The Threats To Secular India

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The Threats to Secular India

Amartya Sen
April 8, 1993 issue
When, some months ago, “The Idea of India”

was agreed on as the title of my Nehru
Lecture at Cambridge,1 I had not imagined
that the subject would be as topical as it, alas,
has become since the terrible events of recent
months. The idea of a secular India, tolerant
of different religions (and of people who
believe in none), which had been taken for
granted since independence, has been
severely damaged by extremist Hindu
political groups.
The present round of events began on

December 6 with the destruction of a
sixteenth-century mosque—the Babri Masjid
—in the northern city of Ayodhya, by
politically organized mobs of activist Hindus,
who want to build a temple to Rama on that Narasimha Rao; drawing by David Levine
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very spot. That outrageous event has been
followed by communal violence and riots
across the country, in which around two thousand people or more
have perished—both Hindus and Muslims, but Muslim victims have
far outnumbered Hindus. Some of the worst incidents have taken
place in Bombay. In what is usually thought to be the premier city of
India, a relatively small but thoroughly organized group of extremist
Hindus went repeatedly on the rampage; the police frequently failed to
protect Muslims under attack, and were often far more violent in
dispersing Muslim mobs than Hindu ones.
It took quite some time for the nationwide condemnation that

followed those events to move the government of India to take a
tougher stand on law and order, and even now the determination of
the government is far from clear. But on February 25 it did manage to
prevent a huge and dangerous Hindu political demonstration in New
Delhi, which could have easily brought communal riots to the nation’s
capital. Stopping the demonstration unfortunately involved
suspending the civil right of free assembly. But in view of the highly
provocative nature of the planned demonstration (for which Hindu
activists had converged from across the country), and in view of the
fact that the confrontation was managed by the police with no loss of
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life, the Indian government has not had to face much criticism for
these violations of civil rights, except, of course, from the Hindu
parties themselves.
T he extremist Hindu political movement that spearheaded the

present turmoil has gone on to demand an official end to Indian
secularism, to be replaced by the recognition of India as a Hindu state.
This proposal, if accepted, would involve a dramatic alteration of one
of the basic principles of the Indian constitution, and a radical
departure from the idea of India—a pluralist, tolerant, and secular
India—which was central to the Indian nationalist movement and
which was reflected in the legal and political structure of independent
India. It is that idea and the challenges it faces that I want to discuss. I
shall argue that these challenges include quite distinct components,
making it inappropriate to analyze the emergence of Hindu extremism
as a single phenomenon: for example, the communal murders and,
thuggery in Bombay are driven by rather different forces from activist
religious politics in Ayodhya; and each in turn differs from the general
increase of Hindu sectarianism among the urban middle classes. It is
as important to understand the different forces underlying the distinct
components as it is to appreciate their deep interconnections.
Secularism as a Part of Pluralism
It may seem extraordinary that a largely passive idea like secularism

can be central to the conception of modern India. Is secularism really
an important issue, or is it just sanctimonious rhetoric? When British
India was partitioned, Pakistan chose to be an Islamic Republic,
whereas India chose a secular constitution. Does that choice make a
real difference?
The distinction is certainly important from the legal point of view, and
its political implications are also extensive, applying to different levels
of political and social arrangements, going all the way up to the head
of the state. For example, unlike Pakistan, whose constitution requires
that the head of the state be a Muslim, India imposes no comparable
requirement, and the country has had non-Hindus (including Muslims
and Sikhs) both as presidents and in other prominent and influential
positions in government.
But secularism is, in fact, a part of a more comprehensive idea—that of

India as an integrally pluralist country, made up of different religious
beliefs, distinct language groups, divergent social practices. Secularism
is one aspect—a very important one—of the recognition of that larger
idea of heterogeneous identity. I shall argue that the sectarian forces
that seek to demolish Indian secularism will have to deal not merely
with the presence and rights of the many Muslims in India, but also
with India’s regional, social, and cultural diversity. Toleration of
differences is not easily divisible.
Muslims in India
Are Muslims marginal in the Indian population? Even though four out
of five persons in India are formally Hindu, the country still has well
over a hundred million Muslims, not much less than Pakistan has, and
rather more than Bangladesh. Indeed, seen from this perspective, India
is the third largest Muslim country in the world. To see India just as a
Hindu country is fairly bizarre in view of that fact alone, not to
mention the fact of the intermingling of Hindus and Muslims in the
country’s social and cultural life.2
The religious plurality of India also extends far beyond the Hindu-
Muslim question. There is, of course, a large and prominent Sikh
population, and substantial number of Christians, whose history goes
back at least to the fourth century AD (considerably earlier than in
Britain). India also had Jewish settlements since shortly after the fall
of Jerusalem. Parsees have moved to India from less tolerant Persia.
There are also millions of Jains, and practioners of Buddhism, which
had been for a long period, the official religion of many of the Indian
emperors (including the great Ashoka in the third century BC).
Furthermore, the number of people who are atheist or agnostic (as
Jawaharlal Nehru himself was) is large too, though census categories
do not record actual religious beliefs—atheists born in Hindu families
are classified as Hindu, reflecting their so called “community
background.”
The framers of the Indian constitution wanted to make sure that the
state would not take a biased position in favor of any particular
community religious conviction. In view of the heterogeneity of India
and of the Indians, any alternative to secularity would be unfair.
Diversity Within Hinduism
The issue of religious plurality concerns not only the relationship

