The Great Indian Political Debate - 3

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Make Geeta national dharma shastra: HC</b>

Allahabad: In a judgement that may ruffle many feathers, the Allahabad High Court has said that Bhagvad Geeta should be made the national dharma shastra of the country and it should be considered a fundamental duty of all citizens to follow the 'dharma' (sublime duty) as propounded by it. "As India has recognised its national flag, national anthem... Bhagvad Geeta may be considered as national (rashtriya) dharma shastra," Justice SN Srivastava has observed.
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[acharya]

Editorial
Nation State or Dharmashala?
By R. Balashankar

Most of the problems India confronts today have their origin in the country’s Independence. We have inherited them with our freedom on August 15, 1947.

The freedom struggle against the British, which started in 1857, with the first War of Independence was also an exercise in defining our nationhood. The partition of India was a tragedy. It was artificial. It was the success and culmination of the two nation theory propounded by Muslim separatists, who were represented by the Muslim League, Aligarh Muslim University alumni, Deoband clergy and Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

The tragedy of partition could have been made into a golden opportunity to define our nationhood. If the composite culture of India, the Hindu heritage and the Bharatiya identity were declared the foundations of this nationhood many problems of today would not have been there. It was convenient for the Congress rulers then to leave things vague. The British too played a role in keeping the bundle of pestering sores alive.

Independent India could have identified and clearly laid down the frontiers of this Nation State. The Constitution is the basis of this Nation State. We have accepted the tricolour as our national flag. We have a national anthem and a national song. We have a national language and a link language, we have an inviolable geographical boundary.

A whole lot of issues which are today traumatising the nation could have been settled long before if the leaders at the time of Independence had shown the political will. Instead, they left it to the future generations of India to settle, enclosing them as “Directive Principles’ in the Indian Constitution. The issues of Uniform Civil Code, ban on cow slaughter, equal wages for equal work, total prohibition and many others could have been settled with finality. Having been divided on religious lines to create a Muslim Pakistan we had every reason to enact laws that were in keeping with our national interest, security, pride and culture.

Directive Principles of State Policy are in Part IV of the Constitution. They are not justiciable i.e one cannot go to court over the rights mentioned in this chapter. These are the the guidelines of the Constitution makers for good governance and progressing towards a strong Nation State.

The cow is worshipped by Hindus. But in many parts of the country, cow is slaughtered and the revered animal is exported illegally for its meat. There have been several agitations in the country demanding a complete ban on cow and calf slaughter. These have been mainly spearheaded by sants and religious leaders. But the successive governments have largely ignored the issue. Some states and religious groups behave as if slaughtering a cow is a matter of faith and pride. This, in the land of ahimsa, Buddha and the Mahatma.

Total prohibition is a far cry now, with the state governments (including the Delhi state) launching official vents. The revenue earned from liquor and the booty from the liquor contracts are too lucrative for the state to give up.

Women constitute more than half the workforce in the country. The early urban picture may have been slightly different. But in the labour intensive agriculture, construction and other sectors women have been working equal if not more. But even today, women are paid less than men. This provision of equal wage for equal work has been enshrined in the Directive Principles, and are yet to be implemented.

Uniform Civil Code is an issue which the politicians avoid like a mine field. They circumvent it, sidestep and never address it. A number of issues of serious concern, like women’s rights, equal justice, equal opportunity, ban on conversions by enticement, population policy, dowry and marriage and other civil laws are being subverted in the absence of a Uniform Civil Code. All unifying aspects of Nation State get ignored and diversity is emphasised from all possible platforms.

There is very little incentive to learn Sanskrit, the treasure house of our knowledge and heritage. But state funded madrasas teach foreign languages alien culture and semitic adventurism. More than 59 years after Independence the people of India are divided along religious lines in the eye of the judiciary, law and the legal system. For the same offence against women, a Muslim gets a different ruling and a Hindu gets a different ruling and so does a Christian. The recent spate of women abuse in the country has once again highlighted the need for a Uniform Civil Code.

Of the 19 Directive Principles, only the ones on Village Panchayat and Right to Education have been made into law. The others like participation of workers in management, separation of judiciary from executive, public health, free legal aid, universal humane working conditions, maternity relief and protection of environment and wildlife have remained just pious goals of the Constitution of India.

These are all issues confronting the nation, challenging the concept of India as a secular Nation State. The people who live in this country are expected to be loyal—worshipful—of the identities of our nationhood. And what are they? Has anyone attempted to define them?

Have we even launched a national campaign to propagate and popularise—create wider awareness of these concepts? Except for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and a few other nationalist organisations nobody bothers to campaign on these issues. The Constitution enjoins upon us to adhere to these principles, implement them and ensure respect for them in the conduct of the citizens.

But day in and day out we see these are violated, defiled even challenged by fissiparous elements. Politicians are always pussyfooting on issues of national honour. Divisive elements get a fillip whenever a government panders to divided loyalties. Reservations based on religion have no constitutional sanction. People or organisations challenging the integrity of the nation, asking for special rights or autonomous status are drilling a hole in the heart of the Indian Nation State. There should be no place for Article 370, for instance, in a free secular democracy. It was meant to be temporary.

Indians, especially Hindus are a very tolerant lot. We take a lot of nonsense, violence and even intimidation in our stride. But this tolerance should not be mistaken for timidity.

A recent survey in The Guradian said every two out of three Muslims in Britain want to leave that country after the 7/7 serial blasts! This is the result of the social and administrative pressure and communal ostracisation on that religious group. The open discrimination against the citizens who are colour different. One instance of terrorist violence where 58 people were killed and 700 injured has changed the attitude of an entire nation to a recalcitrant minority.

Compare this with the Indian response. For decades we have been facing Muslim terrorism, in which nearly 70,000 Indian lives have been lost. A religious minority in the North-east is encouraging militant insurgency. Yet, we have a political system that pampers minorityism in the name of vote bank. We allow millions of Bangladeshi infiltrators, to destroy our social fabric, destabilise our border states and imposes a debilitating burden on the economy. India once offered asylum for the tormented and persecuted. Now it is fast becoming a dharmashala. If India has to exist as a nation, we have to insist and enforce, that every individual living in this country has to unequivocally declare affinity, respect and commitment to the symbols of the Indian Nation State, the national flag, national song, the Constitution and geographic integrity. Our national heros have to be recognised and respected. And national sentiments honoured. This is the message of this Independence Day special.

[acharya]

Agenda

Relationship between rashtra and dharma-II
The concept of dharma
By M.G. Vaidya

Our dharma teaches to connect us to all these that is around us. And how to connect ourselves with these so-called inanimate things? Dharma lays down that it is possible through a sentiment of reverence. As said earlier, the highest and the noblest symbol of reverence is our mother. Regard the whole creation (srishti) as your mother l`f”Vekrk- With this sentiment the earth becomes Hkwekrk, a cow becomes xksekrk, a river becomes yksdekrk. Ganga is not a mere collection of oxides of hydrogen-H20s, it is xaxkkekrk. Our dharma has conferred sanctity on trees, flowers and animals, by associating them with this or that form of the godhood.

Dharma provides people a basis for evolving their particular value system. On the solid foundation of dharma, peoples’ culture, i.e. sanskriti is established. I said that dharma is a principle of universal harmony. At the very first step, there must be harmony between individuals and the society. This can happen only if individuals regard themselves as part and parcel, really as constituents, of society. Some thinkers say that there is a contract between the individual and society. Now contract comes into being only among aliens, or unconnected existences that come together for each other’s material benefit. This contract theory is not acceptable to us. We are for an ingredient theory, for an integrationist theory. It is true that individuals constitute the society, but it must not be forgotten that the individual is a part, while the society is a whole. And a whole is not just the addition of the individuals, it is something more than that. This thought is beautifully contained in a famous hymn of Shankara. In his famous “kV~inhLrks= he says, “Oh Lord, though because of realisation of oneness with You, I am of You but not You of me. A wave is of the ocean and not a ocean of the wave.” On the firm foundation of the integrationist or holistic view, there can the immutable harmony between individual and human society.

Relation with nature
But the human society does not exhaust the whole universe. There are birds and animals, trees and flowers, mountains and rivers, stars and planets. Our dharma teaches to connect us to all these existences. And how to connect ourselves with these so-called inanimate things? Dharma lays down that it is possible through a sentiment of reverence. As said earlier, the highest and the noblest symbol of reverence is our mother. Regard the whole creation (srishti) as your mother. l`f”Vekrk- With this sentiment the earth becomes Hkwekrk, a cow becomes xksekrk, a river becomes yksdekrk. Ganga is not a mere collection of oxides of hydrogen-H20s, it is xaxkkekrk. Our dharma has conferred sanctity on trees, flowers and animals, by associating them, with this or that form of the godhood. The tree Bilva with Lord Shankara, Tulsi with Vishnu, Oudumber with Dattatraya, Vata (banyan) with Savitri. Animals too are associated. Cow with Lord Krishna, the bull with Shankara, even a snake with Shankara, eagle with Vishnu, the lion with goddess Durga, even a little mouse with Ganesh. Every hilltop is made sacred by instituting a temple on it. The Himalaya is Devatatma (nsorkRek). And this association can come only through a spirit of reverence as ordained by dharma.

And lastly dharma connects the whole creation with the Supreme Spirit: call it by whatever name you like or worship it in whatever form you wish. This is the domain of religions. The ultimate aim is to achieve unison with Him. There can be a number of paths to reach the unison. And all paths can be valid. Just as water fallen from the skies, ultimately reaches the ocean, so also obeisance to any symbol of God reaches the Supreme Spirit (ijekRek). Thus dharma vouches for the appreciation of plurality of faiths. It is inclusive. In this sense, Hinduism is a dharma, I can even say that it is the dharma. And this dharma has evolved our culture, i.e. our value-system. This value-system guarantees people to choose their way of worship and have their own rituals.

Dharma’s inevitability
As a nation is conceived to be resting on the culture, dharma becomes imperative for the nation, because culture or laLÑfr is based on the principles of dharma. The root meaning of laLÑfr is to become good. To remain as it is, is çÑfr. To fall below çÑfr is foÑfr (perverseness). Man alone has the potential to become good. He alone can become perverse. Animals behave as per their çÑfr. Therefore it is said that, hunger, sleep, fear and sex are common to both animals and human beings. Dharma is the special characteristic of man. Those that are devoid of dharma are no better than animals. Thus dharma makes us men of a broader perception, of noble mind, and wider attitude. If you build house for you, it is no dharma. If you build a house for other to live, then dharmashala comes up. Dharmashala is not a religious school. You may store any number of medicines for your health, it is no dharma. When you minister to the health-needs of others then that arrangement gets a name of dharmartha hospital. Dharmartha hospital does not treat any religion. Dharmakanta (/keZdkaVk) is a balance, it is so called, because it gives the true weight of a thing. Dharmakanta joins you with truth, Rajdharma means those duties of king or a Government that join him with the people i.e. iztk. And putradharma means those duties of a son that join him with his parents. Thus dharma joins the people to the good of other people.

Our ldeals
On this foundation are based our icons and ideals. Rama, in order to obey the orders of his stepmother, preferred to accept the forest life to ascending the throne. He could have easily brushed away that wish of his father and the stepmother and become the King of Ayodhya. People of Ayodhya would have backed his coronation. Rama does not do that. Rama becomes our ideal. Bharat got the throne, after Rama’s abdication; but he refuses, goes to Rama, brings his sandals, carries them on his head and installs them on the throne. Bharat becomes our ideal. Prince Siddhartha is surrounded by all types of luxuries, almost enmeshed in them, but when he sees the sorrows and miseries of human life, he abandons the palace, to find out the ways to remove these miseries. Siddhartha becomes Bhagwan Buddha. A commander of a king, after defeating the enemy, brings the beautiful woman of the enemy to be presented to the king, in the hope that the king will be pleased by this novel present. But no, the king is displeased. He sends back, with honour, the lady to her in-laws. Chhatrapati Shivaji becomes our ideal king. Panna is just an ordinary maidservant who is entrusted to protect the prince. The murderer comes with a sword drawn in his hand and threateningly asks her, where the prince is. She indicates towards the bed of her own child and sees before her very eyes the murder of her son, but protects the price. Panna becomes our ideal of devotion to duty. Thus, these great men and women create a value-system for which they had paid the price of their selfish desires. Therefore, in order to make the nation consisting of men who are selfless, of unblemished character, you need the teaching and eventual practice of dharma. Thus dharma and the Nation are intimately related. Without dharma people who are strong are bound to become selfish, corrupt, cruel and intolerant; and those that are weak and meek, slavish and submissive, always trodden under the feet of the aggressors and the tormentors. Rampant corruption, inhuman cruelty and social disharmony that we see in the world in general and our country in particular is because we have ignored if not abandoned, the plans to inculcate the principles of dharma in our people. Mere economic prosperity cannot make people good. Man’s desires are insatiable. Man is very possessive. Without dharma he will become a glutton in the matter of eating and a sensuous libertine in the matter of sex. In order that a nation does not fall a prey to the permissive instincts, and the human society does not stoop to the animal level, dharma is essential. Dharma ensures a moral, a restrained, a disciplined, a cooperative, a tolerant, in short a humane civil life. Such a life alone is a guarantee for world peace and world order. Unlike religion, dharma is both secular and spiritual. The combination and interdependence of these two aspects of human life, only, can ensure the dharma, i.e. sustenance and maintenance of the people. The Mahabharat defines dharma as follows:

(Concluded)

(The writer is a senior journalist and former spokesperson of RSS.)

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A Kingdom of Another World (pdf)

8.3. Conclusion

Is secularism a Christian value? Two kinds of problems we have encountered in the Indian debate bring us to a positive answer. On the one hand, the secularists in India argue for the separation of the political and the religious domains, but they do not know what constitutes the identity of either domain. Yet, principles that prohibit the intrusion of religion in the political realm or that declare the freedom of religion are intelligible only if one has a theory in the background, which allows one to identify religion and the way it differs from the secular political world. In this sense, the case of the Indian secularism debate has given us more evidence for the hypothesis that the modern liberal conception of toleration is the product of the secularisation of the Protestant theology of Christian liberty. Against the background of this religious framework, the strict separation of the realm of religious liberty from that of political coercion makes perfect sense. Once such a principle is exported to a culture other than the West, however, it loses its significance and its fruitfulness as a foundation for the resolution of the conflicts between different communities in society. The only role it can play is that of a normative dogma, which presupposes the superiority of western political theory to the traditional forms of pluralism in Indian society.

On the other hand, we have seen that the model of liberal pluralism is not—and cannot be—neutral between the Hindu traditions and the Semitic religions in the Indian plural society. When it comes to an issue like conversion, it turns out that the liberal secular state has adopted the theological view shared by the Semitic religions about the nature of religion and the different cultural traditions of humankind. This does not only create a problem in the liberal political theory’s claim to religious neutrality. It also shows that liberal toleration generates inter-community conflict in the Indian society—rather than alleviating it—precisely because of its theological nature. Both intuitions of the Indian anti-secularists, then, have been captured by the argument of this chapter. On the one hand, secularism has become a barren idea in India, because of its western-Christian origins. On the other hand, it causes ruptures in the fabric of Indian society, instead of allowing these to heal.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

Secularism, Toleration and
the Decline of Indian Pluralism


No society has been celebrated as much for its cultural and religious diversity as
that of the Indian subcontinent. If we wandered through an important city in India
during any of the previous twelve centuries, the number of different cultural groups
we encountered in this society would be vast in comparison to the religious variety
in the seventeenth-century Dutch town we visited earlier. Apart from a range of different
Hindu traditions, historians tell us, the subcontinent was populated by Buddhists,
Jains, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Parsis by the end of the eighth century
(Basham 1969: 264-8, 345-7). In itself, the fact that this extremely plural society did
not collapse indicates that it must have developed successful ways of going about
with cultural and religious diversity. Yet, from the late colonial times onwards, both
Indian and western intellectuals have argued that India needs the modern political
theory of toleration to survive. The liberal model of the neutral state, they suggest, is
as indispensable in India as elsewhere.
In the Indian debate on this issue, the term “secularism” is generally used to
refer to the liberal principles of toleration: a secular state ought to be neutral towards
the various religions in society and it ought to grant to its citizens the right to
religious liberty or freedom of conscience. The Indian Constitution embodies this
model of the liberal plural state. Several of its articles declare the equality of all
citizens before the law, regardless of their religious affiliations. Moreover, Article 25
states the following: “Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other
provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and
the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.” Such legal formulas have
been adopted from the constitutions of the nation states of Europe and America. And
the value of secularism in general, both its advocates and its opponents acknowledge,
has been taken from the modern West and liberal-democratic political theory (e.g.
Madan 1987: 754; Mahajan 2002: 35; Nijwahan 1995: 183-8; Smith 1963: 22; Taylor
1998: 37; Vanaik 1997: 29).
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The common recognition of the western origins of secularism leads the secularists
and the anti-secularists to very different conclusions. The latter argue that it has
become a sterile concept in India because of its alien origins. As a consequence, it
has not alleviated the conflicts between the Hindus on one side and the Muslims
and Christians on the other, but rather created more tensions. Shortly, secularism is a
western and Christian value unfit for the South-Asian societies. This point of view is
taken by Gandhian anti-secularists such as T. N. Madan (1987) and Ashis Nandy (1985,
1998, 1999). It is also shared by many of the Hindutva thinkers—the so-called “Hindu
nationalists”—who argue that the native “Hindu secularism” is superior to the western
brand (Madhok 1995; Nijwahan 1995). In contrast, the secularists disagree that
the western or Christian origin of this idea creates difficulties in India. Thus, Charles
Taylor (1998: 37) writes: “The Christian origins of the idea are undeniable, but this
does not have to mean that it has no application elsewhere.” Mushirul Hasan (1996:
202) makes the following remark: “The central issue is not the Western provenance
of an idea but its place and relevance in a plural society.” The sociologist Andre Beteille
(1994: 560) has similar reservations about the rejection of the idea of secularism
because of its western roots: “Surely, the test of an idea or an institution should be its
capacity to meet our present needs and not its provenance…[G]eography can never
be a decisive test of the social value of an idea or institution.”
Naturally, the Gandhian anti-secularists and the Hindutva thinkers do not reject
the idea of secularism merely because of its western origins. If this was their
reason for doing so, they would also have to dispose of the theories of the natural
sciences—from Newton to Darwin and beyond. They do not. What they question is
the place and relevance of secularism in the Indian plural society and its capacity to
meet the present needs of this society. The issue they raise is not that the idea originates
in the Christian West, but that it is a western and Christian idea, which is of no
significance to the Indian culture and society. However, the retort of the secularists
shows that the anti-secularist argument fails to make it clear what exactly is western
or Christian about the idea of secularism and how its western and Christian nature
creates difficulties in India.
What is the connection between secularism and its culture of origin, the West?
In the previous chapters, Balagangadhara’s theory of religion and its role in the formation
of the western culture has brought us to a hypothesis that allows us to answer
this question. The modern liberal conception of toleration makes sense only against
the background of a particular religious framework. On the one hand, the normative
structure of toleration is the consequence of a specific cultural attitude towards human
society: the incessant pursuit to make a Christian society how it ought to be according
to God’s Will has given rise to a normative ideal like toleration. On the other
hand, the conceptual structure of the notion of toleration or secularism has emerged
from the secularisation of Protestant theology. Its theological core is the presupposi314
tion that human society is divided into a sphere of political coercion and a sphere of
religious liberty. In this sense, liberal toleration could indeed be called “a western
and Christian idea.”
How could the Indian proponents of liberal secularism challenge this hypothesis?
If their theories gave a consistent analysis of the conflicts and tensions in India’s
plural society—which demonstrated that the principles of secularism are the evident
conceptual solution—then the secularists would show that the notion of secularism
has become independent of its religious foundations in the West. These theories
would have to disclose a necessary connection between the structure of the conflicts
and that of the principles of secularism or liberal toleration. The first section of
this chapter will address two questions: Have the Indian secularists produced such
a consistent theoretical analysis which demonstrates that secularism is the solution
to the conflicts between Hindus, Muslims and other groups in the Indian society? If
they have not, how do we account for the deep-seated conviction that secularism is
necessary in India?
What difficulties could the link between liberal secularism and its culture of
origin cause, when its normative principles are transplanted to India? One of the
central claims of liberal political theory is its neutrality towards all religions. However,
if the model of the liberal secular state is based in a Christian theological framework,
its claim to neutrality becomes dubious. In the second section, we will have a closer
look at the clash over state neutrality between the secularists and the anti-secularists
(including both the Gandhian anti-secularists and the Hindutva thinkers) by focusing
on one of its central issues, i.e. the issue of religious conversion. Our question is the
following: Is the secular state in India neutral between the different communities in
its society, when it comes to this issue? The question of conversion in India, we will
see, offers us a unique way to assess the neutrality of the liberal political theory of
toleration.

