If Britain’s Christian roots don’t turn it theocratic, how will India’s Hindu identity make it less secular, democratic?

At a time when the country is debating the **Uniform Civil Code** — though it would be ideal to call it the Common Civil Code — an important book, Unmasking Indian Secularism (Rupa publications), by veteran journalist and writer Hasan Suroor, has hit the shelves. The book raises several pertinent points and also makes a few honest confessions about the state of secular affairs in the country. “Was the idea of declaring India a secular state really borne out of Nehru’s innate liberalism? Alternatively, was it intended to score a political point over Hindu nationalists and the All India Muslim League: An attempt by the Congress party to shame Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, even as it laid foundations of a minority vote bank?” As Suroor asks these questions, he says matter of factly that secularism, as it is being pursued in India, has failed miserably. “Instead of contributing to fostering communal harmony, as was intended, secularism has become a source of division, breeding resentment among the majority community that believes that it is disproportionately weighted in favour of minorities, especially Muslims,” he writes. According to Suroor, there is “no shame in accepting that India has changed” and the Nehruvian model is “no longer in sync with today’s ‘new’ India”. As a possible way out, he suggests the country can look at adopting Hinduism as India’s state religion. He explains, “This is not a plea to abandon secularism altogether or suddenly embrace a theocratic Hindu state, but to look for a model that is more effectively in tune with contemporary political and social realities, and the current national mood — a settlement underpinned by realism rather than idealism.” Suroor is spot on when he busts this myth of theocracy being the alternative to secularism. After all, in many Western liberal democracies, the state is Christian but the government pursues secular policies. The UK, for instance, has its own Church — the Church of England — whose bishops actually sit in the House of Lords, a position no other religion enjoys in that country. Parliamentary proceedings, invariably and unapologetically, begin with a Christian prayer. The Queen is both the head of state and supreme governor of the Church of England. And the British monarch proudly holds the title of being the ‘Defender of the Faith’. Does this make us question Britain’s secularism? No, the UK remains the paragon of liberal, secular values. But the moment one demands more space for Hindu ethos in India’s national sphere, all hell breaks loose. Obituaries immediately turn up, prophesying the end of secularism/liberalism in India. Some go to the extent of writing off democracy in the country. India immediately gets compared with Taliban Afghanistan; even Pakistan, for all its Islamist credentials, fares better in such a scheme of things! Does it mean Hinduism per se is less evolved, liberal and secular than its Abrahamic counterparts? Maybe that is what the outsiders believe, but why have Indians internalised this complex?

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Also Read **​Uniform Civil Code: One nation, two different sets of rules based on religion is an oxymoron** **Uniform Civil Code: BJP rushes to tick the third and final box** **Karnataka hijab controversy: Why Modi government should seriously think about Uniform Civil Code** **Uniform Civil Code: Why states can't legislate on this subject and why Goa example doesn't hold ground** **Amid Udupi hijab controversy, demand for Uniform Civil Code grows stronger** **Why it is right time to discuss and work towards a Uniform Civil Code, shorn of religious rhetoric** **After Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, growing calls in BJP-ruled states for Uniform Civil Code: What does this mean for India?**

