COMMENTARY

Secularism and Religious

Violence in Hinduism and Islam
Vivek Swaroop Sharma

This article underlines the need

to move beyond the exhausted
notion of all religions preaching
peace to studying the specific
manner in which violence is
legitimised in each religion. This
is the first step liberal secularists
need to take if they plan to mount
a successful challenge to the
dominance of the Hindu right.

Vivek Swaroop Sharma (vivek_sharma@

pitzer.edu) teaches politics at Pitzer College,
Claremont, the United States.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

april 30, 2016

he rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party

(BJP) and the increasing assertiveness of the various branches of
the Hindu right (Sangh Parivar) over the
past two years has left secularists in India
and abroad deeply concerned about the
trajectory of Indian society and its politics.
The long hoped for de-sectarianisation
of Indian politics and society now seems
as distant as it has ever been. Secularists
in India and indeed around the world
have tended to dismiss religious politics
and especially violence as being prime
examples of unscrupulous politicians
exploiting sectarian divisions for their
own narrow selfish interests (and at the
expense of the greater good).
Furthermore, in adhering to the bad
politician thesis, secularists tend to portray the religious traditions of Hinduism
and Islam as being fundamentally pacific
and advancing similar if not identical
ethical positions on appropriate social and
political behaviour, and above all, on violence. This attitude towards religious
politics (and violence) is widely seen in
the popular media as well as in the
hallowed halls of academia.
In viewing the problem of religious
politics in this manner, however, secularists have failed to take seriously the
underlying phenomenon that is the cause
of the patterns of politics and violence
that they fear and whose disappearance
they so intensely desire. More specifically
Indian secularists have failed to directly
confront the underlying theological and
ethical systems of Hinduism and Islam,
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especially with regards to the problem of

violence. Rather than holding that either
both religions are equally pacific or that
they are fundamentally advocating similar ethics with regards to political behaviour, it would be better to re-examine
these two religious systems on their own
terms and to thereby develop a more
appropriate vocabulary with which to
advocate for a secular state and politics.
Indeed, liberal secularists will need to
develop a far more direct way for advocating the virtues of their system of social and political relationships if they are
to have any hope of blunting the rising
tide of the Hindu right in India. Essential
to doing this is taking the religious content of these movements seriously.
Dharma of Violence
Both Hinduism and Islam have theological
strands that confront head-on the problem
of violence. They do so, however, in very
different ways and generate very different
strictures on the legitimacy of violence.
The clearest theological statement on
violence within Hinduism comes in the
Gita. Whatever the historical significance
of the Gita in ancient and medieval
worlds, it is clear that by the modern period the Gita had become the principal
condensed articulation of Hindu ethics.
The basic message of the Gita, refined
in long conversation with Buddhist and
Jain rivals, is that the principal source of
legitimate action lies in the concept of
dharma. What the Gita advocates, defiantly and unapologetically in opposition
to Buddhist doctrine, is that the fundamental source of an individuals dharma
is the network of social obligations in
which an individual is embedded. It is,
therefore, an ethical system that is entirely
positional. The rightness or wrongness of
an action is entirely dependent upon the
exact position occupied by the agent at a
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precise moment in relationship to the

broader framework, to kin and to social
relations. The dharma of a child is different than the dharma of an adult; the
dharma of a warrior, as the poet of the
Gita has Krishna state in his sermon so
clearly to Arjun, is different from the
dharma of a peasant, a merchant or a
priest; and so and so forth.
The key point is that the righteousness
of action (including violence) is entirely
a function of social obligations and not
the ultimate purposes to which action is
being applied. The rightness or wrongness
of violence, in this tradition, is entirely
disconnected from the ultimate purposes
to which it is being deployed. A warriors
action could be entirely legitimate even if
the cause in which he fights is not. In this
sense, the ethics of action within Hinduism
is very narrowly conceived and the politics
of violence (the ends in Clausewitzian
terms) is entirely absent. Indeed, the
Gita states that these are of no concern
of an individual assuming that they
could even comprehend it (who are we,
after all, to pretend to know the ends to
which the Gods are working?).
Hinduism, therefore, is not pacific in any
sense. It takes violence for granted and
instead focuses on the question of legitimate violence in a very narrow and highly
contextualised context of individual obligation (itself understood in a social sense).
Furthermore, and worth highlighting, is
the detachment of action from the legitimacy of the causes of action. Put in slightly
different language, Hinduism, as articulated in the Gita, has remarkably little to
say about politics in any modern understanding of the term. And searching
through much of what constitutes popular
or devotional Hinduism since the classical
period, the sheer ubiquity of violence in
the great epics, the Puranas, and the
general corpus of mythology belies any
attempt to classify Hinduism as pacific
let alone Gandhian, notwithstanding the
seeping into Hinduism of the Buddhist
and, above all, Jain concept of ahimsa.
Politics of Violence
Islam, on the other hand, is in some sense
all about politics and could not, therefore, be more different from Hinduism in
this matter. It has become common for
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liberal secularists to assert that Islam is a

