Dispatch #78: Ethical Reflections on Contemporary India: Part 2
In this second part we will go through the essays on secularism and religion from Rajeev Bhargava's book 'Between Hope and Despair-100 Ethical Reflections on Contemporary India’
In the second set of essays, Rajeev Bhargava shifts readers’ attention to the questions about Indian secularism, minority rights, and how the Indian judiciary must look at religion and secular ethos.
I particularly liked the essays on religion, secularism, and judiciary where Bhargava explains what he means when he says that the Indian state must keep a principled distance from religion.
The essays on secularism give readers a framework to distinguish between two types of religions- one, which helps individuals in their journies of self-realisation, is more pious, less disciplined and has no gate-keepers wielding control over the followers and the other religion has hierarchies. Rigid boundaries, created on notions of purity and impurity, control the entry and exit of people in public places, and educational institutions, thus impeding social mobility.
This framework helps readers distinguish between the variant of religion that helps in self-realisation and the other variant that creates oppressive social norms.
Reflection 1: Basic needs, basic rights: The right to minimal decency
Like the constitutional principle of basic structure, the Indian state must articulate a basic rights doctrine to ensure the basic needs of citizens- security and subsistence. This is also referred to as elementary justice. What explains the utter failure of the state to provide basic health services during the pandemic or protect minorities from being harmed? The idea of basic rights develops from basic needs which are physical security and subsistence. Bhargava explains:
When basic needs are not fully met, we feel vulnerable and helpless. We grieve, cry for help or seek assistance. We complain and demand elementary justice from our community, especially from the state. Elementary justice requires that before anything else, the state does everything at its disposal to satisfy all basic needs of its citizens, particularly of those who cannot fend for themselves.
Reflection 2: Rights of the vulnerable, duties of the powerful
Rights and duties are intricately connected to each other, If someone has a right to something, then someone else has a corresponding duty to make sure that that right is not violated. In any egalitarian society, if I have rights that impose duties on others, then others also have rights that impose duties on me. If a community from a religious majority has the right to practice religion, then the same community has duties to let religious minorities practise their religion.
Reflection 3: Are minority rights a good idea?
In the current political climate, minority rights are often equated with minority appeasement. It is often regarded as an ‘irritating weakness, caving into a tantrum-throwing smaller group’. The Indian Constitution specifically guarantees 3 rights to the linguistic and religious groups:
a) Article 30: Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions
b) Article 29: Right to conserve language, culture or script and non-discriminatory behaviour during admission into an educational institution.
c) Article 26: Freedom to manage their own religious affairs subject to public order, morality and health.
Granting rights to linguistic and religious minorities is not special treatment, it’s an ‘egalitarian response to a potential disadvantage’. These rights guarantee to minorities, what the majority already have- freedom to exercise their religion.
Reflection 4: Collective honour and individual dignity
Community-related honour and social hierarchy have an intrinsic relationship. Individuals are identified by their membership in groups. These groups are organised in a hierarchical way in our society. Hence some groups are considered superior to others. Think about caste and gender. Honour is grounded on these hierarchical positions of the group. The fact that superior groups deserve more respect than the inferior ones, gets internalised. Honour is ‘encoded in social norms and becomes the direct expression of status within a hierarchical set-up’. The groups are expected to behave as per the honour code given to them as per group hierarchies. Bhargava explains this further:
Each group is expected to behave by the honour code between superiors and inferiors. One honours a superior community by not marrying any of its members. If the superiority of a community is inscribed in the bodies of its women, how can inferiors touch them? If a member from an inferior caste marries someone from a higher caste, he treats his superiors as equals, thereby violating the social code and dishonouring the entire community.
The individual identity blurs and gets subsumed with the group’s identity. Hence allowing women from superior castes to marry men from lower castes is not only an assault on the honour of the individual but also akin to an attack on the group’s honour.
Reflection 5: The virtue and practice of toleration
There are 4 ways of understanding tolerance in a multicultural society:
a) Refrain from interfering in the activities of others even though one finds them morally reprehensible and has the capacity to stop. An example of this could be cow vigilantes who are not bothered by beef-eating. That’s a quite radical act of tolerance. This is also called negative tolerance.
b) Two groups find each other’s activities morally abhorrent but do not interfere since both groups yield equal amounts of power. The cost of conflict is so high that it acts as a deterrent.
c) People really don’t care about what others are doing. Though there is a mild moral abhorrence for the activities of other group members. There ‘is an attitude of live and let live, a feature particularly of post-industrial, individualist and liberal societies.’
d) The final version of tolerance is almost the opposite of negative tolerance where ‘others are reluctantly accepted against a background of prior hatred’. This kind of toleration goes hand in hand with the acknowledgement of the flaws and blemishes of the other group. We endure the differences; we put up with others despite deep disagreements; we value fraternity despite radical differences in worldview. This is called positive tolerance.
