Indian Secularism: Ambedkar and the Chronicle of a Failure Foretold

Whatever one’s reservations about the limitations of the Indian variant of secularism, it is still surprising that the forces of Hindutva have managed to paint it in such pejorative terms in such a decisive manner in recent decades. Barring a few political parties (mainly of a leftist persuasion) and a shrinking section of the public sphere, there are few principled and articulate defenders of the secular ideal in India today. Yet, it was almost half a century ago, in 1975, that the word ‘secular’ was inscribed into the very self-description of the nation through the 42 nd Amendment to the Constitution of India. More importantly, a commitment to a certain version of secularism had animated the politics of the nationalist movement from the early 20 th century, and the decades of Nehruvian and Congress dominance that followed. This essay seeks to understand the reasons for the precipitous free-fall of an ideal that, in different ways, was central to the ethical and political thinking of a wide range of India’s political leadership, its political parties, popular media, and civic ethos for such a long time. And through that understanding, it seeks to imagine what it might take for the recovery of a more robust variety of secularism in the decades to come.

Caste, Secularism, Democracy

In an unpublished essay “Civilization or Felony?” written sometime in the mid-1940s, B.R. Ambedkar depicted the mainstream understanding of India, both within and outside the nation, in this manner:

“The population of India is generally classified on a linguistic or on religious basis. These are the only two ways of classifying the people of India which have been persistently in vogue for a long time. The effect is that outsiders get the impression that, what is of interest and importance to know about the peoples of India is the religions they profess or the languages they speak. Limited by this interest, they remain content with a knowledge they get about the religions and languages that are prevalent in India. All that the outsider cares to hold in his head is that, in India there are people who are either Hindus or Mahomedans, if he is interested in religion or that there are people in India some of whom speak Marathi, some speak Gujarathi, [sic] some Bengali and some Tamil, etc.” 1

Ambedkar’s contention was that this way of looking at India – as comprising Hindus and Muslims in a linguistically diverse milieu – occludes or disappears the Dalit. Despite being a fourth of the population of undivided India, the Untouchables did not figure in this ubiquitous “India picture” as it were. They were enfolded within the category of Hindu when it served the purpose of Congress (to inflate the number of Indians they claimed to represent, for instance) but kept outside of it through everyday practices of untouchability, caste discrimination, segregation, proscribing inter-caste marriage, and violence prevalent all over urban and rural India. Despite their significant numbers, to Ambedkar’s chagrin, Dalits were never accorded the possibility of nationhood in the way Muslims and even Sikhs had been at various points along the way to independence.

From his point of view, a secularism focused exclusively on the Hindu-Muslim issue and neglectful of caste oppression was superficial and unlikely to embed itself in society. His conception of democracy stressed fraternity and friendship (maitreyi) based on civic equality as its bedrock. In other words, for Ambedkar, secularism was the name for a journey that exceeded the Hindu-Muslim question and ideally culminated in the full equality and fraternity of all citizens in society: not in the state merely maintaining a neutral stance between various (unreformed, traditional, and often deeply hierarchical) religions, or in handing down rights for everyone to practise their faith undisturbed either by the state or by those of other persuasions.

Binary fallacies

If a country is primarily analysed through the lenses of language and religion, progressive and regressive categories in politics come to be assessed in terms of how they comport themselves to those two rubrics. So, a cosmopolitan or a progressive becomes someone who does not wish to impose Hindi and self-defines as a secularist purely in the sense that all religions are equal in the eyes of the state, while a regressive becomes someone who wishes to impose Hindi and believes in Hindutva, or in Urdu and the ummah. In this restricted framework, caste becomes a marginal or aberrant “social issue,” an anachronism rather than an anathema, as Ambedkar insisted it was. Caste, like gender inequality or other aspects of society, was excised from the domain of the contemporary political struggle and any resolution was deferred to a post-independence agenda.

Caste was excised from the domain of the contemporary political struggle and any resolution was deferred to a post-independence agenda.

Ambedkar was quite clear about the implications of this denial of full civic equality here and now to the Dalit: the victory of either the Congress or the Muslim League in attaining independence with or without Partition was likely of little consequence for those who were still “fighting to obtain the title deeds to respectable humanity.” Ambedkar’s acerbic comment on the relative unimportance of independence from the point of view of the Dalit would be confirmed soon enough.

During the tumult of August 1947, in a manner akin to maintaining class divisions and privileges between steerage and first-class passengers on the rapidly sinking HMS Titanic, Hindus often refused to allow Dalits admission into the refugee camps on grounds of caste purity and pollution. Given that nationality at the moment of Partition came to be defined solely by religion, Dalits found themselves in a limbo as they did not fit any of the available categories of Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim on the western frontier. (The fate of the Dalits on the eastern frontier, largely the Namasudras of Bengal, was not much better as their prolonged agony as refugees relocated to Dandakaranya would prove.)

