Indian Secularism and Right-Wing Politics

By Yanis Iqbal

The rapid rise of neo-fascist politics in India has foregrounded issues relating to the politico-ideological valences of religious traditions and the desirability of secularization. Does communalism owe its strength only to a specific political structure or is it also rooted in the tendential exclusivity of popular religiosity? Is the contemporary Right’s vitality to be blamed only on the manipulation of religious sentiments or do religious systems also provide normative nourishment to xenophobic zealotry? Is it the failure of progressive religiosity that has elicited religious extremism or is it the presence of desecularized cultures – in the form of the extended influence and importance of religious institutions, ideologies and identities – that accounts for deeply engrained communal prejudices? While the first parts of these questions assume that Indian communalism is linked to the misuse of religion and can be neutralized through a more democratic invocation of pre-existing religious resources, the seconds parts of these questions complicate the apparently harmless status of religion, drawing attention to how a modernist emphasis on secularization can more effectively counter neo-fascist revivalism. Currently, what dominates the Indian political landscape is the critical traditionalism of the former. In the Hinduism vs Hindutva debate, for instance, the main emphasis was on the articulation of the liberal-democratic arguments within the traditions of the Indian past against the masculinist faith system of the Sangh. This entire discussion ignored Aijaz Ahmad’s warning about how Indian communalism is not just a form of cultural assertion but a totalizing project of national hegemony, which can consequently be countered only through the construction of an alternative national project encompassing all the levels of society:  

If communalism for the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] is really only the cutting edge for the popularization of a fascist national project which has come about to challenge and displace the Centre-Left power blocs that had previously contended for hegemony, then it necessarily follows that the posing of secularism against communalism is necessary but insufficient; that the posing of the more humane and subversive traditions within the belief systems of the Indian past against the Sangh’s masculinist and market-friendly Hinduism is necessary but insufficient; and that it is not possible in fact to challenge a fully articulated fascist national project without posing against it a superior national project capable of organizing what Gramsci once called the ‘national-popular will’. 

One of the major weaknesses of critical traditionalism that prevents it from creating a full-fledged project of national hegemony is its passive reliance on the public significance of religion, as evident in the debate on Hinduism and Hindutva, wherein the political relevance of religion as a spiritual compass remained unquestioned. This stance forces the proponents of critical traditionalism to remain more or less subservient to the institutional complexes associated with the types of religiosities found in India. This article will critically analyze religion in the context of Indian politics to highlight why modernist values, in particular secularization, serve as more effective responses to communalism than the neo-traditionalist refashioning of religious traditions. 