Secularism and the Absence of Theory
Since the declaration of Independence in 1947, the question of toleration and the
secular state has been at the centre of the struggle between the different political
forces in Indian society. With the rise of the Hindu Right and the growing intensity
of Hindu-Muslim conflict in recent decades, this issue has once again become as
urgent as it was in the aftermath of Partition. The growing tensions between Hindus
and Muslims in India today cannot be ignored. The gruesome riots which erupted
in the state of Gujarat in 2002 bear witness to this fact. And so did the destruction of
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the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and the consequent eruption of riots in various Indian
cities ten years before. Therefore, India needs secularism.
At least, that is what “the secularists”—the proponents of liberal toleration—tell
us. Indian society is characterised by its religious pluralism, they say, and therefore
the state should be secular, that is, it should be impartial towards all religions. In this
view, the problem with the Hindu Right is that it strives to make the Indian state
into a religious state. If this were done, the state would consistently take the side
of the Hindu majority in conflicts between Hindus and Muslims and it would no
longer be able to curb the violence as an impartial arbiter. In short, the basic fear of
the secularist thinkers is that India threatens to fall apart if the domain of politics is
not separated from that of religion. It is this view that brings them to sweeping statements
such as the following: “Secularism, for India, is not simply a point of view, it is
a question of survival” (Rushdie 1990: 19).
Since this group of Indian intellectuals attaches such importance to the idea of
secularism, one would expect its content to be more or less clear. However, whenever
the participants in the debate attempt to pinpoint what secularism is, they end up in
obscurity and confusion. In the 1970s, Mushir-Ul-Haq (1972: 6) made the following
remark: “For the last two decades Indians have been talking of secularism, yet the
term remains vague and ambiguous. One may, therefore, be justified in asking: what
does secularism really mean—especially in the Indian context?” Twenty years later,
M. M. Sankhdher (1995: 1-2) articulated the same concern: “Such a commonplace
concept as secularism, with which the man in the street is so familiar and so used to,
tends to acquire the character of a riddle, a puzzle, an enigma amongst intelligentsia.”
In the last few decades, analogous remarks have surfaced again and again. Some
point out “the curious absence, the startling and significant vacuity of the notion
‘secularism’ itself,” and go so far as to claim that the notion has become “a sort of
mantra, a quasi-religious incantation” (Rai 1989: 2770-1). Others put it mildly and
say there is a tendency among Indian intellectuals to interpret the concept in their
own subjective manner (Khan 1994: 373), or they use more pointed terms: “Like
liberal Hindu gods who can take different forms and give a chance to the devotees
to worship in any form they like, in India the concept of secularism has acquired
so many interpretations and it now means different things to different groups of
people” (Srikanth 1994: 39). Whether Muslim or Hindu, rightist or leftist, sociologist
or political scientist, these thinkers all agree on this one point: the term “secularism”
has so many different meanings in the Indian context that it appears to have lost all
meaning.
This section will argue that the semantic confusion surrounding “secularism”
masks a more basic problem in the Indian debate. Instead of being embedded in
a well-structured theoretical framework, the notion of “secularism” or “the secular
316
state” consists of a number of isolated normative propositions—about the separation
of politics and religion and the right to religious freedom—proclaimed as though
these are self-evidently true. First, I will show that the principle of the separation of
politics and religion does not make much sense, because it is based on an arbitrary
distinction between “the religious” and “the political.” Next, we note that a similar
problem confronts the principle of religious liberty: when it is unclear how to identify
the domain of religion, it will be equally vague what it means to secure freedom in
this domain. As a consequence, the tenets of the liberal secular state are not intelligible
in the Indian context, because the theoretical background required to make
sense of them is nowhere to be found.
The Religious and the Political
Not all participants in the secularism debate express difficulties in making sense of
the concept around which the debate revolves. Those who intend to protect the secular
character of the Indian state from the onslaught of the Hindu Right often provide
definitions that appear to leave no doubt as to the meaning of the term. “Secularism,”
they say, requires the separation of the state from religion in general, from all faiths,
or from any particular religious order, or it stands for the separation of religious and
non-religious institutions (Smith 1963; Gopal 1993: 13; Sen 1996: 13; Bhargava 1998b:
488). As secularists, they defend “the demarcation of two realms of existence, the
separation of church from state, of the sacred from the secular” or they reformulate
this in terms of a “distinction between the area of individual autonomy and of secular
or social control” (Chatterji 1995: x). When the secularists argue that this notion is
indispensable in India, it is their burden to produce a theoretical description of the
Indian situation, which demonstrates that the separation of politics and religion is its
only conceptual solution.
At the very least, any such description has to answer two basic questions. Firstly,
it should be able to tell us what properties distinguish the religious domain from the
secular or the political (or vice versa). If there is no theoretical clarity on what makes
some phenomena of Indian culture into religious phenomena or some institutions of
Indian society into religious institutions, then there is simply no point in stating that
the religious ought to be separated from the political. Secondly, the belief that the
secular state offers the one reasonable political answer to the Hindu-Muslim strife
in India derives from the underlying belief that it is the only viable solution to the
predicament of religious pluralism. For this inference to hold, the description should
identify the general properties of religious pluralism and show that these properties
can also be discerned in the Hindu-Muslim problem. In other words, it has to de317
scribe the structure that distinguishes the problem of religious pluralism or religious
strife from other problems of human coexistence. As the cogency of the “secularism
discourse” depends on these two issues, we will examine the extent to which they
are satisfactorily addressed by some of the prominent Indian advocates of secularism.
When India became independent, it was obvious to most leaders of the Indian
National Congress that it had to become a secular state, because they considered this
to be the only form of government that would secure the peaceful co-existence of
Hindus and Muslims. This view found one of its strongest proponents in Jawaharlal
Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister, who went so far as to assert that “no
state can be civilised except a secular state” (cited in Chandra 1994: 79). According to
the chief interpreter of Nehruvian secularism, the historian Bipan Chandra, Nehru’s
definition of secularism was four-pronged:
Secularism meant first, separation of religion from political, economic, social and
cultural aspects of life, religion being treated as a purely personal matter; second,
dissociation of the state from religion; third, full freedom to all religions and
tolerance of all religions; and four, equal opportunities for followers of all religions,
and no discrimination and partiality on grounds of religion (Chandra 1994: 63).
Prima facie, this may appear to be a precise definition. However, when one is aware of
the confusion surrounding the concept of religion, its obscurity becomes baffling. As
Balagangadhara (1994) argued earlier, we do not know today what makes something
into religion. No theory is available that explains the characteristics of the religious
domain. If this is unclear, however, it will also be impossible to separate religion from
“political, economic, social and cultural aspects of life.” One does not know what practices,
beliefs or institutions need to be separated from what other practices, beliefs
or institutions. The Nehruvian secularism turns out to be a scarcely intelligible idea
once one tries to give content to its principle of the separation of religion from the
different domains of public life.
The ambiguity can be shown in B. R. Ambedkar’s interventions in the Constituent
Assembly Debates—the debates leading to the formulation of the Indian Constitution.
At the time of Independence, Ambedkar was the main advocate of some of the
oppressed groups in Indian society. As such, he was a strong proponent of importing
the western liberal notions of state neutrality and equal human rights, because he
believed the injustices of Indian society had to be blamed on the Hindu religion and
its caste system. This stance determined his contributions to the formation of the
Indian constitution. He argued for the adoption of many articles from the constitutions
of western liberal democracies, especially where it concerned the separation
of the state and religion. Given this background, one would expect some clarity in
Ambedkar’s understanding of the role of religion in the Indian society. However:
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The religious conceptions in this country are so vast that they cover every
aspect of life from birth to death. There is nothing which is not religion and if
personal law is to be saved I am sure about it that in social matters we will come
to a standstill…There is nothing extraordinary in saying that we ought to strive
hereafter to limit the definition of religion in such a manner that we shall not
extend it beyond beliefs and such rituals as may be connected with ceremonials
which are essentially religious (Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. 7: p. 781; cited in
Chatterjee 1998: 356).
Religion seems easily identifiable to Ambedkar since he sees that it covers every
aspect of life from birth to death. Naturally, he should be aware that when there
is nothing which is not “religion,” the term loses all meaning. Next, he proposes
that political expediency obliges us to limit the definition of religion. How will we
find out what is really religion and what not? The extraordinary answer is that we
shall define it in terms of beliefs and rituals connected with ceremonials that are
essentially religious. When we are still striving to define what religion is, how can we
possibly know what things are essentially religious? In this quote, it is painfully clear
how arbitrary the statements about the role of religion in Indian society are. One
can feel that “religion” covers every aspect of life in India, and one can at the same
time propose that “religion” ought to be limited to those things which one feels are
“essentially religious.” In the absence of a consistent theory of religion, there is no
firm cognitive ground for any of these feelings. One can invent definitions of “the
religious” according to one’s personal intuitions or one’s political aims.
These theoretical problems in the principles of secularism will not disappear
when the notion “religion” is replaced by “Hinduism,” because that strategy confronts
us with similar questions as to what Hinduism is, whether it is religion or not,
or even whether it exists or not. Nehru himself would certainly admit that these are
thorny issues:
Hinduism, as a faith, is vague, amorphous, many-sided, all things to all men. It is
hardly possible to define it, or indeed to say whether it is a religion or not in the
usual sense of the word. In its present form, and even in the past, it embraces
many beliefs and practices, from the highest to the lowest, often opposed to or
contradicting each other. Its essential spirit seems to be live and let live (Nehru
1946: 75).
It is impossible to identify something which can hardly be defined, which is vague,
amorphous, many-sided, and all things to all men. And when one does not succeed
in identifying the Hindu religion, how can one even dream of separating it from the
state or from the public sphere? Surely a serious problem is involved here. In the
words of a specialist, Richard Zaehner, there is no particular set of dogmas that define
the Hindu religion:
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…Hinduism is quite free from any dogmatic affirmations concerning the nature
of God, and the core of religion is never felt to depend on the existence or nonexistence
of God, or on whether there is one God or many; for it is perfectly
possible to be a good Hindu whether one’s personal views incline towards monism,
monotheism, polytheism, or even atheism. This is not what ultimately matters
(Zaehner 1966: 2; italics mine).
As R. N. Dandekar points out, the social scientific study of Hinduism has long accepted
that this “religion” defies all attempts at definition:
…Hinduism does not insist on any particular religious practice as being obligatory,
nor does it accept any doctrine as its dogma. Hinduism can also not be identified
with a specific moral code. Hinduism, as a religion, does not convey any definite or
unitary idea. There is no dogma or practice which can be said to be either universal
or essential to Hinduism as a whole (Dandekar 1971: 237).
Basically, the conclusion is that the Hindu religion does not have any properties—i.e.
any common beliefs or practices—that allow us to recognise it.
These have become platitudes today, but they hide a vital quandary in making
sense of the notion of secularism in India. If the Hindu religion does not have any
clear properties, how shall we determine when this religion intrudes into the political
domain? When does a state become a Hindu state, as opposed to a secular state?
When the government publicly cites Rama as the prototype of the ethical king? Or
when it consults an astrologer before making an important political decision? When
a puja ritual is done in parliament? Any answer to these and similar questions will be
derived from the properties that distinguish the class of things Hindu from that of
things secular. Since there is not the least consensus on the properties of the Hindu
religion, one can fix this standard as one chooses. Accordingly, one can give one’s own
interpretation as to what it means for India to be a secular state.
Besides, if the essential spirit of the Hindu traditions seems to be “live and let
live,” what then is the point of arguing for secularism or toleration in India? In the
West, such great import was assigned to “the separation of church and state” because
the Christian confessions had given rise to intolerant states, which imposed one specific
form of doctrine, discipline and worship upon the subjects. Considering that the
Hindu traditions do not regard any practice or doctrine as obligatory, it is impossible
that contemporary India is confronted with the same threat of a persecuting religious
state, and that it is in need of the same safeguard of the secular state.
At this point, the objection may arise that although it is quite true that Hinduism
generally has no difficulty with accommodating all kinds of practices and beliefs, the
more dogmatic and intolerant form of Hindutva or “Hindu nationalism” also exists,
and that therefore the Hindu religion should be separated from the state in India.
For such an objection to be meaningful, one will have to demonstrate what makes
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the various Hindu traditions into a “Hindu religion” (or several Hindu religions, for
that matter), how the religious elements of this religion are present in an excessive
form in the discourses and practices of Hindutva, and what it would mean to separate
these elements from politics. These questions have not even been addressed by the
secularists. Thus, one cannot but conclude that they presuppose that the current difficulties
in Indian politics and society should be understood in terms of the relation
between “the religious” and “the political”—while they have no clue as to how to
identify these domains of life and society.
This one assumption is constitutive of the entire debate. For instance, the Nobel
Laureate Amartya Sen (1996: 13-14) argues that the principle of secularism does
not require the state to steer clear of an association with any religious matter whatsoever:
“Rather, what is needed is to ensure that in so far as the state has to deal with
different religions and members of different religious communities, there must be
a basic symmetry of treatment.” The virtue of this approach, he emphasises, is that
the requirement of symmetric treatment leaves open the question as to what form
that symmetry should take. Two imaginary examples are sufficient to assess the consequences
of Sen’s liberality. The first is that of some predominantly Muslim state,
which allows freedom of religion to the minorities, but also proclaims that all women
should wear full burqa. The second example asks us to imagine a time in the future
at which the Indian state enacts a law that forbids the consumption of meat to all
citizens. Both states are still politically secular according to Sen’s principle, since they
treat the members of different religious communities in a symmetric manner.
Of course, he may object to these counter-intuitive examples of secularism by
pointing out that these states do not really respect the principle of symmetry because
they impose the religious values or beliefs of the majority on the other communities.
To make this point convincing, however, Sen should show that matters of dress and
diet are part of the religion of the respective majorities. The validity of this argument
depends on the inclusion of these domains of life in some definition of religion.
Therefore, the states in question could argue as convincingly that their measures are
not related to religion in any way—provided they have another definition of religion.
Thus, Sen’s formula of “basic symmetry of treatment” once again illustrates that the
theoretical inadequacy of the secularism discourse is largely due to the lack of clarity
and stability in the essential conceptual distinction between “the religious” and “the
secular.” The resulting equivocation is not limited to the academic debates. Perhaps,
its consequences are best illustrated when the Indian judiciary arbitrarily invokes a
number of differing definitions of Hinduism and religion to decide whether a certain
community belongs to the religion of Hinduism (Galanter 1971) or whether Hindutva
is a religion or a non-religious way of life (Cossman and Kapur 1996).
The principle of the separation of politics and religion is intelligible only if one
provides a consistent theoretical description that clarifies what religion is and what
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makes the various traditions of the subcontinent into religion. Quite obviously, one
can separate “the religious” from “the political” only if one knows how to recognise
these two spheres by identifying at least one of them. To be able to do so, one should
possess a theory that conceptualises either the religious or the political in terms of
the characteristic features of these domains in life and society. These issues being
as opaque as they are, the idea of secularism was bound to become an empty mantra
and such a mantra will certainly fail to counter the dynamics that are currently disrupting
Indian society.
Freedom of What?
Instead of the separation of politics and religion, one could emphasise the importance
of another principle of secularism, namely, that of the freedom of religion. This
step allows us to illustrate how the absence of theory has brought about fundamental
problems in the actual political and legal conflicts on the nature of the secular state
in India. As said, the Indian Constitution grants “freedom of conscience and the right
freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.”
The central difficulty of the principle of freedom of religion surfaced soon in
the courts of independent India: one’s interpretation of this principle is completely
dependent on one’s conception of the religious domain. The fact that there was no
consensus whatsoever on the characteristics of this domain gave rise to confusing
situations. Thus, the Bombay High Court put forward its very own definition of religion
in its interpretation of Article 25 on the freedom of religion. On the basis of this
definition, it suggested that certain aspects of a particular religion were not religious
but really secular in nature:
…[W]hatever binds a man to his own conscience and whatever moral and ethical
principles regulate the lives of men, that alone can constitute religion as understood
in the Constitution. A religion may have many secular activities, it may have
secular aspects, but these secular activities and aspects do not constitute religion
as understood by the constitution (cited in Smith 1998: 197).
In another similar case, the Bombay High Court stated very explicitly that the authority
of a religious body in relation to its members had nothing to do with religion.
The Supreme Court of India, on the contrary, interpreted Article 25 according to a
completely different definition of religion:
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A religion may not only lay down a code of ethical rules for its followers to accept, it
might prescribe rituals and observances, ceremonies and modes of worship which
are regarded as integral parts of religion, and these forms and observance might
extend even to matters of food and dress (Ibid.: 198).
The confusion is obvious. The different courts determine what freedom of religion
entails according to their verdict as to which activities in Indian society are religious
and which are secular. This would be understandable if there were disputes on the
exact scope of the religious domain. Even if the characteristics of this domain were
clear, the precise location of its boundaries would be disputed. Thus, we saw that in
Reformation Europe the location of the boundary between the spiritual kingdom
and the temporal kingdom was a topic of heated debate (see 3.4.). However, in this
debate, both a theological framework and a social background of Christian institutions
were shared. Therefore, the participants knew roughly to which aspects of life
and society they referred when they asserted that all human beings ought to be free
in the spiritual kingdom.
The situation in India is different altogether. There is no such conceptual framework
and no such institutional background. Consequently, the discord regarding the
interpretation of “freedom of religion” in the Indian courts is not about the precise
location of the boundary of the religious domain. There is no clue on how to recognise
this domain in the first place. According to the exigencies of a case, the judge can
propose that certain activities are secular and not religious, without giving any criterion
or arguments.
In one of its judgements, the Supreme Court tried to provide a route to avoid
the problem of figuring out what religion is and what it means for religion to be free.
“What constitutes the essential part of a religion,” it asserted, “is primarily to be ascertained
with reference to the doctrines of that religion itself” (Ibid.). This shifts the
problem. We now confront more difficult questions: What are the religions of India?
Is “Hinduism” one of them? “Hinduism,” we noted, consists of a range of traditions,
all of which tell different stories. Which of these contains the doctrine that determines
the essential part of the Hindu religion? One could also propose that there
are many different Hindu religions. However, given the absence of scriptures or doctrinal
systems that distinguish them, where will we find the respective doctrines
about the essential parts of their religion? Given the absence of a fixed ecclesiastical
authority, who will decide what this doctrine is?
The meaning and implications of the principle of religious freedom became
highly contentious when the question was addressed of a Uniform Civil Code for the
independent India. At the time of the framing of the Constitution, the secularists
had argued that in a secular state all communities should be subject to a common
civil code, which would regulate marriage, inheritance and other family matters. This
gave rise to Article 44 of the “Directive Principles of State Policy” of the Constitution:
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“The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout
the territory of India.” However, the representatives of the Muslim League party in
the Constituent Assembly argued that the Sharia should be retained as the personal
law of the Muslim community. Interestingly, they invoked the principle of religious
liberty as a grounds for the protection of Muslim personal law:
Religious freedom was most prominently invoked in conceptions of a secular
state in the speeches of proponents of Muslim Personal law in the Constituent
Assembly. Many Muslim League representatives argued that religious personal
laws that governed areas such as marriage, divorce and maintenance, were an
essential aspect of religion, and as such, ought to be granted immunity from
state interference…A secular order…was one in which citizens would have full
religious freedom, including the freedom to live by the tenets of their religious
personal law. The secular state would be excluded from the religious realm and
would lack the authority to intervene in matters regulated by religious personal
law (Bajpai 2002: 183).
Clearly, these laws belonged to the realm of religion, so the Muslim politicians reasoned,
and therefore freedom of religion entailed that their community should be
left free by the state to live according to the Sharia. Thus, one of the Muslim League
representatives in the Constituent Assembly Debates argued as follows:
People seem to think that under a secular State, there must be a common law
observed by its citizens in all matters, including matters of their daily life, their
language, their culture, their personal laws. That is not a correct way to look at this
secular State. In a secular State, citizens belonging to different communities must
have the freedom—to practise their own religion, observe their own life and their
personal laws should be applied to them (cited in Shefali 2002).
Another stated that the “right to follow personal law is part of the way of life of those
people who are following such laws; it is part of their religion and part of their culture”
