Two Concepts of Secularism AKEEL BILGRAMI cuMy subject is the familiar di ration and that the conclusions dr: ic between the concept of religious community; n here are fundamentally generalisabl ‘sion and restrict my focus to fc conspire toward about whose precariousnessin India Iwant to offera philosophical diagnosis, and the very rudimentary India fll into the hands of Nehru and the Congress Pasty. Nehru’s vision of a modem secular India is usually conceded by even is most vocal critics to bea genuine and honourable comunitment. th the long stretches of'either anti-secular oF ly death of | leading a communal nationalist movement adopted much the same vision as‘Nehru's for the newly created Muslim nation), and also a comparison with what might have ‘happened sbhbhai Patel had been at the helm in India instead of Nehru, must allow the conclusion Excerpted rom Akee Bilgraml, Two Concepts ofSecularism’,EeononicandPoites! Wealy, vol. XIX, no. 28,9 July, 1994, 1749-67. acy “Akeel Bilgrami Sal bicind ull we ook wat ya coir es pefre and after the destruction around us today vaya, we can only judge lar success tthe onque at Ayodhya, WEA OP eee Todesrive Nehn's eas atbest ld ey cours to dea ns of Hoi Po yg expanandu fr Which 5 Yor limi a ggjut tne lo stuohistoncl neon of asec I wae ad's answer! and the general sense ofthe intelligentsia, including but notby any means exhausted by most in the acaclemic ‘community, is that there was something deeply flawed in the Sision itself, On this there is a mounting consensus, and indeed I think it would be accurate thereis widespread and accut to be found in the intellectual and pol ‘Tough thaveno particular interest in ments, nor even eventually his way ideal, which is in many ways muddled and mistaken, 1 want to briefly assess this mood because I think that there is much that is excessive in its main claims. I d strand of truth in it which may prove to be an instructive basis for how to rethink the methodological and philosophical basis secularism in India, ‘The contemporary critique of Nehru...usually begins by laying down a fundamental distinction in the very idea of a religious community, a distinction between religions as faiths and ways the last few years nof Nehru’ stature, of life on the one hand and as constructed ideologies on the other. Thisis intended asa contrast between a more accommodat- ing, nor-monolithic and pluralist religious folk traditions of Hin- duis, and Islam, and the Brahmanical BJP and the Muslim League versions of them which amount to constructed religious ideologies that are intolerant of heterodoxy within themsely. intolerant of each other. The ‘cig rye is by implication modernity itself, for its claim is that it conception of nationhood and its st of suchideological constructions that get is by implication fecraft which is the source ects of regi jort those more innocent” aspects of religion which amount to ‘ways of life’ rather than * See contrition by Ashis Nandy iv thi colTaw Concepts of Seeniors at «systems of thought geared to political tvancentent The cutique ‘suggests that onct one accepts the inevitatbty of these jeological constructions, then there is nothang left t0 do wn com _ ating sectanan and communal sentiment and action than to for: | mulate a secular vision which sell amounts to an oppressive ‘nationalist and statist jdeclogy.. Av they woul describe Nehru's vvision, it is one of a moderast tyranny that just as surely (as the © traditions tharexisted in the urcontammated traditions of religions as faiths and ways of lve price to modernity’s distortions. That -was Nehru’s primary contribution then a perversely modernist é he sdo-unifcation of Hinduism which of epper-caste Hindus and in orthodox pavans, the caste to which Nathuram Godse (his assassin) belanged. : ‘Now it should be exnpthasiued that what ishovel and interesting about this critique af Hinds nationalasn os that its intended te De partofalarges critique eta Cilerent ways First tis intended 1s part of a genera! diagnusis in whch Hindu natoralism © 10 be seen as o special instance of the more general wrong Hat identified in nationalism self —- ‘e madern state of mr of necessity the ideal of & nation wih we commgnitement 10 such Things fas development, nations! sexursty, Ngvtly exiled tnd paredagmatscally in the Chite + ceeptual sources of this particular Hindu sationalism is in- im pon a people who have religion from politics in their é therefore leaves that people in raphy. and it} 1g Mat is much mord thee yehing that surfaces ex? plicitly in the critique’s articulator! Firstof all, though there sno gainjaying the humanism inherent in Gandhi's politics, it is also foolsh and sentimental to deny the Brahmanical elements in it, There is the plain and well known fact that Gandhi, no less than the Chitpawan nationalist Tish (however different their nationalist sensibilities were in other respects), encouraged the communal Flindu elements in the 6° tional movernent by using Hinds aymballam to mobilise mass nationalist feeling, As is also well known, his support of the 1eac~ tionary Muslim Khilafat movement had exactly the ame motives the same communalist effeet on the Muslien population. | will not say a word more about thia since this point is very well understood by many who have auudied the national movement, even cussonily More importantly, there some strenuous simplification in