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print versionThe Print, 3 January, 2020
For the first time, India is seeing secularism go from a top-down decree to a street slogan
When Gandhi talked about secularism, he was shown black flags. When Indira Gandhi amended the Constitution to add it, she was asked to clarify what she meant.
by Neeti Nair
For the first time in India’s history, secularism has moved from being a top-down slogan and concern voiced by political leaders and intellectuals, to becoming a battle-cry forged on the ground by citizens with much to lose because of the Narendra Modi government’s Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens.
“Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai, aapas mein hain bhai bhai†; “Inquilab Zindabad†.
Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, we are all brothers; Long live the revolution.
As these slogans reverberate down India’s roads and gullies, and bind us to earlier moments of collective resistance, it behoves us to understand the significance of this historical moment. When was the last time India resonated with slogans celebrating fraternal ties that underscored one’s religious identity?
Adding ‘secular’ to the Preamble
When M.K. Gandhi brought all his political acumen to the last All India Congress Committee session that he would attend, in November 1947, he was fighting against the tide of popular sentiment on the question of minority rights. Despite and because of Partition, Gandhi emphasised that:
“India has been and is a country with a fundamental unity and the aim of the Congress has been to develop this great country as a whole as a democratic secular State where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong. The Constituent Assembly has accepted this as the basic principle of the Constitution. This lays on very Indian the obligation to honour it.â€
Yes, Gandhi did use the word ‘secular’; he also spelt out that it was “the basic creed of the Congress that India is the home of Muslims no less than of Hindus†. For his insistence in prayer meeting after prayer meeting that Muslims belonged in Delhi, that they had to be brought back from refugee camps to which they had been driven by fear, violence, and arson, he was met with black flags and crowds of young men shouting “Gandhi Murdabad (death to Gandhi)†. In the wake of the violence unfolding across partitioned north India, his was a voice that sometimes seemed solitary. Yet, it was what we aspired to be. That aspiration to become a country where people of every religious community might belong, with equal respect and dignity. This guided the drafters of the Indian Constitution.
Almost three decades later when Indira Gandhi moved to pass the 59-clause 42nd Constitution Amendment Bill in both houses of Parliament in 1976, her opponents accused her of not having the right to amend the Constitution. Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s Era Sezhiyan reminded her that she had jailed several of their colleagues; that they had not had the opportunity to debate this mammoth bill; that she could not, like Hitler, be allowed to use the Constitution to subvert the Constitution. In a private letter to prime minister Morarji Desai, former Chief Justice of India, P.B. Gajendragadkar revealed that he had urged Indira Gandhi to have a “national debate†on the provisions of the bill because of their extraordinary importance. Among the 59 clauses was one seeking to alter the Preamble so as to substitute the expression “Sovereign, Democratic Republic†with “Sovereign, Democratic, Secular, Socialist Republic†. Gajendragadkar had urged Indira Gandhi to clarify what she meant by secular.
The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha debates are indicative of the deep wellspring of positive sentiment, regard, and attachment that accrued to the word ‘secular.’ Members from the Jana Sangh, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Indian Union Muslim League, the Republican Party of India, the DMK, Indira Gandhi’s Congress, people from every corner of India and representing a very wide range of castes, tribes, and religious communities spoke out in favour of clarifying what the executive meant by the term “secular†in order to further “strengthen and secularise the content of our democracy†(a pithy phrase used by CPM member Indrajit Gupta). Whereas several of the amendments pushed forward by Indira Gandhi were overturned by the succeeding Morarji Desai government, the amendments to the Preamble remained untouched. Secularism, as an aspiration, had genuine cache and resonance at the time.
Lip service secularism
What did it mean for India to wish to be secular in 1976? This is a worthy question because at least at the level of the political elite in Parliament, there appears to have been a consensus that this was a good thing, a genuine good. Member after member rose to clarify that secularism in India was “neither anti-god nor anti-religion†– it actually meant equal respect to all religions. Therefore, several members such as Jambuwantrao Dhote of the Forward Bloc and Prakash Veer Shastri of the Jana Sangh asked law minister H.R. Gokhale not to write secular as ‘dharm-nirapeksha’ or ‘niddharmi’ when the newly amended Preamble would be translated into Hindi (it was eventually translated as ‘panth-nirapekshak’). While the law minister brushed aside these concerns with barely disguised impatience, the chair of the Congress Committee on Constitutional Changes Sardar Swaran Singh held that:
“…‘secular’ now is a word which I think has become part of our Indian languages. You may go to the Punjab, to Gujarat, even to the South; when they make speeches in their own languages they always use the word ‘secular’ because it has assumed a definite meaning and that meaning is that there will be equality before the eye of the law in our Constitution with regard to people professing different religions. … there is no connotational element of any anti-religious feeling, but it is really respect for all religions…â€
But when parliamentarians including eminent Congresspeople such as Khurshed Alam Khan, Communists such as Bhupesh Gupta and Indrajit Gupta, members of the Republican Party such as N. H. Kumbhare spoke in favour of amendments that would provide reservations to religious minorities in employment and education, or set up a minorities commission, or provide for measures so that Scheduled Castes and Tribes who converted out of Hinduism or Sikhism were not disadvantaged, they found themselves to be very few in number. Their demands that the government define secularism and add substantive safeguards to better explain what was being intended by the addition to the Preamble were met with Congress ministers’ stonewalling, gestures to trust Indira Gandhi to do what would be best for minorities, and then outvoted. The dismissal of each and every substantive amendment to the clause seeking to amend the Preamble shows the exercise of adding ‘secular’ to it to be mere lip-sympathy towards secularism.
This is particularly important to remember at a conjuncture when the Preamble is being carefully and almost ‘prayerfully’ enunciated by citizens across India.
Fight on the streets
To now recall that adding secular to the Preamble was an act that was not accompanied by substantive changes, the need for which was widely recognised, might still help us recover secularism as an aspiration in the present. Secularism has always carried high burdens and always fallen short; it is these demands and hopes that remained unexplored and unmet that will be our light out of an otherwise seemingly endless tunnel. The battle for a secular India will have to be fought and won by Indians, without the expectation of substantive and consistent support from the political class.
Neeti Nair is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and Global Fellow at the Wilson Center. Views are personal.
o o o
Indians are reclaiming, and redefining, the idea of secularism | Opinion
What it means for Indians to be secular in everyday life has emerged with renewed vigour
Yamini Aiyar
Rather than dismissing and wishing away the assertion of religious identity, understand it as a part of India’s conversation with secularism and definition of its practice
They have withstood the government’s sticks and stones, threats of “revenge vows†and daily attempts to delegitimise and label them as “tukde tukde†, anti-national, groups with vested interests, creating a “fear psychosis†. For over a month now, India’s students, India’s women, and most prominently, India’s Muslims, have remained resilient in the face of brutal repression, armed with the Constitution, determined to reclaim their democratic rights.
One month on, what do these protests, now spread across many parts of the country, tell us about this current moment in India’s democracy? Are these protests no more than an inchoate and a leaderless response to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) that, in the absence of formal political organisation, will dissipate in the face of State repression? Or, do they hold out the possibility of shaping a new politics for India that restores meaning to constitutional values of secularism, equality and justice?
Writing in these pages days after Parliament passed the CAA and the protests began, I had argued that the greatest challenge for the movement against the CAA and its sinister twin, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), is that of reclaiming secularism and finding a new vocabulary through which to defend its cause. This is not an easy task. Competitive party politics has hollowed out the true value of secularism, leaving in its place an opportunistic politics of religion. Being “secular†has been reduced to a politics of religious appeasement and chasing vote banks, rather than affirming values of tolerance, equality and peaceful coexistence. Party politics has stripped secularism of its true meaning, and as a result, even committed “secularists†have shied away from the term, preferring the language of tolerance and pluralism.
But in this last month, secularism has slowly found its way back into the public discourse as a constitutional value worth fighting for. The word itself has made regular appearances on posters, and is now integral to the grammar of the current wave of protests. It has also made its presence felt loud and clear, in the repeated chanting of the Preamble of the Constitution, which is the rallying point of the protests. But it is at the now iconic Shaheen Bagh that secularism, and the idea of what it means for Indians to practice being “secular†in everyday life, has truly emerged with renewed vigour and meaning.
On January 12, thousands gathered at Shaheen Bagh to participate in a simultaneous inter-faith prayer. Verses from the Koran and the Bible were read out alongside a kirtan and havan and reading of the Preamble. The imagery was powerful. A Muslim-dominated residential area, demonstrating to India what the practice of secularism, of tolerance, of “Sarva Dharma Sambhava†(a doctrine with Hindu origins that defined the freedom movement and the idea of secularism in modern India) means to ordinary Indians. There is a powerful video doing the rounds that I would urge all readers to watch of Muslim women (identified clearly by what they are wearing) loudly chanting “Jai Sia Ram†. The symbolism of this image is inescapable.
This is how India is defining secularism. Shaheen Bagh is perhaps the first moment in independent India’s history that the idea of secularism is being defined and given meaning by ordinary people. This is not secularism as imagined by intellectuals, lawyers, or career politicians. This is ordinary people, finding ways to articulate what secularism means to them, on Delhi’s streets. And in this act, secularism has not just reappeared but being ascribed a more robust meaning, one that has deep roots in everyday Indian life.
Equally important, these protests are also witnessing a visible, unabashed assertion of religious identity, or more specifically, Muslim identity, including through the now controversial chanting of “La illaha illallah†. This religious assertion has made some supporters of the protests uncomfortable. This discomfort is misplaced. Rather than dismissing and wishing away the assertion of religious identity, it ought to be understood as part of India’s conversation with secularism and definition of its practice. Through the protests, Muslims are asserting their identity as Muslims and as Indians who believe in values of tolerance and harmony. This is India’s definition of secularism.
But does this spontaneous, protest-led reclamation of secularism hold the possibility of translating into a new politics, in the long term? Despite opposing the CAA and taking a strong stance at the state government-level , Opposition parties, particularly the Congress, have failed to seize the opportunity to generate a new discourse on secularism and democracy in to mainstream politics. This doesn’t leave much hope. But as sociologist Patrick Heller reminded me in a conversation recently, we should be careful not to reduce democracy to mere party politics. Democracy begins and its practice is strengthened in the interstices of associational life. What we are witnessing today is democracy in its truest sense. It may not disrupt the status quo immediately, but it holds the promise of a better future.
Yamini Aiyar is president and chief executive, Centre for Policy Research
The views expressed are personal
