Table Of ContentS E C U L A R COMMON S E N S E
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SECULAR COMMON SENSE
MukulI esavan
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PENGUINB OOKS
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.IS Penguin BooksI ndia (P) Ltd., 11 Community Centre,
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Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand , London WC2R ORL, UI<
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First published by Penguin Books India 2001
Copyright C Mukul l(esavan 2001
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To Raghu and Tar.a
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Origins
Indians are sometimes scolded for
misunderstanding secularism. They are
remindedt hat secularismi n its original,w estern
sense, means a commitment to a public life
fenced off from religion-not an equal
pandering to all religions.
This is unreasonable.
It is unreasonable because Indian secularism
grew out of the peculiar circumstanceso f anti
colonial nationalism. India isn't a Christian
country where the State is trying to disentangle
itself from the tentacles of a smothering,
interfering church. Nor is it Ataturk's Turkey
or contemporary Algeria trying to erase
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monarchy and mullahs in the name of a secular
modernity. India is an unlikely subcontinental
state, first made by the English, then remade
by their English-speaking subjects-twice
made, if you like. India was fashioned out of
a process of colonial expansion and conquest
that dragged on for a hundred years. The India
the British made was a complicated jigsaw
an Austro-Hungarian empire under more
ruthless management. The post-194 7 makeover
of India consisted of Congress governments
tidying the partitioned Raj into a Republic: for
Nehru and Patel, the task of secular nationalism
was to smelt a citizenry from the ore of a
heterogeneous population embedded in
subjecthood.
Some of this smelting had been done before
lndepenc,ience by the Congress, through
Gandhi's huge campaigns of civil disobedience.
The discontents of a poor country were
harnessed in the name of the nation against
the colonial State that had, ironically,
consolidated the territory that this would-be
nation wished to occupy. These Congress
campaigns of defiance and solidarity-Non
cooperation, Civil Disobedience, Quit India-
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were important not only because they helped
throw the British out but because they
demonstrated that India's bewilderingly plural
population was capable of pwposeful collective
action. If the colonial census with its columns
of Khattris, Bohras, Khojas, Hussaini Brahmins
and twelve different sorts of Kayasthas was a
systematic unravelling of Indian society-a
dissection of Mother India-the Congress's
mass movements were Gandhi's great magic
tricks with which he put the dismembered
lady together again. Gandhi's mass movements
periodically renewed the Congress's licence
to speak for the nation. Admirers of Jawaharlal
Nehru, Sar~ar Patel, C.R. Rajagopalachari and
Subhas Chandra Bose have complained about
the exaggeration of Gandhi's role in the
national movement, but the truth is that from
the time he led the party into the Non
cooperation movement, right up to 1942,
Gandhi was Merlin and the Congress was the
sorcerer's apprentice.
In its origins, the Congress was a self
consciouslyr epresentativea ssembly of Indians
from differentp arts of India. The first Congress
of 1885 was inspired by the imperial
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assemblage of 1877, a gathering hand-picked
by the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, to represent
India's census diversity. We know that this
stage-managed imperial assembly prompted
Surendranath Banerjea to plan a similar
meeting, one designed to consolidate Indian
public opinion, not to pledge fealty. The
Congress never lost this sense that the nation
was the sum of the sub-continent's species;
that the more Parsis, Muslims, Dalits,
Marwaris, Sikhs, and Christians it could count
in its ranks, the better was its claim to represent
the nation.
The Congress, as its name suggests, saw itself
as a cross between a party and a parliament
(o r at least an assembly of representative
Indians). Typically, till 1939, members of the
Hin~u Mahasabha and the Muslim League
could be members, office-bearers, even
Presidents of the Congress. For the Congress,
being secular meant making different types of
Indians equally welcome; secularism in this
context was a way of being comprehensively
nationalist. Later, as the Congress's
unpopularity with Muslims became
inconvenient,t he party's ideological pluralism
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