the critique’s insistence that nationalism wan the bad seed that‘Two Concepts of Secularism tumed a more pristine Hinduism and Islam ideotogies in India. To begin with, there is the hardly deniable fact that Lenin pointed out quite explicitly. In a curious manner Nandy shares ‘with the Hindw nationalists he erititises an idea that nationalism sasingle and transparen ery thing that Lenin denies. Infact, nationalism cl frustrating to analyse than'either Nandy or the Hindu nationalists allow, and for that reason it is unlikely that it can be an explanatory concept at all. ~»-Though the underlying flaw in the prevalent anticNehu intellectual climate is to misdescribe the sense in which religion may enter pi given the realities of a slowly con- solidating bourgeois democracy and modern state, this is by no means to suggest that Nehruvian insistence on a separation of igion from politics is feasible either. Indeed, my acknowledging that his secularism amounted to no more than a holding process is an acknowledgement of the unfeasibility of that separation in a country with the unique colonial and post-colonial history of communal relationships that India has witnessed. Neither the pre-modem conception of 1 spiritual integration of religion and polities, nor th n separation of religion and politics can cope with the demands of Indian political life today. 353, © communal What I see as a strand of truth in the contemporary critique of Nehru is roughly this: Nehru’s secularism wa Position. But the sense in which it is an imp was a modern intrusion int indeed an ime jon is not that it an essentially traditionalist religious Population. It is not that because, as I said, the population under an evolving electoral denlocracy through this century willy-nilly has come fo see religion entefing politics in non-traditionalist modern political modes. dt is an imposition rather in the sense that it assumed that secidlarism stood outside the substantive arena Of political commitments. It had a constitutional status; indeed it Was outside even of that: it was in the preamble to the Constitution. It was not in there with Hinduism and [slain as one among stil Stantive contested political, commitments to be negotiated, as any Other Contested commitments must be negotiated, one with the other, o aes keel Bilgrami should immediately warn against a facile conflation. It may By the ste ofa doctrine of secularism upon @ people who have OF ie pin secular in this sense. And in tur it may be thought rei com ot all that different from Nandy's (and others’) charge than imposition made against Nehru, since states which impose gntire ways of life upona people are wholly a project of modernity. Let me leave aside for now, as in any case dubious, the idea that only modern states impose ways of life upon people, dubious because it seems to me a wholly unjustified extrapolation to go from the fact that the scale of imposition that modern states are ‘capable of implementing is larger, to the idea t a novelty of the modern state toimpose ways of life. That isnot theconflation Thad in mind. The conflation isthe failure to see that in charging, Nehru with imposing a non-negotiated secularism, T am saying something quite orthogonal to the charge that his was a statist imposition. Pechaps his toas a statist imposition, but that is not what my charge is claiming. Rather itis claiming that what the State imposed was nota doctrine that was an outcome of a negotia- tion between different communities. This critique cannot be equated with a critique of statism, leave alone modem statism, because it may be quite inevitable in our times that, at least at the centre, and probable also in the regions, even a highly negotiated secularism may have to be adopted and implemented by the state (no doubt ideally after an inflow of negotiation from the grass roots). There is no reason to think that a scepticism about Nehru’s secularism along these lines should amount in itself to a critique of the very idea of statehood, because there is nothinginherentin theconcept ofthe state which makesit logically impossible that it should adopt such a substantive, negotiated policy outcome, difficult though it may be to fashion such a state in the face of decades of its imposition of a nor-negotiated secularism, Proof of the fact that my cfitique of Nehru does not coincide with a critique of statehood lies in the fact that the critique applies to a period before independence, ie., before statehood was ac- quired. It is very important to point out that Nehru’s failure to provide for a creative dialogue between communities is not just a failure of the immiediate post-independence period of policy formulation by the state. There are very crucial historical mk RL Ae 8 VA VO. Vo, VO POMTro0 Concepts of Secularism antecedents to it, antecedents which may have made ine the postindependent secularist policies whose non-substantive theoretical status and non-negotiated origins I am criticising. For three decades before independence the Congress, under Nehru refused to let a secular policy emerge through negotiation between different communal interests, by denying ‘at every step in the various conferrings with the British, Jinnah’s demand that the Muslim League represent the Muslims, a Sikh leader represent jjan leader represent the untouchable com- munity. And the ground for the denial was simply that