between Hindus and followers of other faiths (or none). It also
concerns the diversity within Hinduism itself. If it is seen as one
religion, Hinduism must also be seen as thoroughly plural in structure.
Its divisions are not those only of caste (though that is tremendously
important), but also of school of thought. Even the ancient Hindus
classification of “six systems of philosophy” acknowledged highly
diverse beliefs and reasoning. More recently when the fourteenth
century Hindu scholar Madhava Acarya, head of the religious order in
Sringeri in Mysore wrote his famous Sanskrit treatise Sarvadarsana
Samgraha (“Collection of all Philosophies”), he devoted early of his
sixteen chapters to the different schools of Hindu religious postulates
(beginning with the atheism of the Carvaka school), and he discussed
how each religious school, within the capacious body of Hindu
thought, different from the others.
Seeing Hinduism as one religion, fact, is a comparatively recent

development. The term Hindu was originally used mainly to signify
location and country rather than a homogenous religious belief. The
term derived from the river Indus (the cradle of the Indus Valley
civilization going back to 3000 BC), and that river is also the source of
the word India itself. The Persians and the Greeks saw India as the
land around and beyond the Indus, and Hindus were the native people
of that land. Muslims from India were at one stage called “Hindavi”
Muslims, in Persian as well as Arabic, and there are plenty of
references in early British documents to “Hindoo Muslims” and
“Hindoo Christians,” to distinguish them respectively from Muslims
and Christians from outside India.
Ramayana and Rama
Plurality is an internal characteristic of Hinduism as a religion; it is not

just a matter of the external relations between Hindus and non-
Hindus in the secular polity of India. The Hindu activists who last
December demolished the sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya,
wanting a temple to Rama instead, have yet to confront the fact that,
even among those who see themselves as religious Hindus, a great
many would dispute Rama’s divinity (not to mention his preeminent
divinity).
Certainly, in parts of the country the name of Rama is identified with

divinity. Ironically, perhaps the most famous incident in recent times
in which the name of Rama (or “Ram,” as the word is pronounced in
contemporary Hindi) was invoked as synonymous with God took
place when Mahatma Gandhi was murdered on January 30, 1948, by a
Hindu extremist who belonged to a political group not entirely
dissimilar to the ones that destroyed the mosque last December. The
leader of modern India, who was a deeply religious Hindu but whose
secular politics had earned him the wrath of the extremist zealots, fell
to the ground, hit by a Hindu bullet, and died saying “Hé Ram!”
The identification of Rama with divinity is common in the north and

west of India, but elsewhere (for example, in my native Bengal), Rama
is mainly the hero of the epic Ramayana, rather than God incarnate.
Ramayana as an epic is, of course, widely popular everywhere in India,
and outside India as well—in Thailand and Indonesia for example
(even Ayutthaya, the historical capital of Thailand, is a cognate of
Ayodhya). But we have to distinguish the influence of the epic
Ramayana—a great work of literature—from the particular issue of
divinity. In fact, in that ancient epic, Rama is treated very much as a
good and self-sacrificing king rather than as God, and on one occasion
he is even lectured by a worldly pundit called Javali: “O Rama, be wise,
there exists no world but this, that is certain! Enjoy that which is
present and cast behind thee that which is unpleasant.”3
One of the Hindu political leaders described the demolition of the

mosque, with evident reverence, as “Hanuman’s mace at work,”
referring to the monkey king Hanuman who was an ally of Rama, as
told in epic Ramayana. No doubt this is how the destruction appeared
to him, but he could scarcely ignore the fact that Hanuman is not
much revered among hundreds of millions of Hindus in many other
parts of India, or the fact that in popular plays in, say, rural Bengal,
Hanuman is a riotously comic character—affable, amusing, and wholly
endearing, but hardly endowed with any holiness. Indeed, in his Vision
of India’s History, Rabindranath Tagore singles out the epic hero Rama
for special praise precisely because Rama, as Tagore put it, “appeared
as divine to the primitive tribes, some of whom had the totem of
monkey, some that of bear.”4
Thus, the religious differences between Hindus and Muslims cannot

be dissociated from the diversities within Hinduism and between
regions in India. That regional variation applies to modern politics as
well. Indeed, even in electoral politics, the strength of the Hindu
political party, Bharatiya Janata Party—BJP for short—is largely
confined to the north and west of India, with rather little support from
eastern and southern states. If the religious distinctions within the
country are striking, so are the sharp regional contrasts. Of the BJP
members of the Indian parliament chosen in the last election, more
than 90 percent came from just eight states and union territories in
the north and west of India (more than 40 percent from one state—the
large Uttar Pradesh—alone), out of a total of thirty-two states and
union territories spread across India (twenty of which elected no BJP
members at all).
To explain these regional contrasts, various factors have been cited:

for example, the fact that even the Moghul empire never quite
extended to the south and was relatively weak in the east, and also
that there is more of a history of battles against the Moghul empire by
Hindu rulers in the north (such as the Rajputs of Rajasthan), and in
the west (such as the Marathas of Maharashtra). However, an adequate
explanation of the contrasts has to bring in many other distinct social
and cultural factors.
Unresolved Issues
Given the diversity and contrasts within India, there is not, in the
comprehensive politics of the country, much alternative to secularism
as an essential part of overall pluralism. This does not, however, mean
that the secular approach is without its problems. Secularism can
indeed take different forms, and there is much scope for discussing
which form it should take. One of the problems with secularism as it is
practiced in India is that it reflects the sum of the collective feelings of
intolerance of the different communities and is not based on
combining their respective capacities for tolerance. Any statement or
action that causes the wrath of any of the major communities in India
tends to be seen as something that should be banned. This trigger-

