Spotlight: Secularism in South Asia

▪ 1996

 The ideals of secularism have always been important, though precarious, in South Asia. Because of its diverse population, the region has long been a theatre of conflict between religious communities. (See Map—>.) Even when the threat of conflict has been centred around ethnicity or caste, political parties and governments have sometimes appealed to religious considerations to distract attention from these other forms of conflict. In all such circumstances it is secularism that has been eroded.

      In 1993 conflict between Hindus and Muslims in northern India came to a head with the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya and took on a scale and significance not witnessed since the communal troubles during the partition period that culminated in the creation of Pakistan in 1947. The partition left India with a sizable Muslim population (10-12% of the whole) who did not become citizens of the new state of Pakistan, and this population has recently come under an attack from a Hindu nationalist majoritarian movement known as Hindutva. The parliamentary party explicitly committed to a policy of opposition to the Muslim minorities is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but it has important extraparliamentary support from bodies that propagandize for Hindu dominance. This group of organizations, known as the sangh parivar, has a distinctive ideology that claims India is a Hindu nation and that minorities in it, particularly the Muslims, may live in India only if they acknowledge these claims. This means, among other things, that Muslims would not be allowed to live as they do now, under their own code of personal laws. (India, though a secular state, allows Muslims and Hindus to live according to a code of personal laws based on their religion.) This has made the Muslim community particularly defensive on the matter of this code, which many Muslims now believe is the only thing that can preserve their cultural identity. This attitude gives popular currency to the Hindutva claim that Muslims were pampered during the years of British rule and by the "pseudosecular" state of postindependence India.

      Perhaps the most significant event relevant to secularism in the past year was the election of the BJP to power in India's most prosperous state, Maharashtra, in alliance with a militant regional party called Shiv Sena. This newly elected government has already proposed legislation to abolish a separate civil code for Muslims, a move that Muslims resist on the grounds that this federal matter is not subject to state legislation. At the federal level, however, the Supreme Court ruled earlier that conversion by Hindu men to Islam as a means of marrying more than one women was prohibited.

      In Uttar Pradesh, the state with the largest Muslim population after Kashmir, the government led by Mulyalam Singh Yadav fell when a party of the Untouchable community called the Bahujan Samaj Party withdrew its support and formed an alliance with the BJP. This shows how the condition of secularism in India is influenced by the question of caste. Singh's government had assumed that Hindutva was a movement of upper-caste Hindus with no support among the Untouchables, but the defection of the BSP indicates that some groups will put aside economic concerns when jockeying for immediate political power.

      Secularism in Pakistan is an issue of the extent to which the official religion, Islam, will be allowed to dominate the state, and the chief problem in Pakistan at present is threats to the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto from an increasingly Islamic and conservative army.

      In Bangladesh there was an Islamist outcry against Taslima Nasrin's feminist novel Lajja, which expressed sympathy for the plight of the Hindu minority in the country. A similar situation surfaced in India with the publication of Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, which satirizes a leader of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.

      The ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese majority, mostly Buddhist, and the Hindu Tamil separatists in the north seems no closer to resolution, but in Nepal most people prefer making the new multiparty democracy work, and there are few who wish for a return to the absolutist Hindu monarchy.

      In spite of such groups as the "guru busters" of Calcutta, which agitate against religious influence in India, and groups that want to preserve a multireligious state, the secular commitment to free expression of religious dissent will no doubt continue to be under some attack and strain in the countries of southern Asia in the near future.

      Akeel Bilgrami is professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York City and the author of the forthcoming Postcolonial Politics and Cultural Identity.

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