Hindu bias in India's 'secular' constitution: Probing flaws in the instruments of governance

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 26, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 909-926

  Singh, Pritam ^a  

^a OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM; HINDUISM; POLITICS; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR;

ASIA; EURASIA; INDIA; SOUTH ASIA;

EID: 32144456021     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436590500089281     Document Type: Article

References (106)

1. A Sen defines secularism in similar terms as symmetrical treatment of different religious communities in politics. See AK Sen, 'Secularism and its discontents', in R Bhargava (ed), Secularism and its Critics, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
2. The Constitution of India is available at the website http://constitutiono.ndia.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html. I have also used PM Bakshi, The Constitution of India, Delhi: Universal Law Publishing, 2002 and Constitution of India, Lucknow: Eastern Book Company to verify the exact wording of the articles of the constitution. All the three sources had the same wording.
3. 'If the mainstream of the nationalist movement has been secular, it has also stimulated Hindu revivalism and a tendency to identify with patriotism'. M Galanter, 'Secularism East and West', in Bhargava, Secularism and its Critics, p 237.
4. Let us look briefly at Bhikhu Parekh's take on this: 'Neither Gandhi nor many other Congress leaders could look upon the Muslims as anything other than ex-Hindus' (p 299). 'Although Gandhi himself never put it this way and would probably have disowned it, he tended to equate India with the pre- Muslim Hindu India and define Indian identity in Hindu terms. For him India's history began with the arrival of the Aryans and continued for several thousand years during which it developed a rich spiritual culture. It was rudely interrupted by the arrival of the Muslims and then the British, and was to be resumed at Independence. The Muslims and British periods were largely aberrations made possible by Hindu decadence, and had little impact on India. The Muslims were little more than converted Hindus or ex-Hindus whose religion was but an icing on their essentially Hindu cake. And as for the British rule, it imported an alien civilisation unsuited to the Indian genius and which the culturally revitalised Hindu India must reject' (p 308).
5. See B Parekh, 'The legacy of the partition', in A Singh (ed), Punjab in Indian Politics, Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1985.
6. Two interesting studies, with different approaches, of the interface between Hindutva and Indian politics, including the Indian national movement, are C Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, London: Hurst, 1993
7. and S Joshi & B Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India, Volume III, Delhi: Sage, 1994.
8. Brass describes very vividly the Hindu bias in Gandhi's thought and practice: 'Gandhi himself was, in a sense, the most successful of the Hindu revivalist politicians, but his great stress in bringing the Hindu masses into participation in the nationalist movement, by infusing Indian nationalism with the symbols of Gita, the ethics of non-violence and the promise of Ram Rajya, was also his greatest failure, for his revivalism had no appeal to Muslims' (p 127). See P Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, London: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
9. Nanaji Deshmukh, a leading Hindutva ideologist, in a document entitled 'Moments of soul searching', dated 8 November 1984 and circulated by the Hindu supremacist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Force - RSS) soon after Indira Gandhi's assassination, gives an indication of the line of revisionist rethinking ('soul searching') on the part of the Hindutva forces. He writes, 'on January 30,1948 a Hindu fanatic who was a Marathi and had no relation with the RSS, rather was a bitter critic of the Sangh, committed unfortunate killing of Mahatma Gandhi...We ourselves saw how selfish elements, who were well acquainted with this incident, deliberately declared a murderer to be a member of the RSS and also spread the rumour that the RSS people were celebrating throughout the country death of Mahatma Gandhi, and thus they succeeded in diverting the love and the feelings of loss and hurt in the hearts of people for Gandhi.'
10. This document has been reproduced in full in S Islam, Undoing India: The RSS Way, Delhi: Media House, 2002, pp 53-60.
11. It is worth noting here, in passing, that in this document, Deshmukh endorses Rajiv Gandhi, Mrs Gandhi's son, unhesitatingly: 'he [Rajiv] is entitled to get full cooperation and sympathy from the countrymen, though they may belong to any language, religion, caste or political belief...so that he can take the country to real prosperous unity and glory' (ibid, p 60).
