Communalism, Regionalism & Secularism | UPSC – IAS

Introduction to: Communalism, Regionalism and Secularism | UPSC – IAS

Since Independence, the central leadership has confronted several major challenges to the unity of the country. These have included the integration of some 562 semiautonomous princely states into the Indian Union in the years immediately after Independence.

• Despite numerous successes, therefore, in resolving some of the major problems threatening the unity of the Indian state since Independence, some of the problems are so severe that the central government finds it difficult to maintain the unity of the country.

Moreover, the remaining problems cannot be considered to be merely the unresolved remnants of old conflicts but reflect a fundamental structural tension in the Indian political system between forces seeking to strengthen further and centralize more decisively the Indian state and regional and other forces demanding further decentralization, and interdependence between the center and the states. Most scholarly observers of contemporary Indian politics agree that since Independence there has been a considerable decay in the functioning of political institutions and in their public legitimacy.

• Form a comparative perspective, however, india’s political institutions appear quite differently. The performance of India’s political institutions compares favorably in many respects with those of her neighbors or with most other post-colonial societies. Indeed, the Indian political regime is one of the most democratic in the world by most conventional measures of political participation, electoral and party competition, and persistence of parliamentary institutions.
• It is also among the least repressive regimes in the world. With admittedly major exceptions such as the annihilation of Naxalites, terrorists, and those suspected or wrongly accused of being in those two categories. The repressive and brutal measures taken against presumed militant, insurrectionary, and secessionist groups in Punjab, Kashmir, and the northeast, opposition politicians and students and others who engage in public demonstrations against the regime or the dominant party are not normally harassed or imprisoned without cause and are certainly not tortured.
• There is a free press and ordinary people are free to speak their minds in public and private. It is in this background that the concept of secularism, communalism and regionalism assumes importance.

Concept of Secularism in India | UPSC – IAS

The word “Secular” has many meanings in the Indian context. To begin with, secular connotes ‘antireligious‘. To be secular is to be anti-religious, an atheist or agnostic.

Likewise, a secular state must be actively hostile to religion, discourage religious practices, prevent the growth of religious institutions. The secular state in this sense has never existed in India. A small minority of atheists do, but this is nothing new. There is a long and venerable tradition of atheism in Indian culture; it follows that such secular persons have existed even in the past.

• Secondly, the word “secular” means not anti-religious but non-religious. On this view, the secular state is non-religious but permits religious practices outside its sphere. It neither encourages nor discourages religion. It keeps off all kinds of religious and quasi-religious activities. Although Nehru may not have always lived up to this ideal, this may well be the nehruvian conception of secularism.
• Third, the word “secular” has also been identified with multi-religious. Its defenders argue that in India, a land that has given birth to and nourished some of the major religions of the world, a state policy of indifference to religion is neither justified nor workable.

Since most People in India are religious, the state cannot keep away from religious matters or adopt a stance of mere neutrality between the religious and nonreligious. Rather, it should actively promote religion.

The state should play a positive and dynamic role in the pursuit of a religious life. But in a land of many religions, the state cannot discriminate in favour of any one religion. It should grant equal preference to all. So the word “secular” here clearly means an equal preference to the religious and the non-religious and within religions equal respect for all religions. It does not take long to guess that this is the Gandhian conception of secularism.

• Fourth the word “secular“has come to mean multi-communal. This degeneration has been characteristic of the Indian polity over the last 35 years or so. To be secular is to grant equal preference to the fanatical fringe of all religious communities.

Here, the more desirable, universalisable aspects of all religions are overlooked or deliberately neglected and their closed, aggressive and communal dimension is over emphasised.

The BJP has systematically undermined each of the four connotations of the word “secular” and has infused it with a meaning consistent with the rest of its ideology. It attacks the first conception for being anti-religious, the second for being indifferent to religion, and the third and the fourth for granting equal preference to all religious and communal practices. Each of these, for the BJP, is pseudo-secular. For the BJP, secularism in the Indian context must mean granting special favours to a particular brand of freshly manufactured, aggressive Hinduism.

To be secular is to favour a particular communal group. The argument behind it is simple minded but dangerous.  India is a uniquely religious land; religion has a special place in the life of every Indian. No state in India can afford to ignore this fact and therefore it should actively promote religious life. But it must not favour all religions equally. Hinduism is the religion of the majority and therefore the state must favour the Hindu over other religious groups. To even conceive this within traditional forms of Hinduism is impossible, So a new aggressive Hinduism is necessary to articulate this demand.

• The word “secular” must accommodate this brute fact; either it goes or it must be clipped to mean “pro-aggressive Hinduism”. This is positive secularism because it is positive towards this brand of Hinduism. Needless to add that a such a position is highly contentious because it has neither been endorsed by the state nor has it been found reasonable.

Read more in Detail: Secularism in India its Features, Impact and Problems

Concept of Communalism in India | UPSC – IAS

Communalism operates at different levels ranging from individual relations and interests to the local, institutional and national politics and to communal riots. There is a whole range of social relations and politics over which communalism pervades today and this spread of communalism involves two interrelated central issues.