happiness in the use of censorship sits uncomfortably with India’s
otherwise good record of tolerating freedom of expression.
For example, India was the first country to outlaw the distribution of
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, reacting well before the Iranian
authorities took notice of the book and issued their murderous fatwa.
Other examples could be cited of eagerness on the part of the
authorities to take repressive action whenever any religious
community claims that it has been offended. This does not lead to a
tolerant society. The situation might be compared with the issue of
blasphemy in modern Britain. The United Kingdom remains formally
Christian in having an anti-blasphemy law only for Christian beliefs.
There are demands in Britain to extend these blasphemy prohibitions
to cover the beliefs of religions as well. One way of symmetrical
position toward the different religions practiced in modern Britain
would be to do just another would be to scrap the blasphemy laws
altogether. A secular state could choose to move in either two
directions, but those believe that a modern society that respects free
speech should prefer doing away with anti-blasphemy laws in general,
instead of making them apply to all religions, must base their claims
on arguments more substantial than the demand for symmetry. These
remain to be more fully addressed in modern India—and also, I might
add, in modern Britain.
A second question concerns the fact that the Indian interpretation of

secularism includes some legal differences among the various
communities that have to do with their respectal, laws. For example,
while a Hindu can be prosecuted for polygamy, a Muslim man can
have up to four wives, following what is taken Islamic legal position
(although, in practice, that provision is very rarely invoked by Indian
Muslims). There are also other differences, for example, between the
provision made for wives in the event of a divorce, where Muslim
women—according to a certain reading of Islamic law—have less
generous guarantees than Hindu women do.
These differences have been cited again by Hindu political activists to

claim that Hindus, as the majority community, are discriminated
against in India. This is of course a charge, since the discrimination,
insofar as it exists, is against Muslim women rather than Hindu men;
the sexist male point of view is writ large in such Hindu political
complaints. Nor is there any serious empirical basis for the often
repeated claim that polygamy contributes to a higher growth rate of
the Muslim population with that of the Hindus. But the general issue
of asymmetric treatment is an important one, and there would be
nothing nonsecular or sectarian in trying to make the provisions civil
laws apply evenhandedly to individual members of all the
communities.
Challenges to Secularism
What are the sources of the challenge that secularism and pluralist
tolerance are facing in India now? We can, distinguish between three
though not unrelated—tendencies: (1) communal fascism, (2)
nationalism and (3) militant obscuantism.
The term fascism is frequently employed indiscriminately as a word of

abuse. It is certainly no part of my claim that the entire movement of
Hindu politics is fascist in any sense. There are however, specific
political characteristics that are generally associated with fascist
movements,5 and these elements are certainly present among some of
those identified with extremist politics in India today: the use of
violence and threat to sectarian objectives, the victimizing of members
of a particular community, mass mobilization based on frenzied and
deeply divisive appeals, and the use of unconstitutional and strong-
arm methods against particular groups.
Hindu organizations in Bombay, in particular, have revealed some

clearly fascist tendencies. In addition to general riots, the killing of
many Muslims in the city was well-organized by extremist Hindu
groups. Much of the attack was coordinated by a militant organization,
powerful in Bombay, called Shiv Sena, named after Shivaji, a
seventeenth-century Hindu king of the Marathas from Maharashtra
who waged several successful campaigns against the Moghul empire.
The violence in Bombay had features other than those of communal

conflicts. For example, some landlords have evidently taken the
opportunity to organize the destruction of unauthorized slums and
shelters set up by the homeless. In order to eliminate competition,
some trading interests paid these violent groups to destroy their rivals’
shops. And so on. Fascist operations are frequently accompanied by
such activities, in a general atmosphere of the survival of the fiercest.
Most of the victims of the recent Bombay riots were Muslims; they
were primarily poor and frequently helpless people living in
ramshackle slums.6 But some members of well-to-do urban groups
that are traditionally immune to violence were also murdered. In an
interview, Mr. Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sena, has
explained that the mobs that carried out the violence were under his
“control,” that his party did not mind extorting protection money from
civilians for political use, and that if Muslims “behaved like Jews in
Nazi Germany,” there would be “nothing wrong if they are treated as
Jews were in Germany.”7
S hiv Sena is a local phenomenon, confined to the state of

Maharashtra and largely to the city of Bombay. Even in Bombay,
the electoral support of Shiv Sena, though substantial, is limited, and
in last year’s election for the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the
group won considerably fewer than one third of the seats. But its
members have managed to channel the frustrations of the urban
Maharashtrian poor in a destructive direction, and have tried to

increase their political impact through violence, intimidation, and
strategically organized mass hysteria.
Among the Bombay residents—Hindus as well as Muslims—there

were many who risked their lives to save others. Some were praised
internationally (the bravery of Sunil Gavaskar, the great cricketer, was
reported widely in newspapers in England), but there were many
others. However, the record of the Bombay police in preventing these
riots is fairly dismal, and the extent of communal fascist thought
among the police has been exposed by the Indian press. Journalists of
Business India managed to tape partisan instructions radioed on a
special frequency by some senior officers to policemen at trouble
spots; and on that basis, the Indian courts instructed the Bombay
police to seal the official tapes of their conversations, pending a
judicial inquiry.
Muslims have not been victims of Shiv Sena’s wrath, first target. Shiv
Sena has a long record of attacking unions preventing them from
organizing, It has also been a major force in promoting regional
sectarianism. Indeed, it came to prominence in the early 1970s because
of its agitation non-Maharashtrian people of Bombay, particularly
south Indian migrants, whom the Shiv Sena wanted to drive out of the
city. Only more recently have they singled out Muslims for attack.
I have concentrated Shiv Sena’s violence on violence in Bombay both

very large proportion of those recently killed lived there (the total
number of murders in the city has exceeded eight hundred), and also
because of communal fascism—the largely concentrated in could arise
elsewhere in India. Facist movements tend typically to thrive when
less determined political groups are willing to tolerate or appease
them. In this case, the leading Hindu political organization, the BJP—
not a facisit party itself—refused to condemn the violent activities of
Shiv Sena and has treated it, in effect, as an ally
There would be nothing particularly surprising in such complicity on

