Gandhi’s Secularism in the Age of Muscular Hinduism

Vinay Lal

(On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, or, Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday)

Mohandas Gandhi forged such a distinctive path in so many spheres of life that it should come as no surprise that his conception of secularism is also at odds with nearly every commonplace understanding of secularism. Indeed, as my argument unfolds, it will become amply clear that Gandhi’s adherence to secularism entailed a deepening of religious belief; as he was to tell some English friends who came to see him on the evening of 31 December 1947, ‘what I want to do and what I have been eagerly doing for the last sixty years is atmadarshan [self-realization]…. I do not boast of my perfect success at it. But, little by little, I am inching towards it. And my every worldly (secular) engagement is carried out just from this perspective.’

The adherents of a rigorous conception of secularism have long subscribed to the formula of the separation of ‘church’ and ‘state’. Whether such a conception of secularism has existed anywhere even in the West is doubtful, but certainly, as is widely recognized, secularism so understood never had any traction in India except among a miniscule number of people who self-consciously styled themselves atheists, rationalists, and sometimes even humanists. What prevailed in India was not the view that the state might not promote religion, but rather that it was not to bestow favours on one religion at the expense of other religions. Many people have thought that such a view can fairly be said to characterize Gandhi’s own position.

Some of Gandhi’s pronouncements certainly appear to support the view that his secularism, to the extent that the word seems apposite for a man who remarked that not a leaf moved without the will of God, could not countenance the possibility that the state might concern itself with religious matters much less promote one religion. Writing in the pages of his journal Harijan in February 1947, as independence was imminent, he warned that the state ought not to ‘concern itself or cope with religious education’. Shortly after the attainment of independence, he firmly opined on the necessity of an Indian ‘Government for all. It is a “secular” government, that is, it is not a theocratic government, rather, it does not belong to any particular religion.’  There can be no doubt that he would have found the idea of a Hindu rashtra utterly repugnant.

However, the question of Gandhi’s secularism calls for interrogation from other perspectives. Some scholars hold to the view that the more palpable demonstration of his secularism resides in establishing that for him religion was in no wise incompatible with reason. His views on Hindu scriptures may be summoned as an illustration: his unstinting admiration, even reverence, for Tulsidas’ Ramacaritmanas did not stop him from rejecting one of its verses as misogynistic and thus reprehensible. He took a similar view in regard to Islam, and was critical of a Muslim clergyman who defended the stoning to death of Ahmadis on the grounds that it was sanctioned in the Quran: as Gandhi averred, ‘every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent.’

Gandhi had from the outset advocated for a position that is often described as ‘religious politics’. In the concluding chapter of his autobiography (1927-29, he observes that he was drawn into politics owing to his ‘devotion to Truth’, and that ‘those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.’  He had declared as much when he accepted the presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1924, adding the caveat that he had in mind ‘not the religion of the superstitious and the blind, religion that hates and fights, but the universal Religion of Toleration. Politics without morality is a thing to be avoided.’

Gandhi at prayer, around 1948; photographer unknown.

The present turn in Indian politics, with the demonstrable rise of an ugly and xenophobic Hindu nationalism, suggests however the perils of invoking ‘religious politics’—even with the caveats that Gandhi had put forward repeatedly and his plea for a ‘universal Religion of Toleration’.  It is tempting to think that as Gandhi saw India increasingly slipping into communal violence from the late 1920s onward, he may have stepped back from the ‘religious politics’ that he had advocated. His ‘secularism’ is often ascribed to this very set of circumstances, and the liberal interpretation has insisted that he eventually came to adopt something like the bourgeois conception of secularism as a political ideology that was supremely respectful of individual rights.

In plain English, Gandhi, on this reading, increasingly thought that religion was strictly a private affair and should nowhere be dragged into the public. But Gandhi never adhered to the idea of the private and public as distinct and discrete spheres of life.  It is critically important, as well, to recognize how his evening public prayer meeting, a full-length study of which is still awaited though there are countless number of books on his religious life and practices, evolved over the decades.  It may be argued that what is more representative of his outlook is the stupendously radical idea that if the Muslim prays, he should pray that not that the Hindu should become a Muslim but rather a better Hindu; that if the Hindu prays, he should pray not that the Muslim should return to the Hindu fold but rather become a better Muslim; and thus with the Christians, Sikhs, and others.