A Historical Analysis of Religious Tolerance

In India, secularism was established as a popular ethic of religious tolerance, with the notion of tolerance itself being consecrated as forming the cultural core of an ancient and stable Indian civilization. This meant that the necessity of secularization never arose. Satisfied with the primordially defined concept of an unchanging religious-spiritual-cultural essence, the Indian political class never attempted to initiate changes within a heavily religious civil society, considering secularism to be a state of affairs ready at hand to be used in an expedient manner. “In the Indian context,” writes Achin Vanaik, “the overdetermination of the notion of secularization by the idea of tolerance did mean that the question of the secularization of civil society was never posed in the same way as in the West. Whether Indian civil society was, could be or needed to be secularized were effectively non-questions since, for most, the tolerance (i.e. secularism) of Indian society was treated as axiomatic, despite the communal horrors of Partition”. To what extent is this notion of tolerance historically accurate? In the traditional Indian societies, the political authority of the state was marginal, composed of local arrangements of power based on access to land and temple, regional kingdoms and a far-removed grand empire, whose grandiose spatial spread was matched by its superficial penetration into different areas. The third case of power arrangement needs further elaboration. The reign of the great empires of India – the Mauryas (1st century BC), the Guptas (4th century AD), the Delhi Sultanate (12th-16th centuries AD) and the Mughal Empire (16th-18th centuries AD) – was witness to the existence of smaller units of political authorities that practiced diverse forms of vernacular cultures. The imperial center was always embedded in a wider system of multiple regional structures. This dual arrangement was an outcome of the peculiar characteristics of Indian society: 1) in a religiously diverse country, organized political power had no other option than to maintain some distance from the dominant religious group for the sake of stability and peace; and 2) the geographical vastness of the areas made it difficult for imperial agents to forcefully impose on them a completely uniform system of political rules and cultural codes. These concrete imperatives manifested themselves in the theological principles of Hinduism and Islam. In the Manusmriti, we find “a fundamental distinction between the king as the human agent and the law as the superhuman abstract order leads to a theory of restrained rulership and a conception of fairness of treatment towards different types of subjects.” The realm of kingship has various obligations to and relations with the morally transcendent sphere of spirituality. Since society is the embodiment of spirituality, the social order – consisting of different castes – is said to be prior to the state, with the rulers being tasked with the protection of socio-cultural customs. Hindu political theory articulates this subordination of the king’s legislative function to the social order in “the relation between the political ruler and the social practices of the caste order. The ruler’s power is executive or administrative; it cannot make fundamental rules of social conduct or change them. The rules of the caste order as a system of social relations are thus impervious to the constant fluctuations of royal power.” The self-regulating permanence of “deep social life” is to be distinguished from the unstable power dynamics of dynasties, kingdoms and individual rulers, which “affect the lives of a very small number of individuals who are born, by their caste fate, to endure the impermanence and aggravations of a life of political power.” A similar Islamic political theory of restrained rulership and a legislatively powerless state can be seen in the structure of Mughal rule. Its theological precepts derived from the Persianate Islam of the Khorasan region, which had to deal with the conquest of non-Islamic rulers. Relying upon a specific reading of Aristotle, the Muslim intellectuals of this version of Islam asserted that the duty of the ruler, regardless of his own individual faith, was to ensure the development of conditions that would allow the flourishing of his subjects. The royal authority was to work toward the creation of a society that guaranteed not just mere sustenance but also human development. “Living as human beings – not just zoe [life of biology] but bios [life of language and politics] – required conditions in which subjects could use their intellectual and spiritual capacities. On the basis of this interesting derivation from Aristotle, they were able to assert that the task of the non-Islamic ruler was to preserve the religious practice of his Islamic subjects.” Basing themselves on this unique Aristotelian interpretation of Islamic rule, the Mughals practiced forms of toleration that incorporated the religious beliefs of the Hindus. In sum, both Hinduism and Islam established a system of political authority that recognized itself as being conditioned by the constraints of society. While recognizing this historically specific feature of the pre-colonial state, it is important not to advance the theory of “segmentary state,” according to which the grandiose verbal claims of pre-colonial states only hid the empirical reality of near-total lack of authority. In the words of Irfan Habib, “[i]t is held that the British conquest was the product of a ‘revolution,’ by which the East India Company merely replaced the titular Indian state as a partner of the local elites, and the British conquest was thus not really a conquest at all!” Here, the question of centralization is conflated with that of the strength of state power. It is presupposed that a state capable of maintaining sovereignty over its territory has to be centralized in terms of administrative structure and socio-cultural practices. In opposition to this, we need to insist on both the strength of the pre-colonial state and its distance from society – something inconceivable within an analytical perspective mired in European notions of sovereignty. Sudipta Kaviraj articulates this succinctly: 

In terms of their external relations with other kingdoms or empires, these [pre-colonial] states were certainly ‘sovereign’ over their territories; but we cannot simply assume that in their internal relation with their subjects these states exercised the familiar rights of sovereignty. It is essential to understand the difference between actual weakness of a state and its marginality in principle. The relative autonomy of the social constitution from the state did not arise because the state was weak, and would have invaded social rules if it could muster the necessary strength. Rather, it accepted a marginality that was a consequence of its own normative principles. The marginality of the pre-modern state was a social fact precisely because it followed from a moral principle which guided the relation between rulers and subjects.