the part of the extreme right wing of the Hindu movement, for
example the the now-banned RSS—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(National Voluteer Corp)—which was implicated in the assassination
of Mahatma Gandhi as well. But on this occasion even the more
moderate Hindu leaders, such as Atal Behari Vajpayee, failed to
denounce the barbarity that Shiva Sena had unleashed in Bombay.
Perhaps, more important, the Congress Party which runs the
governments of the Indian union and the Maharashtra state, as well as
the Bombay municipality (including the police), did not make a serious
attempt to stamp out Sena’s violence. The dog that did not bark is an
important part of the tragedy that occurred in Bombay, and in the rest
of India.
The Congress Party controls a minority government in India with 245

seats in a parliament of 545. On matter of economic policy
(particularly measures to liberalize government regulation), it is often
opposed by the parties to the left (the Janata Dal has fifty-nine seats
and the two Communist parties hold forty-nine seats between them).
But on matters involving secularism the Congress can count on their
support and also that of nearly all the other—mostly regional—parties
in confronting the Hindu BJP, which has 119 seats, and Shiv Sena,
which has four. So the Congress Party is not threatened in Parliament
on this issue, and indeed many of the other parties have expressed
disapproval—even disgust—at the Congress’s failure to take a stronger
position against Hindu political violence. Occasionally, Congress
leaders have acted with sudden force: for example, after the demolition
of the Ayodhya mosque they used a somewhat dubious constitutional
provision to dismiss the BJP governments in the four states they
controlled. But they have not consistently challenged the actions of
Hindu political parties or provided effective leadership in defending
national unity against communal politics.
The Congress seems inhibited not only by the mild and rather retiring
nature of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao but also by the Congress
politicians’ obsessive fear of losing votes to sectarian Hindu parties,
particularly in the north of India. There are disagreements within the
party, and some newspapers report that the stronger actions it has
taken—dismissing BJP state governments, banning extremist
organizations such as the RSS, and preventing the BJP demonstration
in New Delhi on February 25—came mostly at the insistence of
Cabinet members who are drawn to confrontation. The strong and
efficient action by the police to stop the BJP’s demonstration on
February 25 seems to have raised hopes that Rao still might be capable
of stronger leadership. Still, the measures he took that day were mostly
negative. Little was done to appeal to the public or organize mass
opposition, and Rao relied almost entirely on the police force to
prevent Hindu political activists from converging on the capital.
Sectarian Nationalism
Promoting a sectarian view of Hindu nationalism is not new in the

subcontinent, though the Hindu Mahasabha—the party that
represented Hindu nationalism in British India—was far less
successful among the Hindus than the Muslim League was among the
Muslims. While the leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha never formally
endorsed the proposition of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the head of the
Muslim League, that Hindus and Muslims were “two nations”—an
idea that was part of the League’s campaign for partition and the
creation of Pakistan—their own approach was not entirely at odds
with that view. As it turned out, Hindu Mahasabha failed miserably in
Indian electoral politics both before and after independence, and most
Hindus remained loyal to secular parties.
The BJP is the successor to that Hindu nationalist movement, and

unlike the Hindu Mahasabha (and later the Jan Sangh party), the BJP
is now very successful. It has grown rapidly in recent years, from only
two seats in the Indian Parliament in the election of 1984 to eighty-five
seats in 1989 and to 119 in 1991, out of a total of 545 seats. It is true
that even in the last elections more than three quarters of the Hindus
in India have, in effect, voted against the BJP since they voted for
secular parties. But a quarter of the popular vote is a large proportion,
and the recent agitation seems to have accelerated this growth, at least
in the west and north of India. And central to BJP’s approach to Indian
politics is some variant or other of Hindu nationalism.
Two Nations and Lesser Tales
How can a religious group within a nation see itself as a separate

nation by virtue of that religious identity? In proposing that there were
“two nations” in undivided India, some of the leaders of the Muslim
League argued that the Indian Muslims came from countries further
west and were not natives of India. In an odd turn in the history of
political rhetoric, this “two nation theory” is now favored—explicitly
or implicitly—by many Hindu spokesmen. In fact, there is scarcely any
truth in that theory, since the overwhelming proportion of Muslims in
the subcontinent come from indigenous families that converted to
Islam and not from outside the country.
Another argument used by exponents of Hindu nationalism is based

on the hypothesis that Indian Muslims are loyal to Pakistan rather
than to India, but there is no serious evidence for this thesis either. On
the contrary, a great many Muslims, instead of going to Pakistan,
stayed on in post-partition India, making a deliberate decision to
remain where they felt they belonged. In the armed forces, the
diplomatic services, and government administration, Muslims have
been just as loyal to India as have Hindus and other Indians.
Muslim Kings and Indian History
The Hindu nationalists try to draw on Indian history, pointing out that
the Muslim kings in north India destroyed or mutilated many Hindu
temples; and certainly between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries
the early Muslim invaders and rulers were extremely destructive. For
example, Sultan Mahmud who came from Ghazni, now Afghanistan,
repeatedly north and west India in the century, and devastated cities
as well as temples, including famous Mathura, Kanauj, and what is
now Kathiawar. But as the Islamic rulers became more assimilated to
India, such destruction clearly decreased. Most of the great Moghuls
who ruled over much of north and central India from the sixteenth
century onward could hardly be called destroyers of Hindu buildings
and institutions.
Much is made by Hindu political groups of the intolerance toward

