Every day my email inbox fills with literature damning secularism, already christened, to advertise the mounting allergy, as ‘sick-ularism’. As against a separation of religion and politics in the western model, we instituted equal distance from all religions as the shaping principle of secularism. In doing so, we thought we improvised a clever compromise that reckoned the genius of our land, which is assumed to be irreducibly religious. We have come a long way from this. Seven decades is good enough time to assess the validity of our experiment in secularism.
But, before that, two brief asides. Western Christianity and global Islam attained their pyrrhic victories with the muscles of the state. Both religions got corrupted by aligning themselves with political power-structures. Western Christianity became a contradiction of the Way of Jesus Christ. So also Islam, except for the difference that the politicisation of Islam commenced during the lifetime of the Prophet himself; whereas Jesus died as a victim of the religio-political brutality of Judaism and the Roman Empire.
Secondly, the admixture of religion and politics has worked, all through history, to the detriment of religion. Such advantages as religion sought to derive from an alliance with the state proved seriously counter-productive. The core lesson history affords is: with the ascendancy of the state, gods pale into insignificance. For centuries the main duty of gods was to stabilise political status quo. Public charades apart, they played second fiddle to rulers, who assigned to them such roles as they deemed expedient.
The lust for power overpowered the spiritual paradigm—‘compassion’, as in Buddhism. When, ‘compassion’ got the better of ‘power’—and its soul-mate, cruelty—it was feared to be, and eventually discredited as, a peril to the virulence of the state. Compassion lost out to cruelty in due course.
What is often overlooked in the popular understanding of western secularism is that it was forged in the furnace of decades-long bloody sectarian wars that convulsed Europe. The stereotypical assumption is that this led to a distrust of religion and, therefore, secularism deemed the exclusion of religion—regarding it as a pestilence—from the public domain as a precondition for peace. What has been discounted is the fact that western idea of secularism was also informed by a concern for the authenticity of religion.
There was a realisation that Christianity got demonised through its political philandering.
What happened to religion, through its unholy alliance with state power, was its reduction into an entity identical and parallel to the state itself. Religion, in other words, became no more than a worldly organisation. The ethical core of Christianity, its foremost rationale for relevance in the public sphere, got cankered, given the fact that politics is predicated on expediency, which militates against ethical imperatives.
Incremental evidence in the European context made it compellingly clear that religion had to cease to be itself, if it were to pursue its partnership with politics. This was already evident through the office of Papacy, especially beginning from the Middle Ages. Once Catholic Christianity took a political turn, Popes became super emperors. No further evidence for the peril that religion thus incurs is needed than the fact that the dreaded Inquisition could be improvised to protect a religion whose founder, at the point of being arrested as a prelude to his judicial murder, abjured violence even in self-defence: “Put down the sword; he who takes the sword shall perish by it.”
By now it is clear that our idea of secularism is a bit too naïve, in comparison to the western model. We under-estimated the lust of power to subsume everything—even gods— into its agenda and re-hash all instruments and institutions as its handmaidens. Politicians who readily prostrate themselves before godmen and godwomen, for example, do not care for them; but only for the votes such public gestures fetch. The false sense of security the state proffers by its obeisance to the dramatis personae of superstitious religiosity emboldens its pseudo-deities to violate ethical norms as well as the law of the land. The alliance between religion and politics, corrupts both. Soon, ‘equal distance’ from all religions degenerates into preferential proximity to one, dictated by electoral compulsions.
Only by preserving its quintessential genius—as a reservoir of ethical norms and spiritual values—can religion serve as a beneficial influence on society. Such material gains as a religion hopes to secure through an expedient collaboration with state power, disable it from shoring up the nobility of the human stock and the sanity of the society.
Religion-based vote-bank politics is an inevitable by-product of our model of secularism. I do not know a single religious group that is not over-eager to cultivate the animators of state power to their advantage. Nor do I see today a religious community, including mine, that is genuinely committed to secularism. On the ground, Indian secularism only serves to camouflage the simmering communalism that shapes the attitudes and strategies of all religious communities. It is not only the camp followers of hardcore Hindutva who despise secularism. As of now, only agnostics and atheists are seen to be faithful, if at all, to the idea and practise secularism in India.
Indian secularism is at the crossroads. The present idea of secularism cannot endure for long. That leaves us with two options: either rigorously adopt the European model of secularism or end up, sooner than realised, as a theocratic state, the silhouette of which is already discernible in the assertions and formations already afoot at the present time.
Valson Thampu
Former principal of St Stephen’s College, New Delhi
Email: vthampu@gmail.com