12. A similar revisionist view is discernible in an interview given by Prof Rajendra Singh, a former RSS chief, to Outlook magazine (19 January 1998) published from Delhi. In this interview he makes a mild criticism of Godse by characterising him as a well intentioned nationalist whose killing of Mahatma Gandhi was the wrong method to achieve his goals. To the question 'What is your opinion about Nathuram Godse who killed Gandhi?' Prof Singh replied, 'Godse was motivated by [the philosophy of] Akhand Bharat. Uske mantavya achhe thhe par usne achhe uddeshya ke liye galat method istemal kiye [His intention was good but he used the wrong methods]'. This interview has been reproduced in Communalism Combat, 11(100), August 2004, p 19.
13. In an Indian Communist Party (CPI (M)) booklet containing articles by Harkishan Singh Surjeet, Prakash Karat, Prabhat Patnaik, AG Noorani and Harish Khare, all the contributors made good criticisms of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government's politics in setting up a Constitution Review committee. However, in their attempt to criticise the BJP, they all adopted a defensive attitude towards the existing Constitution of India. Khare even entitled his contribution 'Leave the constitution alone'. In the whole booklet there was only one criticism of the existing constitution, made by Surjeet. He rightly pointed out that 'the strong Hindu revivalist outlook in a section of the Congress leadership also forced the inclusion of cow protection in the Directive Principles. This initial compromise with obscurantist forces was, in the later years, extended to dangerous lengths...The later assumption of power at the centre by a rank communal party like the BJP, was a natural corollary of this compromise' (pp 18-19).
14. See CPI (M), Subverting the Constitution: The RSS-BJP Gameplan, Delhi, 2000. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is the biggest and the most influential of all the communist formations in India.
15. OHK Spate, India and Pakistan: A General and Regional Geography, London: Methuen, 1963, p xxvii.
16. Ibid, p xxi.
17. G Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004, p 293.
18. Ibid, p 293. Although Austin's account of the incident is silent on whether her other demand for the renaming of India as Bharat was accepted by Nehru and other Congress leaders who visited her, it nonetheless highlights the strong emotive association of the Hindus with Bharat.
19. Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report (henceforth CAD), 12 Vols, Delhi, 1946-50, Vol XI, 25 November 1949, p 948.
20. Bhattacharya has brilliantly captured the context and the process of this change from 'federation' to 'Union'. See M Bhattacharya, 'The mind of the founding fathers', in N Mukarji & B Arora (eds), Federalism in India, Delhi: Vikas, 1992.
21. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
22. Quoted by Bhattacharya, 'The mind of the founding fathers', p 99.
23. Ibid, p 96.
24. CAD, Vol XI, 21 November 1949, p 760.
25. Ibid, p 762. From the context of the debate, it is clear that the reference here is to Pakistan.
26. Ibid, p 762.
27. Ibid, p 763. This can be translated as 'Victory to Bharat Constitution, Victory to Mother India'.
28. CAD, Vol XI, 24 November 1949, p 920, emphasis in the original.
29. Austin, The Indian Constitution notes that at one stage of the debate on the issue of residuary powers, it led to communal polarisation 'with Hindus claiming that residuary powers should vest in the centre and Muslims strongly holding the opposite view' (p 196).
30. CAD, Vol XI, 25 November 1949, p 946. Lal was one of the three-member Linguistic Provinces Commission in 1948, which had argued against the creation of linguistic states on the grounds that such states would harm the interests of Indian nationhood.
31. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 242.
32. As a votary of strong centralisation, he reiterated his opposition to the demands for the creation of linguistic states and said that he 'strongly held the view that if a redistribution of provinces has to take place, it should be carried out on an administrative basis'. CAD, Vol XI, p 947. The Hindu nationalist organisations in post-independent India have almost always taken a similar position on the reorganisation of states. Secular linguistic nationalism is viewed, and viewed correctly, by Hindu nationalists as a threat to the consolidation of a singular Indian Hindu identity.
33. CAD, Vol VIII, pp 927-928. Munshi, an early associate of Gandhi, later became one of the founders of the right-wing Swatantra Party and was president for many years of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, a publication house that promotes Hindu culture in India and abroad.
34. See Austin, The Indian Constitution, pp 262-264.
35. Bhattacharya 'The mind of the founding fathers', pp 100-101.
36. CAD, Vol VII, 9 November 1948, p 350.
37. Ibid, 8 November 1948, p 296.
38. Ibid, 5 November 1948, pp 234-235.
39. Ibid.
40. CAD, Vol IX, 3 August 1949, pp 135-142 for Kamath;
41. and pp 142-145 for SL Saksena.
42. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 315.
43. CAD, Vol XI, 23 November 1949, pp 863-864.
44. Ajit Singh Bains, 'Punjab situation', in PV Rao (ed), Symphony of Freedom: Papers on Nationality Question, Hyderabad: All India People's Resistance Forum, 1996, p 179.
45. CAD, Vol XI, 21 November 1949, p 753.
46. Ibid, p 722.
47. Bains, 'Punjab situation'.
48. R Bajpai, 'Constituent Assembly debates and minority rights', Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), 27 May 2000, p 1839.
49. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, London: Penguin, 1997, p 29.
