Secularism in Search of a Nation

NEW DELHI - In 1976, India made an amendment to its Constitution that inserted the word “secular” to describe the great republic. It was a national aspiration and still is, and is glorified as a national characteristic, which it is not from the evidence in plain sight.

By “secular,” India did not mean that it was atheistic or agnostic or that it rejected all religious practices. By “secular,” the people who framed the amendment meant that in India all faiths are accepted, and that Indians are expected to tolerate all religions. Every Indian has grown up listening to the idea of India as a “secular” republic. It is a ceaseless background hum, like all moral lessons. One cannot escape its persistence.

But can a person who is not atheistic truly be “secular” as expected by the Constitution, especially when the two major religions in India are Hinduism and Islam? What happens when the ways of one religion hurt the feelings of the other religion? Are atheistic lawmakers, of whom there were more than a few in the early days of the republic, qualified to decide how religious Indians must view other religious Indians?

On this day, Dec. 6, 20 years ago, it did appear that the demand on practicing Hindus and Muslims in India to be “secular” was unnatural and unsustainable. An ancient mosque called Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, was demolished by a Hindu mob protesting the very existence of the monument. They believed that it was built over a Hindu temple and that the site itself was sacred because Lord Rama was said to have been born there.

The demonstrators had been allowed on the site after the organizers of the protest had promised the Supreme Court that the mosque would not be harmed. The organizers, some of whom were from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which went on to govern the nation, asserted that the ensuing destruction of the mosque was the spontaneous act of an emotional crowd. In the days that followed, there were riots across India in which more than 2,000 Hindus and Muslims were killed.

The mainstream news media in India have always held that Dec. 6, 1992, was a day of shame and that the destruction of the mosque was a mindless act of vandalism. In the months after the riots, newspapers ran features about Hindus and Muslims living in harmony: a temple and a mosque somewhere standing shoulder to shoulder on a single patch of land, a Muslim family that made Hindu idols, Muslims who married Hindus, Hindus who adopted Muslim orphans and so on. That India was “secular” was the respectable point of view among educated Indians.

But, as it often is the case, there was a difference between the respectable view and what a majority actually believed and said in private, which was that the demolition of the mosque was a sign that India was changing and that in this new nation Hindus would become increasingly assertive and intimidating enough to protect themselves against other religions, especially Islam.

When India decided that it was “secular,” what it really meant, without spelling it out, was that Hindus, who make up the majority of the nation, would have to accommodate themselves to the ways of other religions, even if this meant taking some cultural blows. So, Hindus would have to accept the slaughter of cows, which they consider sacred (some Indian states have banned cow slaughter); the Muslim community's perceived infatuation with Pakistan; the conversion of poor, low-caste Hindus to Christianity by evangelists; and the near impossibility of getting admitted to some prestigious schools and colleges run by Christian organizations because so many places are reserved for Christian students.

The anger and frustration of middle-class Hindus at all this and more greatly contributed to the Hindu nationalist movement, which picked up strength through the 1980s as an upper-caste uprising that identified conservative Islam and the Babri Masjid, one of the enduring monuments of the Moghul conquest of India, as foes.

The movement eventually hoisted the Bharatiya Janata Party as a major national party, which led India through two short spells, then for a full five-year term, starting in 1999. It was a period of economic growth, and the confident party went back to the polls in 2004 with the joyous slogan “India Shining.” But it was defeated because there were apparently still too many poor people in the country who did not see the shine.

Now the party hopes it will triumph in the 2014 general elections, chiefly riding on the back of a man linked to the 2002 riots in Gujarat, which claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat and now a possible prime ministerial candidate, was accused of discouraging the police from protecting Muslims, accusations he has denied. But he understood very early in his political career that any nation that has to declare that it is “secular” probably is not.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appeared in print on December 6, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.