Hinduism of the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb during the late
seventeenth century, when he destroyed some temples and imposed
special taxes on the Hindus, among other measures. All of this is true
of Aurangzeb, but to see him as the typical Muslim monarch in India
would be to falsify history. Indeed, none of the other Moghuls showed
anything like Aurangzeb’s intolerance, and some made a great effort to
treat the different religious communities in an even-handed way. Of
course, Akbar—the best remembered of the Moghul emperors, who
between 1556 to 1605—was particularly friendly to Hindu philosophy
and culture. He attempted to establish something like a synthetic
religion, drawing on the different faiths in India; he filled his court
with Hindu as well as Muslim intellectuals, artists and musicians, and
in other ways tried to be thoroughly nonsectarian.
Even Aurangzeb’s brother, Dara Shikoh, was greatly interested in

Hindu philosophy and, with the help of scholars prepared a Persian
translation of some of the Upanishads, which he compared, in some
respects favorably, with the Koran. Dara was the eldest and the favorite
son of Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal, and Aurangzeb
became king only after fighting and defeating Dara, whom he tortured
and beheaded, and he also imprisoned Shah Jahan for life. Whether or
not Aurangzeb’s antagonism to Hindus owed something to his hatred
for his eclectic and somewhat Hinduized brother is hard to tell; but to
take him to be a typical Muslim emperor in India is a travesty of
history.
Hindu extremist groups have been recently busy “reconstructing”

Indian history; they have made repeated attempts to revise school
textbooks to include doctored accounts of what happened in India’s
past, playing down the Muslim contribution to Indian history. Their
accounts are very different from the earlier assessments of more
detached and less political Hindu religious leaders. For example, the
Hindu religious leader Sri Aurobindo, who established the famous
ashram in Pondicherry, saw the history of Muslim rule in India in a
very different light:
Mussulman domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign The Mogul

empire was a great and magnificent construction and an immense amount
of genius and talent was employed in its creation and maintenance was as
splendid, powerful and beneficent and, it may be added, in spite of
Aurangzeb’s fanatical zeal, infinitely more liberal and tolerant in religion
than any medieval or contemporary European kingdom or empire.…8
If the Hindu middle classes in some parts of India have suddenly

become more aware of alleged misdeeds of Muslim rulers in the past,
this is not because new historical facts have just been discovered. It is
because Hindu activists have been trying to re-create a mythical past,
mixing fact with fantasy. The idea that retributive justice can be
sought now for the past misdeeds of Muslim kings, by comprimising

the civil status of contemporary Indian Muslims, is not only ethically
grotesque, it is also historically preposterous.
Muslims and Indian Culture
It is hard to find any basis in Indian literature and culture for a “two
nations” view of Hindus and Muslims. The heritage of contemporary
India combines Islamic influences with Hindu and other traditions, as
can easily be seen in literature, music, painting, architecture, and many
other fields. The point is not simply that so many major contributions
to Indian culture have come from Islamic writers, musicians, and
painters, but also that their works are thoroughly integrated with
those of Hindus. Indeed, even Hindu religious beliefs and practices
have been substantially influenced by contact with Islamic ideas and
values.9 The impact of Islamic Sufi thought, for example, is readily
recognizable in parts of contemporary Hindu literature. Religious
poets such as Kabir or Dadu were born Muslim but transcended
sectional boundaries (one of Kabir’s verses declares: “Kabir is the
child of Allah and of Ram: He is my Guru, He is my Pir”).10 They were
strongly affected by Hindu devotional poetry and in turn deeply
influenced it.
No communal line can be drawn through Indian literature and arts,

setting Hindus and Muslims on separate sides, and the tradition of
integrated Muslim and Hindu work continues in modern art forms,
such as the movies, a large industry in India. Even films on Hindu
themes frequently rely on Muslim writers or actors. Rahi Masoom
Raza wrote the script for the hugely successful Mahabharata, made for
Indian television, in which the actor Feroz Khan identified himself so
closely with his role as the hero Arjun that he renamed himself after
him.
In fact, Islam itself practiced in India for many generations, must now
be seen as an Indian religion, much as the religion of the Parsees or of
the Syrian Christians is accepted as Indian. While it is well known that
Hindu and Buddhist influences were disseminated from India to
Southeast Asia, and Hindu activists take pride in the grandeur of such
shrines as Angkor Wat, dedicated to Vishnu, it is also the case that
Islam, too, spread from India to the same region, particularly in what is
now Indonesia and Malaysia.11 To sustain the thesis of Hindu
nationalism, it is necessary to depreciate the Indianness of Indian
Muslims. But there is no reasonable basis—racial, political, historical,
cultural, or literary—for taking such a view.
Militant Obscurantism
The third component in the antisecular movement is militant

obscurantism—the political use of people’s credulity in unreasoned
and archaic beliefs in order to generate fierce extremism. Religious
gullibility can certainly be exploited to work up a political frenzy on
the basis of obscure convictions. If the events in Bombay indicate the

influence of communal fascism, the attacks on the Ayodhya mosque
show how the force of militant obscurantism can be exploited as a
political weapon.12 The hundreds of thousands of Hindus who were
mobilized in and around Ayodhya were ready to accept their leaders’
unestablished historical claims that a temple to Rama had once stood
on the precise location of the mosque and that it had been destroyed
by one of the Moghul kings. They were also willing to accept both the
extraordinary ethical proposition that this claim justified the
destruction of the mosque now in order to “rebuild” a temple there
and the grand revelation that Lord Rama, the incarnation of God, was
born 5000 years ago at precisely that spot.
The low level of elementary education in that part of India surely

contributes to this gullibility. India still has a shocking rate of adult
literacy—only about 52 percent—but in the “Hindi belt,” stretching
across the north and central India where Hindi is the dominant
language, the proportion is the lowest in India; in fact, the very low
literacy rates in the Hindi belt drag down the Indian average
substantially. It was here that the Rama agitation assumed such force,
and in fact, most of the Ayodhya agitators came from three states in
the Hindi belt: Uttar Pradesh, where the Ayodhya is located, Madhya
Pradesh and Rajasthan. All of these states disproportionately low adult
literates (between 39 and 43 percent according to the 1991 census).
While illiteracy may not be a central feature of communal fascism or
of sectarian nationalism in general, its role in sustaining militant
obscurantism can be very strong indeed.
An Eleventh-Century Account
Obscurantism is, of course, not a problem in India, and Mah. Gandhi,

Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru all wrote exclusively about it.
Interestingly enough, one of the earliest descriptions of the
phenomenon can be found in eleventh-century account in Arabic of
the mathematician and scientist Alberuni, who wrote what was for
many centuries the most authoritative book on Indian intellectual
traditions, including mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.
Alberuni came to India first with the rampaging invader Mahmud of

Ghazni, and he wrote about the destruction caused by Mahmud’s raid
in a way that even the BJP might approve
Mahmud utterly ruined the properity of the country, and performed there
wonderful exploits by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered
in all directions.…. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most
inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.13
That alleged “aversion,” however, was evidently not enough to prevent

Alberuni from having a large number of Hindu collaborators and
friends, with whose help he mastered Sanskrit and studied
contemporary Indian treatises on mathematics, philosophy,
astronomy, sculpture, and religion. His work had great influence in

continuing the Arabic studies (well established by the eighth century)
Indian science and mathematics, which reached Europe through the
Arabs.
Alberuni provided a closely argued account of why philosophical

Hindu positions are not idolatrous. He then wrote at length on how
idols were in fact, made for the followers of popular Hinduism, and
discussed what were thought to be the appropriate sizes of idols,
including that of Rama—like the ones in the Ayodhya dispute today—
concluding:
Our object in mentioning all this mad raving is to teach the reader the
accurate description of an idol, if he happens to see one, and to illustrate
what we have said before, that such idols are erected only for uneducated
low-class people of little understanding that the Hindus never made an
idol of any supernatural being much less of God; and, lastly, to show how
the crowd is kept in thraldom by all kinds of priestly tricks and deceits.14
The recent crowds in Ayodhya who have been kept in what can easily
be described as “thraldom” have certainly experienced a fair share of
“tricks,” both from politically active priests and politicians who
exploit religion. Elsewhere, Alberuni speaks of the odd beliefs of
people deprived of education, especially “of those castes who are not
allowed to occupy themselves with science.”15
Nearly a thousand years after he made them, Alberuni’s points about

the extreme gullibility of the uneducated, and the effectiveness of
deliberately manipulating the “crowd,” have peculiarly contemporary
relevance. While the failures of successive Indian governments
(beginning with Nehru’s own) to expand mass education have done
much to make these groups vulnerable to militant obscurantism, that
vulnerability has also been thoroughly exploited by extremist Hindu
political leaders.
It would, of course, be a mistake to see illiteracy as the cause of

nationalist Hindu politics generally. Illiteracy may not be particularly
important in encouraging the kind of communal fascism we have seen
in Bombay, or in the general spread of Hindu sectarian nationalism.
But in recruiting candidates for obscurantist agitation, as in the
Ayodhya movement, widespread illiteracy and gullibility have certainly
been exploited by skillful political leaders.
W hat can be done now to defend secularism in India? The

different components of Hindu extremism call for a variety of
responses. The threat of communal fascism can be dealt with only
through determined opposition by the public as well as the
government. The political authorities, in particular, have to stop
appeasing such organizations as Shiva Sena. It is terrible to watch
responsible political leaders who, instead of leading public opinion,
wait for it to shift. The lesson of Bombay is mainly a negative one:

catastrophic horrors occur when organized terror in the form of
communal violence is not directly contested and when responsible
authorities drift rather than govern. In the short run, this is mainly a
matter of “law and order,” but in the longer run, the need to confront
the ideology of Shiv Sena and other such groups is clear.
In doing so, it will be important to reassert India’s old traditions of

tolerance and the acceptance of heterogeneity. In fact, even the
seventeenth-century Hindu military leader Shivaji, after whom the
strong-armed Shiv Sena is named, was quite respectful of other
religions. Some historians (such as the respected Sir Jadunath Sarkar,
the author of Shivaji and His Times, published in 1919) attribute to him
a forceful letter on religious tolerance sent to Aurangzeb. The letter
contrasts Aurangzeb’s intolerance with the policies of earlier Moghuls
(Akbar Jahangir, Shah Jahan), and continues as follows:
If Your Majesty places any faith in those books by distinction called divine
you will there be instructed that God is the God of all mankind, not the
God of Muslims alone. The Pagan and the Muslim are equally in His
presence.…. In fine, the tribute you demand from the Hindus is repugnant
to justice.16
That letter may or may not have been actually written by Shivaji,17 but
it would not be contrary to his attitude to religious differences. In fact,
the Moghul historian Khafi Khan, who was very critical of Shivaji in
other respects, nevertheless had the following to say about his
treatment of Muslims:
[Shivaji] made it a rule that wherever his followers were plundering, they
should do no harm to the mosques, the book of God, or the women of any
one. Whenever a copy of the sacred Quran came into his hands, he treated
it with respect, and gave it to some of his Mussalman followers.18
The tradition of religious toleration in India needs to be discussed

more extensively in confronting today’s problems; and in doing so it is
important to show that respect for other religions can be found even
among those historical leaders who are seen as a source of inspiration
for today’s intolerant Hindu organizers.
W hen it comes to dealing with militant obscurantism, we must

clearly distinguish its special features from communal fascism
as well as from the general threat of Hindu nationalism. Obscurantism
thrives on educational backwardness and gullibility. A much more
determined effort is certainly needed to overcome this backwardness,
especially in those regions in the north of India where basic literacy is
extremely deficient, where school education is most limited, and where
it has proved easy to recruit passionate masses of destructive
volunteers in the name of Rama’s birthplace and Hanuman’s mace.
In addition to expanding education, attention must now be paid to the

