Dispatch #82: What is unique about Indian secularism? - Part 4
In this dispatch, we will go through the tenets of Gandhian secularism as explained by political scientist Farah Godrej in her essay titled ‘Secularism in India: A Gandhian Approach’.
In the last dispatch, we established that Gandhi cannot be called a ‘secularist’ in the Western sense where there is a clear distinction between the state and religion. Instead, he believed that the state must give equal respect to all religions and every individual should show mutual respect and tolerance towards other faiths. However, his stand on religion, its relationship with individuals and the state has transitioned over the years.
The University of California based political scientist Farah Godrej begins her essay by stating this paradox outrightly:
On the one hand, he insists that politics must be infused with religion or spirituality (terms he uses interchangeably). At other times, he expresses a strong sentiment that religion and the state should remain separate and that the state should never interfere with matters of religion.
She unpacks this paradox by persuading the readers to think of Gandhi’s idea of religion in two senses:
R1: A religion that should have its imprint on politics. It is the source of all morality and a path of private truth-seeking.
R2: A religion with a principled commitment to doctrinal truth which could harm political life.
Gandhi’s R1 version of religion equates morality with spirituality. Hence, morality should drive politics. As Farah explains, for Gandhi ‘the politics is to be guided by the quest for truth which to him is synonymous with dharma (duty or moral order) ‘. Gandhi once said:
For me, every activity is governed by what I consider my religion. I cannot conceive of politics as divorced from religion. Religion should pervade every one of our actions.
Here, he is trying to suggest that politics and religion are complementary to each other, rather than separate entities as conceptualised by the Western brand of secularism. Gandhi saw politics as something that occurs in the form of daily personal and quotidian interactions rather than our conventional concept of politics as some sort of impersonal interaction with our representatives or bureaucrats.
The R1 concept treats religion as a private activity of seeking truth. It’s a personal affair. The word truth here is quite a loaded term if seen from Gandhi’s lens. For him, there was a clear distinction between absolute truth and relative truth.
Let’s go deeper into this.
Gandhi was deeply influenced by the Jain traditions prevalent in his home state Gujarat. The philosophy of ‘anekantavada’ or multiplicity and relativity of views was at the core of this philosophy. This idea essentially means that truth manifests itself in several forms, many of which may conflict with each other and no single manifestation can be regarded as the ultimate truth. This article sums up the essence of this philosophy quite well:
By this, Jains meant that in many cases the arguments espoused by the various participants in a debate all held some validity. Because the Jain position was able to overcome the apparent inconsistencies between the other views, however, it came closer to fully grasping the one underlying truth, satya.
This way of enquiry is unlike the usual way of looking at an issue in black, white or even grey. Gandhi himself confessed that his understanding of several issues was provisional until and unless tested by himself. That’s why he would separate ‘relative’ truth from ‘absolute truth’. Absolute truth has several manifestations, while relative truth is our perceptions of the absolute truth. This difference is critical to grasp. So anekantavada philosophy rests on the absolute truth which is pluralistic and has many sides. Since human beings have cognitive limitations, they cannot completely grasp the idea of having provisional truths. As a result, they end up believing in one truth which they consider as absolute.
Farah explains this by arguing:
Absolute truth is so pluralistic, many-sided, and fluid that no single human mind can capture it entirely. Human life is most often a struggle to approximate a series of relative truths. Because human knowledge of this absolute truth is fallible, human beings are destined to see the truth only through the fragmented prism of their relative everyday perceptions.
The path to reaching absolute truth is tentative and one has to have several provisional truths to reach the absolute truth. For Gandhi, it was this journey of continuously seeking truth, that would lead human beings to the absolute truth. Simply put, one should continuously seek the truth while having provisional manifestations of truths in the journey. So, when Gandhi said that religion should be a private activity, he was referring to ‘truth-seeking as a private process activity or process, rather than a steady state’. This truth-seeking activity must become a daily habit and one should live it. For Gandhi, these daily activities for seeking truth, put out in public, were fasting or celibacy.
Farah adds:
When Gandhi calls religion a private or personal affair, he means this in an existential sense: it is between you and your God. R1 is a deeply experiential and interactive relationship with the deepest part of the self, the part which Gandhi believed has a special connection to the truth that is God.
So when Gandhi rooted for the use of religion in politics, he was essentially talking about marrying this continuous process of truth-seeking with politics.
Farah concludes:
Gandhi would want R1 and private truth seeking to serve as the repository or expression of moral values, available for checking corruption, violence and other ills of public life. Moreover, when this form of private faith is brought to bear on a public political matter, Gandhi insists that it can be done in an experiential, exemplary, and action-oriented manner: that is, not through declaring a principled commitment to doctrinal truths, but through practices that demonstrate through exemplary engagement the activity of truth-seeking. We can now make sense of Gandhi’s claim that politics cannot be divorced from spirituality or religion when religion is understood in a very particular way as R1.
Gandhi’s R2 version of religion is highly regimented and doctrine-driven. There is no scope for having provisional truths, there is just one absolute truth. The followers of R2 are principally committed to that truth and any alternate truth-seeking might lead to retribution. Within the R2 scheme of things, religions are seen as mutually exclusive; every religion claims to be a unique revelation to humanity and claims to be the only path to meet divinity. Other religions or paths to divinity are seen as rivals. Gandhi was against the idea of integrating R2 into politics as he believed that there is ‘no such thing as one true religion, every other being false’.
Gandhi would support the tentativeness of R1 and warn us about the danger of the infallibility of R2. He cautioned his fellow countrymen when he said that religion or continuously seeking the truth is private and personal and should not be dominated by institutionalized religion R2.
Farah concludes her essay by saying that Gandhi would believe:
If an R2 conception of religion gains pre-dominance over R1, then the individualized, everyday, action-based understanding of religion as conscientious truth-seeking could be displaced by a doctrinal and absolutist one, privileging truth-professed over truth-lived.
The Indian Constitutional Secularism (ICS) which is the and must be the prevalent form of political secularism in India largely subsumes features of Gandhian secularism, argues Rajeev Bhargava in his book.