Has Secularism Caved In To Political Opportunism In India?

Abhishek has spent the last two years studying for the Union Public Service Commission exam. He has a great interest in reading about Indian politics and has strong views on it. Although he is not particularly religious, he feels that Hinduism should be promoted by the Indian state, because it is “a way of life for all Indians”. Therefore, he objects to those who stand for secularism. He thinks they indulge in what has come to be known as appeasement politics. “These people are pro-Muslim.” According to Abhishek, the term ‘sickular’ aptly defines those who “are anti-Hindu in the closet” but call themselves secular.

The young civil services aspirant is, however, not alone who thinks this way. Many, especially Hindu nationalists, believe that those who call themselves secular have always been biased towards Hindus. Many journalists and academicians question those who propagate secularism but fail to practise it; therefore, such secularists are often accused of and ridiculed for being ‘opportunistic’. A commonly used expression is pseudo-secular, which in the age of social media is interchangeably used with the word ‘sickular’—a pejorative expression intended to insult.

The word ‘secular’ originated from the Latin ‘saeculum’, which means “a period of long duration: age”. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, professor of Linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, says, “The temporal element is very important. It was used to separate the eternal time, to which monks were devoted in the monasteries versus ordinary, everyday time. So, this defines the division of church and state in the history of western democracy.”

Nair finds the pun ‘sickular’, which includes the word ‘sick’, a very complex sort of abuse. “It is like saying your party is sick, you are sick. This word has no sustaining value. It is just a word that you deploy, and you are not genuine. You are not healthy.” The word secular is an adjective, unlike the word democracy, which is a noun. Therefore, it can also be applied to people, political formations and so on. So, the availability of a word, in terms of its abusiveness, depends partly on the function it serves.

However, Indian secularism is different from the west. Rajeev Bhargava, a professor with the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, says, “Indian secularism is not anti-rel- igious.” It is about respecting all religions, while maintaining a distance from them. He believes that as a nation “we imagined a mode of existence to which accommodation and acceptance were central” and “the Indian Constitution guarantees some rights to religious minorities to achieve communal harmony”.

Providing certain rights and safeguards to minorities is not appeasement, he says. It helps them grow in society. “For instance, if all of us want to go up, we will build stairs. But for older people, pregnant women and the physically challenged, it might not be easy to climb them. So, we build escalators to enable them to achieve what others already have.” Minority groups should not suffer because they are smaller in numbers. They too must have what the majority community has.

For Bhargava, it is ‘unfortunate’ when people call these provisions ‘pro-minority’ policies. He adds, “It creates the impression that minorities secure those things at the expense of the majority. That may happen sometimes but not if the measures have been conceived thoughtfully.”

According to Bhargava, Indian secularism is about “critical respect” towards every religion. This means the state “cannot show respect for each and every aspect of religion. It has to combine overall respect with disrespect towards features that are oppressive and degrading.” Hence the ban on untouchability and the state’s attempt to reform personal laws that are unjust to women.

The politics of opportunism exercised by almost all parties for electoral gains has apparently led to the degeneration of secularism as a concept in India. Sadly, according to Bhargava, political parties have taken ‘critical’ out of the critical respect (for every religion) and reduced it to making deals with the loudest, most fanatical, orthodox and aggressive sections of every religion”. Therefore, political parties either refrain from addressing religion or do so only when it is in their electoral interest. In Indian politics, this has become quite conspicuous.

In the last few years, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, for example, has often been invoking his Hindu identity. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal earmarked funds for the pilgrimage to Ayodhya. Recently, he even demanded pictures of Laxmi and Ganesha on currency notes. Not be left behind, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav too is seen opting for ‘Hindutva strategies’. The Bharatiya Janata Party, on the other hand, is not only comfortable boasting about its Hindutva politics but also aggressively furthering its agenda. This all shows that non-BJP political parties are no longer comfortable with the tag of being ‘secularist’, as they fear it may push them towards an electorally disadvantaged position. Though, this is not a new trend. From the Shah Bano case to the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute, political parties have always given primacy to electoral gains over practising secularism.

No surprises then if a section of academicians, who are not influenced by the Hindu nationalist thought, too contests the viability of the concept of secularism in the Indian context. Ashis Nandy, one of the forerunners of such academicians and social theorists, believes that the largest section of Indian state functionaries “has never been entirely secular and wholeheartedly implemented secular policies”. He writes in an essay, ‘Closing the Debate on Secularism’, part of an anthology titled The Crisis of Secularism in India, “They have made compromises all the way. For instance, instead of being irreligious, they have tried to get away with equal respect for all religions.”

Nandy further adds that to propagate secularism, one has to invoke non-secular icons. He says, “Kabir, Lalan and Shah Latif, the Baul singers of Bengal and the Charans of Rajasthan, and names from history like Ashoka, Akbar, Dara Shikoh, Mohan Das Karamchand Gandhi, and Narayan Guru, none of whom drew their principles or values from the ideology of secularism.” He, therefore, believes, “secularism has become the last refuge of the intellectually lazy, of those who refuse to confront the logic of their own political and cultural choices”.

It comes as no surprise that expressions such as ‘secularists’, ‘secular intellectuals’ and ‘secular brigade’, along with ‘sickular’, are quite often used as an insult. However, one thing is quite clear: a question about the functionality of secularism is rife. It is the result of an overall disenchantment with the idea of secularism among many who not only think secular parties have failed the country but also suggest failure of ‘secularism’ as an idea. Nair points out, “Secularism was always part of our conceptual apparatus.” But the concept in troubled times has provided people a pretext, and rightly so, to criticise those who they think are not following it in letter and spirit.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Lost in Translation")