After all, as Mr. Tampi pointed out, the Hindu's secular pursuit of material happiness is not meant to be divorced from his obedience to the ethical and religious tenets of his faith. So the distinction between “religious” and “secular” is an artificial one: there is no such compartmentalization in Hinduism. The secularism avowed by successive Indian governments, as Professor R. S. Misra of Benares Hindu University has argued, is based on dharma-nirpekshata (“keeping apart from dharma”), whereas an authentically Indian ethic would ensure that secular objectives are infused with dharma.
I should stress that I find this view persuasive but incomplete. Yes, dharma is essential in the pursuit of material well-being, public order, and good governance; but this should not mean turning public policy over to sants—living “saints”—and sadhus, nor excluding any section of Indian society from its rightful place in the Indian sun. If we can bring dharma into our national life, it must be to uphold, rather than be at the expense of, our pluralist Indianness. Hinduism has always acknowledged the existence of opposites (and reconciled them): pain and pleasure, success and failure, creation and destruction, life and death are all manifestations of the duality inherent in human existence. These pairings are not contradictory but complementary; they are aspects of the same overarching reality. So also with the secular and the sacred: a Hindu's life must involve both. To acknowledge this would both absorb and deflect the Hindu resurgence.
Secularists are reproached not so much for their modernism as for their lack of a sense of their place in the grand Indian continuum, their lack of dharma. In my view, to live in dharma is to live in harmony with one's purposes on earth. This emerges from Hindu tradition, but it is not necessarily practiced in a traditional way. If I can be forgiven for quoting my own fictional character Yudhishtir in The Great Indian Noveclass="underline"
India is eternal. But the dharma appropriate for it at different stages of its evolution has varied. If there is one thing that is true today, it is that there are no classical verities valid for all time…. For too many generations now we have allowed ourselves to believe India had all the answers, if only it applied them correctly. Now I realize that we don't even know all the questions…. No more certitudes. Accept doubt and diversity. Let each man live by his own code of conduct, so long as he has one. Derive your standards from the world around you and not from a heritage whose relevance must be constantly tested. Reject equally the sterility of ideologies and the passionate prescriptions of those who think themselves infallible. Uphold decency, worship humanity, affirm the basic values of our people — those which do not change — and leave the rest alone. Admit that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma.
But secularism as an Indian political idea had, in any case, little to do with Western ideas privileging the temporal over the spiritual. Rather, it arose from the 1920s onward in explicit reaction to the communalist alternative. Secular politics within the nationalist movement rejected the belief that religion was the most important element in shaping political identity. Indian secularism lent itself to an India that had a wealth of religions, none of which should be more entitled by the state.
All the cant about “genuine” and “pseudo” secularism boils down in the end to simply this: Professor Amartya Sen has put it rather well in declaring that political secularism involves merely “a basic symmetry of treatment of different religious communities.” This kind of secularism is actually the opposite of classic Western notions of secularism, because, in effect, it actively helps religions to thrive by ensuring there is no discrimination in favor of or against any particular religion.
In a country like India, our secularism recognizes the diversity of our people and ensures their continued commitment to the nation by guaranteeing that religious affiliation will be neither a handicap nor an advantage. No Indian need feel that his birth into a particular faith automatically disqualifies him from any profession or office. That is how the political culture of our country reflected “secular” assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 81 percent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, of India's first five presidents, two were Muslims; so were many governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, supreme court justices, and chief justices. During the 1971 Bangladesh war with Pakistan, the Indian air force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal Lateef), the army commander was a Parsi (General Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (Lieutenant-General Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal (Major-General Jacob) was Jewish. That is Indian secularism.
Do the critics of secularism want to end an India in which this kind of “secularism” is practiced? And if so, what is their alternative? Hindu chauvinism has tended to portray itself as qualitatively different from Muslim sectarianism. A. G. Noorani has reminded us that as far back as 1958, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had warned against the dangers of Hindu communalism in a speech to the All-India Congress Committee. Nehru's point was that the communalism of the majority was especially dangerous because it could present itself as nationalist: since most of us are Hindus, the distinction between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism could be all too easily blurred.
Obviously, majorities are never seen as “separatist,” since separatism is by definition pursued by a minority. But majority communalism is an extreme form of separatism, because it seeks to separate other Indians, integral parts of our country, from India itself.
This is not to suggest that secular Hindu liberals have got it entirely right. Among the most intriguing correspondence I received as a columnist was a pair of letters from a fellow Keralite, Mr. A. M. Pakkar Koya of Kozhikode, a Muslim with some decidedly perceptive and unconventional opinions.
Mr. Pakkar Koya believes that there is a threat to India from fundamentalism, but he sees it emerging from two kinds of fundamentalism: Hindu and Muslim. The main difference between the two, he argues, is that “the Muslim masses by and large agree with the aims of the fundamentalists and think this is something expected of them. In the name of Islam they are prepared to condone or live under the most retrogressive laws, especially when it comes to women's rights.” The Hindu masses do not have so absolutist a view of their faith — as I too have argued in my own writings.
A more dangerous difference, Mr. Pakkar Koya writes, is that “once they come to power the Muslim fundamentalists will try to eliminate or silence the liberals in Muslim society and those who don't share their views.” Hindu fundamentalists, he believes, are not quite as extremist; so Hindu liberals are in much less danger from them than Muslim liberals are from Muslim fundamentalists. But the problem with that understandable complacency, Mr. Pakkar Koya suggests, is that therefore “the Hindu liberals may not be as keen to prevent a [Hindu] fundamentalist takeover of India as were the secular government and liberals in Algeria to prevent a Muslim fundamentalist electoral victory.”