalist figures.46 To date, however, the
judicial branch has not asked the government to table the report in the
parliament or to file charges. This delay suggests that trying Hindu nationalists in
this case is seen as too politically sensitive.
While the Liberhan report continued to languish, the Allahabad High Court
continued to examine the arguments of the Muslims and Hindus who claim that
the disputed site where the mosque was built belongs to them. In 2010, the court
finally issued a contentious ruling that reflected the divisions between the judges
involved.47 One of the three justices, who dissented, sought to give all the
disputed land to the case’s Hindu parties on the basis of his reading of relevant
Hindu mythology. The remaining justices, one of whom was Hindu while the
other was Muslim, penned a majority judgment that was convoluted to put it
mildly.
The majority ruling accepted the premise that the demolished mosque had been
located on Ram’s birthplace, where there had once been a Ram temple, but the
authors admitted that no archeological evidence had ever been submitted to
substantiate this claim. Rather than rebuilding the mosque as many Muslim
groups had requested, the two Allahabad justices sought to divide the land
between the case’s Muslim party (one-third) and its Hindu parties (two-thirds);
the ruling also gave the Hindu side the most holy plot of land beneath where the
mosque’s dome had been.48
In delivering its complex judgment, the Allahabad High Court contravened
Supreme Court precedent. In late 1992, the incumbent Congress government had
asked the Supreme Court to look into whether “any Hindu religious structure”
had existed on the land before the Babri Masjid had been built. 49 In 1994, the
court responded that it couldn’t adjudicate such questions of religious
belief.50 More than a decade and a half later—in 2010—both Hindu and Muslim
litigants who were disappointed with the Allahabad High Court’s verdict appealed
to the Supreme Court. In May of the following year, the higher court ruled that
the lower court had issued a “strange” judgment. Nine years later, the matter is
still pending.51
In this and other instances, India’s Supreme Court increasingly has had to
remind the country’s various high courts of fundamental secular principles as the
lower courts have become more inclined to indulge in Hindu majoritarianism.
For instance, the murder of a young Muslim man in the city of Pune offers a clear
example of these tensions. Mohsin Shaikh, a young engineer, was coming back
from the mosque when he was killed by a group of Hindu activists who had just
attended a meeting of a group called the Hindu Rashtra Sena that was organized
to protest social media posts depicting derogatory images of Shivaji (a historical
Hindu warrior king) and Bal Thackeray (the founder of the nationalist party
known as the Shiv Sena, a steadfast BJP ally).

Again, the influence of majoritarian Hindu sentiments seems evident. The local
court ruled that Shaikh had been attacked “because he looked like a Muslim,” and
his twenty-three assailants were arrested and accused of murder. But the Bombay
High Court, which heard the case on appeal, freed some of them on bail for the
following reason: “The fault of the deceased was only that he belonged to another
religion. I consider this factor in favour of the applicants/accused. Moreover, the
applicants/accused do not have criminal record and it appears that in the name
of the religion, they were provoked and have committed the murder.” 52 The
Supreme Court later overruled the high court and pointed out that “the fact that
the deceased [Mohsin] belonged to a certain community cannot be a justification
for any assault much less a murder.” The Supreme Court requested that high
court justices be “fully conscious of the plural composition of the country while
called upon to deal with rights of various communities.” 53
These examples suggest that, although the Supreme Court has generally tried to
remain faithful to the secular character of the Indian Constitution, lower courts
have occasionally espoused Hindu majoritarian viewpoints. As far as the judiciary
is concerned, the Supreme Court is arguably one of the last reliable custodians of
India’s secularism, and its attitude vis-à-vis high-profile cases such as the
Ayodhya case going forward will be scrutinized even more closely.

CONCLUSION
Indian secularism is not simply the invention of India’s post-1947 political
leaders; the concept has a longer, distinguished place in the history of Indian
civilization. For millennia, some rulers have promoted the coexistence of India’s
religious communities. Emperor Ashoka did so, in spite of his zealous adherence
to Buddhism, and the Mughal Emperor Akbar went even further by initiating a
syncretic creed—a tradition that culminated in Gandhism. In fact, Indian
secularism is the by-product of a whole civilization, as a senior literary figure,
Nayantara Sahgal, remarked recently: “We are unique in the world that we are
enriched by so many cultures, religions. Now they want to squash us into one
culture. So it is a dangerous time. We do not want to lose our richness. We do not
want to lose anything . . . all that Islam has brought us, what Christianity has
brought us, what Sikhism has brought us. Why should we lose all this? We are
not all Hindus but we are all Hindustani.”54
Hindu nationalism is depriving India of one of its main assets, at a time when
countries around the world are struggling to cope with religious diversity.

By countering this worldview and the secular political culture that has emerged
from it, Hindu nationalism is depriving India of one of its main assets, at a time
when countries around the world are struggling to cope with religious diversity.
For instance, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe has indicated that his
country may have to reform its famous 1905 law codifying laïcité (the country’s
strict conception of secularism, which forbids government involvement in
religious affairs) to make room for religion in the public space again, after the
recent growth in the number of French citizens who practice Islam.
Despite the apparent ascendance of Hindu nationalism under the BJP, however,
it may be premature to conclude that this brand of nationalism has established
undisputed hegemony over Indian politics and society. In fact, secularism may
indirectly benefit from the reactivation of caste identities, which often can
undermine religious identities. In the run-up to India’s 2019 general election,
even the BJP has tried to exploit caste identities by introducing new positive
discrimination (affirmative action) policies.55 For citizens from less privileged
economic backgrounds who belong to the general category (that is, primarily the
upper castes or those untouched by existing state quotas), Modi announced in
January 2019 a 10 percent quota for educational institutions and civil service
posts. In addition, the BJP government in Maharashtra has supported the idea of
reservations for Marathas (a dominant caste of farmers).56 The fact that a party
that has consistently claimed that caste politics serve to divide the nation has
decided to play this card too is a sign of this strategy’s resilience.
In the years ahead, caste politics may well gain momentum at the expense of
Hindu communalism and indirectly contribute to a more secular approach to
politics by dividing the pan-Hindu coalition that the BJP depends on for its
majority. This development is all the more likely to be the case if class
considerations (such as the country’s urban/rural divide) become more salient.
Such developments would probably bring social and socioeconomic issues back to
the fore and could serve as a counterweight to resurgent Hindu majoritarianism.