as a ilar party they could not accept that they did mot represent these communities. Secularism thus never got the chance to emerge out of a creative dialogue between these different com- munities. It was sui generis. This archimedean existence gave secularism procedural priority but in doing so it gave itno abiding substantive authority. As a result it could be nothing more than aholding process, already under strain in the time ofits charismatic the hands of his opportunist heirs. It is this archimedeanism of doctrine, and not its that I think is the deepest flaw in Nehru’s vision and (as I will continue to argue later) ithas nothing essential to do with modemity and its various Nandian cognates: rationality, science, technology, industry, bureaucracy... .Ishould add several cautionary remarks in order to be fair to Nehru’s position. For one thing, Ido not mean to suggest that Jinnah and the Muslim League represented the mass of the Mus! people at these stages of the anti-colonial movement; he only Tepresented the urban middleclass and wasnotin an ideal position to play a role in bringing about the sort of negotiated ideal of secularism that T am gesturing at. Nor am I suggesting that these Various elitist fora at which Jinnah demanded communal repre- sentation could be the loci f Communities that would have been necessary. of these cautionary remarks sp of Nehru’s independence period, a horizon on which any concep- fa negotiated ideal of secularism was not 20 much as vi ig Jinnah and the elitist conferrings aside, the fact is even Congress Muslim leaders such as Azad were never given a 356 Akeel Bilgrami rominent negotiating voice in a communal dialogue wi Hindu counterparts in conferrings within the 8 party of which they were members. The qui in order to eventual substantive secularism in the future never so much as came up. ‘The transcendent ideal of secularism Nehru assumed made such a question irrelev: ywever, the lastand most important of thet nake nary remarks ight be seen as attempting to provide an answer ism of Nel is possible that Nehru and the Congress leadership assumed something wi is true; that the Congress Pai was a peaking) subscribed nationalist party ina way had ceased to be. And on the basis of t already inherent in the party words, the secularism of a par of Nehru’s mind in his rather primitively' presented writings and speeches on secularism. And Ithink the argument needs scrutiny, not dismissal. T say that this argument was at the back of Nehru’s partly because it was often pushed into the background thetoric of a quite different argument was roughly the argument of the left progra Proper focus on the issue of class and the implementation of @ ist programme of economic equ: tobypass the differences. Speaking generally, one. However, except for a f did not voice this argument wit case, if he were thinking hon would have been empt een well aware that the ascendancy in Congress p argument years in the ‘genuine conviction; and in ly, he should have known that to do so sinca he must havethere was no realistic chance of the programme being imple ed. Given that fact, the'pegotiative eal of secularism ben Ai the more pressing ould have been presting a ing Nehru’s argument from ‘implicit’ secularigm, I strongly suspect that scrutin show, not so much that its premise (about Congress Party's comprehensive communal suscription) is false, at the very idea of impl negbtiation, which is derived from the premise and which is crucial to the argument, is not an idea that can in the end be cashed out theon ment is not convincing because there is no bridge th from the idea that an anti-colonial moveinent and a post-colonial {2 favour elements which would yield move which does nothing to is a mere fraudulent labelling ink between composite- such a secularism, is a sophis bridge that gap in the argument sof anon-existing bridging argumentative ness and, what I am calling, a ‘substantive’ secularism. The label hide the fact that the commitment to locus where negotiation be- can be found or carried out, the very idea of secularism is bound to seem an imposition in the special sense I have claimed, idea of a pré-modern India. Since the sense in w! imposition has not so much to do wi as with its rarefied nor-nego should be t. ¥ must emerge from the up with the moderate political leadership of different rel 38 keel Bilgrami communities negotiating both procedure and substance, negoti ing details of the modern polity from the codification ‘primarily tothe distribution of such things as political and cultural dutonomy, and even bureaucratic and industrial employment, ‘as one among course there is, secularism and Islam or Hinduism. But once we see it stantive doctrine, this difference can be formulated in terms than the way Nehru formulate makes secularism different from these specific, ‘commitments is not any longer has an archimedean and non-substantive status, but rather thatittis an outcome of anegotia- tion among these specific commitments. This gives secularism a srent place and function in the polity, and in the minds ‘zens, than Islam or Hinduism could possibly have. Yet this ference does not amount to wholesale transcendence from these us commitments in politics. If secularism par-Indian elite unconcerned and unrealistic about the actual sway of religion in politics. It does so rather because after climbing up the