Bhargava writes:
We put up with disagreeable traits of others, even if we have some power to interfere, simply because overall we have positive feelings for them. Here, one tolerates not despite hate but rather because one loves the other. A mixture of love, friendliness and fellow feeling is the background that sustains this conception. Call this positive toleration- one that encourages moderately critical aspect.
Reflection 6: The ideological crisis of liberal democracy
The liberal democratic project seems to be running out of steam. This is happening precisely due to a design flaw in liberal democracy. The term liberal in liberal democracy stands for a particular kind of liberty. Isaiah Berlin termed this conception of liberty as negative freedom. At the core of negative freedom is the private sphere of an individual that should be out of bounds from the state, government, and other social institutions. This is a very private conception of liberty where individuals are only concerned about their goals and desires. The individual, for whom negative liberty is sacrosanct, retreats from political life and delegates the responsibility of governing the country and making policies to her representative. Bhargava adds that it is this isolation of an individual from the quotidian messy politics that is a flaw in liberal democracy:
Self-government is demanding. Assembling, deliberating, and arriving at informed decisions on important public matters takes time and commitment. How can people preoccupied with producing, buying, selling, consuming and running their own lives in pursuit of private happiness also commit to running a government? They can’t. So, they do the next best thing: find those inclined to make politics their private business to become their representatives. For vast numbers of hapless people who can’t afford to get away with the daily grind of ordinary life and for those whose main purpose in life is the pursuit of personal happiness, there is virtually no time for public life or decision making. Their idea of political involvement is just too thin; the only time they can find for politics is during elections when they choose their representatives.
This leads to mission creep for liberal democracy since democracy gets reduced to the rituals of pressing EVM machine buttons every five years. Since the people have a scant interest in politics and the health of public institutions, degradation sets in. Our political freedoms are being taken away gradually.
The solution for this, according to Bhargav, is forging solidarities and public spiritedness that goes beyond election cycles. This sense of togetherness is the antidote to the surreptitious chipping away of our rights as citizens by the state.
Reflection 7: The moral ambiguity of modern religion
Modern religion is a complex phenomenon. Neither can it be dismissed outrightly in a highly religious society in India, nor its politicisation can be absolved of inflicting huge damage to the country's moral fibre. The state must neither control nor patronise it and, at the same time must strive to prevent it from taking away individual rights. Bhargav tries to explain two versions of modern religion using a thought experiment.
Here is an 8-step process to think about the evolution of religion, its variants and its impact on human lives:
In the distant past, a realisation dawned upon humans that there was a gap between who they were and what they could become for the better. They started searching for a vision, both personal and collective, to overcome this gap and set out on a journey of self-cultivation and greater fulfilment.
Finding this vision could only be achieved through the guidance of a wise man or a guide. Humans started their search for the wise one. They found and started following his teachings. The teachings, it was assumed, will help humans discover the path of self-cultivation.
With the passage of time, a fellow feeling develops among the followers. A sense of mutual learning and support reinforces this fellow feeling.
Let’s call these steps (Steps 1 to 3) ethical religion or Religion A.
Religion A can be one god-dependent, multiple god-dependent or even god-less where human actions derive its sense of ethics and morality from some other sources.
Now, let’s continue with the thought experiment.
Religion A, over a period of time, develops an institutional structure with the followers forming a well-defined hierarchy.
Within this hierarchy, some individuals have put themselves up in a position where they can ‘systematise teachings and turn them into intellectual doctrines.’
Since doctrines have now hardened up because of systematisation, the same set of individuals who systematised them have now become gatekeepers. They can now control the entry and exit of fellow followers based on notions of purity, for instance.
The hierarchies and rigidities have finally become so strong that followers in different groups see each other as rivals.
They can kill, lynch, maim, and humiliate other group members if the opposite camp either doesn’t follow the doctrines or when they try to break the barriers of entry and exit.