content of education. In recent years, to the traditional problem of
illiteracy has been added the danger of deliberately slanted instruction,
including distorted versions of history and the cultivation of sectarian
jingoism. The problem is particularly serious in those northern states
in which BJP has been politically powerful, and where considerable
revision of school textbooks has apparently taken place. This is where
the specific threat of militant obscurantism has become coupled with
the general movement of sectarian nationalism.
Caste and Inequality
The political exploitation of militant obscurantism depends not merely

on the presence of potentially exploitable masses, but also on the
actual policies of sectarian political leaders in dealing with them. If the
BJP had tried to become a truly national party which sought support
even among the Muslims (as it certainly wanted to do at one stage),
the situation would be quite different now. But that statesmanlike
move was abandoned, and BJP is now concentrating on becoming
powerful through sectarian support. So the prevention of this
exploitation must come now from other parties and other social and
political groups.
That this type of political exploitation can in fact be prevented is

borne out by the experience of the state of Bihar, which, like the rest of
the states in the Hindi belt, has an extremely low rate of literacy and
basic education (only 39 percent of its adults were literate in 1991), but
whose citizens did not take much part in the Ayodhya agitation in
neighboring Uttar Pradesh and managed to avoid communal riots
following it. The Bihar state government showed determination and
leadership in preventing chaos and killing which can be fruitfully
emulated by others.
Underlying the situation in Bihar is also the fact that its main political
leaders come from the backward castes; the government and the
ruling parties have tended to channel the energy of rural agitation into
movements attacking the dominance of high-caste Hindus. In fact,
very little obscurantist agitation and remarkably fewer cases of
communal violence have occured in those states in which organized
challenges to the political domination of the high castes have been
prominent and successful. Among them, the southern states—such as
Tamil Nadu or Kerala—have much higher levels of education than all
those in the Hindi belt. But even in Bihar, which is solidly in the Hindi
belt and has just as much illiteracy as the other states there, it appears
that serious attention to such fundamental issues as economic and
social inequality has succeeded in restraining those who want to
exploit the potential for militant obscurantism.
Hindu Nationalism and the Reliance on Ignorance
As for the third factor, Hindu nationalism, we have to distinguish

between the small, hard-core of firm believers and the large, somewhat
amorphous, group of partial recruits. The hard core is certainly not
new—Mahatma Gandhi was shot by a member of it forty-five years
ago—but what has given Hindu nationalism a boost in recent years is
a huge increase in the number of partial converts. Their degree of
commitment varies, but, as was argued earlier, they have been
attracted to a sectarian Hindu view by the use of a systematically
distorted reading of Indian history and culture. The success of the
strategy has depended on such distortions not being challenged with
appropriate force.
A remarkable aspect of recent Hindu politics is not only its

manipulative reliance on ignorance—about the Ayodhya mosque,
about the origins of the Indian Muslims, about the capacious nature of
Hinduism itself—but the neglect by the Hindu leaders of the more
major achievements of Indian civilization, even the distinctly Hindu
contributions, in favor of its more dubious features. Not for them the
sophistication of the Upanishads or Gita, or of Brahmagupta or
Sankara, or of Kalidasa or Sudraka; they prefer the adoration of
Rama’s idol and Hanuman’s image. Their nationalism also ignores the
rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest
steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the
decimal system emerged, where early philosophy—secular as well as
religious—achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented
games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first
systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses
instead to present India—explicitly or implicitly—as a country of
unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and
religious murderers.
This is, of course, James Mill’s imperial view of India, elaborated in his
famous “history” (written without his having visited India and
without learning any Indian language)—an India that is intellectually
bankrupt but full of outrageous ideas and barbarous social customs.
Indian nationalists in the past had disputed the authenticity of that
image; the Hindu nationalists of the present are bent on proving
James Mill right.19
A ntisecular sectarians are having their day in India right now. But
their strength is ultimately limited. Their weakness does not lie
only in the fact that even now a great majority of Indians—Hindus as
well as Muslims—continue to stand opposed to those ideas (and do so
without much leadership from the top). Their weakness arises also
from reliance on exploiting one particular division among Indians, that
of religion, while other national differences and traditions, as I have
tried to suggest, pull in other directions.
First, there are regional differences between forms of Hinduism and

what is or is not taken as sacred. (For example, in assessing the
religious politics of Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya, it is useful to recall
that one of the most popular Bengali plays of the nineteenth century—
Meghnadbadhkabya—portrays Rama as a coward and his enemy
Indrajit as a magnificent hero.) Second, there are social as well as
regional variations in the interpretation of Indian history and also in
the resistance to deliberate distortions presented by sectarian
politicians. Third, the rationalist heritage of India has force of its own
and cannot be easily dismissed by appealing to violent religiosity.
Fourth, the grievances of lower castes lead to a political confrontation
very different from what the Hindu political leaders want.
The deepest weakness of contemporary Hindu politics lies, however,

in its reliance on ignorance at different levels—from exploiting
credulity in order to promote militant obscurantism to
misrepresenting India’s past in order to foster factional nationalism
and communal fascism. The weakest link in the sectarian chain is this
basic dependence on both simple and sophisticated ignorance. That is
where a confrontation is particularly overdue.
—March 11, 1993
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen teaches economics and philosophy at Harvard. He was awarded the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1998. (June 2017)
1. For helpful suggestions, I am most grateful to Sudhir Anand, Peter

