Dispatch #81: What is unique about Indian secularism? - Part 3

In this dispatch we will take a closer look at Gandhi's political secularism and his views on religion and communal harmony.

Source: BBC

One of the most important conceptions of Indian secularism is Gandhian political secularism. But to understand Gandhian secularism it is important first to understand Gandhi’s conceptualization of religion. 

Gandhi was against the rigid structures of the religion very much similar to versions 3 and 4 of religion as defined by Bhargava. He was of the view that ‘there’s endless variety in all religions’ and there are ‘interminable religious differences’. In ‘The Way to Communal Harmony’, he wrote:

For God-fearing men, all religions are good and equal, only the followers of different religions quarrel with one another and thereby deny their respective religions. One of them gave a striking verse from the Grantha Saheb wherein Guru Nanak says that God may be called by the name of Allah, Rahim and so on. The name does not matter if He is enshrined in our hearts. Guru Nanak’s efforts, like those of Kabir, had been directed towards synthesizing the various religions. Some go on a pilgrimage and bathe in the sacred river, others go to Mecca; some worship Him in temples, others in mosques, some just bow their heads in reverence; some read the Vedas, others the Koran; some dress in blue, others in white; some call themselves Hindus, others Muslims. The key to the solution of the tangle lies in everyone following the best in his own religion and entertaining equal regard for the other religions and their followers.

Due to deep religious diversity, Gandhi’s secularism was not based on maintaining a distance from the religion or that there could be one religion that would exist as a uniform religious code. Instead, it was based on mutual respect and tolerance. Gandhi believed that:

The need of the moment is not one religion, but mutual respect and tolerance of the devotees of the different religions. We want to reach not the dead level, but unity in diversity. Any attempt to root out traditions, effects of heredity, climate and other surroundings is not only bound to fail but is a sacrilege. The soul of religion is one, but it is encased in many forms. The latter will persist to the end of time. Wise men will ignore the outward crust and see the same soul living under a variety of crusts.

One could say that Gandhi’s secularism belonged to the Sanatan Sanskriti and Marga schools of thought (which we have already discussed in the previous dispatches) where ethics played a significant role. Gandhi’s ‘oneness’ was not based on belittling other faiths, rather his vision of oneness, as explained by Bhargava, was based on ‘accepting all radical others as equally significant because they variously manifest one supreme being or concept’. Tolerance and mutual respect for diverse religions rather than homogeneity was the cornerstone of Gandhi’s secularism. Bhargava further explains:

Gandhi’s views were shaped more by the wisdom traditions of the ancient world, in which gods and goddesses of each cultural region are different, yet part of the same semantic universe and therefore mutually related and translatable. As a result, no culture denied the reality of the gods of another culture but always found ways to accommodate them.

Gandhi believed that the responsibility to restore communal harmony depended on the people during religious conflict and discord. The post-independence secularism was rooted in Gandhi’s social project of communal harmony which could be summarised with the phrase ‘sarva dharma sama bhava’, which essentially means respect for all religions. The post-independent Indian state was entrusted to ‘ensure trust between religious communities to restore basic confidence if and when it was undermined’. The state must maintain a distance from all forms of religious conceptions to promote a spirit of fraternity as envisioned by the Preamble to the Constitution. This conceptualization of religion makes Gandhian political secularism distinct from its Western counterpart. While the latter emphasized the separation between the church and the state while putting individual freedom at the forefront, the former positioned the state to ensure better relations between members of religious communities, ‘especially in times when they are estranged.’ Gandhian secularism opposes ‘inter-religious domination by proposing that all religions must be treated as equals by the state’. 

The Hindu-Mulsim riots during the partition would convince Gandhi that Indians must prepare themselves to ‘subsume his or her religion to the ideal of secularism’. On 29th June 1947, he wrote this in Harijan:

Religion is no test of nationality but a personal matter between man and his God. In this sense of nationality they are Indians first and Indians last, no matter what religion they profess.

Source: Britannica

Historian Vinay Lal’s brilliant blog post explains how Gandhi’s views on secularism differed from those of Nehru. It is important to note that Nehru, being a non-believer, derived his ideas of secularism from the Western tradition of Enlightenment. In contrast, Gandhi derived his conceptualization of secularism deeply rooted in the Indian traditions of religiosity. Vinay Lal examines the roots of Gandhi’s thinking on religion and secularism by writing:

One source of both his religious worldview and his secularism was the bhakti-sufi traditions of India and I would go so far as to argue that Gandhi should be viewed as the last great representative of the ‘sant’ tradition. His veneration for Tulsidas is well known, but the emphasis on that in scholarly work has somewhat obscured his interest in Narasinha Mehta, Mirabai and Tukaram.

For Gandhi, pursuing religion was more about the liberty of the religious profession. Most of his writings consistently had this element of ‘god is one and road to god are many’ Vinay Lal argues that this notion of multiple roads leading to one god is from the ideals of Advaita. 

In the August 1947 edition of Harijan, Gandhi wrote:

All subjects will thus be equal in the eyes of law. But every single individual will be free to pursue his own religion without hindrance, so long as it does not transgress common law. The question of the protection of minorities is not good for me; it rests upon the recognition of religious groupings between citizens of the same state. What I wish India to do is to assure liberty of religious profession to every single individual. Then only India can be great, for it was perhaps the one nation in the ancient world that had recognized cultural democracy, whereby it is held that the roads to God are many but the goal is one because God is one and the same.

This is a fact that Gandhi started using the word secularism more frequently when he saw how the flame of communalism gripped the entire country by 1947. Although he would not explicitly use secularism in his writings one needs to understand that he always advocated for the ‘liberty of religious profession to every single individual'. In the same edition (August 1947) of Harijan, he wrote:

The state is bound to be wholly secular. I go so far as to say that no denominational educational institution in it should enjoy patronage.

Political scientist Farah Godrej in her essay titled ‘Secularism in India: A Gandhian Approach’ also agrees that Gandhian secularism is not the secularism that we understand in the Western sense. In her essay, she unpacks the contradiction between Gandhi’s assertion as a devout Hindu and his view that ‘politics must be infused with religion’ on one hand and his strong views about how religion and state should remain separate and the state should not interfere with matters of religion. 

More on this in the next dispatch.