Protect India’s secular nationalism!

I often tell foreign friends that India is a land of paradoxes. You can often make two contradictory statements about India and find that both are almost equally true.

The wildly debated recent Pew survey on India pretty much established that. One of the most fascinating paradoxes in the survey was about the role of religion in public life. While 84% of Indians said that respecting all religions is very important to being ‘truly Indian’, 64% Hindus also said that being Hindu is very important to being ‘truly Indian’.

Many analysts took solace in this paradox with a ‘glass is half full’ attitude, but it is deeply problematic.

The driving thrust of Hindutva politics has been to redefine Indian national identity based on the Hindu identity, and then subsume other identities within the Hindu identity. This allows one to believe that Hindus ‘own’ India, while non-Hindus are merely ‘guests’ or (worse) ‘tenants’ in India, with the right to practice their religion but not to lead or represent the nation as a whole.

Of course, a further strand within this ideological debate is the question of ‘who is a Hindu’. While some Hindutva friends hold that Indian Muslims or Christians should also be considered ‘Hindu’, politics is practical, and the most practical way of defining a Hindu in public life is through their religious beliefs (while segregating the rest).

The closest parallel to this model of nationalism is perhaps Israel – a country that is, not coincidentally, looked up to by many Hindutva enthusiasts.

While about 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, Arabs are – for all practical purposes – not ‘truly Israeli’. Arabs have largely been left out of Israel’s growth story, with nearly 40% of them still living in poverty. They are also not conscripted into the military, even though military service is compulsory for other Israeli citizens. And it is highly unlikely that an Arab politician would ever become Israel’s prime minister.

I once asked an Israeli friend why his country does not simply absorb Palestinians as citizens, instead of building illegal settlements. He said, “But we are a Jewish state!” (It was therefore irrelevant that the Palestinians would not like that either.)

By contrast, the Indian model of nationalism, at independence, had meant to embrace all of India’s diverse communities and identities equally. The founders of the Indian republic were unanimous in the belief that India can’t simply become a ‘Hindu Pakistan’. But if being Hindu is considered the key to being ‘truly Indian’, can one ever visualise a Muslim or Christian being elected prime minister?

Sadly, the survey showed that Muslims are also buying into the segregation. Strikingly, but unsurprisingly, almost half of the Muslims surveyed by Pew saw the partition of India and Pakistan as a ‘bad thing’. Indian Muslims hold syncretic religious beliefs with strong Hindu influences (77% of them believe in karma, for instance).

Yet, the Muslim social and political identity is now much more sharply defined. The Muslim attitude to inter-religious marriages is extremely hostile, but they also tend to live largely amongst themselves and want access to religious courts to solve family disputes, rather than go to the general judiciary.

India’s experiment with democracy has been truly unique – especially in the post-colonial world. Around us, many a Congo and Cambodia have stumbled into ethnic conflict and civil war, and hurtled towards ruin. But Indian democracy will only continue to thrive if Indian nationalism continues to celebrate diversity.

Come August 15, India’s secular nationalism would have survived 74 miraculous years. It does not need to be redefined because it isn’t broken.