50. These 'Hindu voices', Khilnani points out, had gone to the extent of demanding 'that the Indian state should explicitly declare itself defender of the interests of the nation's Hindu majority' and that powerful Congress leaders like Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad had called for 'the dismissal of Muslim state officials, and suggested that there was little point in the army trying to protect Muslim citizens' (p 31). This distrust of the minority community officials was revealed again at another critical point in the history of independent India. During the anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi in 1984 after Indira Gandhi's assassination, the Sikh police officials in the Delhi police were disarmed and taken off duty.
51. Bajpai sums up very cogently the two conceptions of secularism as debated during the framing of the Indian constitution: 'More generally, secularism was regarded to imply the exclusion of religion from the political domain: Religion, it was argued, should be a "personal matter" for citizens, restricted to their individual and associational private practices. Another conception of secularism as separation between state and religion was that of state impartiality between different religions: The state would not give preference to any particular religion' (p 182). See R Bajpai, 'The conceptual vocabularies of secularism and minority rights in India', Journal of Political Ideologies, 7(2), 2002, pp 179-197. The state's interest in the welfare and reform of religious institutions exclusively of the Hindus articulated through Article 25 militates against both these conceptions of secularism.
52. For an examination of several layers of the state - religion relationship, see DE Smith, 'India as a secular state', in Bhargava, Secularism and its Critics;
53. and Smith, India as a Secular State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
54. For a critical appraisal of Smith, see M Galanter, 'Secularism East and West'.
55. For a refreshing analysis of the role of religion in the domain of the economy, see B Harriss-White, India Working, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
56. and for a comparative view of the role of religious and secular institutions in India and America, see R Archer, 'American communalism and Indian secularism', EPW, 10 April 1999.
57. J Chiriyankandath, 'Creating a secular state in a religious country: The debate in the Indian constituent assembly', Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 38(2), 2000, pp 1-24, employs the term 'deliberate ambiguity' to explain the co-existing character of religion and secularism in the Indian constitution.
58. 'Much of the upper-caste effort in reforming caste was, and still remains, motivated by the desire to consolidate Hinduism. The idea was that as the lowest castes became politically conscious, they would dissociate themselves from Hinduism, if it did not reform itself.' P Mehta, The Burden of Democracy, Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003, p 58.
59. P Mehta, 'Why the BJP is calm: What would a Hindu state do that the secular state has not done already?', The Telegraph, 4 March 2004, emphasis added.
60. CAD, Vol XI, 21 November 1949, p 762.
61. P Singh, 'Akali agitation: The growing separatist trend', EPW, 4 February 1984, pp 195-196.
62. A Alam, 'Secularism in India: A critique of the current discourse', in P Brass & A Vanaik (eds), Competing Nationalisms in South Asia, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002, p 95.
63. For a review of this, see P Singh, 'Political economy of nationalism: minority left and minority nationalisms vs mainstream left and majority nationalism in India', International Journal of Punjab Studies, 9(2), 2002, pp 287 - 298.
64. Ibid, p 101.
65. Ibid, p 100.
66. The Bose article he cites is Sumantra Bose, 'Hindu nationalism and the crisis of the Indian state: A theoretical perspective', in Sugata Bose & A Jalal (eds), Nationalism, Democracy and Development, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
67. An analysis of Operation Bluestar, the Indian army operation at the Golden Temple at Amritsar, and its aftermath would stretch the scope of this paper too far but it might be worth pondering over whether it marked a shift from an assimilationist approach towards the Sikhs to a confrontational or even selective liquidationist approach in the 1980s and 1990s. For an examination of how the policy of state power the Sikhs had to confront has determined the cycles of violence and non-violence in their history, see P Singh, 'Violence and nonviolence in the Sikh struggle for survival and political power', paper submitted to the Annual Conference of the British Association for the Study of Religions, Harriss Manchester College, Oxford, September 2004.
68. K Ilaiah, 'Cow and culture', The Hindu, 25 October 2002.
69. K Ilaiah, Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism, Kolkata: Samya, 2004, passim.
70. Smith, India as a Secular State, p 489.
71. Mehta, 'Why the BJP is calm'.
72. See CPI (M), Subverting the Constitution, pp 18-19.
73. CAD, Vol XI, 25 November 1949, p 948.
74. D Lelyveld, 'Words as deeds: Gandhi and language', in Brass & Vanaik, Competing Nationalisms in South Asia, p 181.
