The Invention of Religious Politics in South Asia

Perhaps the most momentous political event in South Asia in the twen­tieth century was not independence and the withdrawal of British rule, but the political partition of the subcontinent into two rival states: India and Pakistan.

The year following independence and the partition of the subcontinent was a time of massacre after massacre. Trains arriving in India from Pakistan carried loads of corpses of passengers slaughtered on the journey that they hoped would bring them to safety. Similar numbers of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed as they attempted to disengage from their homelands and join the throngs of refugees that gathered in Karachi and Dacca on the Pakistan sides and in Delhi and Calcutta on the Indian side. Though the numbers are disputed, the figures often quoted about this tragic shift of population is 14 million people uprooted, 10 million sent into refugee camps, and over a million killed.

One of the interesting features of this tragic episode is that it is not clear that partition had to happen. There had not previously been a strong groundswell of support for a Muslim-dominated state. There were some lone voices calling for an independent Muslim state earlier in the twentieth century, notably that of the poet Muhammad Iqbal, which he expressed in the 1930 meeting of the Muslim League; but most leaders in the League desired a semi-autonomous region in a united India, and according to one historian, Ayesha Jalal, Jinnah raised the issue of an independent Pakistan largely as a threat, a kind of bargaining chip to gain what he really wanted, a semi-autonomous state.^[161] Jinnah's rival Muslim organisation, the Unionist Party in the Punjab, was adamantly opposed to secession.

So if there was no huge demand for a separate Muslim Pakistan in the subcontinent, where did the idea come from? One might argue that it came from the Muslim political tradition over the centuries, but that is not quite true either. Although Muslim history is full of strong political leaders, caliphs who led armies and empires, there is not really a precedent for the modern idea of a religious nation state. In fact, the idea of the nation state - the notion that there is such a thing as a natural national community in a geographical region that supports a state apparatus which is responsible to it - is a foreign idea. Specifically it is a European idea, and the introduction of the concept of national community - and the role of religious affiliation within it - was exported by the British to South Asia and, for that matter, to much of the rest of the world.

In an interesting book, Enlightenment in the Colony, a UCLA scholar of comparative literature, Aamir Mufti, argues that the British helped to invent the idea of religious minorities in India.^[162] Mufti's point is that, although Muslims in South Asia were in the numerical minority over the centuries, ever since Moghul rule brought Islam to the subcontinent, they did not think of them­selves as minorities. Nor were they treated as minorities within a society that was unselfconsciously pluralistic.

According to Mufti, the process of secular nation-building in Europe has gone hand in hand with the conceptualisation of a national culture that marginalises some religious and ethnic communities in the process of creat­ing the idea of a unified national culture. In doing so, the byproduct of this nationalist paradigm is the invention of the notion of ‘minorities' as a problem. The paradigmatic case in Europe is the ‘Jewish question', in which Jews do not fit into the idea of cultural consensus in emerging modern national communities. Adolf Hitler's infamous ‘final solution' to the Jewish problem was an attempt at cultural and physical extermination. Alternatively, the British solution at the end of World War II was to help create the modern state of Israel as one that would provide a national homeland for the Jews.

Mufti argues that this idea is transported to South Asia where both British and Indian nationalist leaders identify the national culture with Hinduism, as they imagine that, as in European nations, the national culture of India should be part of one homogeneous religious entity. This way of thinking makes Muslims a minority, and like the Jews in Europe they create a problem for the building of a modern national community. In Mufti's examination of the literature in Britain as well as the literature produced by Indian writers in English, Hindi and Urdu languages, he finds that this notion of Muslim minority identity as a problem creeps into writing about nation-building in the subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No surprise, then, that Jinnah - the urbane, London-trained leader of the Muslims - as well as the cosmopolitan Nehru would think of modern nation-building as one of homogeneous cultural unity in a way that would naturally exclude minorities such as Muslims.

The idea of the modern nation state is a part of the world's inheritance from the European Enlightenment, in which religion plays a somewhat paradoxical role. While Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke regarded political institutions as secular - free from the taint of religious influence - they thought of the culture of a national community as unified, a unity that often involved common religious beliefs. According to the Berkeley sociol­ogist John Lie, in an arresting book, Modern Peoplehood, the concept of a national community, or ‘peoplehood', is one of the major constructs of the Enlightenment's understanding of modernity.^[163] The modern nation is inconceivable, Lie argues, without it. The very notion of a national commu­nity needs the glue of culture, including religion, to hold it together.

Both Pakistan's Jinnah and India's Nehru bought into the European idea that national communities were formed with a homogeneous culture. They also accepted the Enlightenment notion that national governments should be secular - free from the influence of sectarian bias or religious authority. To Jinnah, this meant that South Asian Muslims constituted a distinct nation within the subcontinent, and this warranted their being granted a semi- autonomous region, or, failing that, their own separate nation state of Pakistan. But the dapper Jinnah, ever dressed in a European-style business suit, was insistent that the government of the new Pakistan would be similar to European states - that is, secular.

Nehru also accepted the European notion of a culturally homogeneous nation with a secular government, but he interpreted both of those concepts somewhat differently than from Jinnah. Nehru's description of India's cul­tural unity in Discovery of India seemed to many Muslims to be very Hindu, but Nehru thought of it as Indic - not narrowly Hindu but a part of a united cultural tradition. He did not think that it privileged Hindu or any other set of religious beliefs. In his mind, Indian culture embraced Islam as well as Hinduism. His notion of secularism, therefore, was a matter not just of keeping religious influences out of government but also of treating all religious communities equally and in a fair-minded way. It was precisely for this reason that Nehru thought that the Muslims should be a part of India and not separate from it.

In fact, neither Jinnah nor Nehru's European notions of national culture and secular government had much connection to traditional ways of thinking about religion and politics in India's history. The concept of a national community is non-existent in India's early history, as it was in most societies, including European ones, before the eighteenth century. There were caliphs and kings, princes and emperors, who ruled on the basis of power, not the consent of the governed. Even so, however, they were expected to uphold certain moral standards in their conduct of governing. In traditional India, there is the notion that kings are expected to come from military castes that have their own ethical codes of conduct. Moreover, the king of a realm is expected to rule on behalf of dharma, the moral order that undergirds all of society. The image that is presented in ancient scriptures is that of a king upholding the ‘white umbrella' of moral righteousness over the people. But these rulers are not in any narrow sense religious.

The same can be said of the Mughal rulers, a lineage of Muslim emperors who reigned over much of the subcontinent from roughly the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries.

British colonial rule was secular, of course, but the colonial government maintained an ambivalent relationship to the hordes of Christian mission­aries who had the run of India during its rule. Many of the British officers regarded them as a nuisance. But others regarded them as an extension of the civilising influence of the British rule. Christian hospitals and educational institutions were especially welcomed as efforts to serve Indian society and bring the benefits of Western civilisation to South Asian shores. The inheri­tors of British rule in South Asia - Nehru and Jinnah - carried on this tradition of secular government with a benign, but wary, attitude towards religious authorities and organisations. Each regarded religious extremists and true believers as potentially dangerous. But each also regarded religion, as an ingredient of the cultural homogeneity that made India and Pakistan distinc­tive national communities, to be absolutely essential. And that laid the groundwork for the religious violence of recent centuries.

The trajectory of religious politics in India and Pakistan after independence in 1947 is different from what either Nehru or Jinnah expected. In both cases, religion burst out of the confines in which they thought it had been con­tained, as elements of a homogeneous national culture, into direct and often violent participation in politics.