(Ibid.).
The same argument surfaced in the famous Shah Bano case of the 1980s (Rudolph
& Rudolph 2001: 52-3; Tambiah 1998: 427-33). In this case, the Supreme
Court had challenged the status of Muslim personal law by applying the Criminal
Procedure Code to the claim to maintenance of a Muslim wife, Shah Bano, who
had been divorced by her husband. In reaction to this judgement, the largest-ever
agitation of Muslims in independent India was instigated. Eventually, the national
government overruled the Supreme Court judgement through the ratification of the
Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act of 1986, which basically protected
Muslim personal law. In the debate about this Act in the Lok Sabha (the Indian
parliament), Ebrahim Sulaiman Sait, Muslim League leader and one of the chief
proponents of the Act, put forward a typical view when he declared that “secular324
ism…is full freedom to live according to one’s own religion and not interfere with
Shariat religion. The Muslims in this country have therefore full freedom to follow
Shariat as part of their religion” (cited in Bajpai 2002: 189). Frank Anthony, a Christian
Anglo-Indian representative of the Congress Party in the Lok Sabha declared
that secularism means “equal respect for all religions, equal respect for the rights
of minorities” and therefore he felt that “the Muslims today, if they feel that it is a
Koranic injunction…then the Government has, not only an option but a duty to see
that this Bill is passed” (Ibid.). Several other representatives similarly argued that a
secular state ought not to interfere in the religious life of the minorities and ought to
leave all steps towards reform to these communities themselves.
Naturally, the liberal secularists oppose this interpretation of the principle of
religious freedom. They assert that the fact that members of different communities
who are citizens of the same country are governed by different inheritance laws is “an
anachronism indeed in modern India and diametrically opposed to the fundamental
principles of secularism” (Smith 1963: 497-8). Or they complain that “the absence
of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) of even an optional nature has been a concession to
a Muslim fundamentalist leadership adamant about the sanctity of a conservatively
interpreted Sharia” (Vanaik 1997: 46). Another classical suggestion is that the communities
in India have failed to understand the principles of secularism:
The Constitution declares India to be a secular state in which persons are
guaranteed equal protection of the law and where there is to be no discrimination
based on religion, caste, race, sex or place of birth. On the other hand, freedom
of religion is also guaranteed but what is happening is that this freedom is being
exploited by religious groups to infringe fundamental rights and equal protection
of the law. This antagonism between two sets of freedoms arises from the fact
that religious and political groups have not understood or appreciated the basic
principles of secularism (Chatterji 1995: ix).
Freedom of religion, from the perspective of the secularists, cannot be understood
as the freedom to follow the system of “personal law” of one’s religion. Rather, it
entails that the individual is free from all laws in the domain of religion. In the words
of Justice Ruma Pal (2001: 32-3) of the Supreme Court of India: “While laws may be
derived from religion, they do not form part of it, and the need for a uniform civil
code cannot be overstated. It would not impinge on the freedom of an individual’s
conscience, nor on the expression of it.”
This dispute leads to a deadlock. One group insists that the domain of religion
includes the legal restrictions it puts on the matters of family life. If the secular state
and its legal system intrude upon these matters, this is seen as a violation of the tenet
of religious freedom. Another group believes that religion is a private matter of the
individual, which cannot possibly include a legal system like the Sharia. This group
will view the position of the first group as an infringement upon the principle of
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freedom of religion. The secular state is then obliged to interfere in the practices of
the first group and to impose a common civil code on all individual citizens. In other
words, it has to discard the tradition of this community. On what grounds could one
take a position in this conflict on the interpretation of secularism and its principle of
religious freedom?
On cognitive grounds? This would be possible if one had a scientific theory on
the domain of religion in Indian society. This theory would have to tell one what the
characteristics and limits of this domain are, what freedom in this domain entails,
and how it leads to a stable plural society. Such a theoretical foundation cannot be
found for the tenet of freedom of religion. Naturally, one can always take a position
on normative grounds. One could show that the principle of religious liberty as it has
emerged in liberal political theory implies that the individual conscience ought to be
free from all coercive laws in the domain of religion. Hence, a religious community
ought not to impose the laws of its religion on its members. Legal coercion is the
prerogative of the state.
Why should a group like the Indian Muslims accept these normative grounds?
What is the problem in the claim that religion, from an Islamic point of view, does
include religious laws and that, consequently, religious liberty includes the liberty
for a community to live by these laws? The secularists argue that the Islamic doctrine
which argues that the religious domain encompasses the laws of the Sharia is
false. However, they are not able to show that this account of religion is untenable by
providing a cognitively superior theory of religion. Instead, the normative grounds
upon which they take this position assume the truth of a particular understanding of
religion. This understanding fixes the characteristics and the outer limits of the religious
domain as follows: each individual is autonomous in this domain and, therefore,
no religious laws ought to be imposed on the individual citizen.
If a society shares this understanding of religion—if the view has become part
and parcel of its common sense—the principle of freedom of religion appears to
make sense and disputes like the above could be settled in favour of the secularists.
This is what generally happens in the liberal democracies of the contemporary West,
where the majority of the citizens shares the “secular” and “modern” understanding
of religion. However, when it is challenged in a country like India, one confronts the
embarrassing task of showing how and why this view is superior to other views—the
supposedly “religious,” “conservative” and “traditional” ones. In the absence of a
sound theoretical foundation, one can then only conclude that the liberal norm of
religious liberty presupposes the superiority of this understanding of religion.
In the previous chapters, we have seen where this presupposition stems from.
The norm of religious liberty has emerged within the theological framework of anticonfessional
Protestantism. Therefore, the norm will inevitably presuppose the
superiority of its theological understanding of religion. In the words of the earlier
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quoted Constitution of Maryland, religion “is the duty of every man to worship God in
such a manner as he thinks most acceptable to him” (in Perry (ed.) 1952: 349). Or in
the similar words of K. T. Shah, one of the participants in the Constituent Assembly
Debates, “religion is a private affair between man and his god. It has no concern with
anyone else in the world” (Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. 7: 819). As a consequence,
laws cannot possibly belong to the domain of religion, because the relation between
God and every human being’s conscience should always be left free from coercive
laws.
As long as this theological understanding of religion is present in the background,
the principle of religious liberty will not bring about significant conceptual problems.
When the principle is cut loose from this theological background, however, one can
interpret it in different ways according to one’s understanding of the domain of “religion.”
The dispute will be interminable, because no neutral or scientific theoretical
basis exists which allows one to decide between these different views of religion.
This is the problem of the Indian debate on freedom of religion. The problem is not,
as many have argued, caused by the fact that the term “secularism” has acquired a
new meaning in India, namely “equal respect for all religions” (Bajpai 2002: 191;
Chatterjee 1998: 349-51; Madhok 1995: 116). Neither is it a question of “group rights”
or “minority rights” versus “individual rights” (Chandhoke 1999). Rather, the meaning
of “secularism” and “freedom of religion” have become vague and shifting, because
these normative principles have been detached from the theoretical framework
in which they were embedded, viz. the Protestant theology of Christian liberty.
Secular Politics and Plural Religion
It is not that no attempts at all have been undertaken to theorise the religious and
the conflicts it is alleged to cause in India. In fact, a specific terminology has been
coined to study these conflicts, namely, that of “communalism” and its cognates such
as “communal violence” and “communal riots.” What is this phenomenon of communalism?
Nehru defined it as “a narrow group mentality basing itself on religious
community but in reality concerned with political power and patronage for the group
concerned,” or, more bitterly, as “politics under some religious garb, one religious
group being incited to hate another religious group” (cited in Chandra 1994: 62). In
a series of essays, Bipan Chandra has similarly argued that communalism should be
understood as an ideology which connects religious identities with secular interests,
and which suggests that the secular interests of the followers of different religions
are opposed to one another (Chandra 1994: 148-9). Both Nehru and Chandra argue
that the problem is not so much religion itself or even the pluralism of the various
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religious communities, but rather that the religion of the communities is being used
to pursue secular interests in the political domain.
Let us try to illustrate this account of communalism with an example. Imagine a
leader of the Jain community who encourages his followers to engage in a campaign
of non-violent resistance to British rule in the colonial era—or one who does the
same towards the activities of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (one of the organisations
of the Hindutva movement) today. Arguably, both leaders use religion (Jain
ahimsa) to pursue political interests. Their position further entails that these political
interests are opposed to those of the Christian colonials or to those of the Hindu
nationalists. Thus the position fulfils the conditions of Nehru’s and Chandra’s notion
of communalism. However, Nehru, Chandra and most other secularists would not
like to condemn these acts as instances of communalism in the same way they would
condemn the case of Hindu leaders who incite their followers to destroy a mosque.
One can think of many other examples which throw doubt on the above explanation
of communalism.
The explanation of communalism is not useful because it is based on the invalid
assumption that one knows what constitutes secular as against religious interests. Does
the Gandhian non-violence imply the pursuit of a secular interest, a religious interest
or that of a secular interest tied to a religious identity? The account of communalism
should allow us to answer such questions. Since it does not, its conceptual foundation
collapses and it loses all viability as an explanation of the negative role of community
in Indian politics. Rather than being the conclusion of a careful analysis of this issue,
the normative view that religion ought not to be used to pursue secular interests is
the pre-theoretical assumption the account starts from. It seems both the distinction
between the religious and the political and the moral tenets about their separation
precede all analysis of the current tensions in the Indian society.
The secularists often assert that the most typical property of Indian secularism
is its firm opposition to communalism. Secularism then is explicitly presented as the
ultimate ideological answer to the communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
Now, as said, any description of the Hindu-Muslim conflict which is to prove that the
secular state is necessary in India, should discern the structure of the class of conflicts
that can be resolved through secularism and show the necessary connection between
this structure and that of the latter concept. The account of communalism does certainly
not offer such a description. When we remove its useless distinction between
secular and religious interests, it merely suggests there are different communities in
Indian society, which come into conflict because they have (or falsely believe they
have) differing interests. Of course, this is a description that can be applied to any
and every conflict between two groups of people.
Adding the terminology of “the religious” gives us the impression that we are
describing a specific kind of conflict; that we are referring to a specific category of
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conflicts that should be analysed and solved in the same manner. This would be
the case if we could demonstrate that the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims
in contemporary India, those between Protestants and Catholics in early modern
Europe, and all other conflicts we designate as “religious conflicts” share a common
structure that makes them into religious conflicts. But the predicate “religious” does
not refer to such a common structure in the phenomena it intends to describe. It
rather appears to be a self-explanatory tag which generates the illusion that we have
a deeper understanding of these phenomena. So even if Nehru wrote in 1936 that
“the communal problem is not a religious problem, it has almost nothing to do with
religion,” and even if some contemporary thinkers agree that the communal riots do
not revolve around religion, such claims do not explain anything about the conflicts
among the various communities in Indian society as long as one does not provide
theoretical criteria to distinguish religious problems from those that have nothing to
do with religion (cited in Chandra 1994: 71).
If one does not possess such criteria, any argument one constructs in order
to demonstrate that secularism is the sole answer to India’s problem of “religious
pluralism” is bound to end up in a conceptual muddle. This is well illustrated by
the work of the political theorist Rajeev Bhargava. The case for secularism is “overdetermined,”
Bhargava believes, since the reasons in favour of the idea are “overwhelming”
(Bhargava 1998: 488). Of these reasons, he considers “the argument from
ordinary life” to be the most convincing. This argument begins with the assertion
that religious world-views are constituted by ultimate ideals. When the believers of
different religions and non-believers have to live together, a clash of their ultimate
ideals is always imminent. A clash of such ideals could deprive people of leading an
ordinary life. Since it is the state’s task to secure a minimally decent existence for its
citizens, all ultimate ideals must be expunged from the affairs of the state. Therefore,
politics and religion have to be separated, the two domains have to keep a principled
distance and respect each other’s boundaries. “To sum up,” Bhargava says, “ordinary
life requires that an acceptable minimum standard exists and that it is barbaric to fall
below it.” Political secularism is the only way to secure this minimum standard and
to avoid barbarism (Bhargava 1998: 491).
This argument from ordinary life is sustained by a specific conception of the
common predicament with which human societies are generally confronted. Both in
the West and in India, Bhargava suggests, secularism was consolidated in the face of
irresolvable religious conflicts and in the aftermath of sectarian violence. More generally,
he concludes that “whenever conflicts became uncontainable and insufferable,
something resembling a politically secular state simply had to emerge” (Bhargava
1998: 497). This simply had to happen because of the following reason:
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At no point in the history of humankind has any society existed with one and only
one set of ultimate ideals. Moreover, many of these ultimate ideals or particular
formulations of these have conflicted with one another. In such times, humanity
has either got caught in an escalating spiral of violence and cruelty or come to the
realisation that even ultimate ideals need to be delimited. In short, it has recurrently
stumbled upon something resembling political secularism. Political secularism must then
be seen as a part of the family of views which arises in response to a fundamental
human predicament. It is neither purely Christian nor peculiarly Western. It grows
wherever there is a persistent clash of ultimate ideals perceived to be incompatible
(Bhargava 1998: 497-98; my italics).
Although there is some ambiguity in this passage (societies have to develop political
secularism itself or “something similar” that belongs to the same “family of views”),
Bhargava does not really waver from his main point: all cultures and societies are
confronted with one and the same fundamental human predicament and secularism
is the answer to this predicament.
When Bhargava claims that the secular state has to emerge whenever conflicts
become uncontainable and insufferable, he cannot possibly mean all conflicts since
this would imply that even fights between family members, lovers or neighbours
have secularism as their solution. He is referring to conflicts between groups holding
divergent religions, and he defines these conflicts in terms of the distinctive property
of “a persistent clash of ultimate ideals.” This, of course, is a rather vague notion and
the author never comes to explaining what makes an ideal into an ultimate ideal. This
heading of a clash of ultimate ideals could well comprise a gang-war between Latinos
and Blacks somewhere in L.A., a battle between the hooligans of two rival soccer
teams somewhere in Europe, a separatist struggle of an ethnic minority anywhere in
the world, and literally thousands of other conflicts. It sounds slightly absurd if one
claims that the secular state is the solution to all of these conflicts. Still, in this view,
whenever some compromise emerges between conflicting parties, this would have
to be seen as an instance of humanity solving “the fundamental human predicament”
by stumbling upon “something resembling political secularism.”
Bhargava is so keen on proving the universal scope of the idea of secularism, that
he presents it as the indispensable solution to the human predicament of religious
pluralism. Since he begins with the assumption that this predicament is a universal
phenomenon of human societies, he never really poses the question as to what
properties make a conflict into a religious conflict. The consequence is that he takes
recourse to some all-encompassing category—“the clash of ultimate ideals”—which
cannot possibly refer to a well-defined set of conflicts with common structural traits.
The same is true for the resulting notion of political secularism: if all non-violent
compromises that prevent barbarism between groups holding different “ultimate
ideals” are termed “secularism,” the term becomes so all-encompassing that it loses
its meaning. Thus, Bhargava’s argument from ordinary life seems to be no more than
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a tautology: he wants to give secularism its due simply by stating that all peaceful and
civilized pluralism in human societies is due to secularism.
At this point, we can come back to the confusion surrounding the idea of secularism
among the Indian intellectuals. Fundamentally, this confusion is caused by
the utter lack of theoretical clarity in the religious-secular distinction. On top of that,
the vacuous term of “secularism” has grown to be the keyword in Indian political
discourse to refer to any kind of situation in which different groups of people live
together: if they get along well, this is because of secularism; if they fight and kill
each other, they are in need of the antidote of secularism. Anything that allows different
kinds of people to live together can be called secularism, and thus the notion
has become as vague as it possibly could: it is defined as “a state of mind, almost an
instinctive feeling, such as existed, by and large, for many centuries in India, when
Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and followers of other faiths lived side by side in
general harmony” (Gopal 1993: 19-20), or as “a respect for differences cutting across
class, caste, community, and gender, in which religion is a component in the shaping
of identity but not the determining criterion” (Bharucha 1998: 6).
Instead of examining and theorising the ways in which the different cultural
groups have succeeded or failed to live together peacefully, we take recourse to this
obscure concept of secularism to discuss these matters. Consequently, the discourse
of the liberal secular state prevents us from understanding the problems of pluralism
in India, instead of helping us to solve them. The urgency of these problems today
makes it all the more painful that the idea prevails that they can be coped with by
endlessly repeating that “the religious” should be separated from “the political.”
Religious Strife and the Necessity of Secularism
Where does the stubborn conviction originate that secularism as the separation of
politics and religion is indispensable in India? What sustains it? In post-Reformation
Europe, the different confessions imposed a strict doctrine on the believers and the
confessional strife arose from the conflicting truth claims made for these doctrines. A
classical justification for liberal toleration emerged from this fact: the state should not
take a position in this conflict of truth claims, for it would then persecute those who
went against its religious position and this would eventually bring about the destruction
of a state. This rationale was adopted by the Indian secularists from the time of
the Constituent Assembly Debates onwards:
Separation was…regarded as a critical imperative, as ‘mixing religion and politics’
was dangerous from the standpoint of the survival of the new nation-state.
Religion was viewed as a source of deep discord in the nation, and the recent
331
violent partition of the country was thought to be a direct consequence of ‘mixing
politics and religion’. It was felt if conflicts about religious doctrines were played
out in the arena of the state, the state would be torn apart. Therefore, the state, in
order to save itself and in order to achieve the consolidation of the nation, had to
keep clear of matters concerning religion (Bajpai 2002: 182).
This has remained the most basic “argument” for the secular state in the writings
of the secularists throughout the twentieth century. Secularism is necessary in India
because of the persistence of violent religious strife between Hindus and Muslims.
The assumption is that the problem of diversity in India is equivalent to the problem
of diversity that emerged in post-Reformation Europe. Both are instances of the
general predicament of “religious diversity” and “the basic idea of the secular state
represents the only sound democratic solution to the problem of religious diversity”
(Smith 1963: 93).
The peculiarity of this belief becomes clear, once one is aware that there can be
no such conflict of truth claims between the Hindu traditions and Islam (or any other
religion). In fact, from the eleventh century to the present day, Christian and Muslim
visitors to India have been struck by the fact that the Hindus do not make any truth
claim for their traditions. While travelling through India in the eleventh century, the
Muslim traveller Alberuni was surprised by the indifference of the local traditions towards
doctrinal controversy: “On the whole, there is very little disputing about theological
topics among themselves; at the utmost, they fight with words, but they will
never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy” (Alberuni
in Sachau, Ed. 1888: 3). Throughout the centuries, many European missionaries and
travellers came to a similar conclusion: the Hindus did not perceive any conflict between
their “religion” and the doctrines of the Christian religion. They did not desire
others to accept their teachings as true and refused to reject the doctrines of others
as false (see the next section of this chapter for an analysis; e.g. Bernier 1671: 149-50;
Ziegenbalg 1719: 14).
Today, this still is the story told by the standard textbook accounts of “Hinduism”:
unlike the Semitic religions, it does not attach any importance to doctrine or
dogma. Thus, Duncan Derrett (1968: 57) in a classical work on law and religion in
India notes the following characteristic of Hinduism: “One is free to have any and
every belief or no beliefs at all, without forfeiting one’s religious denomination or affiliation.”
As Richard Zaehner puts it in his introduction to the Hindu religion:
Hindus sometimes pride themselves, with some truth, that their religion is free
from dogmatic assumptions…They do not think of religious truth in dogmatic
terms: dogmas cannot be eternal but only the transitory, distorting, and distorted
images of a truth that transcends not only them but all verbal definition. For the
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passion for dogmatic certainty that has racked the religions of Semitic origin from
Judaism itself, through Christianity and Islam, to the Marxism of our day, they feel
nothing but shocked incomprehension (Zaehner 1969: 4).
Or in the words of Ram Singh (1992: 35), “a Hindu may believe in one God or ten, or
ten million, or none at all; in the theory of karma, transmigration of souls, or in nothing
at all, and will still remain a Hindu.” In short, the Hindu traditions do not make
truth claims for some set of doctrines.
If this is the case, how can one claim that the Hindu-Muslim problem revolves
around a conflict between different religious truth claims? How can one argue that
secularism is necessary because of the religious strife in Indian society? How can the
danger of mixing politics and religion in India be located in the issue of the state taking
a position in the conflict of religious doctrines? The fact that it is totally unclear
what characterises the domain of religion in Indian society and how it differs from<br

