Hindu Bias in India's ‘Secular’ Constitution: probing flaws in the instruments of governance

Abstract There has been almost a consensus among the political opinion makers in India that the Constitution of India that came into force in 1950 has been a secular constitution. This paper critiques that consensus and demonstrates that the secularism of India's constitution is Hindu-tainted. It takes up some key articles of the Indian constitution and, by analysing the constitutional debates of the 1940s that went into the making of those articles, highlights the Hindu bias features of the Indian nationalist movement and the constitution. While acknowledging some admirable and progressive features of the constitution, the paper argues that its Hindu bias must be read as symptomatic of the depth of institutionalised Hindu communalism in India and the shallowness of the secular foundations of the Indian republic. The existence of institutionalised Hindu communalism means that the power of Hindu communal sectarianism is greater than that which is merely represented by Hindu nationalist organisations. The paper concludes by suggesting that the secular reconstruction of India demands critical combat with the institutionalised communalism embedded in a range of societal and state institutions. Examining Hindu bias in the constitution is an instance of an examination of institutionalised communalism in one key institution of the Indian state and society. Acknowledgements A first attempt at articulating the idea behind this paper was made at two seminars at St Anthony's College and Balliol College, Oxford some years ago. Thanks to Gowhar Rizvi and Amitabh Mattu, the organisers of these seminars, respectively, for the opportunity to present my ideas there. Thanks also to Tapan Raychaudhury for a discussion on some aspects of the issues covered in the paper. Rohini Banaji encouraged me to write the paper, circulated its first draft among the members of Insaniyat, a Mumbai-based organisation and provided feedback. Robin Archer, Rochana Bajpai, James Chiriyankandath, Meena Dhanda, Satya Pal Gautam, Hardeep Gill, Ben Rogaly, Tanya Singh and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan gave very valuable comments on the later versions of the paper. I have benefited also from several general discussions with Jairus Banaji, Barbara Harriss-White and Iftikhar Malik. The staff at the India Institute Library, Oxford provided generous support. Shahid Qadir showed keen interest in the paper and acted as a catalyst in its completion. Thanks to all of them. Responsibility for the views expressed and any errors is entirely mine. Notes Pritam Singh is in the Business School at Oxford Brookes University, Wheatley Campus, Wheatley, Oxford OX33 1HX, UK. Email: p.singh@brookes.ac.uk A Sen defines secularism in similar terms as symmetrical treatment of different religious communities in politics. See AK Sen, 'Secularism and its discontents', in R Bhargava (ed), Secularism and its Critics, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. The Constitution of India is available at the website http://constitutionofindia.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html. I have also used PM Bakshi, The Constitution of India, Delhi: Universal Law Publishing, 2002 and Constitution of India, Lucknow: Eastern Book Company to verify the exact wording of the articles of the constitution. All the three sources had the same wording. 'If the mainstream of the nationalist movement has been secular, it has also stimulated Hindu revivalism and a tendency to identify with patriotism'. M Galanter, 'Secularism East and West', in Bhargava, Secularism and its Critics, p 237. Let us look briefly at Bhikhu Parekh's take on this: 'Neither Gandhi nor many other Congress leaders could look upon the Muslims as anything other than ex-Hindus' (p 299). 'Although Gandhi himself never put it this way and would probably have disowned it, he tended to equate India with the pre-Muslim Hindu India and define Indian identity in Hindu terms. For him India's history began with the arrival of the Aryans and continued for several thousand years during which it developed a rich spiritual culture. It was rudely interrupted by the arrival of the Muslims and then the British, and was to be resumed at Independence. The Muslims and British periods were largely aberrations made possible by Hindu decadence, and had little impact on India. The Muslims were little more than converted Hindus or ex-Hindus whose religion was but an icing on their essentially Hindu cake. And as for the British rule, it imported an alien civilisation unsuited to the Indian genius and which the culturally revitalised Hindu India must reject' (p 308). See B Parekh, 'The legacy of the partition', in A Singh (ed), Punjab in Indian Politics, Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1985. Two interesting studies, with different approaches, of the interface between Hindutva and Indian politics, including the Indian national movement, are C Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, London: Hurst, 1993; and S Joshi and pp 142 – 145 for SL Saksena. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 315. cad, Vol XI, 23 November 1949, pp 863 – 864. Ajit Singh Bains, 'Punjab situation', in PV Rao (ed), Symphony of Freedom: Papers on Nationality Question, Hyderabad: All India People's Resistance Forum, 1996, p 179. cad, Vol XI, 21 November 1949, p 753. Ibid, p 722. Bains, 'Punjab situation'. R Bajpai, 'Constituent Assembly debates and minority rights', Economic and Political Weekly (epw), 27 May 2000, p 1839. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, London: Penguin, 1997, p 29. These 'Hindu voices', Khilnani points out, had gone to the extent of demanding 'that the Indian state should explicitly declare itself defender of the interests of the nation's Hindu majority' and that powerful Congress leaders like Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad had called for 'the dismissal of Muslim state officials, and suggested that there was little point in the army trying to protect Muslim citizens' (p 31). This distrust of the minority community officials was revealed again at another critical point in the history of independent India. During the anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi in 1984 after Indira Gandhi's assassination, the Sikh police officials in the Delhi police were disarmed and taken off duty. Bajpai sums up very cogently the two conceptions of secularism as debated during the framing of the Indian constitution: 'More generally, secularism was regarded to imply the exclusion of religion from the political domain: religion, it was argued, should be a "personal matter" for citizens, restricted to their individual and associational private practices. Another conception of secularism as separation between state and religion was that of state impartiality between different religions: the state would not give preference to any particular religion' (p 182). See R Bajpai, 'The conceptual vocabularies of secularism and minority rights in India', Journal of Political Ideologies, 7(2), 2002, pp 179 – 197. The state's interest in the welfare and reform of religious institutions exclusively of the Hindus articulated through Article 25 militates against both these conceptions of secularism. For an examination of several layers of the state – religion relationship, see DE Smith, 'India as a secular state', in Bhargava, Secularism and its Critics; and Smith, India as a Secular State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. For a critical appraisal of Smith, see M Galanter, 'Secularism East and West'. For a refreshing analysis of the role of religion in the domain of the economy, see B Harriss-White, India Working, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 and for a comparative view of the role of religious and secular institutions in India and America, see R Archer, 'American communalism and Indian secularism', epw, 10 April 1999. J Chiriyankandath, 'Creating a secular state in a religious country: the debate in the Indian constituent assembly', Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 38(2), 2000, pp 1 – 24, employs the term 'deliberate ambiguity' to explain the co-existing character of religion and secularism in the Indian constitution. 'Much of the upper-caste effort in reforming caste was, and still remains, motivated by the desire to consolidate Hinduism. The idea was that as the lowest castes became politically conscious, they would dissociate themselves from Hinduism, if it did not reform itself.' P Mehta, The Burden of Democracy, Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003, p 58. P Mehta, 'Why the bjp is calm: what would a Hindu state do that the secular state has not done already?', The Telegraph, 4 March 2004, emphasis added. cad, Vol XI, 21 November 1949, p 762. P Singh, 'Akali agitation: the growing separatist trend', epw, 4 February 1984, pp 195 – 196. A Alam, 'Secularism in India: a critique of the current discourse', in P Brass & A Vanaik (eds), Competing Nationalisms in South Asia, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002, p 95. For a review of this, see P Singh, 'Political economy of nationalism: minority left and minority nationalisms vs mainstream left and majority nationalism in India', International Journal of Punjab Studies, 9(2), 2002, pp 287 – 298. Ibid, p 101. Ibid, p 100. The Bose article he cites is Sumantra Bose, 'Hindu nationalism and the crisis of the Indian state: a theoretical perspective', in Sugata Bose & A Jalal (eds), Nationalism, Democracy and Development, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. An analysis of Operation