75. Nehru expressed his helplessness to protect Urdu from the onslaught of the Hindi lobby. He said in a speech in 1948, 'if my colleagues do not agree, I can not help it'. Quoted in M Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims since Independence, London: Hurst, 1997, p 159.
76. Figures from S Saxena, 'Language and the nationality question' in Rao, Symphony of Freedom, p 292.
77. Ibid.
78. For a review of this, see Singh, 'Political economy of nationalism'. It is worth adding here that not only the tribal languages but even Braj, Avadhi and Maithili were also included in the Hindi fold. Avadhi, Braj and Maithili have their own distinctive character but have been relegated to the status of dialects of Hindi by privileging 'Khari Boli' as the official Hindi. What greater irony could there be than that Braj, which was a Bhasha (language), should become a boli (dialect) of the Khari Boli. There are strong voices of protest against this unfair denial of the status of language from many linguistic groups in North India, the area characterised as the Hindi region. Perhaps the denial of the linguistic diversity of North India was to foster a homogenous linguistic identity among the Hindus there. I owe this point to Prof Satya Pal Gautam of the Philosophy Department at Punjab University, Chandigarh.
79. Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, has provided an excellent account of how the struggle of the Maithili speakers to get constitutional recognition for their language was defeated by the Hindi nationalists. He points out that some Maithili speakers used the term 'Hindi imperialism' to decry the Hindi nationalists (p 113).
80. According to Brass, 'A Maithili "devotee" put it, "the wolf of Hindi wants to swallow the whole of the language of north Bihar"' (p 70). Brass has also discussed, though in less detail, the role of the Hindi movement in denying constitutional recognition of the Bhojpuri and Magahi languages.
81. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 298.
82. CAD, Vol VII, 5 November 1948, p 235.
83. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 298.
84. Ibid, p 274. It is another unfortunate coincidence that one is forced to observe that in contemporary India the strongest regional blocs of support for Hindutva forces come from North India and Gujarat.
85. A Rai, Hindi Nationalism, Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002, p 109.
86. Ibid, p 90.
87. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 284.
88. Ibid, pp 284-285.
89. See also Rai, Hindi Nationalism, for his comments on the Indian socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia's Angrezi Hatao (Remove English) agitation of the 1960s (p 117).
90. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, also discusses the proximity of SSP (the Socialists) and Jan Sangh as proponents of Hindi in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (p 271). The shared sentiment of Hindi chauvinism among Hindu nationalists and some North Indian socialists in that period could be a clue to understanding the seemingly paradoxical behaviour of some Indian socialists openly aligning with Hindutva forces in India in the past decade and a half. Some Indian Gandhians also get roped into this shared space of Hindi enthusiasts opposing 'Western' English.
91. S Vedalankar, The Development of Hindi Prose Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century (1800-1856 AD), Allahabad: Lokbharti, 1969.
92. Rai, Hindi Nationalism, p 52.
93. See also Vedalankar, The Development of Hindi Prose Literature.
94. Rai, Hindi Nationalism, p 53.
95. SK Chatterji, Indo-Aryan and Hindi, Calcutta: Firma KS Mukhopadhyay, 1960, p 241.
96. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, p 186.
97. K Kumar, The Political Agenda of Education, Delhi: Sage, 1991, p 128.
98. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 264.
99. Rai, Hindi Nationalism, p 77.
100. Quoted by Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 283.
101. I tested some of these ideas on institutionalised communalism and racism first at the workshop on 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogroms organised jointly by the Centre for South Asian Studies, Coventry University and the Association for Punjab Studies (UK) on 30 October 2004 at Coventry University. I am thankful to the workshop participants and especially to Vrinda Grover and Urvashi Butalia for their very useful reactions and comments.
102. For an early attempt to examine institutionalised communalism in the media in the context of the Punjab crisis in the 1980s, see P Singh, 'Role of media', in A Singh, Punjab in Indian Politics;
103. P Singh, 'Punjab and the government media', EPW, 12 January 1985
104. and Singh, 'AIR and Doordarshan coverage of Punjab after the army action', EPW, 8 September 1984.
105. Vrinda Grover provides a useful contribution towards examining institutionalised communalism in the police and judiciary. V Grover, 'Prejudice and democracy: Law, police and anti-Sikh massacre, 1984', paper presented at the Workshop on 1984 anti-Sikh Pogroms, Coventry, 30 October 2004.
106. B Cossman and R Kapur are also taking steps in this direction. See especially their excellent chapter 2, 'The Supreme Court Hindutva judgements', in Cossman & Kapur, Secularism's Last Sigh? Hindutva and the (Mis) Rule of Law, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.