In addressing a gathering of Buddhists on the occasion of Buddha Jayanti in 1925, Gandhi recalled that Muslims often mistook him for a Muslim, the Jains for a Jain, and his Christian friends for a Christian. The Christian missionaries who met Gandhi soon realized that it was pointless to make an attempt convert him to Christianity since he was a much better Christian than any they had ever encountered. It is Gandhi’s profound religious belief and sensibility that made him resolutely secular; his secularism, and his worldly obligations, each of which was but an attempt to strive for self-realization, deepened his religious belief.  His veneration for other faiths made him more, not less, of a Hindu. The advocates of a militant and muscular Hindu nationalism are in this matter entirely clueless—scarcely surprising given their ferocious disdain for self-reflexivity or anything that may remotely be called thought.

First published in print and online in the Indian Express, 2 October 2023, as “Gandhi’s Secularism Drew on His Profound Religiosity”. The present version is slightly longer.

The Assassins of Gandhi’s Memory

Vinay Lal

The assassins of Gandhi’s memory are everywhere in India today.  They lurk in many of the highest offices of the land, in legislative buildings, in the alleys and byways of Indian cities, and most of all in middle-class homes where it is an article of faith to hold Gandhi responsible for the partition of India, condemn him for his purported appeasement of Muslims, dismiss him as an anti-modernizer, ridicule his unstinting and principled advocacy of nonviolence, and sneer at him for his effeminizing politics.

Statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the Indian Parliament complex, New Delhi.

Gandhi’s Religion

Gandhi Jayanti, 2 October 2019

(First of a long series that will continue through the year on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi.)

The subject of Gandhi’s “religion” has never been more important than at present when Hindu nationalism is sharply ascendant and Hindu pride is being championed as a necessary form of the reawakening of a long subjugated people.  The contemporary Hindu nationalist narrative also feeds on other propositions, among them the conceit that Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion, the view that Hinduism is uniquely tolerant, the apprehension that Hinduism’s tolerance has historically rendered it vulnerable to more aggressive faiths, and the twin conviction that Indian civilization is fundamentally Hindu in its roots and that secularism is alien to India.

The Kathua Rape Case: The Moral Collapse of a Civilization

Tabrez Ansari:  the 24-year old man was beaten over hours and compelled to chant “Jai Shri Ram”:  he died two days later.

India has been awash with news of what are called “mob lynchings” over the last few years and another case has come to light of a Muslim man in Jharkhand who was tied up, beaten, and forced to chant Jai Shri Ram over a period of 12 hours.  The man, Tabrez Ansari, died several days ago.  Horrific as this atrocity is, it is also, we might say, part of an orchestrated chaos. One atrocity follows another; attention shifts from one ‘event’ to another, and we do not pause long enough to consider the moral implications of any one atrocity.  It is in the light of this that it behooves us to return briefly to what transpired at Kathua, which has receded into the background just days after the court adjudicated on the matter, and consider whether India has not already entered into a phase of moral collapse from which it may never fully recover.

*Indian Muslims: What Place for Them in Political Discourse and Asian American Studies?

Part Three of “Asian American Studies and Its Futures”

The Hindu nationalists whose writ runs large in much of India today have amply demonstrated that Islamic extremists are scarcely alone in their vicious instrumentalization of religion to political ends.  And India is by far from being the only example of a country where the virulent disease of nationalism has brought what are called “strong” men into power and emboldened their followers, who more often than not exhibit extreme forms of xenophobic conduct, to terrorize and intimidate political opponents as well as those who are, on one account or another, deemed alien to the nation.  In the United States, at least, evangelical Christianity has played a considerable if understated role in stoking the fires of xenophobic nationalism.

 

It is, however, the subject of Islam and American Muslims with which I would like to stay as I turn my attention from Pakistani Muslims to Indian Muslims.  What these days is termed the “radicalization” of Muslims is increasingly on display in India as well, and both the indifference of the state to the marginalization of Muslims, as well as the provocations to which they are subjected by belligerent Hindus, are likely to accentuate the trend toward such “radicalization”.  Kashmir is often pointed to as the most blatant example of the marginalization of the Indian Muslim, and Kashmir has long appeared in the manifestos of radical jihadi groups as among those Muslim-predominant places that need to be liberated from the rule of the infidel.