The variant of Religion A which follows the above steps (Steps 4 to 8) can be referred to as Religion B.
Bhargav adds:
What was once a loose community has now metamorphosised into a highly doctrine-oriented, bureaucratised, exclusivist structure. Alas, the pursuit of Religion A has for some time now been dependent on one’s belonging to Religion B.
Modern religion is a mix of Religion A and Religion B and hence one cannot stop having an ambivalent feeling towards the modern religion. You may love the Religion A features present in modern religion, but abhor the Religion B features that have crept in.
And how does the politics interact with the modern religion?
Bhargav explains:
Our politics cannot be conducted without drawing upon the resources of one or the other Religion A. Hence Gandhi’s statement with which even Nehru agreed: ‘I can say without the slightest hesitation that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.’ But equally, Religion B cannot meddle in politics without vitiating it. Furthermore, morally sensitive citizens can neither endorse a strict separation between the state and modern religion nor allow the boundaries between them to become so porous that the state wilfully destroys people’s freedom to choose and practise Religion A. This is why they insist that the state keeps a principled distance from all religions- keep off Religion A and intervene when morally necessary in Religion B.
Reflection 8: Religion and the Indian Constitution
What role does a liberal-democratic constitution like the Indian Constitution play in a religious society like India? It basically does two things- check the political tyranny by the majority and bring upon social transformation. Both these goals are non-trivial.
Let’s revisit the Religion A and Religion B framework. Religion A finds its roots in the ethics of self-cultivation. Religion B results from the social norms that create rigidities and hierarchies. Social norms here mean the rules through which the gatekeepers, in Religion B, control social interactions- whom to marry, whom to eat with, what to eat, which job must be performed by whom etc. The connection between ethics and social norms remained loose in India. People could adopt ethical frameworks without letting social norms go off. This provided a lot of flexibility for ethics to exist even amidst rigid and extractive social norms. So, an individual could pursue a god (ethics) while judiciously following social norms (caste system). The Indian Constitution is socially transformative because it attacks the core of the social norms.
Reflection 9: What do the courts miss in the Constitution?
In the Abhiram Singh vs C.D. Commachen judgement given by the Supreme Court in 2017, the 7-judge bench held that appealing to the ascriptive identities of any candidate and that of the voters constitutes a ‘corrupt practice’ under Section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act (1951). The bench expounded the meaning of Indian secularism in two ways-
a) Religion must not play any role in the governance of the country.
b) Secularism does not mean ‘the denial of the reality of an unseen spirit or the relevance of religion to life or that we exalt irreligion’.
Hence, acknowledgement of the importance of religion and impartiality by the state for any religion coexist in our Constitution as its basic features.
However, Bhargav argues that the wall of separation between the state and the religion in Indian secularism is not rigid, but porous. The Indian Constitution allows the state to play an active role in affairs of religion and at the same time it allows religious compulsions to enter governance. There’s a distance between them but they are not separable. Some of the examples of how the state and religion enter into each other’s turf are:
1) Article 25 grants freedom to profess, practise and propagate religion.
2) Article 26 grants rights to people to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes.
3) Ban on untouchability.
4) Temple entry to women.
1st and 2nd examples show how religion enters into governance. 3rd and 4th examples show how the state enters into religion.
Bhargav writes:
A distinctive feature of Indian secularism is that it rejects the wall of separation but demands that the state keep a principled distance from all religions. It requires that the state has a value-based engagement with or disengagement from religion. Indian courts must endorse and espouse principled distance and drop the tired rhetoric of strict separation.
Reflection 10: Should the state leave religion alone?
The answer depends on the type of religion- Religion A or Religion B. If it’s Religion A where the people adopt an ethical path of self-cultivation and self-discovery, then the state must stay away. However, if we have the Religion B variant where there is widespread ‘discrimination, exclusion, marginalisation, humiliation, oppression and persecution’ then the state must intervene decisively to inhibit the domination of one community over the other.
Bhargav, in this essay, repeats his stance on religion and state:
In my own work over decades, I have consistently maintained that a strict separation between state and religion is not desirable. The state can neither take the view that it will control all aspects of religion not that it will have nothing to do with it; no matter what happens, it will always keep religion at an arm’s length. The state must keep, what I have called, a principled distance from all religions.
In a nutshell, the state must not interfere in the matters of religion- how is it professed or practised? At the same time, the state must not feel shy to intervene where the religious practices and social norms result in domination and persecution.