The lack of a clear locus of political authority in pre-colonial formations meant that the state could not act decisively on behalf of the society. Instead of actively attempting to implement its favored political programme, the pre-colonial state had to respect the internal regulations and practices of social groups as long as taxes and revenues were paid. Hence, a segmented societal architecture relied for its sustenance upon the multiple, dispersed and stable rituals of community social life. This is what is meant by ancient pluralism. Unlike the modern culture of individual rights, such pluralism was restricted to the mere fact of coexistence, with the normatively stronger attitudes of inter-religious respect being generally absent. In the words of Kaviraj: “Coexistence of numerous local communities which would have liked to impose their ways on others had they the power to do it, is not equal to a situation of pluralism-tolerance. It is a pluralism which represents a powerless intolerance.” This model of ineffectual intolerance rather than positive ideological tolerance is evident in the actual workings of the much glorified “composite culture,” in which liberal nationalists give a modernist flavor to the interaction between Hindus and Muslims through a retrospective imputation of secular values to past traditions.  According to Kaviraj, the Muslim control of “the upper layers of political authority” and the Hindu control of “commercial, craft and other productive practices” gave rise to “an effective protocol of trans-active relations for the prosecution of everyday business.” These “transactions in mundane matters like commerce and administration” were strictly separated from the domestic space of family, where spiritual exclusiveness remained dominant. Further, “because the mundane is less important than the sacred for pre-modern mentalities,” the public domain of material transactions was considered less important than the private domain of familial spirituality. “[T]he temple and the mosque, the household puja and namaz remained more significant than the market and the court; and these interactions did not result in the creation of a public space under the state’s control.” Any cultural synthesis in the areas of art, architecture, music and literature was confined to the elite boundaries of the state. Despite the efforts of the Bhakti-Sufi tradition, the message of religious egalitarianism could not percolate into the concrete ethos of Indian social life, becoming ossified into otherworldly quietism. The weakness of syncretic-fusionist traditions flowed from its pre-reflective nature – it was not epistemically organized and consciously claimed by the people belonging to different religio-cultural communities. It functioned as a loose moral code liable to dissolve when extended into spheres of society explicitly concerned with power equations. Javeed Alam writes that the pre-reflective compositeness of folk traditions “was not aligned with contending orthodoxies in a way as to be taken as necessarily acceptable when consciously thought about. Once the orthodoxy felt the danger and began intervening, by whatever modalities from above, they more or less succeeded…in pushing back or defeating most of these trends”. The spirit of religious equality and universalism propagated by the Bhakti-Sufi tradition was a systematization and popularization of the everyday experience of demographic diversity and cultural heterogeneity that formed the core of pre-colonial India. More particularly, it was concretely rooted in the material experience of religiously diverse people coming together for the purposes of commercial and administrative work. People skilled in these practical activities had a tendency to think in secular terms when dealing with the phenomena and problems of their work. For instance, the government institutions, from the medieval period onwards, had officials, generals and soldiers belonging to all religions. The Muslim and Hindu rulers (Sher Shah Suri, Akbar, Aurangzeb, Shivaji, Ranjit Singh etc.) freely employed the followers of other religions, specifically in the revenue administration and the army. These rulers also made efforts to ensure that the execution of public duties by the officials was done within a nonreligious framework. Given the emergent materialism of this secular framework, it was in consonance with the spirit of social and scientific development. The Bhakti-Sufi tradition denoted a cultural radicalization of these secular-scientific experiences, extending the materialist principles found in the public sphere of work into the private sphere of religiosity. However, the domain of the private was dominated by Brahmanical ideology. Unlike the overwhelming majority of the common people, the upper castes were divorced from any kind of material labour for their livelihood. The life of Brahmins depended on intellectual exercises that did not have a practical orientation toward materialism. They were one who controlled the means of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual production, while the rest of society produced material wealth. Thus a division emerged between intellectual and physical labour, between spiritual and temporal life. Driven by cosmic ideas of a distant mental universe, rather than phenomena of the socio-material world, the Brahmins developed themselves into idealists – the most powerful example being the philosophical system developed by Adi Shankara. Insofar that this idealism was backed by the social and political might of upper castes, the developing secular-scientific culture of the working people and its cultural counterpart in the Bhakti-Sufi tradition suffered a defeat. Due to the hegemony of casteism, the working people as a whole and the cultural representatives of this class were beholden to the ideological power of Brahmanical idealism. As EMS Namboodiripad writes: “It was therefore, an unequal battle between the toiling people who were inherently materialistic in outlook and those who lorded it over them with their idealistic philosophy.” The victory of idealist philosophy led to the entrenchment of an anti-scientific outlook that ossified the social structure through a continued dependence upon closed religious abstractions. The predominance of separate religious identities in the private sphere along with growing inter-religious interaction in the public sphere meant that pre-modern forms of tolerance represented structures of coexistence in which there were neither any sharp and conflictual religious divisions nor any widely prevalent processes of cultural synthesis. This traditional society was an intersecting network of hierarchies, tolerances and intolerances: some differences were accepted, others were frowned upon, with the elites of religious communities never forgetting to draw lines of demarcations and establish diverse inequalities. 