 

Nevertheless, as many commentators in and outside India have noted, Indian Muslims themselves have remained strikingly unreceptive to calls to global jihad.  More Muslims have been enlisted in various Islamic terrorist organizations from Britain, where they number in the vicinity of 3 million, than from all of India.  “India, with 180 million Muslims, has produced almost no jihadis.”  So ran a recent headline in the Indian Express, a major English-language daily, which continues in this vein:  “Muslims here see stake in political system.”  If one is perhaps inclined to dismiss such a view as propaganda from an Indian publication, we may consider that the stodgy and highly respected The Economist, which cannot be accused of being partial to India, ran an article in 2014 entitled, “Why India’s Muslims are so Moderate.”  While noting that “India’s Muslims generally have reasons for some gloom”, enduring, for example, lower levels of education, poorer employment prospects, and diminished representation in government jobs in comparison with Hindus, the article also highlights the repudiation of violence across a broad swathe of Indian Muslim communities and their engagement with members of other religions.  “The contrast with the sectarian bloodletting, growing radicalism and deepening conservatism in Pakistan next door”, states the author, “is striking.”  This is much the same conclusion reached by the New York Times correspondent who shortly thereafter wrote on “Why India’s Muslims Haven’t Radicalized.”

 

I am aware, I think, as much as anyone else of how much of the present political discourse has pivoted around the ‘Good Muslim’ vs. ‘Bad Muslim’, or around the ‘extremist Muslim’ vs. the ‘moderate Muslim’.  So, I am cognizant of the perils of such discourse, and likewise of how the ‘Good Muslim’ is really a cloak for anti-Muslim sentiment that cares not to reveal itself as such.  There is, for those who decry or lament the very presence of Islam in their midst, some capital to be derived from speaking of the ‘Good Muslim’ with approbation.  The discourse of the ‘Bad Muslim’ is, in the present political climate, here to stay: the question is whether we might derive a different kind of politics from the figure of the Muslim who is not merely an object to be appropriated into the framework of a conservative or liberal politics.

 

The anomalous figure of the Indian Muslim in contemporary politics to which I have adverted thus deserves much greater attention than anyone has been lavished on him thus far.  One would not know any of this from a reading of contemporary Western ‘authorities’ on the politics of Muslim societies.  Gilles Keppel’s The War for Muslim Minds:  Islam and the West (Harvard University Press, 2004), makes absolutely no reference to India:  apparently, on this, rather not uncommon reading, India partakes neither of the West nor of Islam and thus has no say or investment in this matter. I fear similarly that when “Muslim Americans” are invoked, it is a certain kind of Muslim, the supposedly “authentic” Muslim who is of ‘Middle Eastern’ provenance, who is generally being brought to mind.  There is little if any cognizance of just who these Muslim Americans are and very little acknowledgement that they are the inheritors of a great many different, and often conflicting, traditions and histories.

Early converts to the Ahmadiyya movement. Two missionaries, Sufi Bengalee and Khalil Nasir, are sitting at the center.  Source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmadiyya_in_the_United_States

 

Ten percent of the Asian Indian population of around four million in the US is comprised of Muslims, though there is virtually no mention of them in the voluminous commentary on Muslims that appears in the press every day.  If they are to any degree representative of the strands of Indian Islam to which I have very briefly alluded, should we say that they are perhaps uniquely positioned to mediate between Asian Americans and Muslim Americans, as well as between Muslim Americans and American society at large?  While Moustafa Bayoumi’s attempt to briefly complicate the history of Muslim Americans is commendable, and he is entirely right that “Muslim Americans” are not just a “post-2001 population”, South Asian Muslims appear nowhere in his commentary.  Consider this:  if we are to speak of the beginnings of organized Islam in the United States, and the possibilities of multiracial coalitions between South Asians, Arabs, and American Muslims, how can we possibly overlook—as he does—the role of Ahmadiyya preachers, who had arrived in the US in the 1920s from what was then undivided India, in giving Islam in the US a new lease of life and in overcoming, as Junaid Rana has put it trenchantly, “racial and ethnic separation that existed not only in the Muslim community, but the U.S. and globally”? (See “Islam and Black America:  The Story of Islamophobia”, Souls 9, no. 2 (April-June 2007), 156.)

(To be continued)

For Part I, see:  https://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2017/12/24/asian-american-studies-and-its-futures/

For Part II, see:  https://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2017/12/25/islam-and-asian-american-studies/

For Part IV,  see: https://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2017/12/26/south-asians-muslim-americans-and-the-politics-of-identity/