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Opinion Lead
Published: December 19, 2014 00:49 IST | Updated: December 19, 2014 01:06 IST

Nationalism as antonym of communalism

Faisal Devji
Since Independence, secularism is increasingly opposed to communalism, with the nation no longer central to its definition. Does this
indicate the failure of the nation to demonstrate its plurality, and therefore secularism?

One of the peculiarities of Indian political debate is that everyone claims to be secular while accusing others of not
being so. Secularisms hegemony as an idea was made clear by L.K. Advani, when he coined the now famous term
pseudo-secular to describe his political enemies. But if secularism is so dominant an idea, this is because it is and
has always been deployed as a polemical category as much as a constitutional principle, and indeed its insertion into
the Constitution by Indira Gandhi was itself a partisan act. In colonial times, for example, Congressmen identified
secularism with nationalism, which was in turn held to be the real antonym of communalism. In other words it was
the pluralism and popularity of the Congress, compared with the supposedly sectarian appeal of Hindu and Muslim
parties, that was seen as defining its secular credentials, and this in a demographic rather than constitutional way.
On secularism
Since Independence, however, secularism is increasingly opposed to communalism, with the nation no longer
central to its definition. Is it therefore being separated from a strictly populist logic to assume a purely juridical
character and does this indicate the failure of the nation to demonstrate its plurality and therefore secularism,
which must instead be sought in the pre-modern past? Even in the days of its alleged dominance under Nehru,
secularism could hardly be said to possess its own history or even existential reality, given that its membership
included both the religious and irreligious. Indeed, secularists had to lay claim to explicitly religious precedents,
such as bhakti or Sufi forms of devotion, and the pluralistic festivals with which these were often associated. In other
words, the condescending reference was invariably to the folk devotions that had never, in fact, been part of the
culture of self-professed secularists.
And so both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continue to invoke a populist and indeed
majoritarian logic to define the secular, but the changing nature of the Indian polity has given this rhetoric a quite
different meaning. For the folk elements of its demographic logic have been replaced by varieties of ostensibly
high-culture religiosity that no longer needs to display any pluralism, as long as it is assumed to be tolerant, a
term that in the nationalist past had been used for another kind of high culture, that of royalty and aristocrats like
Asoka or Akbar. Nehru himself preferred this form of the secular, which also served as a historical mask for the
Congresss quasi-colonial vision of itself. Before Independence, after all, its claims to hold the demographic middle
ground between religious extremes had mirrored British attempts to constitute the colonial state as a neutral third
party between Hindus and Muslims, itself a classically liberal position, despite the fact that it was deployed in an
illiberal political system.

The absence of a
distinctive theory
of state repeatedly
casts Hindu
nationalism back
into a social
movement, one
that can only make
claims on cultural
and demographic
rather than
constitutional
grounds.

By making such a claim while not yet in control of the state, the Congress signalled
its intention of taking it over, and in the meantime creating an alternative
structure of governance in Indian society. But like the colonial state and its
inappropriately liberal model of rule, the Congress also sought to delimit the
political arena by circumscribing it within certain linguistic and institutional
conventions, thus depoliticising everything outside these as irrational,
superstitious and the like. And yet it was this very Congress, especially under
Gandhis influence, that had always subjected both the neutrality of British rule
and even that of the state as such to criticism, of which the theory of divide and
rule was perhaps the most common manifestation. What did it mean, then, to
claim a neutrality that was at the same time denied, one that in addition was made
outside the state whose capture was simultaneously being anticipated?
State of politics
We might argue that secularism remains a polemical category because it is
deployed in order to capture the state while never fully inhabiting it. For as in
colonial times, during which its exclusion from state power made for a nationalism
grounded in society and its cultural and religious languages, Indian politics today
continues to be divided between state and society. This is nowhere more evident
than in the way in which even the most powerful of Indias governments have never
been able or indeed willing to monopolise the use of violence in the classical form,
as defined by Max Weber, that is meant to characterise nation states. On the

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contrary, they tolerate and even rely upon what we might describe as social violence, whether or not it is
encouraged and even organised by agents of the state.
This inability or unwillingness to monopolise the use of violence in its own name, I want to argue, illustrates neither
the weakness nor backwardness of the Indian state, but instead constitutes its dynamic structural logic, one that has
again come into its own after Indias liberalisation in the 1990s, when society, in the form of the private sector and
informal economy, re-emerged as an important site of political contestation. In this sense the non-Weberian
character of the Indian state is as linked to neoliberalism today as it had been in the colonial past to the anticipatory
politics of a nationalism based in society. And it is the BJP that is now in the position of traversing the path from
social to state power, and wrestling, as the Congress once did, with the problem of striking a balance between the
two, if one can indeed be found.
Hindu nationalism
Hindu nationalism, which in the form of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has repeatedly been banned, and
thus deprived of a political life in public institutions, has for a long time now represented the quintessential form
that social power takes in India. For by the time Indira Gandhis premiership came to an end, the once formidable
social base of the Congress had been whittled away, as the party chose to concentrate its power in the institutions of
the state. Of course it continued to rely upon non-state actors, most violently during the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984,
but these did not represent the kind of mass base that the Congress had possessed in colonial times. Hindu
nationalism, on the other hand, augmented its social power while keeping it separate from the fortunes of the BJP
as a political party, though this relationship has been placed under strain whenever the latter has been in
government.
More interesting than the shifting balance of power between the BJP and its family of non-state Hindu
organisations, however, might be the fact that Hindu nationalism has never possessed a theory of state. Unlike the
vision of an Islamic state, for instance, with its distinctive if non-egalitarian constitutional structure, Hindu
nationalism has no alternative political model, apart from an insistence on the dominance of majoritarian culture
and concerns. And this is its triumph as much as tragedy, since the absence of a distinctive theory of state repeatedly
casts Hindu nationalism back into a social movement, one that can only make claims on cultural and demographic
rather than constitutional grounds. And in this sense it is the most appropriate heir of a concept of secularism that
had always been populist in its argumentation. If anyone has recognised this, it is, unsurprisingly, the Muslim
fundamentalists who support secularism in India, but want an Islamic state where they are in a majority. They
deny the hypocrisy of this position by arguing that since Hindu nationalism has no theory of state, and so no
critique of secularism, it might be oppressive but is still capable of being secular.
But the fact that Hindu nationalism possesses no theory of state also means that it carries the non-Weberian logic of
Indian politics to its conclusion, by refusing to depoliticise social life or condemn its concerns as irrational and
superstitious. In doing so, it is not only heir to the whole history of nationalism in colonial India, but at the same
time is also best placed to capitalise on the importance of civil society activism in our own neoliberal times.
Commentary on both secularism and communalism in India has tended to focus too readily on plots and
conspiracies that are meant to illustrate the coming together of sinister caste, class and other interests with popular
prejudice and fear. But while accurate in some ways, these modes of understanding may be too superficial in others.
We should attend instead to the structural and historical factors that define Indian politics, which appear to show a
much greater continuity between parties and politics than is usually recognised to be the case.
(Dr. Faisal Devji is Reader in Modern South Asian History and Fellow of St. Antonys College at the University of
Oxford, where he is also Director of the Asian Studies Centre.)
Keywords: secularism, communalism, Hindu nationalism, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, civil society activism, Dr.
Faisal Devji
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