India still a secular state

One of the more pernicious images I encounter abroad is of an India about to combust in the flames of religious strife, says Pavan K Varma.

One of the more pernicious images I encounter abroad is of an India about to combust in the flames of religious strife. To my mind this is just not true. There are, of course, religious extremists among both Hindus and Muslims. But, fortunately they are on the fringes of the nation's life, and have more of a nuisance value, grabbing media space quite disproportionate to their actual impact.

I think, on the contrary, India really presents a strikingly successful example of communal harmony. The Muslims came as proselytising invaders many centuries ago; they wrested political power but soon discovered that the bulk of the Hindus would not convert to their faith. In fact, Hinduism was then, and is today, a remarkably self-assured religion. It is not a religion under siege, as some paranoid people want us to believe.

The Hindu faith has no one scripture, no one god, no one prescribed form of ritual and no one church. It allows for dissent, and Sanskrit has, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, the world's largest literature in the agnostic and aesthetic tradition. Hinduism is a way of life and nothing can really challenge its diffused omnipresence. That is why Hindus remain the overwhelming majority in India in spite of the fact that we were ruled for centuries by two aggressively proselytising religions.

If Hindus do not consider themselves under threat from Muslims, the Muslims have long ago shed their role as invaders. They have become a part of the national fabric, and this is the end result of hundreds of years of a gradual but definitive syncretism. Akbar, the great Moghul, had a Hindu, Jodha Bai, as his queen. He was called both Jahanpanah and Mahabali. Dara Shikoh had the Bhagwad Gita and the Upanishads translated into Persian. Amir Khusrau sang songs on Hindu devotional themes. Ghalib wrote a beautiful masnavi on the temple city of Benares. Both Hindus and Muslims bow in obeisance at the tomb of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, and both are devotees of Shirdi Sai Baba. The millions of Hindus on pilgrimage to the Ayyappa shrine in the Sabirimalai hills of Kerela stop en route to pray at the dargah of a Muslim saint. And Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Aamir Khan are the leading box office draws of Bollywood.

The other myth we need to debunk is that communal strife is a constant or perennially recurring phenomenon in India. Professors Ashutosh Varshney and Stephen Wilkinson of Harvard have studied the communal situation in India between 1960 and 1993. They discovered that in 20 out of those 23 years there was none or negligible communal violence. 80 per cent of the violence that did take place happened in just two Gujarati cities: Ahmedabad and Vadodra. Hindu-Muslim violence, they thus concluded, was neither chronic nor pervasive but town specific, with 24 towns nationally accounting for 62 per cent of the total deaths and 50 per cent of the total number of incidents.

The greatest bulwark against religious strife is democracy. Muslims are the biggest ethnic minority of India. They number close to 150 million, and are scattered all across the country. In Assam, they constitute 30 per cent of the population; in West Bengal and Assam they account for 25 per cent. They number 30 million in UP and 15 in Bihar. They are important segments too in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Indeed, the manner in which Muslims vote can influence the results in as many as 125 parliamentary constituencies, one-fourth of the House. No political party with any aspirations of ruling in Delhi can, therefore, ignore them.

The truth is that both Hindus and Muslims have increasingly become part of the mainstream of India. Today, most Indians want to swim away from the islands of religious exclusiveness towards the secular opportunities of mainland India. Survey after survey has shown that the construction of a temple in Ayodhya is not an issue of importance for Hindus, and that most Muslims would happily accept a negotiated settlement or a judicial verdict in the Babri Masjid case. In the most conservative Muslim seminary, classes in computers and in English have quietly begun; and the membership of Hindu fundamentalist organisations is falling. People want to get on with their lives rather than to be caught in the futile politics of hate and hostility.

With its many religions and races and languages, India is one of the world's most interesting human laboratories. And, this laboratory has shown that people of different faiths can coexist, especially in a democratic and plural polity. It is this message that we need to proudly give the world, rather than be defensive about our record in interfaith relations.

(A Stephanian, Pavan Kumar Varma is a senior Indian diplomat and presently Minister of Culture and Director of the Nehru Centre in London. Author of several widely acclaimed books likeGhalib: the Man, the Times and the recently released Being Indian, he will be writing the column Hyde Park Corner, exclusively for HindustanTimes.com)