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One finds the answer in coloniality that has inflicted on Indian minds. J Sai Deepak, in his book Bharat That Is India, invokes this phenomenon while talking about the State (first the one run by the British and then the Indian) managing Hindu temples while pursuing the policy of non-interference vis-à-vis Islamic religious institutions. He writes, “Perhaps, in the eyes of the coloniser, Muslims, being ‘people of the book’, were deemed less corrupt and immoral than idol-worshipping heathen, and hence were exempt from State interference.” Ironically, post-Independence, the Indian State continues to act as “the successor of the coloniser in its step-motherly treatment of native consciousness”. Sai Deepak explains, “Clearly, this is attributable to the Indian State’s embracing of colonial assumption that the ‘Hindoo’ is corrupt, debauched and backward, especially with Brahmin, and therefore such institutions must be under State control in order to ‘reform’ them.” Suroor, no doubt, deserves praise for dropping the H-bomb when even the intellectuals apparently sympathetic to the Hindu cause stop short of saying that. But when one reads the book thoroughly, one realises it is an act done out of compulsion. It’s not the result of an organic appreciation for the idea called Bharat that encompasses different faiths and religions. That the history of Indian Muslims doesn’t begin with Mohammed bin Qasim, as Pakistan’s official history suggests. That the roots of Indian Muslims can and should be found, like the rest of Hindus, in the Vedas and Upanishads. The moment this civilisational understanding is realised, things will fall in line, and distrust and disdain for the term Hindu vanish. Religion-wise, India is a land of several faiths, but culturally and civilisationally it is one Hindu whole. But then it’s easier said than done. More so for converts, who form an overwhelmingly large number of Indian Muslims, who suffer from the double dose of coloniality — one Western and the other Islamic. It not just makes Indian Muslims question their own heritage, just like Hindus, but also adds to it, what VS Naipaul says in Beyond Belief, “the fundamental rage” against one’s past. History, for them, becomes “a kind of neurosis” where too much is ignored, too much is moulded, and too much is invented. Worse, there’s too much to be angry and alienated about. It’s a war within, with one’s own native culture, tradition, and people (of different faith). What Europeans did to their colonies in Asia, Africa and America, fundamentalist Islam did to the converted people. Suroor, for all his openness, too fails to pass this test. He writes, “Muslims and other minorities have their own reasons to be suspicious of the secular establishment. Far from benefiting from secularism, the minorities claim that their grievances and frustrations have been manipulated by the Congress party and other Centre-Left groups, and they have been used as proxies in the battles against Right-wing political rivals.” Well said! But can the author point out when the Muslim community has made a conscious decision to discourage the vote-bank politics pursued in the name of secularism? In fact, the community shifted its allegiance from the Congress to, says, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal because the latter took an even more stringent and populist stand in favour of the minorities. Later, when the Bharatiya Janata Party became the most powerful party in the country, the Muslim support invariably went to any party that was believed to be in a position to defeat the saffron party. The author, however, is right in saying that secularism, “as practised over the past 70 years, has not worked, not only for Hindus, but also for Muslims”. He is also spot on when he says that Muslims “never campaigned for an explicitly secular India at the time of Independence, nor was their decision to stay in India necessarily influenced by the political nature of the state”. Where he falters and falls for the colonial/Marxist propaganda to secularise Jinnah’s innately communal project called Pakistan and paint the Muslim League a shade fairer by endorsing that “others — the British, the Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha — were equally, if not more, complicit” for India’s Partition. Of course, the British played its part in dividing the nation. The Congress and the Mahasabha too could have acted a bit smartly. But the real reason for Partition was that a community voted overwhelmingly in its favour — Jinnah’s Muslim League secured 89.5 per cent Muslim votes, while the Congress could get 4.5 per cent Muslim votes. When combined with 6 per cent votes that went to other Islamist parties, it’s obvious that over 95 per cent Muslim population wanted the creation of Pakistan. They didn’t reject the ‘communal’ Hindu Mahasabha but the ‘secular’ Congress led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It’s another matter that many of them preferred to stay back in India after Partition. Suroor shows similar historical flippancy when he calls the CAA “a manifestation of Savarkar’s Hindutva principle of Hindu supremacy”. He seems to confuse CAA with NRC, and fails to understand that CAA per se has nothing to do with Indian Muslims. But the most fundamental error was his failure to comprehend the fact that the CAA, in a way, was a long-delayed promise fulfilled by the Indian leadership: A promise made to the minority population in both East and West Pakistan who were encouraged by the Gandhi-Nehru duo to desist from migrating to India. They had promised their safety. Be that as it may, Unmasking Indian Secularism, despite several shortcomings, is an important book. It at least makes a plea, even if grudgingly, to move India towards its roots, to stop denying its core Hindu identity. Hinduism isn’t just a religion for India, it is its civilisational crux around which the country’s socio-cultural mass revolves around. It’s a good beginning, especially in a country where the Mughal harem, where Hindu girls were forcibly introduced, was seen as a sign of religious syncretism, where secularism meant one community getting first right to the nation’s resources at the cost of others! 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