• First is the state of consciousness in society.
• The second is communalism as an instrument of power, not purely for capturing state power, but for operating in political/social and economic domains and at almost all levels of social organization.

Religion is an integral factor in the existing state ot social consciousness in our society. It provides an identity of being part of a community to all those who believe in the same religion.  It is perceived and believed that those who belong to the same religion have a certain common identity. It is this belief in commonality which is used for communal mobilization. That is communalism.

• Communal mobilisation are based (or a possibility of creating a perception) that there are identities which ,are based on religious belonging. Such an identity, in fact, can be manipulated for purposes of power at various levels. The increasing efforts at communalisation are a part of this process, that is, manipulation of religious consciousness to serve the interests of certain political parties. The mobilisation of sections of society on the basis of religious beliefs for the purpose of power is central to the intensification of communalism today.

The process of communalisation draws upon communal solidarity which is both a contemporary – construction and an outcome of objective historical development during the colonial period. For constructing communal solidarity a selective appropriation of the past is being attempted, by equating Hindu with Indian. The contemporary communal mobilisation derives sustenance from a Hindu interpretation of the past. Needless to say, it is a backward projection of the needs of the present day communalism.

• Two good examples of this are the attempts to establish Hinduism as a homogeneous religion from ancient times and, secondly, the notion of the existence of Hindu community from early times. The very stimulating work done by Romila Thapar on the ancient history of India considers in detail the social and ideological dimensions of Hinduism as well- as its historical evolution.
• The Hindu community, as Romila Thapar has very rightly remarked, is an “imagined community”. It is not a community which really existed. In the past, the communities were based on location, on occupation, on caste and sometime on sects. Even in contemporary society, secular communities are more in operation than religious communities. An individual in society spends more time in secular pursuits than in religious matters.

Today communalism is primarily an instrument for acquiring power. And power is, to begin with, acquired at the grass-root level and, therefore, it has got to be contested at that level. These local associations or communities-, the grass root communities, are a way of positing an alternative to communalism.

Read more in Detail – Communalism in India Characteristics, Causes and Problems

Concept of  Regionalism | UPSC – IAS

States reorganization has been a dominant problem of federalism. The problem of regionalisms has acquired importance in political circles. The situation of Punjab, Kashmir and Assam and the north east has been of crucial significance despite its special status and its particular form of regional autonomy, the central government and political leaders have intervened as much or more in Kashmir since independence than in any other state of the Union. Consequently, the history of its politics from Independence until the outbreak of the recent internal war cannot be understood without knowledge of center-state political relations and alliances.

There are three prevailing explanations for the rise of an insurrectionary movement amongst Kashmiri Muslims against the Indian state in Kashmir.

One is an argument which always presents itself in movements such as these, that in reflects the primordial desires of the Kashmiri Muslims. In fact, however, the course of modem kashmiri history demonstrates the opposite: the absence of any clear universally accepted ultimate goal for kashmiri Muslims, let alone the rest of the non-Muslim population of the state.

• The second explanation is that the Indian state has taken a “too soft and permissive attitude” with political forces who have set out to exploit the special status of Kashmir and to manipulate religious and separatist sentiments for their own political advantage.
• A third explanation, the point of view adopted here, is rather that the central government has been not “soft and permissive,” but manipulative and interventionist and that it has not kept its promise to respect in practice the limited autonomy granted to Jammu & Kashmir under the terms of accession.

Many alternative explanations for the resurgence of regional and communal conflicts in the past twenty years have been offered, including the persistence of immutable primordial cleavages in Indian society, their underlying bases in economic or class differences, and specific policies and political tactics pursued by the central and state governments. The analysis here has given primacy to the latter.

However, it is also true that the problems in the Punjab, in the northeastern region, and in Kashmir have been complicated by the presence of other factors which were not present in the linguistic reorganisation of states which took place during the Nehru period.

In the Punjab case, the most important difference is the fact that the Sikhs are a separate religious as well as linguistic group. In the northeast, the issues have been tangled by the presence there of several tribal minorities, whose demands have been secessionist, by the migration of large numbers of people from other provinces of India, particularly West Bengal, to the northeastern states states of Assam and Tripura especially, by illegal migrations from Bangladesh as well, and by the presence of large numbers of both Hindus and Muslims among the migrant and local populations. In Kashmir, the issues have been complicated by the internationalization of the dispute, the special status which Kashmir has had since its integration into the Indian Union, and its perceived. integral connection with the opposed founding ideologies of the two principal successor states to the British Raj.

Nevertheless, the argument here is that the policies pursued by the government of India after Nehru’s death have played a major role in the intensification of conflicts in these regions and have in the process highlighted a major structural problem in the Indian political system. That problem arises from the tensions created by the centralizing drives of the Indian state in a society where the predominant long-terms social, economic, and political tendencies are toward pluralism, regionalism, and decentralization. Although the same tensions existed in the Nehru years, central  government policies then favored pluralist solutions, non-intervention in state politics except in a conciliatory role or as a last resort, and preservation of a separation between central and state politics, allowing considerable autonomy for the latter.