Secularism in India continues to be
in crisis. However, an ambiguity lying at the very heart of this claim has not
altogether been dispelled: is the crisis due primarily to external factors as
when a good thing is undermined by forces always inimical to it, when it falls
into incapable or wrong hands, when it is practised badly? Or, is it rather
that the blemished practice is itself an effect of a deeper conceptual flaw, a
bad case of a wrong footed ideal? Indian critics such as T.N.Madan, Ashis Nandy
and Partha Chatterjee have all argued that the external threat to secularism is
only a symptom of a deeper internal crisis.
Secularism
in their view has long faced an internal threat in the sense that the
conceptual and normative structure of secularism is itself terribly
flawed. In different ways, each argues that secularism is linked to a
flawed modernization, to a mistaken view of rationality, to an impractical
demand that religion be eliminated from public life, to an insufficient
appreciation of the importance of communities in the life of people and a
wholly exaggerated sense of the positive character of the modern state.
In what follows, I try to argue against this view. I do not wholly dispute
their claims about modernity, nation-state or rationality and the importance of
religion and community- in limited but significant ways their critique is
valid. But I disagree both with the general implications of their claim as
well with their understanding of Indian secularism as necessarily tied to a
flawed modernist project. In particular, I contend that these critics fail to
see that India developed a distinctively Indian and differently modern variant
of secularism.
Ideals are rarely if ever and never
simply transplanted from one cultural context to another. They invariably
adapt, sometimes so creatively to suit their new habitat that they seem
unrecognizable. This is exactly what happened to secularism in India. Indian
critics of secularism neither fully grasp the general conceptual structure of
secularism nor properly understand its distinctive Indian variant. Indian
secularism did not erect a strict wall of separation, but proposed instead a
‘principled distance’ between religion and state. Moreover, by balancing
the claims of individuals and religious communities, it never intended a
bludgeoning privatization of religion. It also embodies a model of
contextual moral reasoning. All these features that combine to form what I call
contextual secularism remain screened off from the understanding of these
critics.
Though I do not agree with these
critics that the conceptual and normative structure of secularism is flawed, I
do agree that it faces an internal threat. However, I have a different
understanding of the nature of this threat. Isaiah Berlin has reminded us that
the history of ideas is replete with great liberating ideas slowly turning into
suffocating straightjackets. One reason for this is that we forget that they need
continual interpretation: no idea can flourish without its defenders finding
better and better ways of articulating and formulating them. An idea faces
an internal threat when its supporters, out of akrasia, willful or unwitting
neglect, ignorance, confusion or delusion cease to care for it, or when its own
proponents mistakenly turn against it. I have no reason to doubt
secularism is threatened by forces fiercely opposed to it. But my focus
in this lecture is on the internal threats to secularism. The principal
contention is that one such internal threat is the failure to realize the
distinctive character of Indian secularism.