Bluestar, the Indian army operation at the Golden Temple at Amritsar, and its aftermath would stretch the scope of this paper too far but it might be worth pondering over whether it marked a shift from an assimilationist approach towards the Sikhs to a confrontational or even selective liquidationist approach in the 1980s and 1990s. For an examination of how the policy of state power the Sikhs had to confront has determined the cycles of violence and non-violence in their history, see P Singh, 'Violence and non-violence in the Sikh struggle for survival and political power', paper submitted to the Annual Conference of the British Association for the Study of Religions, Harriss Manchester College, Oxford, September 2004. K Ilaiah, 'Cow and culture', The Hindu, 25 October 2002. K Ilaiah, Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism, Kolkata: Samya, 2004, passim. Smith, India as a Secular State, p 489. Mehta, 'Why the bjp is calm'. See cpi (m), Subverting the Constitution, pp 18 – 19. cad, Vol XI, 25 November 1949, p 948. D Lelyveld, 'Words as deeds: Gandhi and language', in Brass & Vanaik, Competing Nationalisms in South Asia, p 181. Nehru expressed his helplessness to protect Urdu from the onslaught of the Hindi lobby. He said in a speech in 1948, 'if my colleagues do not agree, I can not help it'. Quoted in M Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims since Independence, London: Hurst, 1997, p 159. Figures from S Saxena, 'Language and the nationality question' in Rao, Symphony of Freedom, p 292. Ibid. For a review of this, see Singh, 'Political economy of nationalism'. It is worth adding here that not only the tribal languages but even Braj, Avadhi and Maithili were also included in the Hindi fold. Avadhi, Braj and Maithili have their own distinctive character but have been relegated to the status of dialects of Hindi by privileging 'Khari Boli' as the official Hindi. What greater irony could there be than that Braj, which was a Bhasha (language), should become a boli (dialect) of the Khari Boli. There are strong voices of protest against this unfair denial of the status of language from many linguistic groups in North India, the area characterised as the Hindi region. Perhaps the denial of the linguistic diversity of North India was to foster a homogenous linguistic identity among the Hindus there. I owe this point to Prof Satya Pal Gautam of the Philosophy Department at Punjab University, Chandigarh. Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, has provided an excellent account of how the struggle of the Maithili speakers to get constitutional recognition for their language was defeated by the Hindi nationalists. He points out that some Maithili speakers used the term 'Hindi imperialism' to decry the Hindi nationalists (p 113). to Brass, Maithili put it, of Hindi to the whole of the language of (p Brass has also though in the role of the Hindi movement in constitutional recognition of the and Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 298. cad, Vol VII, 5 November 1948, p 235. Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 298. Ibid, p It is another unfortunate that one is forced to that in India the of for Hindutva forces from North India and A Hindi Nationalism, Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002, p Ibid, p Austin, The Indian Constitution, p Ibid, pp – See also Hindi Nationalism, for his comments on the Indian Ram of the (p Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, also the of and Sangh as of Hindi in and (p The of Hindi among Hindu nationalists and some North Indian in that could be a to the of some Indian with Hindutva forces in India in the and a Indian also get into this of Hindi S The of Hindi in the – Hindi Nationalism, p See also The of Hindi Hindi Nationalism, p and p Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, p K The Political of Delhi: Sage, p Austin, The Indian Constitution, p 264. Hindi Nationalism, p Quoted by Austin, The Indian Constitution, p I some of these ideas on institutionalised communalism and first at the on 1984 by the for South Studies, University and the Association for Punjab on October at I to the and to and for their very and For an early attempt to institutionalised communalism in the in the context of the Punjab crisis in the see P Singh, of in A Singh, Punjab in Indian P Singh, 'Punjab and the epw, 12 January and Singh, and of Punjab after the army epw, 8 September a contribution towards institutionalised communalism in the police and and police and anti-Sikh paper at the on 1984 anti-Sikh October 2004. B and R are also in this See their excellent 'The Hindutva in & Hindutva and the of Delhi: Oxford University Press, on Singh Pritam Singh is in the Business School at Oxford Brookes University, Wheatley Campus, Wheatley, Oxford OX33 1HX, UK. Email: p.singh@brookes.ac.uk