Dalits fleeing Pakistan could not count on refugee status in India as their claims to Hindu-ness was itself contested by their alleged co-religionists. A large number of Dalits had worked as landless labourers in what came to be declared Pakistan, but they weren’t entitled to compensation once they moved to India as they had not “lost” any property or assets on the other side. Thus, while a Hindu or Sikh farmer, merchant, or homeowner could claim economic compensation from the government once settled in India; for Dalits, damned both by poverty and caste status, nationality was irrelevant. It was a searing illustration of something Ambedkar had said at his very first meeting with the Mahatma: “Gandhiji, I have no homeland.” 2

And the fact is that while untouchability and caste were inextricably associated with Hinduism, it was very much part of the way Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, or any religion was practised in India. In her brilliant work on the unwritten histories and silences of the Partition, Urvashi Butalia 3 details how both India and Pakistan, when they appeared solicitous of the welfare of the Dalits during the chaos of those times, were so for only one reason: they needed someone to maintain sanitation facilities in refugee camps on both sides of the border. In other words, to remove the refuse and garbage, to bury or cremate the dead, and do the age-old tasks that none but Dalits had done for centuries (and continue to do to this day).

An exclusive secularism

A secularism defined exclusively in the context of the communal, i.e., Hindu-Muslim equation, was never going to be capacious enough to acknowledge and accommodate the rights of Dalits. While Ambedkar was himself eloquent and acerbic on this limitation, it was also evident to someone like Jawaharlal Nehru who noted in 1954 that “a caste-ridden society is not properly secular” 5. This limitation of the Indian variety of secularism would prove to have fateful – and unforeseen – consequences in the decades after independence.

The Congress variety of secularism that began in the early 20 th century during the movement for independence anchored its meaning to an inclusive anti-colonial nationalism. In practice, though, it defined itself mainly against what it described as the communal separatism of the Muslims and was relatively accommodating of the prejudices, casteism, and religious majoritarianism of the Hindu right. From its inception, this definition of secularism positioned itself more against the dangers of Muslim communalism while turning a blind eye to or even actively collaborating with the Hindu right, especially when it came to the matter of retaining upper-caste privilege and abjuring a frontal assault on issues such as untouchability, temple entry, inter-dining, and inter-caste marriage prior to independence.

The continued prominence of the likes of Purshottamdas Tandon, Jamnalal Bajaj, Madan Mohan Malaviya, K. M. Munshi, and Rajendra Prasad within Congress, and the revolving door between that party and the Hindu Mahasabha clearly indicated this. As did the fact that at the capillary level, namely in the smaller towns and villages, Congress party cadres and local caste Hindu organisations were woven seamlessly together. As Gyan Pandey 6 argued many years ago, this intransigent hostility to Muslim demands descried as separatist communalism accompanied by a politics of coexistence with Hindu majoritarianism was reflected in the fact that while there existed a category called “nationalist Muslims” (typified by the likes of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad), there was no cognate category called “nationalist Hindus”: by default to be Hindu was seen as simultaneously Indian, while to be Muslim needed qualification as to whether one was of the ‘secular-national’ or of the ‘communal-separatist’ variety.

The proximity of Congress’ secularism to an upper-caste Hindu ethos was exemplified not merely in Gandhian politics and strategy which drew so heavily on Hindu symbology for its efficacy (cow-protection and invocations of Ram Rajya, for instance), it was also evident in the prolix writings of Nehru where the idea of India was often anchored within an upper-caste Hindu imagination repackaged as ancient culture, civilisation, and tradition. Congress secularism drew upon a selective and magnanimous reading of Hinduism, one that talked of the putatively timeless traditions of tolerance, inclusiveness, syncretism and absorptive capacity of that religion in explaining and justifying the ‘paradox’ of Congress secularism, viz., a political party in a deeply religious society that was ostensibly committed not to the religious majority but to the idea that the nation was a plural space within which all religions were deserving of equal respect and treatment.

Othering the critics

That this understanding of the tolerance and capaciousness of Hinduism was a savarna rendition of the religion, that it ignored its deeply hierarchical nature that was sanctioned by scripture, and the ubiquity of caste violence in the maintenance of that order, can be readily seen in the critiques of the likes of Periyar or Ambedkar or many others at this same time. But such critiques and critics of Hinduism, and of Congress’ secularism, were ruled out of bounds of the ‘legitimately’ political as they raised social and allegedly ‘divisive’ issues at a time when the primary contradiction was the fight against colonial rule.

In other words, the anti-caste politics of Ambedkar and Periyar, and their various counterparts in different parts of India, were seen as diversionary or anti-national or loyalist, and the high political domain reserved exclusively for the achievement of national independence. The imperilling of the so-called unity of the yet-to-be-achieved nation was used to silence and marginalise the alleged separatist, divisive casteist, noisy feminist, and rabid communalist. Against all these sub-national categories stood the supposedly tolerant, pacific, spiritual and secular “Indian” who turned out, upon closer examination, to be an upper caste Hindu Congressite epitomised by someone like Nehru.