Colonial Modernity and the Indian Renaissance 

With the onset of colonialism, the ancient framework of coexistence came under stress. Faced with the foreign threat of the British, Indian society was forced to reflect upon its internal constitution; colonialism provided an external vantage point from which the loosely held diversity of national life had to transcend its status as a structural mode of pragmatic coexistence. In order to effectively encounter the colonial Other and protect their interests, many of the numerous communities of India began to think about their position in the socio-cultural word, thus generating diverse notions of social good. These differing notions of good were engaged in competition not just with one another but with the conception of good attached to the colonial introduction of modernity. As the elites of various religious entities organized themselves into pressure groups to negotiate with the colonial authority, the self-consciousness of the Indian people came to include a degree of community-based political coherence and national-level exchange of ideas. To take an example, the growth of new communicative infrastructures and the emergence of census-making sharpened the sense of difference between Hindus and Muslims, giving rise to the statistical imagination of majorities and minorities. Within this numerical battle, the practical behavior of ineffective intolerance was superseded by the modern capacity to orchestrate well-thought-out communal mobilizations. In such a situation of growing – and discordant – integration and the rise of modern forms of collective action in the political sphere, the local arrangements of static coexistence could no longer function as adequate methods for the resolution of various conflicts. As Alam elaborates: 

The happy coexistence of the numerous communities each living with minimal interactions though with cordial understandings could no more be taken for granted as in earlier times. This was the source enormous strains on the inherited capacities of people to handle interpersonal, intra-community, and inter-community relations. This was over and above the new competition generated by the establishment of colonial economy and administration and the struggle for share in power in the social arrangement taking shape then. The situation required interlocutors for exchange of opinions and ideas and adjudication of diverging interests and diverse notions of good between these very differently positioned worlds. Successful mediation required either people placed outside the numerous communities or those who could think beyond the limits of these communities, each of which was getting more and more unified as well as assertive. Old style dialogue as used to take place between adjacent communities enjoying local autonomy would no more do between people now more and more distant from one another and demanding things from the world which was unfamiliar to old type of transactions. All this was to sap the traditionally built-in resources including those of tolerance and mutual perseverance.

