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Secularism
- American style India is about the only country in the world
where secularism is a problem. This is precisely because it is a multi-religious
country with substantial segments of he population professing various religions
like Islam, Christianity, Sikhism and Buddhism. This is not to say that other
countries do not have their own religious minorities. There are Muslims and Christians in China, not to
speak of Buddhists, but the prevalent philosophy of state is Communism that
doesn't take religion at all into consideration. Indonesia has a substantial
percentage of Christians, not o speak of Hindus and Christians of late in
Indonesia have been under pressure from Islamic fundamentalists. But most
European countries don't need to worry about minorities. Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium,
the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries are all Christian though there may
be varied proportions of Roman Catholics and Protestants among them. The United
Kingdom is Christian with the Church of England being supreme. The head of the
Royal Family is crowned according to Christian rites by the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the oath is taken on the Bible but nobody dismisses the country
or the people as communal. Secularism in those countries has a separate
connotation. In Germany a party can call itself the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)
or the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) but it does not invite opprobrium from
secularists. A citizen may refuse to pay a small tax for the upkeep of churches
but that is left to the good sense of the tax-payer whether to pay or not. When
President de Gaulle of France and Chancellor Adenauer of then West Germany
prayed together at Koln Cathedral in a gesture of reconciliation, no one
suggested that they were 'communal'. Both France and Germany were Christian
countries and praying in a cathedral seemed the most natural thing to do.
It is only in India that singing Saraswati vandana at an official function comes
under severe damnation by our 'secularists'. The general belief is that the United States of
America is 'secular', even if the President-elect of the country may take his
oath of office on the Bible and attend Church. Is the United States truly
'secular'? The question has been raised - and sought to be
answered-interestingly enough, in the current issue of Span (January/February
2001) by one Wilfred M. McClay. He speaks of two concepts of secularism. He says
that despite "impressive victories in the courts and in the halls of
government and academe, prayers (in the US) are still uttered at the
commencement of Congressional sessions. God's name appears in our currency and
in the oaths we take in court, chaplains are still employed by Congress and the
armed services (and) the tax-exempt status of religious institutions remains
intact". "The fact is" avers McClay, "America is still not
an entirely secular country, one sanitized of any form of public sanction for
religion". The pressure of religion
on the individual could be very heavy as Yellapragada Subba Row, a great
scientist working at Lederle Laboratories in the United States found, being
alone in a Christian community in the thirties. To escape his uniqueness Row who
was born Hindu first turned to atheism only to accept Christianity later to get
a feeling of belonging. In the United States, McClay insists, one
"comes face to face with a crowd of paradoxes" And he adds: "And
none is greater than this: that the vanguard nation of technological and social
innovation is also the developed world's principal bastion of religious faith
and practice. The United States has managed to sustain remarkably high levels of
traditional religious beliefs and affiliation, even as it careens merrily down
the white water rapids of modernity". Sociologists from Max Weber to Peter Berger have
insisted that secularisation is one facet of the powerful monolith called "modernisation",
trusting that secularisation would come along bundled with a comprehensive
package of modernising forces such as urbanisation, rationalisation,
professionalisation, functional differentiations and bureaucratisation. The more
the modernisation that society underwent, the presumption was that secularity,
in all its fullness would arrive "as naturally as adulthood".
Apparently this has not yet happened in the United States. McClay argues that
perhaps the religious efflorescence that one sees in America today is merely
defensive and fleeting. Indeed, he remarks, it could be argued persuasively that
the United States has never been more thoroughly under the command of secular
ideas than it is today" and that "the nation's elite culture, as it is
mirrored in mass media and academe, is committed to a standard of antiseptically
secular discourse, in which the ostensibly value-neutral languages of science
and therapy have displaced the value-laden language of faith and morals".
As he further notes, a steady stream of court decisions since the 1940s has
severely circumscribed the public manifestation of traditional religious symbols
and sentiments, helping to create what has been called 'the naked public square.
For all that there is the view that
"secularism, rather than religion" is the power that is ebbing away.
Noting that, McClay feels that it is "small wonder, then, that religion has
responded to the challenge of secularism with a vigorous defence of its role in
public life - a role that, whatever one thinks of it, shows no sign of going
away quietly". Indeed, he adds, and this is very significant, "there
is a growing sense that religion may be an indispensable force for the upholding
of human dignity and moral order in a world dominated by voracious state
bureaucracies and sprawling trans-national corporations that are neither
effectively accountable to national law nor effectively answerable to
well-established codes of behaviour". If this is said of the
United States where the majority of Christianity-professing people have never
felt the suffocating power of an elite professing a minority religion, should it
be surprising that Hindus in India should hark back to their own centuries old
faith to find an anchor for their lives? McClay speaks of two kinds of secularism: a
negative one and a positive one. When, under the guise of separating church and
state, secularism seeks to exclude religious belief and practice, as much as
possible, to the realm of private predilection and individual taste, it is
negative. Positive secularism has aims that are higher and nibbled, seeking, as
it does, to free human beings to fulfill the most exalted elements of their
nature. This understanding of two secularims, McClay suggests, may help explain
the paradoxical situation in which secularism seems at one and the same time
both victor and vanquished. As he sees it, Americans have by and large accepted
negative secularism as an essential basis for peaceful co-existence in a
religiously pluralistic society. Furthermore, he adds: "Religious activity
and expression (in the United States) will likely continue to grow, further
eroding the rule of positive secularism - but it will do so largely within the
container of a negative - secularist understanding of the world. The return of
religious faith is not likely to be a fearsome 'return of the repressed' at
least not in the United States". If religious faith can return to the United
States without a fearsome "return of the repressed", why should it not
return similarly to India in the same manner? Whatever the shortcomings of the
majority faith-Hinduism - in India (and, alas, it has several), attacks on the
minority faith is not one of them. McClay makes an interesting point. He says:
"It follows, however, that religious faiths must undergo some degree of
adaptation in accommodating themselves to negative secularism. To begin with,
they must, as it were, learn how to behave around strangers. But there is more
to it than that. The key question adherents must ask is whether such an
adaptation represents compromise of their faith or a deepening and clarifying of
it". What does adaptation mean in the Indian context? In India the majority
faith is Hinduism. For centuries it has been the target of first Islam and later
evangelical Christianity both of which were resented. Living under Islamic rule,
Hindus in past centuries hardly could resist conversion. Who, in the
circumstances, should adopt to whom? Can Christianity, under the presumed right
to propagation, give offence to Hinduism by indulging in conversions, howsoever
sophisticatedly described? These are points to ponder over. Secularism, in essence, means respect for all
religions. Respect involves not giving offence to another religion or faith in
any way whatsoever. The line dividing propagation and conversion is very thin
and in India, at least, it can give rise to a lot of epistomological confusion,
which is best avoided in the larger interests of communal peace. To insist that
propagation is of the very essence of Christianity which has to be conceded
under the articles of the Constitution is to demand allegiance not to the spirit
but the letter of the law. A wise minority will have to learn to adapt to the
society in which it functions in order to live in peace and harmony. The
Sanskrit concept of sarva dharma samabhava must be upheld in all its nuances if
secularism has to be truly meaningful in India. That, truly, would be positive
secularism worthy of applause.
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