Hindu populism a threat to India’s secularism

When India got its independence from Britain 70 years ago this week, it was founded as a secular democracy — secular because it acknowledged the status and rights of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and other religious minorities as equal to those of the Hindu majority.

Mahatma Gandhi, the great hero of the independence movement, was a devout Hindu, but he was murdered by a Hindu fanatic for defending Muslim rights after Partition with Pakistan. It was one of the most fortunate assassinations in history, because Hindu radicals had been using Pakistan’s declaration that it was a “Muslim state” to demand that India be declared a “Hindu state.” After Gandhi’s murder, Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, was able to round up tens of thousands of Hindu extremists and exploit popular reverence for Gandhi to nail down India’s identity as a secular state.

India is still a democracy, but a portrait of one of the men who conspired to assassinate Gandhi now hangs in India’s parliament. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, leads the BJP (Indian People’s Party), which was created as the political wing of the RSS (National Volunteer Organization), a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization. And secular is now spelled “sickular” by the Hindutva trolls on Twitter.

Hindutva is Hindu exceptionalism of the kind that gives rise to the trope that “to be Hindu is to constantly take offence.” It sees India as a “wounded civilization” because it has spent most of the past thousand years under the rule of various foreign invaders, and proposes to remedy that with a highly simplified version of politicised Hinduism.

It’s just another brand of populism, in other words, but its chief Indian proponent, Modi, must deal with far deeper divisions in society than his American counterpart, Donald Trump. He is a much more disciplined man, however, and he does not waste time tweeting.

Modi is focussed on economic growth, and in particular on raising the living standards of the lowermiddle-class Indians who are his strongest supporters. But to get and keep the parliamentary majority that would let him carry out his program he must appeal to a broader audience.

For more than half a century India got along with the secular principle that religion is a private matter, but Modi supported a national ban on cow slaughter when he took office. More recently he banned the slaughter of buffalo as well. So it’s hardly surprising that “cow protection” vigilantes have been attacking and sometimes killing people suspected of trading in beef.

Modi supports the ban because high-caste Hindus believe cows are sacred and must not be eaten. However, lower-caste Hindus, the so-called Dalits (untouchables), do eat beef, and they make up about a quarter of India’s voting population.

Muslims, who dominate the beef and leather trades, make up another 14 per cent of the voters, but Modi doesn’t worry about losing their votes because they were never going to vote for the BJP anyway. He cares very much about the Dalit vote, because they are the key to making the BJP the natural party of government.

So Modi walks a tightrope on the issue of sacred cows, promoting their protection to appeal to his uppercaste voters, while weakly condemning the murder of butchers and leather workers.

The bottom line is that the secular liberals are in retreat, the religious minorities are being marginalized, and the people who define India as a “Hindu country” are in charge.

It’s too early to say that this is an irreversible change, but it’s a radical departure from the country’s founding values. It’s still a democracy, but it’s looking more like Pakistan.