Thus, India’s interaction with colonial modernity led to novel forms of political churning whose ideological intensities and normative horizons could no longer be contained by the structural pluralism of traditional society. Ancient pluralism was only suitable for the small-scale scenario of pragmatic inter-community interaction – a form of segmented toleration propped up by the lack of a centralized political authority. With the British conquest of India, the fragmented sociological and political landscape of India had to respond to a common Other embodied in the colonial state. This process of responding to the British state as part of colonial modernity decisively changed the structural organization of Indian society. In the pre-colonial society of plural traditions, the state ruled society as a group of rulers separated from the society situated below them, lacking any substantive ideological and institutional bonds with the latter. This allowed Indian society to persist with its compartmentalized dynamic of inter-group toleration. However, with colonialism, the presence of a foreign state not hesitant to introduce deep changes in society led to the politicization of the latter; power became the major concern of different groups, with the privileged spokespeople of these groups deploying new idioms to articulate their interests. This produced the conflictual intermeshing of diverse notions of social good. In this condition, what was of prime importance was the establishment of a secular system that would ensure that the competing, and often irreconcilable, conceptions of good in public life did not lead to the eruption of conflicts. The indispensability of secularism, the need for a principle capable of democratically managing the competing notions of good, thus emerged from the internal exigencies of Indian society. But such a need was not satisfied by the peculiar logic of Indian modernity, which produced new styles of culture and politics in a highly uneven manner. The intellectual origins of modernity in India can be found not in an internal dynamic of cultural churning, but in the foreign ideas introduced by the British state and its myriad apparatuses. The recipients of these ideas were the newly emerging middle class who were roughly divided into three sections: 1) those who occupied most of the administrative posts in the colonial government; 2) those who enjoyed economic privileges owing to the landed interests that had been created by the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793; and 3) those comprador sections of Indian traders who were valued by the British for their knowledge of internal markets and sources of supply. Given the social and economic proximity of these middle class trading intermediaries and administrative subordinates to the British state, they were inevitably influenced by Western ideas. Finding themselves in a novel cultural configuration, the Indian middle class started glorifying the West and imitating the liberal trends of their British superiors – a response that first developed in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and spread to other parts of the country later. Guided by the newfound perspectives of the colonial-modern Other, the Westernized middle class of India subjected tradition to critical enquiry. This yielded some positive results: cruel social practices like sati and infanticide were abolished, irrational religious rituals like hook swinging and human sacrifices were rejected, and patriarchal regulations over women were loosened to some degree. However, the social base of these reforms was an economically exploitative middle class which mainly wanted to reconcile its traditional position of power with the modern milieu of colonial rulers. The agenda they were pursuing was one of individualistic compromise that wanted to change native culture without engendering any sort of socio-political radicalism capable of disrupting the economic programme of the British Raj. Naturally, the primary thrust of 19th century social reformers was on the Reformation of personal faith rather than an all-encompassing vision of Renaissance that could have challenged all sorts of exploitation. Insensitive to the problem of social exploitation and political subjugation, the approach of the leaders of the Renaissance toward the feudal order and colonial rule was shrouded in confusion and silence. Failure to associate with either the anti-feudal opposition of the oppressed subalterns or the anti-colonial sentiments of the Indian masses restricted the area of operation of the Indian Renaissance. Its middle class social foundation was content to merely harmonize private religious beliefs with the new conditions of colonial modernity. As such, the conceptual vocabulary of the Indian Renaissance was based on religion and caste, severely neglecting the broader theme of socio-political struggles against exploitation. Looking inwards within religiocized communities, the Indian Renaissance leaders legitimized or opposed social reforms through an interpretative dependence upon religious texts. “Almost every leader of the renaissance,” KN Panikkar writes, “from Rammohan to Narayana Guru, drew upon Vedanta as the philosophical inspiration of their social vision. It was from the influence of Vedanta that they derived their belief in monotheism and universalism.” Instead of radically transcending tradition through its incorporation into a new secular paradigm, the Indian Renaissance changed tradition through its selective reformulation, which itself was conducted in wholly religious terms. Even when conceptualizing monotheism and the unity of godhead, the Indian thinkers of Renaissance put the matter in a religious language. In the Hindu community, religious reformation relied upon the Vedas for its articulatory structure and nearly every Renaissance leader saw the propagation of the Vedas as an important goal: “Rammohan translated the Upanishads into Bengali and English, Debendranath devoted his life to the dissemination of the philosophy of Vedanta from which he earlier received enlightenment, and Keshab Chandra Sen propagated Vedanta through popular publications. Vedanta was the inspiration of Narayana Guru also, even though he belonged to a low caste and his teachings were the ideological influence of a low caste movement.” In the Muslim community, a similar influence of religiocized perspectives could be found. “Be it for a Makti Tangal in Kerala or a Syed Ahmed Khan in North India,” notes Panikkar, “reforms were to follow scriptural prescriptions. However, they tried to interpret scriptures in such a fashion that the demands of a modern society could be accommodated. It was such a perspective which informed Syed Ahmed Khan’s efforts to reconcile Islam with modernity or Makti Tangal’s attitude towards the study of languages.” The constant invocation of religion for either the approval or disapproval of reforms facilitated the growth of particularized identities that stood in antithesis to the universalist social philosophy of Indian Renaissance. Proclaiming that different religions are just varying embodiments of the same universal truth of humanity’s oneness, Renaissance ideas had tried to overcome the different regional and cultural barriers to unite people on a common platform. But these ideas were undermined by the contradictory pull coming from the strong commitment to scriptural narratives – a narrow approach that failed to transform the religious ideal of universal oneness into the socio-political discourse of equality, justice and fraternity. As the exclusivist tendency of Indian Renaissance overpowered its universalist message, a new tension emerged between the two basic ideas of Renaissance – rationalism and universalism. Having hitched the project of rationalist critique to the cultural authority of religious re-interpretations, the Indian Renaissance thinkers contributed to the entrenchment of faith as the dominant criterion for considering the validity of any change. The critical application of reason to unjust social practices was set aside in favor of a more subdued strategy of rejigging the textual coordinates of religious teachings to align them with the liberal sensibilities of the Indian middle class. While this was the general historical outcome of the Indian Renaissance, there were some cases that displayed the alternative trajectories available to the social reformers. This is encapsulated in the journey of the Brahmo movement from Rammohan to Anandamohan Bose, which demonstrates how different class interests led to different cultural strategies on the part of the Renaissance leaders. The early feudal interests of Rammohan and Debendranath circumscribed the extent to which the multiple brutalities of Indian tradition could be resisted. This gave rise to a counter-movement of the young Brahmos, which soon abandoned its former leader Keshab Chandra Sen to press for a more radical agenda, which ultimately resulted in in the formation of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj in 1878 – a Brahmo subgroup that advocated for the universal liberation of all people, democratic republicanism and the welfare of labour. Inspired by Anandamohan, the young Brahmo radicals belonged to middle class and lower class families. Driven by a humanitarian desire to do something for their working class brethren, they used the legal constitutionalism of Western political theory to protest against the British policy of exploitation of Indian laborers in the tea gardens and other places. Sibnath Sastri, a leading young Brahmo, published “a poem “Sramajibi” in “Bharat Sramajeebi” 1874 Vol. 1 edited by Sasipada Bandopadhya through which he gave a call to the workers to rise and emancipate themselves from the bondage of exploitation. It may be recalled that Muzaffar Ahmed one of the founders of the Communist Party of India recognized Sivnath Sastri as one of the first enlightened persons who welcomed the need to form an organization for the working class.” These socio-political expansions of the meaning of Indian Renaissance were weak exceptions to the dominant trend of increasingly religiocized communitarian interests. 