[acharya]

Secularism and the Absence of Theory
Since the declaration of Independence in 1947, the question of toleration and the secular state has been at the centre of the struggle between the different political forces in Indian society. With the rise of the Hindu Right and the growing intensity of Hindu-Muslim conflict in recent decades, this issue has once again become as urgent as it was in the aftermath of Partition. The growing tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India today cannot be ignored. The gruesome riots which erupted in the state of Gujarat in 2002 bear witness to this fact. And so did the destruction of 315 the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and the consequent eruption of riots in various Indian cities ten years before. Therefore, India needs secularism.
At least, that is what “the secularists”—the proponents of liberal toleration—tell us. Indian society is characterised by its religious pluralism, they say, and therefore the state should be secular, that is, it should be impartial towards all religions. In this view, the problem with the Hindu Right is that it strives to make the Indian state into a religious state. If this were done, the state would consistently take the side of the Hindu majority in conflicts between Hindus and Muslims and it would no
longer be able to curb the violence as an impartial arbiter. In short, the basic fear of the secularist thinkers is that India threatens to fall apart if the domain of politics is not separated from that of religion. It is this view that brings them to sweeping statements such as the following: “Secularism, for India, is not simply a point of view, it is a question of survival” (Rushdie 1990: 19).
Since this group of Indian intellectuals attaches such importance to the idea of secularism, one would expect its content to be more or less clear. However, whenever the participants in the debate attempt to pinpoint what secularism is, they end up in obscurity and confusion. In the 1970s, Mushir-Ul-Haq (1972: 6) made the following remark: “For the last two decades Indians have been talking of secularism, yet the term remains vague and ambiguous. One may, therefore, be justified in asking: what does secularism really mean—especially in the Indian context?” Twenty years later, M. M. Sankhdher (1995: 1-2) articulated the same concern: “Such a commonplace concept as secularism, with which the man in the street is so familiar and so used to, tends to acquire the character of a riddle, a puzzle, an enigma amongst intelligentsia.”
In the last few decades, analogous remarks have surfaced again and again. Some point out “the curious absence, the startling and significant vacuity of the notion ‘secularism’ itself,” and go so far as to claim that the notion has become “a sort of mantra, a quasi-religious incantation” (Rai 1989: 2770-1). Others put it mildly and say there is a tendency among Indian intellectuals to interpret the concept in their own subjective manner (Khan 1994: 373), or they use more pointed terms: “Like liberal Hindu gods who can take different forms and give a chance to the devotees to worship in any form they like, in India the concept of secularism has acquired so many interpretations and it now means different things to different groups of people” (Srikanth 1994: 39). Whether Muslim or Hindu, rightist or leftist, sociologist or political scientist, these thinkers all agree on this one point: the term “secularism” has so many different meanings in the Indian context that it appears to have lost all meaning.
This section will argue that the semantic confusion surrounding “secularism” masks a more basic problem in the Indian debate. Instead of being embedded in a well-structured theoretical framework, the notion of “secularism” or “the secular 316
state” consists of a number of isolated normative propositions—about the separation of politics and religion and the right to religious freedom—proclaimed as though these are self-evidently true. First, I will show that the principle of the separation of politics and religion does not make much sense, because it is based on an arbitrary distinction between “the religious” and “the political.” Next, we note that a similar problem confronts the principle of religious liberty: when it is unclear how to identify the domain of religion, it will be equally vague what it means to secure freedom in this domain. As a consequence, the tenets of the liberal secular state are not intelligible in the Indian context, because the theoretical background required to make sense of them is nowhere to be found.
The Religious and the Political
Not all participants in the secularism debate express difficulties in making sense of the concept around which the debate revolves. Those who intend to protect the secular character of the Indian state from the onslaught of the Hindu Right often provide definitions that appear to leave no doubt as to the meaning of the term. “Secularism,” they say, requires the separation of the state from religion in general, from all faiths, or from any particular religious order, or it stands for the separation of religious and non-religious institutions (Smith 1963; Gopal 1993: 13; Sen 1996: 13; Bhargava 1998b: 488). As secularists, they defend “the demarcation of two realms of existence, the separation of church from state, of the sacred from the secular” or they reformulate this in terms of a “distinction between the area of individual autonomy and of secular or social control” (Chatterji 1995: x). When the secularists argue that this notion is indispensable in India, it is their burden to produce a theoretical description of the Indian situation, which demonstrates that the separation of politics and religion is its only conceptual solution.
At the very least, any such description has to answer two basic questions. Firstly, it should be able to tell us what properties distinguish the religious domain from the secular or the political (or vice versa). If there is no theoretical clarity on what makes some phenomena of Indian culture into religious phenomena or some institutions of Indian society into religious institutions, then there is simply no point in stating that the religious ought to be separated from the political. Secondly, the belief that the secular state offers the one reasonable political answer to the Hindu-Muslim strife in India derives from the underlying belief that it is the only viable solution to the predicament of religious pluralism. For this inference to hold, the description should identify the general properties of religious pluralism and show that these properties can also be discerned in the Hindu-Muslim problem. In other words, it has to de 317 scribe the structure that distinguishes the problem of religious pluralism or religious strife from other problems of human coexistence. As the cogency of the “secularism discourse” depends on these two issues, we will examine the extent to which they are satisfactorily addressed by some of the prominent Indian advocates of secularism.
When India became independent, it was obvious to most leaders of the Indian National Congress that it had to become a secular state, because they considered this to be the only form of government that would secure the peaceful co-existence of Hindus and Muslims. This view found one of its strongest proponents in Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister, who went so far as to assert that “no state can be civilised except a secular state” (cited in Chandra 1994: 79). According to the chief interpreter of Nehruvian secularism, the historian Bipan Chandra, Nehru’s definition of secularism was four-pronged:
Secularism meant first, separation of religion from political, economic, social and cultural aspects of life, religion being treated as a purely personal matter; second, dissociation of the state from religion; third, full freedom to all religions and tolerance of all religions; and four, equal opportunities for followers of all religions, and no discrimination and partiality on grounds of religion (Chandra 1994: 63). Prima facie, this may appear to be a precise definition. However, when one is aware of the confusion surrounding the concept of religion, its obscurity becomes baffling. As Balagangadhara (1994) argued earlier, we do not know today what makes something into religion. No theory is available that explains the characteristics of the religious domain. If this is unclear, however, it will also be impossible to separate religion from “political, economic, social and cultural aspects of life.” One does not know what practices, beliefs or institutions need to be separated from what other practices, beliefs or institutions. The Nehruvian secularism turns out to be a scarcely intelligible idea once one tries to give content to its principle of the separation of religion from the different domains of public life. The ambiguity can be shown in B. R. Ambedkar’s interventions in the Constituent Assembly Debates—the debates leading to the formulation of the Indian Constitution.
At the time of Independence, Ambedkar was the main advocate of some of the oppressed groups in Indian society. As such, he was a strong proponent of importing the western liberal notions of state neutrality and equal human rights, because he believed the injustices of Indian society had to be blamed on the Hindu religion and its caste system. This stance determined his contributions to the formation of the Indian constitution. He argued for the adoption of many articles from the constitutions of western liberal democracies, especially where it concerned the separation of the state and religion. Given this background, one would expect some clarity in Ambedkar’s understanding of the role of religion in the Indian society. However: 318 The religious conceptions in this country are so vast that they cover every aspect of life from birth to death. There is nothing which is not religion and if personal law is to be saved I am sure about it that in social matters we will come to a standstill…There is nothing extraordinary in saying that we ought to strive hereafter to limit the definition of religion in such a manner that we shall not extend it beyond beliefs and such rituals as may be connected with ceremonials which are essentially religious (Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. 7: p. 781; cited in Chatterjee 1998: 356).
Religion seems easily identifiable to Ambedkar since he sees that it covers every aspect of life from birth to death. Naturally, he should be aware that when there is nothing which is not “religion,” the term loses all meaning. Next, he proposes that political expediency obliges us to limit the definition of religion. How will we find out what is really religion and what not? The extraordinary answer is that we shall define it in terms of beliefs and rituals connected with ceremonials that are essentially religious. When we are still striving to define what religion is, how can we possibly know what things are essentially religious? In this quote, it is painfully clear how arbitrary the statements about the role of religion in Indian society are. One can feel that “religion” covers every aspect of life in India, and one can at the same time propose that “religion” ought to be limited to those things which one feels are “essentially religious.” In the absence of a consistent theory of religion, there is no firm cognitive ground for any of these feelings. One can invent definitions of “the religious” according to one’s personal intuitions or one’s political aims.
These theoretical problems in the principles of secularism will not disappear when the notion “religion” is replaced by “Hinduism,” because that strategy confronts us with similar questions as to what Hinduism is, whether it is religion or not, or even whether it exists or not. Nehru himself would certainly admit that these are thorny issues:
Hinduism, as a faith, is vague, amorphous, many-sided, all things to all men. It is hardly possible to define it, or indeed to say whether it is a religion or not in the usual sense of the word. In its present form, and even in the past, it embraces many beliefs and practices, from the highest to the lowest, often opposed to or contradicting each other. Its essential spirit seems to be live and let live (Nehru 1946: 75).
It is impossible to identify something which can hardly be defined, which is vague, amorphous, many-sided, and all things to all men. And when one does not succeed in identifying the Hindu religion, how can one even dream of separating it from the state or from the public sphere? Surely a serious problem is involved here. In the words of a specialist, Richard Zaehner, there is no particular set of dogmas that define the Hindu religion: 319 …Hinduism is quite free from any dogmatic affirmations concerning the nature of God, and the core of religion is never felt to depend on the existence or nonexistence of God, or on whether there is one God or many; for it is perfectly possible to be a good Hindu whether one’s personal views incline towards monism, monotheism, polytheism, or even atheism. This is not what ultimately matters (Zaehner 1966: 2; italics mine).
As R. N. Dandekar points out, the social scientific study of Hinduism has long accepted that this “religion” defies all attempts at definition:
…Hinduism does not insist on any particular religious practice as being obligatory, nor does it accept any doctrine as its dogma. Hinduism can also not be identified with a specific moral code. Hinduism, as a religion, does not convey any definite or unitary idea. There is no dogma or practice which can be said to be either universal or essential to Hinduism as a whole (Dandekar 1971: 237).
Basically, the conclusion is that the Hindu religion does not have any properties i.e.
any common beliefs or practices—that allow us to recognise it. These have become platitudes today, but they hide a vital quandary in making sense of the notion of secularism in India. If the Hindu religion does not have any clear properties, how shall we determine when this religion intrudes into the political domain? When does a state become a Hindu state, as opposed to a secular state?
When the government publicly cites Rama as the prototype of the ethical king? Or when it consults an astrologer before making an important political decision? When a puja ritual is done in parliament? Any answer to these and similar questions will be derived from the properties that distinguish the class of things Hindu from that of things secular. Since there is not the least consensus on the properties of the Hindu religion, one can fix this standard as one chooses. Accordingly, one can give one’s own interpretation as to what it means for India to be a secular state. Besides, if the essential spirit of the Hindu traditions seems to be “live and let live,” what then is the point of arguing for secularism or toleration in India? In the West, such great import was assigned to “the separation of church and state” because the Christian confessions had given rise to intolerant states, which imposed one specific form of doctrine, discipline and worship upon the subjects. Considering that the Hindu traditions do not regard any practice or doctrine as obligatory, it is impossible that contemporary India is confronted with the same threat of a persecuting religious state, and that it is in need of the same safeguard of the secular state. At this point, the objection may arise that although it is quite true that Hinduism generally has no difficulty with accommodating all kinds of practices and beliefs, the more dogmatic and intolerant form of Hindutva or “Hindu nationalism” also exists, and that therefore the Hindu religion should be separated from the state in India.
For such an objection to be meaningful, one will have to demonstrate what makes 320 the various Hindu traditions into a “Hindu religion” (or several Hindu religions, for that matter), how the religious elements of this religion are present in an excessive form in the discourses and practices of Hindutva, and what it would mean to separate these elements from politics. These questions have not even been addressed by the secularists. Thus, one cannot but conclude that they presuppose that the current difficulties in Indian politics and society should be understood in terms of the relation between “the religious” and “the political”—while they have no clue as to how to identify these domains of life and society.
This one assumption is constitutive of the entire debate. For instance, the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (1996: 13-14) argues that the principle of secularism does not require the state to steer clear of an association with any religious matter whatsoever:
“Rather, what is needed is to ensure that in so far as the state has to deal with different religions and members of different religious communities, there must be a basic symmetry of treatment.” The virtue of this approach, he emphasises, is that the requirement of symmetric treatment leaves open the question as to what form that symmetry should take. Two imaginary examples are sufficient to assess the consequences of Sen’s liberality. The first is that of some predominantly Muslim state, which allows freedom of religion to the minorities, but also proclaims that all women should wear full burqa. The second example asks us to imagine a time in the future at which the Indian state enacts a law that forbids the consumption of meat to all citizens. Both states are still politically secular according to Sen’s principle, since they treat the members of different religious communities in a symmetric manner. Of course, he may object to these counter-intuitive examples of secularism by pointing out that these states do not really respect the principle of symmetry because they impose the religious values or beliefs of the majority on the other communities.
To make this point convincing, however, Sen should show that matters of dress and diet are part of the religion of the respective majorities. The validity of this argument depends on the inclusion of these domains of life in some definition of religion. Therefore, the states in question could argue as convincingly that their measures are not related to religion in any way—provided they have another definition of religion. Thus, Sen’s formula of “basic symmetry of treatment” once again illustrates that the theoretical inadequacy of the secularism discourse is largely due to the lack of clarity and stability in the essential conceptual distinction between “the religious” and “the secular.” The resulting equivocation is not limited to the academic debates. Perhaps, its consequences are best illustrated when the Indian judiciary arbitrarily invokes a number of differing definitions of Hinduism and religion to decide whether a certain community belongs to the religion of Hinduism (Galanter 1971) or whether Hindutva is a religion or a non-religious way of life (Cossman and Kapur 1996).
The principle of the separation of politics and religion is intelligible only if one provides a consistent theoretical description that clarifies what religion is and what 321 makes the various traditions of the subcontinent into religion. Quite obviously, one can separate “the religious” from “the political” only if one knows how to recognise these two spheres by identifying at least one of them. To be able to do so, one should possess a theory that conceptualises either the religious or the political in terms of the characteristic features of these domains in life and society. These issues being as opaque as they are, the idea of secularism was bound to become an empty mantra and such a mantra will certainly fail to counter the dynamics that are currently disrupting Indian society.
Freedom of What?
Instead of the separation of politics and religion, one could emphasise the importance of another principle of secularism, namely, that of the freedom of religion. This step allows us to illustrate how the absence of theory has brought about fundamental problems in the actual political and legal conflicts on the nature of the secular state in India. As said, the Indian Constitution grants “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.” The central difficulty of the principle of freedom of religion surfaced soon in the courts of independent India: one’s interpretation of this principle is completely dependent on one’s conception of the religious domain. The fact that there was no consensus whatsoever on the characteristics of this domain gave rise to confusing situations. Thus, the Bombay High Court put forward its very own definition of religion in its interpretation of Article 25 on the freedom of religion. On the basis of this definition, it suggested that certain aspects of a particular religion were not religious but really secular in nature:
…[W]hatever binds a man to his own conscience and whatever moral and ethical principles regulate the lives of men, that alone can constitute religion as understood in the Constitution. A religion may have many secular activities, it may have secular aspects, but these secular activities and aspects do not constitute religion as understood by the constitution (cited in Smith 1998: 197).
In another similar case, the Bombay High Court stated very explicitly that the authority of a religious body in relation to its members had nothing to do with religion. The Supreme Court of India, on the contrary, interpreted Article 25 according to a completely different definition of religion: 322 A religion may not only lay down a code of ethical rules for its followers to accept, it might prescribe rituals and observances, ceremonies and modes of worship which are regarded as integral parts of religion, and these forms and observance might extend even to matters of food and dress (Ibid.: 198).
The confusion is obvious. The different courts determine what freedom of religion
entails according to their verdict as to which activities in Indian society are religious
and which are secular. This would be understandable if there were disputes on the
exact scope of the religious domain. Even if the characteristics of this domain were
clear, the precise location of its boundaries would be disputed. Thus, we saw that in
Reformation Europe the location of the boundary between the spiritual kingdom
and the temporal kingdom was a topic of heated debate (see 3.4.). However, in this
debate, both a theological framework and a social background of Christian institutions were shared. Therefore, the participants knew roughly to which aspects of life and society they referred when they asserted that all human beings ought to be free in the spiritual kingdom.
The situation in India is different altogether. There is no such conceptual framework
and no such institutional background. Consequently, the discord regarding the
interpretation of “freedom of religion” in the Indian courts is not about the precise
location of the boundary of the religious domain. There is no clue on how to recognise this domain in the first place. According to the exigencies of a case, the judge can propose that certain activities are secular and not religious, without giving any criterion or arguments. In one of its judgements, the Supreme Court tried to provide a route to avoid the problem of figuring out what religion is and what it means for religion to be free. “What constitutes the essential part of a religion,” it asserted, “is primarily to be ascertained with reference to the doctrines of that religion itself” (Ibid.). This shifts the problem. We now confront more difficult questions: What are the religions of India?
Is “Hinduism” one of them? “Hinduism,” we noted, consists of a range of traditions,
all of which tell different stories. Which of these contains the doctrine that determines the essential part of the Hindu religion? One could also propose that there are many different Hindu religions. However, given the absence of scriptures or doctrinal systems that distinguish them, where will we find the respective doctrines about the essential parts of their religion? Given the absence of a fixed ecclesiastical authority, who will decide what this doctrine is?
The meaning and implications of the principle of religious freedom became
highly contentious when the question was addressed of a Uniform Civil Code for the
independent India. At the time of the framing of the Constitution, the secularists
had argued that in a secular state all communities should be subject to a common
civil code, which would regulate marriage, inheritance and other family matters. This gave rise to Article 44 of the “Directive Principles of State Policy” of the Constitution:
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“The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” However, the representatives of the Muslim League party in the Constituent Assembly argued that the Sharia should be retained as the personal law of the Muslim community. Interestingly, they invoked the principle of religious liberty as a grounds for the protection of Muslim personal law: Religious freedom was most prominently invoked in conceptions of a secular
state in the speeches of proponents of Muslim Personal law in the Constituent
Assembly. Many Muslim League representatives argued that religious personal
laws that governed areas such as marriage, divorce and maintenance, were an
essential aspect of religion, and as such, ought to be granted immunity from
state interference…A secular order…was one in which citizens would have full
religious freedom, including the freedom to live by the tenets of their religious
personal law. The secular state would be excluded from the religious realm and
would lack the authority to intervene in matters regulated by religious personal
law (Bajpai 2002: 183).
Clearly, these laws belonged to the realm of religion, so the Muslim politicians reasoned, and therefore freedom of religion entailed that their community should be left free by the state to live according to the Sharia. Thus, one of the Muslim League representatives in the Constituent Assembly Debates argued as follows:
People seem to think that under a secular State, there must be a common law
observed by its citizens in all matters, including matters of their daily life, their
language, their culture, their personal laws. That is not a correct way to look at this
secular State. In a secular State, citizens belonging to different communities must
have the freedom—to practise their own religion, observe their own life and their
personal laws should be applied to them (cited in Shefali 2002).
Another stated that the “right to follow personal law is part of the way of life of those people who are following such laws; it is part of their religion and part of their culture” (Ibid.).
The same argument surfaced in the famous Shah Bano case of the 1980s (Rudolph
& Rudolph 2001: 52-3; Tambiah 1998: 427-33). In this case, the Supreme
Court had challenged the status of Muslim personal law by applying the Criminal
Procedure Code to the claim to maintenance of a Muslim wife, Shah Bano, who
had been divorced by her husband. In reaction to this judgement, the largest-ever
agitation of Muslims in independent India was instigated. Eventually, the national
government overruled the Supreme Court judgement through the ratification of the
Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act of 1986, which basically protected Muslim personal law. In the debate about this Act in the Lok Sabha (the Indian parliament), Ebrahim Sulaiman Sait, Muslim League leader and one of the chief proponents of the Act, put forward a typical view when he declared that “secular324 ism…is full freedom to live according to one’s own religion and not interfere with Shariat religion. The Muslims in this country have therefore full freedom to follow Shariat as part of their religion” (cited in Bajpai 2002: 189). Frank Anthony, a Christian Anglo-Indian representative of the Congress Party in the Lok Sabha declared that secularism means “equal respect for all religions, equal respect for the rights of minorities” and therefore he felt that “the Muslims today, if they feel that it is a Koranic injunction…then the Government has, not only an option but a duty to see that this Bill is passed” (Ibid.). Several other representatives similarly argued that a secular state ought not to interfere in the religious life of the minorities and ought to leave all steps towards reform to these communities themselves.
Naturally, the liberal secularists oppose this interpretation of the principle of
religious freedom. They assert that the fact that members of different communities
who are citizens of the same country are governed by different inheritance laws is “an anachronism indeed in modern India and diametrically opposed to the fundamental principles of secularism” (Smith 1963: 497-8). Or they complain that “the absence of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) of even an optional nature has been a concession to a Muslim fundamentalist leadership adamant about the sanctity of a conservatively interpreted Sharia” (Vanaik 1997: 46). Another classical suggestion is that the communities in India have failed to understand the principles of secularism:
The Constitution declares India to be a secular state in which persons are
guaranteed equal protection of the law and where there is to be no discrimination
based on religion, caste, race, sex or place of birth. On the other hand, freedom
of religion is also guaranteed but what is happening is that this freedom is being
exploited by religious groups to infringe fundamental rights and equal protection
of the law. This antagonism between two sets of freedoms arises from the fact
that religious and political groups have not understood or appreciated the basic
principles of secularism (Chatterji 1995: ix).
Freedom of religion, from the perspective of the secularists, cannot be understood
as the freedom to follow the system of “personal law” of one’s religion. Rather, it
entails that the individual is free from all laws in the domain of religion. In the words of Justice Ruma Pal (2001: 32-3) of the Supreme Court of India: “While laws may be derived from religion, they do not form part of it, and the need for a uniform civil code cannot be overstated. It would not impinge on the freedom of an individual’s conscience, nor on the expression of it.”
This dispute leads to a deadlock. One group insists that the domain of religion
includes the legal restrictions it puts on the matters of family life. If the secular state and its legal system intrude upon these matters, this is seen as a violation of the tenet of religious freedom. Another group believes that religion is a private matter of the individual, which cannot possibly include a legal system like the Sharia. This group will view the position of the first group as an infringement upon the principle of 325
freedom of religion. The secular state is then obliged to interfere in the practices of
the first group and to impose a common civil code on all individual citizens. In other
words, it has to discard the tradition of this community. On what grounds could one
take a position in this conflict on the interpretation of secularism and its principle of
religious freedom?
On cognitive grounds? This would be possible if one had a scientific theory on
the domain of religion in Indian society. This theory would have to tell one what the
characteristics and limits of this domain are, what freedom in this domain entails,
and how it leads to a stable plural society. Such a theoretical foundation cannot be
found for the tenet of freedom of religion. Naturally, one can always take a position
on normative grounds. One could show that the principle of religious liberty as it has emerged in liberal political theory implies that the individual conscience ought to be free from all coercive laws in the domain of religion. Hence, a religious community ought not to impose the laws of its religion on its members. Legal coercion is the prerogative of the state.
Why should a group like the Indian Muslims accept these normative grounds?
What is the problem in the claim that religion, from an Islamic point of view, does
include religious laws and that, consequently, religious liberty includes the liberty
for a community to live by these laws? The secularists argue that the Islamic doctrine which argues that the religious domain encompasses the laws of the Sharia is false. However, they are not able to show that this account of religion is untenable by providing a cognitively superior theory of religion. Instead, the normative grounds upon which they take this position assume the truth of a particular understanding of religion. This understanding fixes the characteristics and the outer limits of the religious domain as follows: each individual is autonomous in this domain and, therefore, no religious laws ought to be imposed on the individual citizen.
If a society shares this understanding of religion—if the view has become part
and parcel of its common sense—the principle of freedom of religion appears to
make sense and disputes like the above could be settled in favour of the secularists.
This is what generally happens in the liberal democracies of the contemporary West,
where the majority of the citizens shares the “secular” and “modern” understanding
of religion. However, when it is challenged in a country like India, one confronts the
embarrassing task of showing how and why this view is superior to other views—the
supposedly “religious,” “conservative” and “traditional” ones. In the absence of a
sound theoretical foundation, one can then only conclude that the liberal norm of
religious liberty presupposes the superiority of this understanding of religion.
In the previous chapters, we have seen where this presupposition stems from.
The norm of religious liberty has emerged within the theological framework of anticonfessional Protestantism. Therefore, the norm will inevitably presuppose the
superiority of its theological understanding of religion. In the words of the earlier
326
quoted Constitution of Maryland, religion “is the duty of every man to worship God in such a manner as he thinks most acceptable to him” (in Perry (ed.) 1952: 349). Or in the similar words of K. T. Shah, one of the participants in the Constituent Assembly Debates, “religion is a private affair between man and his god. It has no concern with anyone else in the world” (Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. 7: 819). As a consequence, laws cannot possibly belong to the domain of religion, because the relation between God and every human being’s conscience should always be left free from coercive laws.
As long as this theological understanding of religion is present in the background,
the principle of religious liberty will not bring about significant conceptual problems.
When the principle is cut loose from this theological background, however, one can
interpret it in different ways according to one’s understanding of the domain of “religion.”
The dispute will be interminable, because no neutral or scientific theoretical
basis exists which allows one to decide between these different views of religion.
This is the problem of the Indian debate on freedom of religion. The problem is not,
as many have argued, caused by the fact that the term “secularism” has acquired a
new meaning in India, namely “equal respect for all religions” (Bajpai 2002: 191;
Chatterjee 1998: 349-51; Madhok 1995: 116). Neither is it a question of “group rights”
or “minority rights” versus “individual rights” (Chandhoke 1999). Rather, the meaning of “secularism” and “freedom of religion” have become vague and shifting, because these normative principles have been detached from the theoretical framework in which they were embedded, viz. the Protestant theology of Christian liberty. Secular Politics and Plural Religion It is not that no attempts at all have been undertaken to theorise the religious and the conflicts it is alleged to cause in India. In fact, a specific terminology has been coined to study these conflicts, namely, that of “communalism” and its cognates such as “communal violence” and “communal riots.” What is this phenomenon of communalism?
Nehru defined it as “a narrow group mentality basing itself on religious community but in reality concerned with political power and patronage for the group concerned,” or, more bitterly, as “politics under some religious garb, one religious
group being incited to hate another religious group” (cited in Chandra 1994: 62). In
a series of essays, Bipan Chandra has similarly argued that communalism should be understood as an ideology which connects religious identities with secular interests, and which suggests that the secular interests of the followers of different religions are opposed to one another (Chandra 1994: 148-9). Both Nehru and Chandra argue that the problem is not so much religion itself or even the pluralism of the various
327 religious communities, but rather that the religion of the communities is being used to pursue secular interests in the political domain.
Let us try to illustrate this account of communalism with an example. Imagine a leader of the Jain community who encourages his followers to engage in a campaign of non-violent resistance to British rule in the colonial era—or one who does the same towards the activities of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (one of the organisations of the Hindutva movement) today. Arguably, both leaders use religion (Jain ahimsa) to pursue political interests. Their position further entails that these political interests are opposed to those of the Christian colonials or to those of the Hindu nationalists. Thus the position fulfils the conditions of Nehru’s and Chandra’s notion of communalism. However, Nehru, Chandra and most other secularists would not like to condemn these acts as instances of communalism in the same way they would condemn the case of Hindu leaders who incite their followers to destroy a mosque. One can think of many other examples which throw doubt on the above explanation of communalism.

