Indian Secularism and Rise of Right-wing Politics | Manoj Kumar Mishra

The boundaries between civic and cultural nationalism were never neatly demarcated in India. For instance, Congress leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Ganesh festival was adopted by the right-wing Shiv Sena party of Maharashtra as an expression of Hindu assertion. Mahatma Gandhi spoke of the spiritualisation of politics and suggested the inseparability between religion and politics, although he did not express a preference for a particular set of religious values over any other. Right-wing politics under the Bharatiya Janata Party has taken advantage of these overlapping spheres to push its Hindutva agenda forward as such spiritual politics.

IN INDIA, IDENTITY politics is inherent to the provisions of the Constitution and the conception of secularism as conceived by our lawmakers. Indian secularism is different from the Western [read French] variant in so far as it does not completely separate religion and politics. Second, it includes the historical percept that the newly-constituted nation inherits its rich tradition of respecting all religions equally.

The Indian state had to play a major role in piloting social reforms and change the religious practices hindering the path of development. Further, enforcement of fundamental rights also required reforms of social practices embedded in religion. For instance, article 17 of the Indian Constitution abolishes the practice of untouchability which is rooted in the hierarchical caste system within the Hindu society.

Practices of Sati implying forcible immolation of the wife in the husband’s funeral pyre after the latter’s death which was embedded in religious rituals of traditional Hindu society required legislation by the state to end the practice.

Similarly, the practice of Child Marriage has been legally stopped and widows who were earlier not allowed to remarry, are now legally allowed to remarry by the Indian state. The Western models of secularism could not have helped in securing these reforms.

The making of the Indian Constitution was a herculean and egalitarian exercise. It was prepared by the Constituent Assembly whose members were elected by the legislative assemblies of different states. Although the political elites did not belong to a monolithic socio-economic structure, the socio-economic conditions that they represented were varied.

Political groups such as the Indian National Congress (INC) and Hindu Mahasabha conceptualised national identity through different lenses, based on their interpretation of historical experiences and understanding of socio-economic conditions prevailing at that point of time which could bring about the enlightenment norms of equality, liberty and justice for the masses. The INC, under the leadership of the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, considered respect for plurality and protection of minority rights through the Constitution as a way to realize these norms. The Hindu Mahasabha, representing the upper castes, considered instituting a Hindu Rashtra could provide justice to the people by taking the two-nation theory to its logical conclusion. Extremists within the Congress Party also voiced their opinions for an India with a strong Hindu cultural identity as its foundation.

However, Nehru’s and moderate Congress leaders’ prescriptions about the protection of the rights of minorities gradually tilted towards appeasement of religious minorities by successive Congress leaders and Hindu Mahasabha’s radical approach towards the religious minorities was softened by successive political groups like the Jan Sangh and the BJP formed to defend the changing contours of Hindu culture. Extreme right-wing politics of Hindu Mahasabha was moderated by leaders such as Shyama Prasad Mukherjee who dissociated himself from the Mahasabha and formed the Bhartiya Jan Sangh in 1951. On the core question of membership of Muslims and Christians, the RSS opened its membership to these minority populations in 1979 under the stewardship of Balasaheb Deoras.

The pluralist ideology of the INC was diluted as Nehru’s daughter and his political/ideological successor Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not shy away from accommodating Sikh religious extremists, such as the fundamentalist preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the late 1970s and early 1980s to defeat the Akali Dal in Punjab, a political party largely popular and comprised of moderate Sikhs [1].

When much-publicised conversions of untouchable communities in and around the village of Meenakshipuram in South India to Islam in 1981 took place, it was the Congress government of Indira Gandhi which warned against the disuniting of India and said that Gulf money would induce untouchables and tribal peoples to leave the Hindu fold [2].

The BJP kept blaming the Congress Party for treating the religious minorities as a monolithic group and misusing the group rights for vote-bank politics. On the other side, the BJP government, in line of this argument, has outlawed the practice of Triple Talaq to demonstrate its commitment to individual rights while it kept criticising the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s steps to revoke the Supreme Court’s verdict on the Shah Bano case in the 1980s as a ’minority appeasement’ strategy [3].

Much like Prime Minister Indira Gandhiâ’s attempts to tilt the 1983 Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections in the Congress Party’s favour by raising the bogey of Muslim invasion of Jammu region through a resettlement bill, the Party’s pluralist credentials goaded her grandson Rahul Gandhi to make exclusive visits to temples prior to elections and his inconsistent remarks posed challenges to his party’s secular credentials and played straight into the BJP’s hands. For instance, in 2012, declaring to the voters in Badaun, Rahul gave credit to his grandmother Indira Gandhi for breaking up Pakistan.
He said: ’˜You know that when any member of my family has decided to do anything, he does it. Be it the freedom struggle, the division of Pakistan or taking India to the 21st century [4].’ That had the possibility of being misconstrued and was a tad far-fetched.

On the other hand, in a bid to camouflage its communitarian ethos, the BJP and its sister organisations have been trying to bring the socially and economically backward Pasmanda Muslims to the ’mainstream’. For instance, since 2002, the RSS-backed Rashtriya Muslim Manch (RMM) is working towards this end [5]. In a similar vein, a cursory look at the BJP’s manifestos of 2019 and 2024 makes it very clear that phrases like India’s Civilisation/ Cultural Heritage/Ancient Bharatiya Civilisation have been chosen by the party to replace concepts like Hindu identity or Hindutva with clear communal connotations. While the right-wing tendencies of the secular front find more and more expression today, the compromises and appeasement policies of the right wing are no longer hidden. This is because as new India grows older, more and more grey areas become apparent in its laws and socio-cultural practices; India has never been about either or.

(Author: Manoj Kumar Mishra is Lecturer in Political Science, SVM Autonomous College, Jagatsinghpur, Odisha)