ladder of religious politics (via a dialogue among acknow- ledged substantive religious commitments in politics) this emer- gent secularism might be in a position to kick that ladder of religious politics away. There is no paradox here of a doctrine emerging from its opposite, no more so than in any movement argument being proposed is esse secularism emerges from a creative playing out (no historical proposal) of a substan communal politics that is prevalert ata certain histori When it is hard won in these ways, secularism is much more likely to amount to something more than a holding process. AndTwo Concepts of Secularism 359 ' 360 Akeel Bilgre ' sxcuse for not taking up this aspect of Nandy is that this is so not merely because (unlike Nehru’s secularisim) it ag- (My oly ee ovo Re Boe ims on Nehr's Sana knowledges as its very starting-point the inseparability of religion °°" it seemed Kyumbfounding, though common, confusion. There i from politics, but also because, at the same time, it does not shun simply no dependable connection between communalism and 4 realistic appreciation of the entrenched facts of modern political ar yack of scientific temper, because communalism life, which Nehru (unlike his contemporary critics) was right to the: omenon (with ezonomic underpinings nd cultura conse embrace wholeheartedly. This way of looking at things gives 2 ences) and nota matter of having an unscientific ooo ‘There philosophical basis to the widespread but somewhat vague anti- quences much connection between belie inthe power of science Nehru feeling (shared by a variety of different political positions fand secular attitudes as in god and moral today) that in a country like India we cannot any longer embrace pehaviour. That is to say, minded ¢an a secularism that separates religion from politics. And it does so be party to a cynical adoption without in any way ceding ground to those who draw quite the most devout can be suspiciou: wrong conclusions from this vague feeling: it cedes nothing to Nandy is so obviously right to think th the Hindu national nor to the Muslim communalist, nor even igia for a by-gone pre-modernism. The importance of seeing things this way lies precisely in the fact that it counters what is a dangerously easy and uncritical tendency today, the tendency to move from derstandable fe science and its method, sequences in large-scale ca secular polit to Ashis Nandy's 1 cru tensive invest | that it seemed to me hardly w fused on Nandy’s more contro vague but un- and interesting argumen {elu which linked hissecul ‘nationalism, and in tur g of the inseparability of religion from politics internally with its opP ‘i dn ao ral phenomenon of to one or other of these conclusions. It counters this tendency J yroo as a special instance of @ g by a very specific philosophical consolidation o! feeling, 50 reeadern tunes. It does nothing to improve Whe BE ing, ts dubious Vi { these conclusions which are often derived from it now no s separable strand, ¥i longer seem compulsory. Or, to put it more strongly (and more wrow into the argument a quite SFP science correctly), this philosophical cons« n of this understandable these considet a wrongs feeling allows us to see these conclusions derived from the feeling ‘Nandy, however, may NO! ral wrongs ts simply noms regarding secularism are perhaps insep Nehru ec of modernity and the enlightenment, _aln a very important sense, an aspect of Nandy’s of that other commitment of mode=nity ,, which T have not focused on, inher a muddle the tishistic commitme scientific ‘knowledge. ‘Thus for him 7 other as well. ‘uncovers in Nehru’s thinking. There isa stand in Nehru’s thinking to reject one is to e wel fusion. The Tight the scent Se a eee 1 a Si eh Net cond restricted my attention:to Nandy’s discussion ata pee co, that leaves it open.that each of thote king Nehru’s things. And if that is 50, fever ced es lnm aera ee eee ee accompanying statism. But this might seem unfair since his dis- happen. be wrong ut tor Gussion makes so much of modemity and the enlightenment necessary wrt 8 tothe idea of these! ight besa S enlightenment paradigm) jook's power to overcome com sienghandpoto wen eg sal 1! 8 i snfaic that ‘critique of something as onfused shoul on Foe ieee ee eS len hapa part of Nandy’ wie of Nehru’s modernism, and therefore then to leave out of his critique of Nel Pijected Nandy's outright scepticism about secularism 109 easily.Two Concepts of Secularism 361 secularism, his critique of his modernist commitment to science and technology, on the grgund that these two commitments that are the targets of two separate critiqueshave noinherentinferential link and were only linked by a confusion in Nehru’s thinking. ButNandy, and others who follow him, donot leave these separable things separate, and see their critiquesof them asessentially linked. In doing so they make essentially the same confusion... Unlike those critiques of Nehru that criticise him for being too sitfiated in the grand paradigmatic concepts of the enlighten- ment nd of mode: i knowledge the deter- , my conclusions are less ambitious but algo, I submit, less preposterously nostalgic and potentially more constructive My (admittedly primitive and sketchy) proposal for an alternative conception of secularism seeks, by a posited process of reflection ‘ation, to arrive at a dialectical outcome un- and internal ne;