The explanation of communalism is not useful because it is based on the invalid
assumption that one knows what constitutes secular as against religious interests. Does the Gandhian non-violence imply the pursuit of a secular interest, a religious interest or that of a secular interest tied to a religious identity? The account of communalism should allow us to answer such questions. Since it does not, its conceptual foundation collapses and it loses all viability as an explanation of the negative role of community in Indian politics. Rather than being the conclusion of a careful analysis of this issue, the normative view that religion ought not to be used to pursue secular interests is the pre-theoretical assumption the account starts from. It seems both the distinction between the religious and the political and the moral tenets about their separation precede all analysis of the current tensions in the Indian society.
The secularists often assert that the most typical property of Indian secularism
is its firm opposition to communalism. Secularism then is explicitly presented as the
ultimate ideological answer to the communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
Now, as said, any description of the Hindu-Muslim conflict which is to prove that the
secular state is necessary in India, should discern the structure of the class of conflicts that can be resolved through secularism and show the necessary connection between this structure and that of the latter concept. The account of communalism does certainly not offer such a description. When we remove its useless distinction between secular and religious interests, it merely suggests there are different communities in Indian society, which come into conflict because they have (or falsely believe they have) differing interests. Of course, this is a description that can be applied to any and every conflict between two groups of people. Adding the terminology of “the religious” gives us the impression that we are describing a specific kind of conflict; that we are referring to a specific category of 328 conflicts that should be analysed and solved in the same manner. This would be the case if we could demonstrate that the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in contemporary India, those between Protestants and Catholics in early modern Europe, and all other conflicts we designate as “religious conflicts” share a common structure that makes them into religious conflicts. But the predicate “religious” does not refer to such a common structure in the phenomena it intends to describe. It rather appears to be a self-explanatory tag which generates the illusion that we have a deeper understanding of these phenomena. So even if Nehru wrote in 1936 that “the communal problem is not a religious problem, it has almost nothing to do with religion,” and even if some contemporary thinkers agree that the communal riots do not revolve around religion, such claims do not explain anything about the conflicts among the various communities in Indian society as long as one does not provide theoretical criteria to distinguish religious problems from those that have nothing to do with religion (cited in Chandra 1994: 71).
If one does not possess such criteria, any argument one constructs in order
to demonstrate that secularism is the sole answer to India’s problem of “religious
pluralism” is bound to end up in a conceptual muddle. This is well illustrated by
the work of the political theorist Rajeev Bhargava. The case for secularism is “overdetermined,”
Bhargava believes, since the reasons in favour of the idea are “overwhelming”
(Bhargava 1998: 488). Of these reasons, he considers “the argument from
ordinary life” to be the most convincing. This argument begins with the assertion
that religious world-views are constituted by ultimate ideals. When the believers of
different religions and non-believers have to live together, a clash of their ultimate
ideals is always imminent. A clash of such ideals could deprive people of leading an
ordinary life. Since it is the state’s task to secure a minimally decent existence for its citizens, all ultimate ideals must be expunged from the affairs of the state. Therefore, politics and religion have to be separated, the two domains have to keep a principled distance and respect each other’s boundaries. “To sum up,” Bhargava says, “ordinary life requires that an acceptable minimum standard exists and that it is barbaric to fall below it.” Political secularism is the only way to secure this minimum standard and to avoid barbarism (Bhargava 1998: 491).
This argument from ordinary life is sustained by a specific conception of the
common predicament with which human societies are generally confronted. Both in
the West and in India, Bhargava suggests, secularism was consolidated in the face of irresolvable religious conflicts and in the aftermath of sectarian violence. More generally, he concludes that “whenever conflicts became uncontainable and insufferable, something resembling a politically secular state simply had to emerge” (Bhargava 1998: 497). This simply had to happen because of the following reason:
329 At no point in the history of humankind has any society existed with one and only one set of ultimate ideals. Moreover, many of these ultimate ideals or particular formulations of these have conflicted with one another. In such times, humanity has either got caught in an escalating spiral of violence and cruelty or come to the realisation that even ultimate ideals need to be delimited. In short, it has recurrently stumbled upon something resembling political secularism. Political secularism must then be seen as a part of the family of views which arises in response to a fundamental human predicament. It is neither purely Christian nor peculiarly Western. It grows wherever there is a persistent clash of ultimate ideals perceived to be incompatible (Bhargava 1998: 497-98; my italics).
Although there is some ambiguity in this passage (societies have to develop political secularism itself or “something similar” that belongs to the same “family of views”), Bhargava does not really waver from his main point: all cultures and societies are confronted with one and the same fundamental human predicament and secularism is the answer to this predicament.
When Bhargava claims that the secular state has to emerge whenever conflicts
become uncontainable and insufferable, he cannot possibly mean all conflicts since
this would imply that even fights between family members, lovers or neighbours
have secularism as their solution. He is referring to conflicts between groups holding divergent religions, and he defines these conflicts in terms of the distinctive property of “a persistent clash of ultimate ideals.” This, of course, is a rather vague notion and the author never comes to explaining what makes an ideal into an ultimate ideal. This heading of a clash of ultimate ideals could well comprise a gang-war between Latinos and Blacks somewhere in L.A., a battle between the hooligans of two rival soccer teams somewhere in Europe, a separatist struggle of an ethnic minority anywhere in the world, and literally thousands of other conflicts. It sounds slightly absurd if one claims that the secular state is the solution to all of these conflicts. Still, in this view, whenever some compromise emerges between conflicting parties, this would have to be seen as an instance of humanity solving “the fundamental human predicament” by stumbling upon “something resembling political secularism.”
Bhargava is so keen on proving the universal scope of the idea of secularism, that
he presents it as the indispensable solution to the human predicament of religious
pluralism. Since he begins with the assumption that this predicament is a universal
phenomenon of human societies, he never really poses the question as to what
properties make a conflict into a religious conflict. The consequence is that he takes
recourse to some all-encompassing category—“the clash of ultimate ideals”—which
cannot possibly refer to a well-defined set of conflicts with common structural traits.
The same is true for the resulting notion of political secularism: if all non-violent
compromises that prevent barbarism between groups holding different “ultimate
ideals” are termed “secularism,” the term becomes so all-encompassing that it loses its meaning. Thus, Bhargava’s argument from ordinary life seems to be no more than
330 a tautology: he wants to give secularism its due simply by stating that all peaceful and civilized pluralism in human societies is due to secularism.
At this point, we can come back to the confusion surrounding the idea of secularism
among the Indian intellectuals. Fundamentally, this confusion is caused by
the utter lack of theoretical clarity in the religious-secular distinction. On top of that,
the vacuous term of “secularism” has grown to be the keyword in Indian political
discourse to refer to any kind of situation in which different groups of people live
together: if they get along well, this is because of secularism; if they fight and kill
each other, they are in need of the antidote of secularism. Anything that allows different kinds of people to live together can be called secularism, and thus the notion has become as vague as it possibly could: it is defined as “a state of mind, almost an instinctive feeling, such as existed, by and large, for many centuries in India, when Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and followers of other faiths lived side by side in general harmony” (Gopal 1993: 19-20), or as “a respect for differences cutting across class, caste, community, and gender, in which religion is a component in the shaping of identity but not the determining criterion” (Bharucha 1998: 6).

Instead of examining and theorising the ways in which the different cultural
groups have succeeded or failed to live together peacefully, we take recourse to this obscure concept of secularism to discuss these matters. Consequently, the discourse of the liberal secular state prevents us from understanding the problems of pluralism in India, instead of helping us to solve them. The urgency of these problems today makes it all the more painful that the idea prevails that they can be coped with by endlessly repeating that “the religious” should be separated from “the political.”

Religious Strife and the Necessity of Secularism
Where does the stubborn conviction originate that secularism as the separation of
politics and religion is indispensable in India? What sustains it? In post-Reformation
Europe, the different confessions imposed a strict doctrine on the believers and the
confessional strife arose from the conflicting truth claims made for these doctrines. A classical justification for liberal toleration emerged from this fact: the state should not take a position in this conflict of truth claims, for it would then persecute those who went against its religious position and this would eventually bring about the destruction of a state. This rationale was adopted by the Indian secularists from the time of the Constituent Assembly Debates onwards:
Separation was…regarded as a critical imperative, as ‘mixing religion and politics’
was dangerous from the standpoint of the survival of the new nation-state.
Religion was viewed as a source of deep discord in the nation, and the recent

331 violent partition of the country was thought to be a direct consequence of ‘mixing politics and religion’. It was felt if conflicts about religious doctrines were played out in the arena of the state, the state would be torn apart. Therefore, the state, in order to save itself and in order to achieve the consolidation of the nation, had to keep clear of matters concerning religion (Bajpai 2002: 182).
This has remained the most basic “argument” for the secular state in the writings
of the secularists throughout the twentieth century. Secularism is necessary in India because of the persistence of violent religious strife between Hindus and Muslims. The assumption is that the problem of diversity in India is equivalent to the problem of diversity that emerged in post-Reformation Europe. Both are instances of the general predicament of “religious diversity” and “the basic idea of the secular state represents the only sound democratic solution to the problem of religious diversity” (Smith 1963: 93).