pacific religion that has been hijacked by
misguided individuals seeking to mobilise
politically on the basis of the legitimacy
provided by Islam. Indeed, Western (and
Indian) politicians routinely make statements that assert that Islamic fundamentalists have gotten Islam wrong.
Instead of this liberal and secular essentialising of Islam, it would be more productive to take Islams deep reflection on
the nature of legitimate action seriously.
Islam, as represented both by the life of
its Prophet and the Koran, has a great deal
to say about legitimate and ethical violence. My purpose here is not to enter the
highly contested debate over the precise
meaning of jihad. It is instead to note that
Islam does not inherently reject violence.
Instead, the emphasis is on the precise
boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate
violence. While it is possible for reasonable
people to disagree about where those precise boundaries lie, that there is in fact
legitimate and ethical forms of violence
within Islam cannot be denied or ignored.
For the present purposes it is worth emphasising that legitimate violence within
Islam is entirely political (in the sense of
defence of the community of believers
and their political rights in this world).
The Prophet himself engaged in violence
with his own hands and led armies into
battle (and lest Hindus feel smug about
this, it is worth pointing out that Rama,
Krishna, and the list goes on, are all deeply
implicated in the exercise of violence in the
epics and the Puranas). What is different
between Hindu and Islamic religious attitudes towards violence is that in one
case the righteous of the cause is central
and in the other it is the righteousness of
the social obligation. One is political and
the other is social. One is communal and
the other individual. But neither has an
inherent problem with violence: only
with the ways in which it is exercised.
Exhausted Notion
Secularists will need to abandon Gandhis
exhausted notion of the inherently pacific of the inherently pacific nature of
religion: neither Hinduism nor Islam is
theologically pacific. Instead, secularists,
as will be explored below, need to return
to the traditional liberal position of

separating religion from politics and removing communalism from the arena of the
state. Religious violence is not, pace
Gandhi, inherently incompatible with
religious theology. Therefore, the liberal
response to religious violence needs to
start with the assumption that the question
is not whether or not religion is inherently
pacific but what role ought it play, in a
pluralistic society, at the level of politics.
Secularisms Challenge
In a deep sense, secularism in India has
always been an elite phenomenon and
its success has always been tied to the fate
of that elite in maintaining control over
the state. From the very beginning of the
independent Indian state, Indian secularism has been compelled to govern a society in which liberal values had penetrated but little and whose basic vocabulary
(derived above all from kinship and
communitarian identities) are decidedly
aliberal if not always explicitly antiliberal. As the secular elites grip on
power within the state has faded (first
electorally and then within the administration itself), it has retreated further into
its bastions within the intelligentsia. Ever
diminishing portions of political parties
and administrative organs of the state are
unable to speak to, let alone counter, the
tide of Hindu politics on their own terms.
Part of this is a consequence of organisation as my colleague Tariq Thachil has
so ably demonstrated in his book (Elite
Parties, Poor Voters: How Social Services
Wins Voters in India); but part of this is a
consequence of the fact that the secular
elite in India have never viewed the
active missionising of liberalism to be a
part of their writ. For much of the postindependence period they controlled the
state after all and so there was no perceived need to do so since the state itself
was supposed to, through education and
social policy, generalise their values. This
neglect of the burden of propagating liberal secularism also generated a lazy
detachment from the deeper currents of
Indian society that were generating
enormous newly organised communal
and regional political movements that are
explicitly anti-secular and anti-liberal.
Liberal secularism has never had an
easy time in India but it does appear that

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the challenge to it has deepened and

become much more fundamental. The
standard bearer of Indian secular politics, the Indian National Congress, is in
disarray and may even disappear as a
major alternative to the BJP entirely. The
dismissiveness of Hindu politics that
comes so naturally to secularists is giving
way to deep and legitimately so, apprehension, about the direction that the Indian
state and society are taking. Indian liberal
secularists will need to missionise and
persuade the majority of the Indian population of the correctness of their programme for reform of social organisation and the state because if liberal secularism were ever self-evident to the
majority of the Indian population, that is
clearly no longer the case.
For what it is worth, liberal secularism,
too, is a religion (in the sense that it has
a set of first order principles that it seeks
to apply to the organisation of the state
and its relationship to its society). Like all
religions, liberal secularism needs its adherents to engage with its opponents on
terms by which it may persuade others that
some form of salvation can be achieved
through its programme. Liberal secularists can no longer stand above the fray
sticking their noses up at the deluded

Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

april 30, 2016

cadres of the Hindu right. Doing this will

mean taking religious politics, including
the secular liberal variant, seriously.
Secularism in India, as elsewhere,
offers a legitimate path to moving past
communalism (and hence communalbased violence) by emphasising the fundamentally individual nature of religious
adherence and the need to keep religious identity, as far as is possible, outside of the formal structures of the state.
The founders of India Republic had
wisely seen that liberal secularism was
the only legitimate basis for a pluralistic
society to coexist with a modern state
focused on development. This is an
argument, as the past few decades have
made abundantly clear, that is not selfevident to the majority of the Indian
population for whom communal mobilisation has become increasingly the norm.
In Conclusion
Liberal secularism in India needs activism beyond the salons of the elite and
ways need to be found to participate, as
one ideology among many, in the public
market of ideas. Ultimately, most Indians,
as do most people around the world,
care about immediate welfare questions
and so liberal secularists in India need

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to make the argument as to why secularism is a better path to development than

is religious politics. But none of this will
happen if liberal secularists continue to
hold lazy views of religion and the
sources of communal violence.
Simply dismissing religious violence as
a phenomenon generated by bad agents
will not do any more. Engaging in platitudes about the universality of religions
message(s) of peace will also not do. Liberals will not be able to properly speak to
the underlying causes of communalism
without first understanding what religion
really is and what its theological positions
on violence really are. Platitudes about the
universality of the peace message inherent in all religions, aside from being false,
only generate smug detachment from a society in which the message of religious
communalism is persuasive because it actually does strike legitimate cords. Looking to the state to uphold secularism in
the absence of a general consensus in the
citizenry of the republic on its virtues,
and indeed necessity, given Indias extreme religiously plural society, can no
longer suffice. The argument must be
made directly, actively and consistently as
to why secular liberalism offers the best
path for Indias developmental aspirations.

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