Cultural Nationalism and the Left Alternative 

Modern politics in India inherited the intellectual legacy of the Indian Renaissance, which meant that it forewent the discourse of universal citizenship in favor of a more culturally localized focus on religio-communitarian interests. The initial interaction of the Indian political class with the British was carried out not as a modality of citizenship, since the Renaissance had failed to create a non-exclusive imagination of secular identity, but as multiple attempts to build pressure groups that could both bargain with and resist the British authorities, and, unavoidably, these pressure groups reflected the actual divisions of Indian society – religion, caste and community. The entanglement of Indian politics in socio-structural fault lines was visible even in the secular Indian National Congress, whose internal workings were oriented toward striking a balance among the elites of the various religious entities and denominational communities. Given that Indian politics claimed to represent the sectional interests of different communities in relation to the colonial authority, the emerging forms of Indian nationalism were stamped with a cultural character that gave preference to the language of internally homogenous and politically meaningful religious groups. Ahmad talks about how “diverse individuals and groups subscribing to a particular religion or sect came to be defined as coherent communities and political entities precisely because groups of elites needed to claim that they represented such communities and entities.” In colonial society, the discursive predominance of community over citizenship, the invention represented by the representors, translated into a form of anti-colonialism dominated by elite Romanticism. This cultural nationalism of colonized India used revivalist nostalgia and a demand for national re-purification against the British Other, which was perceived as an agent of defilement that used alien cultural forms to violate the country’s collective India. In this narrative of past greatness, ahistorical references were made to a Golden Age when India was a landscape of Hindu purity, undisturbed by Christian and Muslim incursions. The ruling intelligentsia of a caste-ridden society such as India very frequently confused culture with religion, fueling Brahmanical generalizations of caste cultures as “national” culture. In effect, these representational strategies solidified the colonial view of Indian history, which consisted entirely of discrete ages populated by equally well-defined communitarian interests. The Indian nation was posited as an already existing incarnation of an inexhaustible reservoir of shared culture and not a concrete outcome of common citizenship and juridical equality. Nationalism among the anti-colonial leaders remained deeply cultural in its constitution, with its political and civic aspects being overshadowed by the sentiments of blood and belonging, spiritual identity, ethnic or religious essence, revivalism and purification. Generalizing this traditionalizing impulse of Indian nationalism, Ahmad notes how “the slide from dreams of cultural retrieval to religious revivalism, and from cultural nationalism to religious purification and particularity, always lurks as a real potential at the very heart of anti-colonial nationalisms of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois strata.” While the Romantic and anti-progressive imaginary of nationalism confused culture with religion and attempted to valorize India’s historical past for the purpose of defeating colonial culture, there also existed a subaltern thrust towards a materialist conceptualization of culture. Whereas the strategy of Romantic nationalism was to construct an identity between religion and culture throughout society with the help of politically homogenized communities, the strategy of subaltern nationalism was to show how cultural practices included not only religious features and meanings but also social experiences of secular struggles against material exploitation. Instead of eternalizing the essentially historical and contingent intertwinement of religion and culture, the subaltern re-fashioning of nationalism based itself on the modern subjectivity of self-reflexivity to critically highlight the internal contradictions that vertically divided the supposedly cohesive communities of religious interests. Against the class elites of religious communities who insisted upon building social identities around primordial loyalties, the Indian subalterns foregrounded the concrete intersection of religious identity with a host of other social and economic vectors, like the existence of class and caste oppressions. In broader terms, subaltern nationalism advanced a concrete understanding of the Indian social formation, grounded in an analytical perspective for which the history of the people was bound with the history of material production and hence of the classes that constituted those productive structures and its effects. This framework recognized the concrete importance of class struggle, from which flowed the necessity of a multi-cultural and multi-religious community of the oppressed, and the replacement of the elite-dominated state by a people-centric democratic community open to all the citizens of the country without any form of discrimination. Counterposed to this subaltern materialism was the cultural nationalism of Romanticists for whom real history was the history of blood, belief, belonging, race, ethnicity etc. The criteria of truth for any change in society was to be the national ethos of the country, which set its cultural subjects upon the path of divine liberation and constant purification – a permanent circling around the lost zone of a glorious past. What remained central in the minds of cultural nationalists was not the logic of class conflict and social production but the politically manipulated discourses of parochial identities and communities. 

Within the Indian anti-colonial struggle, the materialist perspective continued to exist as a subterranean force, calling in question the mainstream language of cultural myths, civilizational clashes, and collective spirit. Such questioning led to radical hostility toward the traditional status quo, and generated a very modern conception of every people’s inherent right to liberty, collective self-determination and popular sovereignty. This kind of anti-colonial social revolutionism produced a nationalism that was culturally diverse, religiously pluralistic, legally federalist and republican, with strong guarantees for individual and collective rights. Secular nationalism of this modern variety, cognizant of the need for displacing religion from its place of public importance and installing a democratic discourse of universal rights, was perceived by native Romanticists as disruptive for the unity of the anticolonial movement. What was considered more expedient was a blinkered focus on the struggle for political autonomy through a cultural movement with religious underpinnings. As a consequence, the secular politics of subaltern materialism was replaced by an elite emphasis on a common culture constituted by religions and castes. As a result, a disjunction emerged between the politically progressive objective of national independence and the culturally regressive goal of nativist rebirth. Panikkar writes: 

That a large number of people who supported and even participated in political struggles were unable to go along with temple entry or eradication of untouchability was an expression of this. A distinct gap existed between their cultural and political consciousness…at a time when political movement was the dominant force a transformation of backward elements of culture was possible only through an integration with it. As it did not happen, backwardness in culture not only continued to exercise its influence over the popular mind, it also succeeded in dominating it. What happened in India was not an integration of cultural and political struggles, but an intrusion of culture into politics. Instead of politics transforming backward culture, politics was vitiated by cultural intrusion. We find this tendency developing, even if unintended, from the time of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Ganapati festival and Gandhiji’s Rama Rajya, to assume monstrous proportions in the religion-based politics of the Muslim League and the Hindu Maha Sabha during the national movement. 

In Independent India, the weaknesses of the anti-colonial struggle are visible even today in the electoral tactics of liberal secularists, who have allowed the cultural discourse of primordial loyalties to constantly hollow out the modern message of political sovereignty. For them, nationhood is defined in a civilizational manner instead of being a common product of the anti-colonial struggle. As Ahmad writes: “Please contemplate the fact that the claim that we are a nation is, in our history, much older than the claim that we are a secular nation or that this nationhood in some fundamental way cannot be born without the abolition of colonial autocracy. Even the most secular of our nationalists continued to think of India as a primordial nation civilizationally defined, rather than a modern nation that was the product of the anti-colonial movement itself and an entity that arose out of the crucible of 15 August 1947.” Given that the Indian liberals continue to operate primarily on the terrain of culture and civilization, secular activities in civil society are mostly confined to the highly predictable invocation and idealization of the uniquely tolerant nature of the Indian religious tradition – a mechanical exercise that arises in response to the communal focus on religious conflicts and extremism. In this entire political operation, what remains constant is the undiminished primacy of religion as a moral and cultural code of political action. Both liberal secularists and right-wing fanatics agree on the status of religion as a totalizing model of existential ethic that is as sufficient as the secular and modern framework of the Indian constitution – a present-day manifestation of the cultural intrusion that took place into national politics during the period of anti-colonial struggle. In contrast to the uncritical attitude of the liberal-fascist forces to the public predominance of religion, Communists insist on displacing religion from its current status as a social totality in itself and reducing it to a mere subcomponent of a wider democratic discourse of universal values. As Vanaik says: 

Religious discourse is not communalist discourse. It only provides the alphabet, or perhaps some words, from which the ugly sentences of communalist discourse are constructed. But religious discourse must also be seen as only one kind of discourse, language or alphabet system among others in a modern, secular society. It is a discourse that must recognize its limited applicability. When it intrudes into other domains where other languages (and alphabets) are more fitted – i.e. when it becomes legitimized as an acceptable discourse on the terrain of modern politics – then it widens the field over which communal discourse operates. This is true even when, in that domain, it can be used to fight communal constructions of its ‘alphabet’. 

The Communist stance toward religiocization is visible in the controversy that the Indian Right has created over various historical events. In 1921, the Mappila Muslims of Kerala staged an armed revolt against the British authorities and their feudal allies who happened to be upper-caste Hindus. Since the landlords and peasants were from different religious groups, the revolts of the Mappila Muslims against their exploiters are regarded as communal riots, as expressions of Muslim fanaticism against the Hindus. The hidden presupposition of this communal angle is that an individual’s personality is wholly determined by a single identity, that of religious faith. “Therefore, a Hindu or a Muslim, whether he is a peasant or a landlord, a worker or an industrialist, a teacher or a bureaucrat, a politician or a scientist, is guided by a consciousness rooted in religion. An implication of this imputed univocal consciousness is that he is a member of a community of such individuals professing the same faith, regardless of the different secular vocations in which they are engaged.” Instead of revealing the multifarious constitution of the individual, and the historically diverse forces that combine to generate his/her contradictory consciousness, the Right obscures any form of concrete politics by imposing upon them the grand abstractions of religion. Instead of fighting this increasing religiocization of society, Indian liberals keep on talking about religious co-existence and harmony. This model of secularism as religious harmony is based on a unidimensional view of religion, which entirely ignores the internal differentiations that vertically divide religious communities. Each religion contains within itself multiple social, economic and cultural groups, among whom relationships are not just complementary but also contradictory. Taking into account the fact of intra-religious divisions, homogeneous religious communities don’t exist; religious categories are historically enmeshed in a network of social and economic relations. Any political position that singularly focuses upon religious pluralism substantivizes religion, giving it a solid character that it actually does not possess. The reification of religion in turn accentuates the sense of difference that is inherent in any religious identity, creating the religious base upon which communal forces can work. A Communist approach to secularism, in contrast, would de-institutionalize religion by showing how it is filled with social and cultural hierarchies that prevent the formation of a neat faith-based consensus. This shifts the emphasis from internally unified religious communities to the multiple material and ideological contradictions that sustain religion as a conflictual historical category. Since religion is no longer regarded as a complete totality but as a contingent and contradictory mode of social organization, the language of homogenous religious communities and the attendant liberal construction of inter-religious harmony becomes redundant. What matters now is the strong guarantee of universal equality that would end all forms of exploitation found in religious groups. The liberal narrative of religious co-existence and toleration no longer occupies a central place because it is superseded by a democratic narrative that transcends religious pluralism to construct an over-arching framework of justice, equality and fraternity. Within this all-encompassing discourse of modern values, secularism is re-articulated as the universal promise of citizenship, carrying within itself the “values of non-racial and nondenominational equality, the fraternity of the culturally diverse, the supremacy of Reason over Faith, the belief in freedom and progress, the belief that the exercise of critical reason, beyond all tradition or convention or institution, is the fundamental civic virtue without which other civic virtues cannot be sustained”. 

The political situation that India currently faces demands a Communist version of secularism, one that would embed the multi-religious working class in the democratic totality of secular struggles against economic exploitation and political repression. This dialectical transcendence of religious pluralism stands in contrast to liberal anti-communalism, which merely searches national tradition to find instances of religious harmony. Socialist political practice will overcome this anemic agenda of national integration and communal harmony by waging progressive democratic struggles that include within their programmatic vision the fight of the multi-religious working class against all forms of exploitation, including communal manipulation. Usually, such a socialist universalism is rarely present in democratic struggles and therefore an organic connection between secular action and democratic struggles is not formed. Panikkar notes: “Almost all voluntary organizations engaged in fighting for peoples’ rights are secular in their conviction. Yet, they all tend to remain single-issue oriented organizations without incorporating a conscious struggle for secularism in their activities. Therefore, in times of crisis their secular commitment becomes rather fragile, as happened to some trade unions in Mumbai at the time of the Ramajanmabhumi campaign.” The viewpoint of socialist universalism will remedy the religious exclusivism of democratic struggles by consciously launching a movement for secularization dedicated to combating the exploitative practices of institutionalized religious formations. This is what the Left used to do before it began eulogizing India’s syncretic traditions and interfaith unity. In the past, the Left parties would use the local idiom of folk cultures to criticize piety and blind faith, thus promoting a secularized commitment to pro-poor universalism. In the words of Praful Bidwai: “Left-wing activists in the arts and theatre would deploy satire and parody to demolish the moral claims of devotees of Ram, including the Kshatriya prince’s upholding of customary casteist dogmas and practices such as beheading a Shudra for committing the crime of reading the Vedas, or driving Sita to self-destruction in defense of male-supremacist prejudice. They would pour scorn on religion and self-styled swamis.” Today, what we need is the construction of a left-wing secular discourse that consciously recognizes itself as a subset of the discourses of democracy and equality. Oriented toward the principles of socialism, such a general democratic discourse would secularize civil society and thus combat the resurgent wave of neo-fascism.