The peculiarity of this belief becomes clear, once one is aware that there can be
no such conflict of truth claims between the Hindu traditions and Islam (or any other religion). In fact, from the eleventh century to the present day, Christian and Muslim visitors to India have been struck by the fact that the Hindus do not make any truth claim for their traditions. While travelling through India in the eleventh century, the Muslim traveller Alberuni was surprised by the indifference of the local traditions towards doctrinal controversy: “On the whole, there is very little disputing about theological topics among themselves; at the utmost, they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy” (Alberuni in Sachau, Ed. 1888: 3). Throughout the centuries, many European missionaries and travellers came to a similar conclusion: the Hindus did not perceive any conflict between their “religion” and the doctrines of the Christian religion. They did not desire others to accept their teachings as true and refused to reject the doctrines of others as false (see the next section of this chapter for an analysis; e.g. Bernier 1671: 149-50; Ziegenbalg 1719: 14).

Today, this still is the story told by the standard textbook accounts of “Hinduism”:
unlike the Semitic religions, it does not attach any importance to doctrine or
dogma. Thus, Duncan Derrett (1968: 57) in a classical work on law and religion in
India notes the following characteristic of Hinduism: “One is free to have any and
every belief or no beliefs at all, without forfeiting one’s religious denomination or affiliation.”

As Richard Zaehner puts it in his introduction to the Hindu religion:
Hindus sometimes pride themselves, with some truth, that their religion is free
from dogmatic assumptions…They do not think of religious truth in dogmatic
terms: dogmas cannot be eternal but only the transitory, distorting, and distorted
images of a truth that transcends not only them but all verbal definition. For the
332 passion for dogmatic certainty that has racked the religions of Semitic origin from Judaism itself, through Christianity and Islam, to the Marxism of our day, they feel nothing but shocked incomprehension (Zaehner 1969: 4).
Or in the words of Ram Singh (1992: 35), “a Hindu may believe in one God or ten, or ten million, or none at all; in the theory of karma, transmigration of souls, or in nothing at all, and will still remain a Hindu.” In short, the Hindu traditions do not make truth claims for some set of doctrines.
If this is the case, how can one claim that the Hindu-Muslim problem revolves
around a conflict between different religious truth claims? How can one argue that
secularism is necessary because of the religious strife in Indian society? How can the danger of mixing politics and religion in India be located in the issue of the state taking a position in the conflict of religious doctrines? The fact that it is totally unclear what characterises the domain of religion in Indian society and how it differs from the political realm, brings us to similar puzzles: How have the secularists come to the belief that the crux of “the communal problem” lies in the abuse of religion for secular or political ends? Where does the conviction come from that the conflicts and tensions in India have anything to do with the relation between politics and religion in the first place? Whence the presupposition that one can understand Indian society in terms of the distinction between the religious and the political realms?

The secularist account of the Hindu-Muslim problem is not based in a theoretical
analysis of the conflicts and tensions that disrupt the Indian society. This much
is clear. Hence, it must have other origins. Somehow, the following image of Indian
society must have come into being and spread among the Indian intellectuals: This
society is suffused by religion; religion determines every sphere of life and action.
Therefore, the religious and the political realm are not separated from each other
as they properly should be. This has two consequences. On the one hand, religious
strife between the different communities must be one of the crucial forces in Indian
society. On the other hand, religion must be abused by certain persons or groups for their own political or worldly ends. Such an image of India does exist: it is part of the European colonial image of Indian society, which gradually became dominant from the seventeenth century onwards.
As Balagangadhara argues, the Christian West systematically described other
cultures as “pale and erring variants of itself.” Earlier, we saw that the main feature
of these western descriptions was the identification of a native religious system that
characterised each culture. The Europeans presupposed they would find religion in
India, because the biblical framework that shaped their thoughts and experiences
had told them that religion was a universal phenomenon. The only way in which
they could make sense of the Indian culture was in terms of its religious doctrines
333 (Balagangadhara 1994: 65-140). Two aspects of this western colonial understanding of India are crucial for our concerns.
On the one hand, given the fact that different “religions” lived side by side, the
colonials assumed that the Indian society could not but be torn by religious strife.
The interaction among the Hindu, Muslim and other communities was viewed as the
mirror image of the conflict between the different confessions in European society.
The predicament of confessional strife in post-Reformation Europe was taken as a
template for the description of the conflicts and tensions in the Indian society. This
is well illustrated by Gyanendra Pandey’s study The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990). “By the end of the nineteenth century,” he writes, “the dominant strand in colonialist historiography was representing religious bigotry and conflict between people of different religious persuasions as one of the more distinctive features of Indian society, past and present—a mark of the Indian section of the ‘Orient’” (Pandey 1990: 23-4).
The British colonials began to describe any conflict between various communities
in the Indian society in terms of religious bigotry and the fundamental antagonism
between “Hindus” and “Muslims.” Pandey shows how a series of conflicts in
nineteenth-century India were understood in terms of the “religious” or “doctrinal”
differences between the conflicting groups, while the conflicts were not at all related
to such differences. For instance, a clash between military and police personnel
in Benares in 1809 was said to originate “no doubt, in religious differences” even
though it was not clear how it had anything to do with such differences. Basically, the image of the colonial writers was the following:
Given the nature of ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’, a violent
conflict between the two was always on the cards. The riots of 1809 are represented as part of a continuum, a tradition: ‘one of those convulsions which had frequently occurred in the past owing to the religious antagonism of the Hindu and Moslem sections of the population’. Or as Francis Younghusband put it in a book entitled Dawn in India, published in 1930, ‘the animosities of centuries are always smouldering beneath the surface’ (Pandey 1990: 44).
From the nineteenth century onwards, Indian society was characterised in the
western colonial descriptions in terms of a latent antagonism between Hindus and
Muslims, which every now and then broke out into fierce religious strife. These descriptions were not founded in a theory of religious strife, which showed how the
Hindu-Muslim problem revolved around religion. Rather, they were sustained by
the assumption that Indian society was to be understood as a less developed variant of western society: India was stuck at the stage of “the Wars of Religion,” which the West had left behind in the seventeenth century.
334 On the other hand, the colonials conceived of Indian society in terms of the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal realm, because this relationship was central to their understanding of false religion. From the start, it had been clear to the Europeans that the Indian religions were instances of idolatry. The British colonials added a new layer: they conceptualised the Indian traditions within the frame of the Protestant understanding of false religion. Hence, the descriptions of religion in India were modelled upon the theological notions of “popish idolatry” and “spiritual tyranny.” In a recent article, Raf Gelders and Willem Derde (2003) show how these Protestant notions structured the colonial descriptions of Indian religion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, western scholars and missionaries alike began to conceive of the Indian society in terms of the sway of corrupt priests, the Brahmins, who added their own human fabrications to religion in order to gain power in the temporal world. The result was the colonial image of the caste system:
What was not part of religion is made part of it and is falsely worshiped. Exterior
modes of worship make religion hollow and bereave it from its content, i.e., the
essence of religion. What is not expressly directed in the original is made obligatory
by sophisticated reasoning. Consequently, the religion is no longer accessible
without the help of a specialist, i.e., the priest. What keeps these developments
going is the thirst for more power after the priests first tasted it. What begins
as priestly power soon extends itself to a longing for worldly richness and civil
authority. The result is caste: a political institution meant to keep a whole nation
under the sway of sacerdotal slavery (Gelders & Derde 2003: 4612).
In other words, the nature of religion in the Indian society was clear to the colonials, because they possessed a theoretical framework that explained it: the Protestant conception of idolatry as a spiritual tyranny.
In Christian Europe, the belief that the realm of spiritual liberty ought to be
separated from the realm of political coercion resulted from the following theological understanding of the confessional strife: (a) it was caused by sinful men who abused spiritual religion for carnal worldly ends; (b) to do so, they imposed bogus spiritual
laws and false doctrines—human additions to true religion—on the believers; © this
divided the true Christian religion into several factions, each claiming to be the only
true Christian community, and thus it created discord in Christendom—instead of
unity around a common core of doctrines. Very schematically, these were the basic
problems in mixing the temporal with the s

[Guest]

Secularism as such is not the main point of conflict in the Indian political and social system. The Indian State has no religion at the same time it guarantees freedom of practicing any religion by the citizens. However, over the years almost all political parties have tried to mix up relations with politics and that is the main reason for the present state of affairs in the Indian political scene. As elections come, religion continues to play a very important factor for all political parties. Once the Election is over, it again plays an important role in the composition of the government.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-Ravish+Oct 22 2007, 09:57 PM-->QUOTE(Ravish @ Oct 22 2007, 09:57 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Secularism as such is not the main point of conflict in the Indian political and social system. The Indian State has no religion at the same time it guarantees freedom of practicing any religion by the citizens. However, over the years almost all political parties have tried to mix up relations with politics and that is the main reason for the present state of affairs in the Indian political scene. As elections come, religion continues to play a very important factor for all political parties. Once the Election is over, it again plays an important role in the composition of the government.
[right][snapback]74521[/snapback][/right]
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That is because, Ravish, you have not read the Constitution of India. So, you are projecting your pious hopes and wishes on the Indian state. Please read the following extract from the Constitution, and tell me if it still conforms to your opinions. If yes, please explain how.
<!--c1-->CODE<!--ec1-->Right to Freedom of Religion
25. Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion.—(1) Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.
(2) Nothing in this article shall affect the operation of any existing law or prevent the State from making any law—
(a) regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice;
(b) providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.
Explanation I.—The wearing and carrying of kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion.
Explanation II.—In sub-clause (b) of clause (2), the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly.
26. Freedom to manage religious affairs.—Subject to public order, morality and health, every religious denomination or any section thereof shall have the right—
(a) to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes;
(b) to manage its own affairs in matters of religion;
© to own and acquire movable and immovable property; and
(d) to administer such property in accordance with law.
27. Freedom as to payment of taxes for promotion of any particular religion.—No person shall be compelled to pay any taxes, the proceeds of which are specifically appropriated in payment of expenses for the promotion or maintenance of any particular religion or religious denomination.
28. Freedom as to attendance at religious instruction or religious worship in certain educational institutions.—(1) No religious instruction shall be provided in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State funds.
(2) Nothing in clause (1) shall apply to an educational institution which is administered by the State but has been established under any endowment or trust which requires that religious instruction shall be imparted in such institution.
(3) No person attending any educational institution recognised by the State or receiving aid out of State funds shall be required to take part in any religious instruction that may be imparted in such institution or to attend any religious worship that may be conducted in such institution or in any premises attached thereto unless such person or, if such person is a minor, his guardian has given his consent thereto.
Cultural and Educational Rights
29. Protection of interests of minorities.—(1) Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same.
(2) No citizen shall be denied admission into any educational institution maintained by the State or receiving aid out of State funds on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them.
30. Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions. — (1) All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.
(1A) In making any law providing for the compulsory acquisition of any property of an educational institution established and administered by a minority, referred to in clause (1), the State shall ensure that the amount fixed by or determined under such law for the acquisition of such property is such as would not restrict or abrogate the right guaranteed under that clause.
(2) The State shall not, in granting aid to educational institutions, discriminate against any educational institution on the ground that it is under the management of a minority, whether based on religion or language.<!--c2--><!--ec2-->

[Guest]

I have taken note of the points mentioned in the Constitution of India. There is nothing in these provisions that prevent me from following my religion. The restrictions on religious freedom are similar to the restrictions imposed in the Constitution of other democratic countries. Most of the major countries in the EU have a State religion yet they have granted religious freedom to the citizens and non citizens resident in those countries

Since pre independence period, the political leaders have been debating as to whether India should be a nation without a religion or a Hindu Rastra as the majority of the citizens are Hindus. Even after declaring India to be a Hindu RASTRA it is still possible to provide religious freedom to those who are not Hindus. The Hindu community in India has always been a divided lot and as such incapable of providing a united front. The same situation must have prevailed in the Constituent Assembly and as such the majority community itself decided to have the present type of political system in the country. The debate still continues but new elements have got added to it as time has changed. Today, as the things stand , influenced by the Western oriented electronic media, the religious feeling and identity of the younger generation is fast diminishing, particularly in the urban areas. The dilution of the religious and cultural values is taking place very fast but unfortunately it is not taken due note by the religious leaders and people who are still strictly religious. Most of them try to live in a fools paradise. No amount of constitutional amendment is going to retard the situation.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Politicians are not national assets: HC </b>
PTI | New Delhi
Posted online: October 25, 2007
Observing that they were not a "national asset", Delhi High Court on Thursday took the politicians' head on over having their security guards on tow when they step out and wryly told them to remain in the confines of their homes and offices if they feel threatened by citizens.

"You should not let these men (politicians) to come out. Their presence in public places itself threatens the common men. I do not know why it has become a matter of prestige for them to move with 10-15 uniform security personnel carrying lethal weapon," a Bench comprising Justice TS Thakur and Justice Veena Birbal told the Union Government.

While hearing a PIL on police reforms seeking segregation of force into two wings to deal with law and order and Investigation independently, the court expressed its displeasure over the inconvenience the common people are to put up by the overwhelming presence of security guards accompanying politicians at public places.

In harsh remarks laced with sarcasm, the judges could not hide their dismay when they said, "if these people feel so threatened they should not come out in public places."

<b>The judges said that they (politicians) were not a national asset which should be protected and if they were, the citizens would protect and there was no need to be threatened by them (public).</b>

"It has become fashionable and a status symbol. The more people (security men) surrounds these people (politicians) the more prestigious they feel. It is obnoxious that common men are forced to stay on the sidelines and are prevented to walk on the pavements when the politicians pass through", the Court said.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

Undoing idea of secular India


Muslim clerics and the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board have now a new cause to pursue - opposition to the mandatory registration of marriages as directed by the Supreme Court. The apex court ruled in favour of compulsory registration of marriages on February 14, 2006, and asked all States and Union Territories to make law in this regard.
<b>
The court's order is meant to protect the rights of women, including their right to inheritance and maintenance, and check practices like child marriage. However, 20 months after the court delivered this judgement, it has found that a majority of the States were yet to comply with its directions.</b> While just five States have laws for compulsory registration of marriages, some others have made laws which make the registration of marriages optional for Muslims. Taking stock of the situation, the court has now issued a fresh directive and told all States and Union Territories to make registration of marriages mandatory within 90 days for all citizens irrespective of their religious affiliation.

However, despite this fresh directive, representatives of the AIMPLB say that registration of marriages should not be made mandatory for Muslims because Muslim marriages are solemnised only in the presence of witnesses and local qazis maintain registers of all marriage contracts. Hence, Muslim marriages need not be registered afresh under a state-made law. These arguments carry no weight. Have not members of the AIMPLB attended Hindu marriages? Often Hindu marriages are solemnised in the presence of thousands of witnesses and many Hindu sects, religious orders and temples maintain records of marriages solemnised in their premises or by their priests.

Similarly, Parsis, the tiniest religious minority in India, and Christians have a system by which marriages are registered in their places of worship. So, what is so special or unique about Muslims that they be exempt even from this innocuous rule requiring registration of marriages? And, if the Indian state feels so helpless that it would rather violate a judgement of the Supreme Court than make the AIMPLB see reason, are we to presume that it has lost the capacity to govern and enforce Article 14 of the Constitution, which ordains equality before law and the equal application of the laws?

The AIMPLB has made a habit of objecting to progressive law-making in the social sector. Every time an attempt is made to make a national law to promote the interests of women and children, there is a howl of protest from Muslim clerics and the AIMPLB. They did this in a big way when Mrs Indira Gandhi's Government introduced the Adoption of Children Bill in Parliament in 1972 to bring in a uniform law on adoptions.

The Government thought of this measure because under The Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956, only Hindus have the right to adopt children. However, Muslim clerics argued that adoption of children is prohibited in Islam and, therefore, the Government cannot make a law which gives all citizens, including Muslims, the right to adopt children. The AIMPLB was adamant. Its representative told a Joint Committee of Parliament that examined this Bill that though the Bill does not force anyone to adopt children, a common law on adoption applicable to all citizens would amount to "alluring" Muslims to take to adoption and thus violate their religious tenets.

Many scholars and politicians tried to reason with Muslim clerics to give up their objections. They said the proposed adoption law was only an enabling legislation. If adoption is "haram" in Islam, Muslims need not make use of the law and adopt children. Mr Tahir Mahmood, a noted authority on Islamic law, told the committee that he was of the view that adoption is not prohibited in Islam. "Islam is rather indifferent to adoption." Second, the Bill is not asking anyone to adopt children. "It is only a permissive piece of legislation." However, opinions like that of Mr Mahmood fell on deaf ears. The Government succumbed to the cacophonous protests from Muslim clerics and abandoned the Bill.

In the 1980s, Muslim clerics scuttled the Supreme Court's efforts to provide relief to divorced Muslim women. When the court held that such women were entitled to alimony under law made by Parliament, Muslims launched a nation-wide agitation and forced the Rajiv Gandhi Government to amend the law and thus upturn the court's judgement.

In recent times, Muslim clerics have even launched campaigns that have had an adverse impact on the health of Muslim children. While the Government is pumping in huge funds to educate parents across the country on the need for timely immunisation of children, Muslim clerics in Uttar Pradesh and some other parts of the country unleashed a vicious propaganda against the polio vaccine and advised Muslims not to allow healthcare workers to administer polio drops to their children. They spread the word that these drops would induce infertility and were actually meant to curtail the Muslim population! Thanks to this irresponsible conduct of Muslim clerics, 70 per cent of the polio victims in India in recent years are Muslim children, although Muslims constitute just 13.4 per cent of the population. There is no constitutional provision that exempts religious leaders from responsible conduct. The state must get this message across to religious leaders who raise demands and issue injunctions that are injurious to public order and health.

The latest manifestation of the maladjustment of Muslim clerics to a secular, democratic environment is their opposition to the registration of marriages. And while doing so, they are even ready to take on the Supreme Court. Sadly, this mischief is being abetted by the state. It now appears as if pseudo-secularism is a national creed and the Indian state has begun to practice it as if it were constitutionally ordained. How else is one to interpret the response of many States to the Supreme Court's order?

If the State feels that it does not have the power to bring in and enforce even such an innocuous law; if in the face of protests from a few Muslim clerics, it feels so enfeebled that it disobeys the Supreme Court, we must conclude that the Indian state lacks the motivation to preserve the secular, democratic environment. If this be so, India's unity and integrity will be in peril in the near future and the current generation of politicians will have to take the blame for undoing the idea of a united, secular, democratic India.

[acharya]

How "Sonia Congress" is undoing India

We have now reached a stage in our national history when the majority of the Hindus in India numbering over 800 million should realise that a bad 'non-secular' BJP government rooted in Hindutva and deriving its inspiration from our age-old Hindu culture and tradition is better than the so-called 'secular' UPA government which is in the stranglehold of "Sonia Congress" and the motley conglomeration of Communist parties -- an immoral marriage of political convenience which only poses an imminent threat to the integrity and unity of India. If the Congress party does not reform itself by weaning itself away from the present dangerous path of 'pseudo-secularism', it is bound to lose all its moral authority to seek a single 'Hindu Vote' in India in the not very distant future.

-- V Sundaram


Excerpts/Adaptation:
======================
'Sonia Congress' and the other parties in the UPA coalition are only interested in the minority vote banks of the Muslims/Christians. They are not bothered about the territorial integrity, security and safety of India nor are they worried about the ancient and rich cultural heritage of India based on Sanathana Dharma. What matters is the survival of Sonia and not the survival of India.

'Sonia Congress' will rest only after dividing every family in the country. In order to achieve this nefarious aim, they have created a committee with Justice Rajindar Sachar as chairman to ostensibly prepare a report on the current 'social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India'.

While Congress party divided the country on communal lines in the name of 'secularism', the present UPA government is interested in creating a 'pseudo' Islamic Republic of India unlike the true 'Islamic Republic' of Pakistan. (Jinnah was responsible for the Partition of India and he created the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with the full connivance and acquiescence of the Congress party. At least Jinnah had the courage and conviction to call his country an 'Islamic Republic').

The Congress party has created a slavish nation where the 85 per cent majority craves for the indulgence, patronage and sufferance of the 15 per cent minority

The dumb millions of India should not fail to note that the "Sonia Congress" party in New Delhi will leave no area of vote bank politics untouched and unmolested. The recent attempt to divide and destabilise the Armed Forces on the basis of caste, colour, creed, community and religion is in keeping with this 'anti-national' policy of the Congress during the last 58 years. It is now trying to sow the seeds of dissension within the Armed Forces for cornering the minority votes in India.

After successfully dividing and Balkanising India on the basis of caste, colour, creed, religion and language, the Congress party is now trying to divide the Armed Forces on the same political basis for short-term political gains.

Having destroyed the country through a system of politically motivated 'reservations', the Congress party is now trying to extend the same principle to the Armed Forces and is using the instrumentality of the Justice Rajindar Sachar Committee to achieve this most reprehensible and condemnable anti-national objective.

The UP Governor, who is a toady of the Congress Party in general and Sonia Gandhi and her family in particular, would not initiate any action against the irresponsible conduct of a Cabinet Minister of his government.

A Cabinet Minister from UP and senior Samajwadi Leader Mohammed Yaqoob has spoken like an irresponsible terrorist on Friday last when he called for the beheading of the cartoonist who had sketched Prophet Mohammed in a blasphemous manner for a Danish newspaper. The Minister has announced that he would give the avenger Rs 51 crore and weigh him in gold. He has beaten Sonia Gandhi and the UPA government in the shameful game of pseudo-secularism. What is amazing is that he has clarified that he has obtained the informal clearance of the UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav for making this statement.

The UPA government is 'pseudo-secular'; Dr. Manmohan Singh is and so is Sonia Gandhi. All of them will remain neutral between M F Hussain's obscene paintings of Hindu Gods and Goddesses and the hurt feelings of mute, suffering Hindus in the majority. Hussain's painting of Bharath Mata shows his contempt for India that is Bharath and its culture. Hussain is guilty of a constitutional offence. He is the favoured and favourite child of the Congress party. He is more important to the Congress party than the nation and more than 800 millions of Hindus in India. And the Muslim clerics of India have also chosen to vote for the conspiracy of silence in regard to the blasphemous paintings done by Hussain against Hindu Gods and Goddesses.

The 'pseudo-secular' Congress party cannot distinguish between the vital national issues and the political/intellectual skills to master the fundamental principles of political analysis. Minorities are described as secular, decent and divine while the majority Hindus are always described as 'communal, indecent and dreadful'. Why this calculated discrepancy and discrimination rooted in the infatuation for minorities and contempt and hatred for the majority?

According to the Congress party, all Christian and Muslim schools in India can teach Bible and Koran. Hindus cannot teach Gita or Ramayana in their schools.

States like Maharashtra, Bihar, Kerala, Pondichery, all Hindu-majority States, have in the past elected Muslims as Chief Ministers. Can ever a Hindu dream of ever becoming the Chief Minister of Muslim majority Jammu & Kashmir? We don't have the example of a single Muslim country where a non-Muslim can become its President or Prime Minister.

There are nearly 52 Muslim countries in the world. In no Muslim country the government provides a Haj subsidy. Only in India (not even in Pakistan) the government under the then stranglehold of the Congress party introduced Haj subsidy in the late 1950s.

We don't have any Muslim country in the world where the Hindus are extended the same special rights that all the Muslims enjoy in India.

Do we have a single instance of a Mullah or Moulvi who has ever declared a fatwa against the Muslim terrorists in India or elsewhere?

We have now reached a stage in our national history when the majority of the Hindus in India numbering over 800 million should realise that a bad 'non-secular' BJP government rooted in Hindutva and deriving its inspiration from our age-old Hindu culture and tradition is better than the so-called 'secular' UPA government which is in the stranglehold of "Sonia Congress" and the motley conglomeration of Communist parties -- an immoral marriage of political convenience which only poses an imminent threat to the integrity and unity of India. If the Congress party does not reform itself by weaning itself away from the present dangerous path of 'pseudo-secularism', it is bound to lose all its moral authority to seek a single 'Hindu Vote' in India in the not very distant future.
======================

'No' to impending Islamic Republic of India

Mahatma Gandhi declared that a bad self-government is better than a good foreign or alien government. We have now reached a stage in our national history when the majority of the Hindus in India numbering over 800 million should realise that a bad `non-secular` BJP government rooted in Hindutva and deriving its inspiration from our age-old Hindu culture and tradition is better than the so-called `secular` UPA government which is in the stranglehold of Sonia`s Congress party and the motley conglomeration of Communist parties - an immoral marriage of political convenience which only poses an imminent threat to the integrity and unity of India.

Jinnah was responsible for the Partition of India and he created the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with the full connivance and acquiescence of the Congress party. At least Jinnah had the courage and conviction to call his country an `Islamic Republic` while the Congress party has only divided the country on communal lines in the name of `secularism`. The present UPA government is only interested in creating a `pseudo` Islamic Republic of India unlike the true `Islamic Republic` of Pakistan. No wonder Pakistan is strong in their natural `secularism` and we are shaky in our unnatural `pseudo- secularism`.

There are nearly 52 Muslim countries in the world. In no Muslim country the government provides a Haj subsidy. Only in India (not even in Pakistan) the government under the then stranglehold of the Congress party introduced Haj subsidy in the late 1950s. The Congress party under the leadership of Nehru made it possible for the re-emergence of the Indian Muslim League in the 1950s as a political party in India. Hindu Mahasabha was treated as an enemy by the government of India. The Congress treated the Indian Muslim League as its friend, philosopher and guide to get rid of the communist Nambudripad government in Kerala.

We don`t have any Muslim country in the world where the Hindus are extended the same special rights that all the Muslims enjoy in India. The Congress party has created a slavish nation where the 85 per cent majority craves for the indulgence, patronage and sufferance of the 15 per cent minority. We don`t have the example of a single Muslim country where a non-Muslim can become its President or Prime Minister. States like Maharashtra, Bihar, Kerala, Pondichery, all Hindu-majority States, have in the past elected Muslims as Chief Ministers. Can ever a Hindu dream of ever becoming the Chief Minister of Muslim majority Jammu & Kashmir?

According to the Congress party, all Christian and Muslim schools in India can teach Bible and Koran. Hindus cannot teach Gita or Ramayana in their schools. According to Congress party, Hindus have no problems or ought to have no problems. For Sonia Gandhi, Arjun Singh, Dr Manmohan Singh and the like, those in majority who call themselves Hindus are themselves the problem. Do we have a single instance of a Mullah or Moulvi who has ever declared a fatwa against the Muslim terrorists in India or elsewhere?

After successfully dividing and Balkanising India on the basis of caste, colour, creed, religion and language, the Congress party is now trying to divide the Armed Forces on the same political basis for short-term political gains. The Congress party under Sonia will rest only after dividing every family in the country. In order to achieve this nefarious aim, they have created a committee with Justice Rajindar Sachar as chairman to ostensibly prepare a report on the current `social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India`. The Congress party and the other parties in the UPA coalition are only interested in the minority votebanks of the Muslims/Christians. They are not bothered about the territorial integrity, security and safety of India nor are they worried about the ancient and rich cultural heritage of India based on Sanathana Dharma.

Having destroyed the country through a system of politically motivated `reservations`, the Congress party is now trying to extend the same principle to the Armed Forces and is using the instrumentality of the Justice Rajindar Sachar Committee to achieve this most reprehensible and condemnable anti-national objective. Chief of Army Staff J J Singh has boldly declared that the military would continue to follow `secular norms` in recruiting soldiers. He has clarified that the Armed Forces have never considered recruitment on the basis of community. It should not be forgotten that in every communal riot after independence in every part of India, it is only the Army which has succeeded in creating a climate of trust and confidence among the various sections of people without distinction of caste, colour, creed, community or religion. The Congress party is now mischievously trying to sow the seeds of dissension within the Armed Forces for cornering the minority votes in India.

The `pseudo-secular` Congress party cannot distinguish between the vital national issues and the political/intellectual skills to master the fundamental principles of political analysis. No doubt issues are infinitely more complex and difficult to master than fundamental principles of analysis. The very reason why there is an issue in the first place is usually because no single principle can possibly resolve the difference to the mutual satisfaction of all concerned. Innumerable principles are often acting and interacting in a changing environment, creating vast amounts of complex facts to be mastered and assessed - if one is serious about resolving issues responsibly, as distinguished from generating cheap political excitement. The Congress party under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi is only interested in the politics of `cheap pseudo-secular popular(!) excitement`. The `disgraceful` attempt of Congress party to teach issues to the illiterate citizens of India is like teaching calculus to people who have not yet learned arithmetic, or surgery to people lacking the rudiments of anatomy or hygiene. Worse, it is teaching them to go ahead and perform surgery, without worrying about boring details.

Sardar Patel once wrote to Nehru: `I am rather surprised that you are talking about nationalist Muslims. So far as I am concerned, it is a contradiction in terms`. The situation has not changed much even today. It is not therefore surprising that the Imam of Delhi Syed Ahmed Bukhari has said, ` the government committee seeking information regarding Muslims in the Armed Forces is necessary for the benefit of the community. There is less than one per cent Muslims in defence services and it is the responsibility of the government to recruit Muslims in all services according to the population pattern of the community`. The `pseudo-secular` UPA government in New Delhi would on the one hand welcome these very patriotic remarks from Syed Ahmed Bukhari with great gusto and enthusiasm and on the other gloss over the observations of Chief of Army Staff with suave political silence and indifference, if not contempt!

We have now hilarious news to the effect that a Cabinet Minister from UP and senior Samajwadi Leader Mohammed Yaqoob has spoken like an irresponsible terrorist on Friday last when he called for the beheading of the cartoonist who had sketched Prophet Mohammed in a blasphemous manner for a Danish newspaper. The Minister has announced that he would give the avenger Rs 51 crore and weigh him in gold. He has beaten Sonia Gandhi and the UPA government in the shameful game of pseudo-secularism. What is amazing is that he has clarified that he has obtained the informal clearance of the UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav for making this statement. Will the same Minister come forward to issue a fatwa against M F Hussain who has painted Hindu Gods and Goddesses and Bharath Mata in a more blasphemous and obscene manner than his Danish counterparts? The UP Governor, who is a toady of the Congress Party in general and Sonia Gandhi and her family in particular, would not initiate any action against the irresponsible conduct of a Cabinet Minister of his government.

The UPA government is `pseudo-secular`; Dr. Manmohan Singh is and so is Sonia Gandhi. All of them will remain neutral between M F Hussain`s obscene paintings of Hindu Gods and Goddesses and the hurt feelings of mute, suffering Hindus in the majority. Hussain`s painting of Bharath Mata shows his contempt for India that is Bharath and its culture. Hussain is guilty of a constitutional offence. He is the favoured and favourite child of the Congress party. He is more important to the Congress party than the nation and more than 800 millions of Hindus in India. In this context, I would like to ask a simple question as to why all the Muslim clerics of India have chosen to vote for the conspiracy of silence in regard to the blasphemous paintings done by Hussain against Hindu Gods and Goddesses?

The dumb millions of India should not fail to note that the Congress party in New Delhi will leave no area of vote bank politics untouched and unmolested. The recent attempt to divide and destabilise the Armed Forces on the basis of caste, colour, creed, community and religion is in keeping with this `anti-national` policy of the Congress during the last 58 years. What matters is the survival of Sonia and not the survival of India. Minorities are described as secular, decent and divine while the majority Hindus are always described as `communal, indecent and dreadful`. Why this calculated discrepancy and discrimination rooted in the infatuation for minorities and contempt and hatred for the majority? If the Congress party does not reform itself by weaning itself away from the present dangerous path of `pseudo-secularism`, it is bound to lose all its moral authority to seek a single `Hindu Vote` in India in the not very distant future. Long live pseudo-secularism!

By V Sundaram
http://www.indiacause.com/columns/OL_060226.htm

* * *

Sonia pushing country towards another partition?
-- Because precisely the same was the basis of 1947 partition

Nagpur, Feb. 26 (PTI): The RSS today demanded scrapping of the Justice (Retd) Rajender Sachar committee forthwith and dubbed the move as "height of appeasement of Muslims."

On the third and final day of its meeting here, the Akhil Bhartiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS) of the Sangh passed a resolution asking the Centre to disband the Sachar panel which it felt was posing a threat to country's unity, integrity and true secularism.

The Sabha also opposed all moves to give minorities reservations on the basis of religion, RSS spokesman Ram Madhav, told reporters on sidelines of the concluding session of Sabha.

The RSS will not allow another partition of country on basis of religion, Madhav said adding, the Sachar Committee was asked to identify the states, regions, districts and blocks where there was dominant Muslim population. "Will this not push the country towards another partition, because precisely the same was the basis of 1947 partition," the resolution said.

It is very unfortunate that the committee even resorted to most dangerous move of dividing the armed forces on religious lines by seeking a headcount of Muslims. The government backtracked on the whole issue because of the firm stand taken by present and past top officials of armed forces, Madhav claimed.

RSS demands scraping of Sachar panel
http://www.hinduvoice.net/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?flavor
=archive&id=20060228102655&list=hnl
February 26, 2006

* * *

Now, a headcount of Muslim voters
The New Indian Express,
www.newindpress.com
28 February 2006.

Sachar Directive to the District Collectors -- It is a well-thought of, deep rooted, totally divisive and dangerous move by the Congress, initiated to garner Muslim votes: Venkaiah.

Chennai, February 27. Close on the heals of the controversial Muslim headcount in the armed forces, the Justice Sachar Committee has directed all District Collectors in the country to provide details of Muslim voters in all the Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies.

The directive was issued through a circular dated February 20 to all District Collectors by S. Zafar Mahamood, Officer on Special Duty, Prime Minister's high level committee headed by Justice Rajinder Sachar.

"Please let us have the following information in respect of all the Parliamentary and Assembly constituencies (separately each) falling in your jurisdiction: (a) total population and (b) total number of voters in all the Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies with break up of (i) Muslims, (ii) SC, (iii) ST and (iv) others," the circular said, directing the Collectors to send the information "by fax within a week of the receipt of the letter".

The copies of the letter were circulated to reporters by the senior BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu at a press Conference. "It is a well thought of, deep-rooted, totally divisive and dangerous move by the Congress, initiated to garner Muslim votes," charged Venkaiah.

Otherwise, how can anybody explain the Government of India circular to all District Collectors to give the break-up of Muslim voters in each constituency?"

He charged that it had exposed the evil and real intention of the Congress and the UPA Government. If the UPA Government claimed that it was carrying a socio-economic study of the backwardness of the Muslim community, why was it not studying the backwardness of other communities?

"When backward people are there in all communities, what is the necessity to give importance to Muslims about alone? What about Christians or Sikhs and other sections of the minority community of different castes like Nadars and Brahmins?" he asked. Alleging that it was not a socio-economic study, but a political study being carried out, keeping in view the elections, he said that the BJP would oppose it both inside and outside Parliament.

Venkaiah also strongly condemned Prime Minister Manmohan's suggestion of "self-rule within the Constitution" to Kashmir. The suggestion was made during Singh's speech at the recent round-table conference on Kashmir in Delhi. Replying to a query on Bush's visit, he said the BJP welcomed it. "It should be used an opportunity to ally the apprehensions in the minds of the people on the nuclear and Iran issues." Stating that the party was in favour of US action against Iran, Venkaiah said, and "We are not opposing center's policy on the issue but only the method in which the government is handling it."

* * *

Scholarships for minorities
The New Indian Express, March 1, 2006

New Delhi, Feb. 28. The Government will finance 20,000 higher education scholarships for students belonging to minority communities, (read Muslims) Union Minister P. C. Chidambaram said on Tuesday.

He also proposed to double the corpus for the Maulana Azad Educational Foundation to Rs. 200 crores. "I propose to extend greater financial support to the organisations actively involved in the welfare of minorities," he said. He also proposed to increase the central allocation to National Council for Promotion of Urdu from Rs. 10 crores to Rs. 13 crores.

* * *

Minorities Education Bill

New Delhi: The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday passed the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (Amendment) Bill, 2005, by a voice vote. Minister of State for HRD M.A.A. Fatmi said the reason for bringing this amendment bill is that the minority educational institutions were facing problems in securing NOCs from the authorities concerned for their establishment. (UNI).

* * *

Stop communal census: Venkaiah
Deccan Chronicle, Chennai 28 February 2006.

Chennai, Feb. 27: Former BJP president Venkaiah Naidu on Monday termed as "a deep rooted and dangerous move" the circular issued by the Centre to all the district collectors directing to give the statistics of Muslim voters in each Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies.

Releasing the circular issued by Dr. S. Zafar Mohamood, joint secretary to the Central government, who is on a special duty with the Prime Minister's High Level Committee for preparations of report on social, economic and educational status of the Muslims, Mr. Naidu said the circular had exposed the evil designs and intentions of the Congress-led UPA government.

"Why the government is targeting the Muslims and has left out the Christians? Because, Christian voters are negligible. The government is not at all interested in the socio-economic status of the Muslims. It is only interested in their votes in view of the forthcoming Assembly elections in four states," he alleged.

Accusing the UPA government of pursuing dirty vote bank politics, he said the BJP would not allow the government to go ahead with its plans.

Reacting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's suggestion for self-rule for Kashmir within the Constitution, Mr. Naidu said the speech of the Prime Minister was highly objectionable and dangerous.

He wondered whether the Prime Minister made the remarks in view of the visit of the US president Bush since most of the decisions of the Centre were taken under the pressure from the US.

"What does he mean by self-rule? Is Kashmir not ruled by Kashmiris? The Prime Minister's suggestion will create chain reaction in other parts of the country. We will never allow self-rule and we will raise the issue in the Parliament," he said.

* * *

Is India relapsing into pre-partition days?
DISMISS & ARREST HAJI YAQOOB KURESHI: IAIF

Indian American Intellectuals Forum (“IAIF”) expresses outrage at the sensational and provocative statement by a ruling member of India’s largest state government, Utter Pradesh. The Uttar Pradesh Minority Welfare Minister Haji Yaqoob Qureshi has come out with an extraordinary public offer of awarding a huge bounty of 51 Crore Rupees (over $11 million) to anyone who successfully carries out an illegal and criminal act of murdering -- by the favorite Islamic method of beheading -- the Danish cartoonist credited with preparing the controversial cartoons on Prophet Mohammad.

The Forum also condemns in the harshest possible terms the other prominent Muslim leader and a senior member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, Zafaryab Jilani, and another Samajwadi Party MP from Moradabad, Dr Shafiqur Rahman Barq. These two gentlemen, one holding a highly responsible position within a well known Muslim institution and the other an elected member of India’s national parliament, have openly supported Haji Yaqoob’s illegal statement and public offer. IAIF demands that besides Mr. Qureshi, the other two, Mr. Jilani and Dr. Barq, also should be booked for openly aiding and abetting in the criminal act, and for their irresponsible utterances.

The cartoon crisis, most certainly is a small issue, which has been blown out of proportion by the Jihadi Muslims. It is our firm and sincere belief that cartoons or no cartoons, the Jihadis will continue manufacturing one reason or another to wage Jihad -- an important Islamic religious command -- against the non-believers (Hindus, Budhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, Jewish, etc.).