Bauer, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Akeel Bilgrami, Sugata Bose,
G.A. Cohen, Edward Desmond, Keith Griffin, Ayesha Jalal, Kumari
Jayawardena, Azizur Rahman Khan, V.K.Ramachandran, Tapan
Raychaudhuri, Emma Rothschild, and Antara Dev Sen. ↩
2. On the importance of anthropological understanding in seeing the

need for secularism, see the powerful analysis of Nur Yalman, “On
Secularism and Its Critics: Notes on Turkey, India and Iran,”
Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 25 (1991). ↩
3. English translation from H. P. Shastri, The Ramayana of Valmiki

(London: Shanti Sadan, 1952), p. 389. ↩
4. Rabindranath Tagore, A Vision of India’s History (Calcutta: Visva-

Bharati, 1951, reprinted 1962), p. 32. ↩
5. On this see S. J. Woolf, editor, The Fascism (Vintage, 1969), Walter

Laqueur, editor, Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (University of
California Press, 1976). ↩
6. See V. K. Ramachandran, “Reign of Terror: Shiv Sena Pogrom in

Bombay,” Frontline, February 12, 1993. ↩
7. Time Magazine, international edition, January 25, 1993, p. 29. ↩
8. Sri Aurobindo, The Spirit and Form Polity (Calcutta: Arya

Publishing House, 1947), pp. 86-89. ↩
9. On this see Kshiti Mohan Sen, Hinduism (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1960). He discusses the interrelations in greater detail in
his Bengali book Bharaté Hindu-Mushalmaner jukta sadhana
(Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1949). ↩
10. See One Hundred Poems of Kabir, translated by Rabindranath

Tagore (London: Macmillan, 1915), Verse LXIX. See also Kshiti
Mohan Sen, Hinduism, Chapters 18 and 19. ↩
11. See Brian Harrison, South-east Asia (London: Macmillan, 1954), p.

43. ↩
12. On this subject and on related issues, see the important collection
of papers edited by S. Gopal, Anatomy of a Confrontation: The
Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi Issue (New Delhi: Viking Penguin,
1991). ↩
13. Alberuni’s India, translated by Edward C. Sachau, edited by Ainslie

Embree (Norton, 1971), Chapter 1, p. 2 ↩
14. Alberuni’s India, Chapter 11, p. 122 ↩
15. Alberuni’s India, Chapter 2, p. 32. ↩
16. Quoted in Vincent Smith, The Oxford History of India, fourth

edition, edited by Percival Spear (London: Oxford University
Press, 1974), pp. 417-418. ↩
17. It is suggested that Nil Prabhu Munshi was the scribe of this letter
(Shivaji could not write). An alternative hypothesis attributes the
authorship to Rana Raj Singh of Mewar/Udaipur. ↩
18. Quoted in Smith, The Oxford History of India, p. 412. ↩
19. In my Lionel Trilling Lecture at Columbia University (“India and

the West”), I discuss the role played by foreign observations of
India in influencing the self-perception of Indians themselves. ↩

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1/23/24, 3:04 PM The Threats to Secular India | Amartya Sen | The New York Review of Books

April 8, 1993 issue

When, some months ago, “The Idea of India”

The present round of events began on

It took quite some time for the nationwide condemnation that

T he extremist Hindu political movement that spearheaded the

Secularism as a Part of Pluralism

It may seem extraordinary that a largely passive idea like secularism

But secularism is, in fact, a part of a more comprehensive idea—that of

Diversity Within Hinduism

The issue of religious plurality concerns not only the relationship

Seeing Hinduism as one religion, fact, is a comparatively recent

Ramayana and Rama

Plurality is an internal characteristic of Hinduism as a religion; it is not

Certainly, in parts of the country the name of Rama is identified with

The identification of Rama with divinity is common in the north and

One of the Hindu political leaders described the demolition of the

Thus, the religious differences between Hindus and Muslims cannot

To explain these regional contrasts, various factors have been cited:

tends to be seen as something that should be banned. This trigger-

A second question concerns the fact that the Indian interpretation of

These differences have been cited again by Hindu political activists to

The term fascism is frequently employed indiscriminately as a word of

Hindu organizations in Bombay, in particular, have revealed some

The violence in Bombay had features other than those of communal

S hiv Sena is a local phenomenon, confined to the state of

Maharashtrian poor in a destructive direction, and have tried to

Among the Bombay residents—Hindus as well as Muslims—there

I have concentrated Shiv Sena’s violence on violence in Bombay both

There would be nothing particularly surprising in such complicity on

The Congress Party controls a minority government in India with 245

Promoting a sectarian view of Hindu nationalism is not new in the

The BJP is the successor to that Hindu nationalist movement, and

Two Nations and Lesser Tales

How can a religious group within a nation see itself as a separate

Another argument used by exponents of Hindu nationalism is based

Muslim Kings and Indian History

Much is made by Hindu political groups of the intolerance toward

Even Aurangzeb’s brother, Dara Shikoh, was greatly interested in

Hindu extremist groups have been recently busy “reconstructing”

Mussulman domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign The Mogul

If the Hindu middle classes in some parts of India have suddenly

sought now for the past misdeeds of Muslim kings, by comprimising

Muslims and Indian Culture

No communal line can be drawn through Indian literature and arts,

The third component in the antisecular movement is militant

the basis of obscure convictions. If the events in Bombay indicate the

The low level of elementary education in that part of India surely

Obscurantism is, of course, not a problem in India, and Mah. Gandhi,

Alberuni came to India first with the rampaging invader Mahmud of

That alleged “aversion,” however, was evidently not enough to prevent

astronomy, sculpture, and religion. His work had great influence in

Alberuni provided a closely argued account of why philosophical

Nearly a thousand years after he made them, Alberuni’s points about

It would, of course, be a mistake to see illiteracy as the cause of

W hat can be done now to defend secularism in India? The

wait for it to shift. The lesson of Bombay is mainly a negative one: