Rethinking Secularism in India in the Age of Triumphant Fascism

Abstract

This essay deals with the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) to power in the 2014 National Elections, a party that is fundamentally anti-secularist and anti-democratic whose aim is to convert secular and democratic India into a Hindu Kingdom. It deals with the crisis of secularism in India and the Revolutionary Marxist response to this crisis. The methodology that it follows is the Marxist one. The leitmotiv of this paper is rather startling—Marx was not a secularist as one has hitherto imagined. It claims that a new theoretical problematic has to be sought in understanding the dilemma haunting secularism: the discourse and practice of secularism are important, and yet Marx (the exemplary humanist and revolutionary) was not a secularist as one imagines it. What we have done is a terrain shift in our study of secularism, especially on the question of the thesis of the separation of religion and the state. This essay consequently makes a distinction between ‘secularism as we know it’, or liberal secularism, and communist secularism. Besides this, the essay grounds the discourse in material social formations in India that are determined by the Asiatic mode of production and along with this mode, the caste formations that are inherent in the Indic variant of the Asiatic mode of production. By and large, the entire discourses of secularism and the rise of fascism in India determined by the ideologies of liberalism and Stalinism ignore the caste question. Thus along with the caste question, the Asiatic mode of production is also brought in, a mode of production that mainstream Marxists have almost ignored, thereby implanting Eurocentric understandings of secularism in India. We thus discover certain methodological guidelines where we develop new terms and conditions to understand an authentic ‘people's secularism’. This essay deals with the question of secularism in India as rooted in the conflict between ‘secularism from above’ that was grafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and the upper caste elites in the freedom movement against British colonialism and ‘religious politics from above’ that formed the contours of elite politics in India since 1947. In contrast to ‘secularism from above’ (or liberal secularism) and ‘religious politics from above’, this essay argues for ‘secularism from below', which shall serve as the revolutionary critique of Indian fascism.