Radical Islamic fanatics who extol the virtue of violence and hatred are determined to establish Sharia (the Islamic Law) all over the world. To achieve their sinister objective, they would indulge in intimidation and murders, on one pretext or the other. In the process, they would gag the voice of reason. They would not allow freedom to their captive followers to know or find out the truth. That is precisely the reason that there is no democracy in Muslim nations.

These fundamentalists believe that by creating a fear psychosis in the mind of masses, they can silence the voice of reason and ultimately impose Nizam-e-Mustafa (Rule of Allah) in all the countries. That is the reason they killed von Ghog, the Dutch filmmaker who questioned the treatment of Muslim women in Islamic countries. Norwegian publisher of Satanic Verses, William Nygaard, was also shot dead by Islamic fanatics.

It is paradoxical that on one hand the radical Islamists insist that Islam happens to be a religion of peace, and on the other hand, they openly warn that if anyone ever questioned their faith, that person would be killed! That is the reason that Islam as the religion is widely seen as being synonymous with Jihad and terrorism.

Islamic fanatics use sophistry and subterfuge in democratic societies. They deny any kind of religious freedom to non-believers in their own countries. They exploit democracy, secularism, liberal laws, human rights and compassion of free societies everywhere. Islam forbids Muslims to assimilate with people of other creeds or civilizations, while at the same time exploiting the freedom and democracy in non-Islamic lands for their own advantage. Muslims enjoy legal redress in the democratic nations, which they deny to non-believers in their own lands. Life is a constant humiliation and hell for non-Muslims in Islamic nations. The time has come that political parties the world over give up their egregious naiveté and emerge from torpor because religious bigotry cannot be countered by dilettantism.

The reason India is a democratic and secular country is because it is predominantly Hindu. We should not forget that India was divided in 1947 on the basis of two nation theory. Ashok Mehta, a prominent leader of yesteryears, in his book “Political Mind of India” has categorically stated that 93% of Muslims voted for the creation of Pakistan in 1946 elections. Had all the Muslims left India for Pakistan at that time, the Hindus would have lived their lives peacefully in Hindu India. Now the descendants of those Muslims have made the life of Hindus miserable in their own country.

It is a matter of great disgrace and disgust that Hindus are being terrorized by Muslims in the Hindu India. The manner in which rowdy Muslim mobs damaged BJP office in Lucknow, attacked and looted Hindu stores in Hyderabad after the Friday prayer and threatened Hindus in Bangalore, is reminiscent of pre-partition days depredation against Hindus. The astonishing display of political pusillanimity and mal-adroitness on the part of India’s UPA-controlled central government and Samajwadi-controlled state government, coupled with the vote bank politics, has emboldened these Jihadis to take out their anger on innocent Hindus because someone insulted Islam in Denmark!

This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, irrationality and intolerance, on the part of Muslims against Hindus, is difficult to sustain. At this juncture, India needs leaders with vision, perspicacity, competency and sense of history to be able to handle these demagogues who want to divide India on the communal lines.

Indian American Intellectuals Forum (IAIF) is a New York-based organization. It organizes seminars on the issues affecting Indian-Americans. It invites prominent speakers and publishes their views on-line and in newspapers. Its aim is to strengthen Indo-American relationship.

Narain Kataria
President

* * *

Hindu Temple Attacked by Muslims (MIM) in Hyderabad
Tension grips Tappachabutra in city
Staff Reporter, Sunday, Feb 26, 2006
Damage of statues in front of temple triggers angry protests
http://www.hindu.com/2006/02/26/stories/...170100.htm

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* Police make lathicharge twice to disperse crowd
* BJP, TDP leaders try to pacify devotees
* Police forces deployed in the area as a precautionary measure

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Hyderabad: Tension gripped the sensitive Tappachabutra area on Saturday following alleged desecration of the Darbar Maisamma temple. Noses of the two lion statues in front of the temple were found broken, leading to anguish and distress among the locals.

As word spread people in large numbers kept coming triggering rumours of communal flare-up. The police had to resort to mild lathicharge twice to disperse the crowd in the afternoon. There were reports of the retreating mob throwing stones at some houses in Tallagadda locality.

Action demanded

The statues were stated to have been damaged in the wee hours of Saturday with a stone lying nearby. It was noticed when the temple was opened at 5.30 a.m. Temple chairman Amar Singh alerted the police.

As the day progressed angry devotees gathered at the temple and raised slogans against the MIM. They demanded action against the guilty. BJP leader Baddam Balreddy and Telugu Desam MLA G. Sayanna rushed to the temple at 1 p.m. and tried to pacify the agitated devotees. "We don't know who have damaged the statues. But certainly it is the act of those who have no religion," Mr. Amar Singh said and demanded immediate arrest of the guilty.

As the crowd kept swelling, additional police forces were summoned. The Rapid Action Force took up position and the water canon was kept ready. The police deployed 30 pickets in Tappachabutra and Kulsumpura police station limits. "It is a mischief of some vagabond or drunkard," said Tappachabutra Inspector M.S. Venguopal Rao.

Karwan MLA Afsar Khan later visited the temple and enquired about the incident. The MLA said that he would do his best to see that the guilty were brought to book.

* * *

Cartoon riots spills in to our temples -
Tension in Hyderabad after damage to temple
(By Indo Asian News Service)
Saturday February 25, 06:21 PM
http://in.news.yahoo.com/060225/43/62ozb.html
http://www.hinduvoice.net/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?flavor
=archive&id=20060228102731&list=hnl

Hyderabad, Feb 25 (IANS) Tension prevailed in the sensitive Karwan area of the city Saturday after miscreants vandalised a portion of a temple, according to police sources.

Local people became agitated when they found statues of two tigers damaged in front of the Maisamma temple in the city. Police suspect that the incident occurred Friday night.

Policemen were deployed in large numbers in Karwan, Talagadda and adjoining localities after a mob protesting against the damage to the temple attacked three shops. Some passing vehicles were also damaged. Police resorted to mild caning to disperse the protesters. Four people were taken into custody. Activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Bajrang Dal staged protests demanding the arrest of the vandals. Police have sealed roads leading to Karwan to prevent outsiders from entering the area. They have also intensified patrolling in sensitive localities.

* * *

From: Shobhan Ganji (shobhang@buy.com)
Subject: Muslims must give up their Rowdy Attitude.
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 06 01:33:07 IST

Look at this Below Article: Four Deaths in Clashes. Clashes are instigated by Muslims. Who started the Problem? Answer is Muslims. Have they ever lived in peace with Hindus in the Country? No. What does the Stupid Congress government will say? They are expressing their rights. Is this the way to express riots? Forcing people to shut-down the businesses? If this goes on in a Hindu Majority Country, what goes on in Pakistan and Bangladesh against Hindus is difficult to comprehend. Let the world arise and kick these Fanatics. They spread violence nothing else. Who says that Islam is a religion of Peace?

Four deaths in clashes in Lucknow

Muslims tried to force Hindus to shut their shops, police said.

Four people have been killed in clashes between Hindus and Muslims in the city of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, the state government says.

Violence started after Muslims protesting at President Bush's Indian visit tried to force Hindu traders to shut their shops, police say.

The state's Home Secretary, Alok Sinha, said eight people were being treated in hospital for their injuries.

Police say the protesters also set fire to shops and banks in the city.

"Muslims after offering prayers went around ordering shops to down their shutters to protest President Bush's visit to India which sparked off the clashes because the Hindus objected," police chief Ashutoch Pandey told the AFP news agency.

Three of the dead are reported to have been shot. It is not clear how many of the dead are Muslims or Hindus.

The authorities have now imposed a ban on gatherings of more than five people.

Reports say arguments between Hindus and Muslims got out of control because of inadequate security with many police deployed elsewhere to deal with a visit by Indian President Abdul Kalam.

* * *

From: arthashasthra7@touchtelindia.net
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 06 01:50:41 IST

UNNECESSARILY PEOPLE ARE DYING IN THE HANDS OF ISLAMIC JIHADI'S

Friday, March 3, 2006 (Lucknow):

At least four people were dead and 15 injured in cross firing during an anti-Bush protest in Aminabad, Lucknow. Clashes between Muslims and Khatik community broke out after Muslims asked Khatik community to join the protest. The protestors went on a rampage damaging shops and vehicles while trying to enforce a shutdown. Police said the situation was under control. Additional security personnel had been rushed to the areas. However, Aminabad, Hazratganj and Kaiserbagh areas were tense following the violence. There were reports of firing in the air from some areas and several shops and vehicles were damaged in brick batting. Shops and business establishments downed shutters in the main markets of Lucknow following the incident. (With PTI inputs)

==========================

Comment posted by
HinduismDefense to VivekaJyoti at 3/05/2006 05:05:44 PM
Subject: How "Sonia Congress" is undoing India

PM BEHIND THE PM
By S.P. Attri (USA)
----------------------

1. The ascent of Sonia Gandhi, to the position of PM behind the PM, is not a tribute to our democracy; it is a dazzling-sight of deep shame. Sonia Gandhi is a Hideous-Mortification of the Hindu. Those who mouth that question of Sonia's foreign origin has gone away, has been put to rest, and is a thing of the past, are inordinately mistaken. This question will not let Sonia cuddle with comfort, it will string around her neck for a long time, it will make our Hindus hang our head in shame.

2. Sonia is a creature of Catholicism, any Hindu who puts faith in Sonia, is a Sucker. Of course, there is lot of apathy and un-assertiveness among the Hindus. This must be dispensed with quickly, or there is going to be no future for the Hindus, in the country of India, which is going to be totally inhospitable to the Hindu, and the cost to the Hindu, is going to be staggering. It is imperative that Hindus take notice of what is going on around them, and get a reality-check. If we Hindus sit on our A**, then we shall surely be kicked in the A**.

3. Reality-Check: Sonia's rise to the position of PM behind the PM, does not mean that, Hindus are Anti-BJP or Pro-Congress. Hindus are neither Pro nor Anti-BJP, nor are they Pro nor Anti-Congress. Hindu has no loyalty to either BJP or to Congress. Hindu looks at only his own pocket-book, his loyalty is only to his own personal economic interest. Hindu does not judge the law, whether it is a good law or a bad law. He judges the law, according to how it affects him personally. Hindu's loyalty does not extend beyond this simple choice or principle. That is why Hindu has not been community-minded. Even in the sixteenth century, Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur (Butcher-Babur) observed this distinctive characteristic of the Hindu, and mentioned it in his Babur-Nama.

4. Hindu's memory is also awfully-short. Hindus, by and large, have all but forgotten the achievements and accomplishments of BJP, during its five year regime. During these five years, BJP created millions of High-Tech Jobs, produced hundrds of thousands of Highly-Trained Workers, and started the arrival of billions of dollars worth of outsourcing business, coming into India. These achievements of BJP, are far far greater than what Congress brought in the fifty years before that. But it needs to be admitted and appreciated, that everybody in India, has not benefited equally, from the flood of BJP's high tech progress, and it has played a pivotal role in the fortunes of BJP. City folks of India, have benefited more, than the rural folks of India.

5. The Rascals of Congress and of Leftists, have taken full advantage of this Disparity, they have been making Colossal-Promises, which are not only preposterous, but impossible to fulfill, they are destined eventually to run afoul of the masses of India.

Question: Can the problems of the Hindu be solved?

Absolutely-Yes, but only if Hindus are willing to: "Put their money where their mouth is."

There are many many things that we Hindus can do, but they all require sacrifice, and putting our money where our mouth is. There is no free lunch in life. But no power on earth can save the Hindu, if the Hindu is not willing to defend himself.

6. Islamism and Christianism are always trying to exterminate the Hindu and his Hinduism, from the land of India, and will succeed in their evil-intentions, if we Hindus let them do it. But Islamism and Christianism can also be demolished if we Hindus batter them with Heavy-Hindu Artillery of Strong Hindu Action.

-- Surinder Paul Attri

* * *


# posted by swamijyoti @ 2:50 PM
Comments:
Zahira Sheik (Best bakery case) lied, is being convicted and fined.

What happens when others defamed Swami Ramdev's on his medicines ?

What about the press briefings of Brinda and company that made Hindus and Swami Ramdev look silly ? Isn't that defamation ? When the govt found medicines clean, how did the earlier samples have animal matter ?

What about the attack on Ayurveda, a 2000 year old knowledge ? What about the reputation of Hindus ? sants or common men ? are Hindus destined to die in bomb blasts, defamations and lies ?

What applies to Zahira Sheikh should apply to Brinda Karat and company or anyone who is proven to have lied ? or no ?

Is Zahira prosecuted just because she is a Muslim Woman ?

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Divide and rule </b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
Coalitions can work, Mr Singh
Inaugurating a federalism conference in New Delhi on Monday, Prime Minister <b>Manmohan Singh complained that regional parties and those with narrow, "regional and sectional loyalties" tended to distort the "national vision". </b>Read alongside his recent statement -- to the board of a management consultancy -- that "fractured mandates" were impeding national development, it is clear that <b>Mr Singh is blaming the coalition system for the comatose state of the India-United States nuclear deal</b>. Admittedly, a multi-party alliance, with a variety of State and community specific agendas, can be inimical to policy consistency. Even decisions that are obviously advantageous to India can fall by the wayside. Yet, is the Prime Minister being entirely honest when he blames the proverbial 'system'? Is he not shirking responsibility? After all, coalitions and fractured mandates are here to stay. It is extremely unlikely that any election in the near future is going to give either national party -- the BJP or the Congress -- more than 150 to 175 seats. In such a scenario, pushing through with what is practicable and what the head of the coalition believes needs to be done is a test of leadership. It requires a mix of inter-personal skills, political conviction and, sometimes, bloody-mindedness. It is about starting with the assumption that politics is the art of the possible -- not that it is a dirty business that self-righteous technocrats must float two inches above. Mr Singh's frustration at the Left and select regional allies -- the DMK, RJD and NCP -- sabotaging the nuclear agreement may be understandable. Even so, if the deal now seems near-impossible, it is because the Congress lost its nerve, and the party leadership did not have the courage to go ahead. A federalised polity is the symptom -- the ailment lies elsewhere.

Coalition Governments and fractured mandates cannot be wished away. Neither would it be fair to categorise them as non-achievers. <b>The NDA experiment was a success because, as Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee had a persona and a public credibility that overrode coalition contradictions. Yes, even he had to compromise -- notably with the frequent blackmail of the Telugu Desam -- but in the end he could make significant progress on whatever he wanted to achieve: From Pokhran II to the national highways project to a new telecom policy</b>. Mr Singh can argue that his Government and party are hamstrung by the absence of an overwhelming national figure such as Mr Vajpayee. Fair enough, but consider other coalition models. In 1996-97, the United Front (UF) gave India its most disjointed Government since, perhaps, the last days of the Mughal Empire. Yet, as Finance Minister, Mr P Chidambaram presented an aggressive Budget in February 1997. He cut taxes, bet on the Laffer curve and put his trust on a demand surge driving up the economy. The Budget was prescient; it anticipated the boom that arrived a few years later and set fiscal policy on a course that has not been reversed. It is nobody's argument that the then Prime Minister, Mr HD Deve Gowda, or Mr Chidambaram's then party, the Tamil Maanila Congress, or the rest of the UF or the Left that was a part of the Government, believed in economic liberalism. How, then, does Mr Singh explain that Budget of 10 years ago?
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

<!--emo&:blink:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='blink.gif' /><!--endemo--> India needs quality leadership: Kalam

PTI | New Delhi

Posted online: November 06, 2007

Former President APJ Abdul Kalam on Tuesday said India needs quality leadership and asked the states to share their infrastructure and knowledge to reduce disparities among them.

"We are a democratic billion people who need quality leadership," he said adding to succeed leaders require a shared vision for the nation, with an ability to take real time decisions, to travel along an unexplored path and nobility in management.

"This will help reduce disparities and conflicts between the states thus helping in attaining non-linear growth," Kalam said addressing the Fourth International Conference on Federalism here.

"Working together is the need of the hour. The nation can work together on common issues for achieving sustainable growth," the former President said.

"India has 28 states which are multi-religions, multi-lingual and multi-cultural...Hence the solution to the problem and development also should be region-based," he said and added region-based growth will give a fillip to growth and provide equal opportunities.

A federal economy should aim at reducing the rural-urban divide while providing a prosperous and healthy future, devoid of terrorism and having a sustainable growth, Kalam, who during his tenure as President had been advocating at Providing Urban amnities in Rural Areas (PURA), said.

[acharya]

Lastly Hindu renegades, those intellectuals who want to cut off India at any cost from her past and make a copy -- however brilliant -- of a Marxism which has died everywhere else, or of the United States of America, where violence, divorce and depression are affecting three persons out of five, are extremely active at the moment, thanks to a government who chooses to close its eyes while this is going on.

Yet, it is for this Precious Knowledge that all Indians, be they Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Sikh, should retain their dharmic identity, while being faithful to their Creed or Supreme God. This Diwali thus should symbolise for all Indians, the rekindling of this Light in their hearts.


http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/07francois.htm

[Guest]

<b>Baptized’ south Gujarat tribals re-embrace Hinduism</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Surat, December 18 Around 2,000 tribal men and women from different villages in South Gujarat, who had converted to Christianity, re-embraced Hinduism on Monday evening at a religious ceremony ( sammelan) at the Shivaji ground in Tapi district.
They took an oath by the fire in the presence of Jagat Guru Acharya Narendra Maharaj and submitted affidavits that they won't convert to Christianity ever again in the future.

The people had started gathering at the venue since Sunday night listening to the Jagat Guru's teaching before re-converting to Hinduism at the ceremony a day later.

Narayan Solanki, a disciple of Narendra Maharaj in Tapi district said, "There are many disciples of the Maharaj working in different villages of Vyara, Dharampur, Songadh, Mandvi, Ahwa-Dang, Vasda and so on. They visit these places and interact with the tribals who have been baptised earlier by various missionaries and convince them to return back to Hinduism."

According to Solanki, the Maharaj also runs an ashram at Naneej village in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. It was after a visit to one such ashram that they became motivated to become his disciples. "We visit different villages and persuade those, who have been baptised, to come back into the Hindu fold," said Solanki.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> <!--emo&:cool--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/specool.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='specool.gif' /><!--endemo-->

[ramana]

Mudy, Please read this article to see how important tribals are to hindu culture.

Oral Epics of women of Dandakranya


Once tribals are lost Hinduism is lost.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Once tribals are lost Hinduism is lost. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes, that is why missionaries always target tribals, they did in MP,Chatisgarh, Nagaland, Tripura, Raj, Gujarat.
My grandmother did lot of work in Bastar area in 60s.

[Guest]

Can't get crazier than this...

Principle of SHARIA''H Investment

The term ‘Islamic Investment ’ in this article means a joint pool wherein the investors contribute their surplus money for the purpose of its investment to earn halal profits in strict conformity with the precepts of Islamic Shari’ah. The subscribers of the Fund may receive a document certifying their subscription and entitling them to the pro-rata profits actually accrued to the Fund. These documents may be called ‘certificates’ ‘units’ ‘shares’ or may be given any other name, but their validity in terms of Shari’ah, will always be subject to two basic conditions:


http://iio.moneycontrol.com/

[Bharatvarsh]

Can anyone tell me if there has been ANY attempt at all to change Aurangabad to something else?

The name is so shameful and that too in SHIVAJIS HOMESTATE

"Aurangabad, Bihar, a city and a municipality in Aurangabad district in the state of Bihar, India
Aurangabad District, Bihar, one of the thirty-seven districts of Bihar state, India
Aurangabad, Maharashtra, a city in Maharashtra, India
Aurangabad District, Maharashtra, a District in Maharashtra, India

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurangabad "

In Maharashtra at least it was named after the b@st@rd Aurangzeb, imagine having cities named after Hitler in Israel, on top of this no city named after Shivaji.

What did Shiv Sena do when in power to wipe out this blot on the nation?