Liberal secularism in India needs activism beyond the salons of the elite and ways need to be found to participate, as one ideology among many, in the public market of ideas. Ultimately, most Indians, as do most people around the world, care about immediate welfare questions and so liberal secularists in India need to make the argument as to why secularism is a better path to development than is religious politics. But none of this will happen if liberal secularists continue to hold lazy views of religion and the sources of communal violence.
Simply dismissing religious violence as a phenomenon generated by “bad agents” will not do any more. Engaging in platitudes about the universality of religions’ message(s) of peace will also not do. Liberals will not be able to properly speak to the underlying causes of communalism without first understanding what religion really is and what its theological positions on violence really are. Platitudes about the universality of the peace message inherent in all religions, aside from being false, only generate smug detachment from a society in which the message of religious communalism is persuasive because it actually does strike legitimate cords. Looking to the state to uphold secularism in the absence of a general consensus in the citizenry of the republic on its virtues, and indeed necessity, given India’s extreme religiously plural society, can no longer suffice. The argument must be made directly, actively and consistently as to why secular liberalism offers the best path for India’s developmental aspirations.
- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/18/commentary/secularism-and-religious-violence-hinduism-and-islam.html#sthash.M7fgouTH.dpuf
Dharma of Violence
Both Hinduism and Islam have theological strands that confront head-on the problem of violence. They do so, however, in very different ways and generate very different strictures on the legitimacy of violence. The clearest theological statement on violence within Hinduism comes in the Gita. Whatever the historical significance of the Gita in ancient and medieval worlds, it is clear that by the modern period the Gita had become the principal condensed articulation of Hindu ethics.
The basic message of the Gita, refined in long conversation with Buddhist and Jain rivals, is that the principal source of legitimate action lies in the concept of dharma. What the Gita advocates, defiantly and unapologetically in opposition to Buddhist doctrine, is that the fundamental source of an individual’s dharma is the network of social obligations in which an individual is embedded. It is, therefore, an ethical system that is entirely positional. The rightness or wrongness of an action is entirely dependent upon the exact position occupied by the agent at a precise moment in relationship to the broader framework, to kin and to social relations. The dharma of a child is different than the dharma of an adult; the dharma of a warrior, as the poet of the Gita has Krishna state in his sermon so clearly to Arjun, is different from the dharma of a peasant, a merchant or a priest; and so and so forth.
The key point is that the righteousness of action (including violence) is entirely a function of social obligations and not the ultimate purposes to which action is being applied. The rightness or wrongness of violence, in this tradition, is entirely disconnected from the ultimate purposes to which it is being deployed. A warrior’s action could be entirely legitimate even if the cause in which he fights is not. In this sense, the ethics of action within Hinduism is very narrowly conceived and the politics of violence (“the ends” in Clausewitzian terms) is entirely absent. Indeed, the Gita states that these are of no concern of an individual assuming that they could even comprehend it (who are we, after all, to pretend to know the ends to which the Gods are working?).
Hinduism, therefore, is not pacific in any sense. It takes violence for granted and instead focuses on the question of legitimate violence in a very narrow and highly contextualised context of individual obligation (itself understood in a social sense). Furthermore, and worth highlighting, is the detachment of action from the legitimacy of the causes of action. Put in slightly different language, Hinduism, as articulated in the Gita, has remarkably little to say about politics in any modern understanding of the term. And searching through much of what constitutes popular or devotional Hinduism since the classical period, the sheer ubiquity of violence in the great epics, the Puranas, and the general corpus of mythology belies any attempt to classify Hinduism as “pacific” let alone “Gandhian,” notwithstanding the seeping into Hinduism of the Buddhist and, above all, Jain concept of ahimsa.
Politics of Violence
Islam, on the other hand, is in some sense all about politics and could not, therefore, be more different from Hinduism in this matter. It has become common for liberal secularists to assert that Islam is a pacific religion that has been hijacked by misguided individuals seeking to mobilise politically on the basis of the legitimacy provided by Islam. Indeed, Western (and Indian) politicians routinely make statements that assert that Islamic fundamentalists have gotten Islam wrong. Instead of this liberal and secular essentialising of Islam, it would be more productive to take Islam’s deep reflection on the nature of legitimate action seriously.
Islam, as represented both by the life of its Prophet and the Koran, has a great deal to say about legitimate and ethical violence. My purpose here is not to enter the highly contested debate over the precise meaning of jihad. It is instead to note that Islam does not inherently reject violence. Instead, the emphasis is on the precise boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate violence. While it is possible for reasonable people to disagree about where those precise boundaries lie, that there is in fact legitimate and ethical forms of violence within Islam cannot be denied or ignored. For the present purposes it is worth emphasising that legitimate violence within Islam is entirely political (in the sense of defence of the community of believers and their political rights in this world).
The Prophet himself engaged in violence with his own hands and led armies into battle (and lest Hindus feel smug about this, it is worth pointing out that Rama, Krishna, and the list goes on, are all deeply implicated in the exercise of violence in the epics and the Puranas). What is different between Hindu and Islamic religious attitudes towards violence is that in one case the righteous of the cause is central and in the other it is the righteousness of the social obligation. One is political and the other is social. One is communal and the other individual. But neither has an inherent problem with violence: only with the ways in which it is exercised.
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