Pew India investigation brings us back to something else Gandhi, Savarkar differed on

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Vinayak Damodar Savarkar | Savarkar.org

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IIndia’s religious diversity has once again been highlighted by the latest Pew poll – Religion in India: tolerance and segregation. Diversity, moreover, is a matter of belief in one’s religion but with a keen awareness that there are others who do not profess or do not belong to the same faith. It would be an exaggeration to call this approach “unity in diversity”, as Nehru had envisioned India’s unique nationality. Unlike Europe, but perhaps more like America, Indians undoubtedly prefer “tolerance” rather than “secularism” as a mechanism for living with religious diversity.

Tolerance, as the survey reveals in striking statistics, takes the form of controlling the taboos of catering and marriage or, in short, of everyday social life. So far as the Pew inquiry is concerned, ‘tolerance’ has therefore gone hand in hand with ‘segregation’, as religious communities overwhelmingly prefer internal uniformity and limitation beyond mixing and mixing with other distinct ones. . This blunt conclusion defies easy political and ideological moorings and legacies.

Consider, for example, that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founding ideologue of Hindutva, believed in inter-dining. In contrast, Mahatma Gandhi, the icon of Hindu-Muslim friendship and who spearheaded the global Khilafat for the imperial rights of Muslims, was fiercely opposed to meals and mixed marriages. Today’s India has therefore confirmed both the ascendancy of the Hindutva and the views of its ardent critic Gandhi on everyday social life. Greater nuance, greater complexity, and longer-term data will be needed to show whether there is in fact a strong correlation between the rise of political Hindutva and social segregation as a dominant way of life with the religious diversity.

Gandhi’s views did not prevail in a single sense. On the contrary, since 1950 and throughout India’s democratic life, religious diversity as a lived segregation has made four related issues not only controversial but viscerally salient for Indian political and social life.


Read also : Who is your neighbor? What we don’t see in the Pew India study


Women: Sobject of india experienced segregation

One, experienced segregation, tolerance or even secularism (call it what you will) mainly concerned women. Women (and the Pew survey does not specify, let alone amplify this critical element) are the main subject of religious life in India. From the stillborn Hindu bill from Ambedkar to Shah Bano, to say nothing of Roop Kanwar Sati, to the current issues of triple talaq, Sabarimala and love-jihad – all are women-centered.

Debates about religion, its legal boundaries and social policing, in short, are debates about women in India. Calling it “patriarchy” does not explain it. Not because he is not, in fact he is intensely patriarchal, but such a calculation can only be a starting point rather than a conclusion of the situation. In a recent debate on the Pew Inquiry, when I emphasized the central role of women in this debate, all of the men in the panel readily agreed that women bore the burden of India’s tolerance and segregation. But this was quickly explained as “patriarchal” and even “civilizational”, as if it was background noise or just a deep (unfazed) reality as they aimed to center and celebrate the survey results because it testified to the diversity of India.


Read also : Why did Modi’s rivals fail to challenge him? This survey of Indian religiosity has clues


Caste as segregation and individual rights

Second, segregation is indeed a caste. Separation and social distancing or the debate over mixing and brewing in India is run through by caste. There seems to be little hope or even a way out of the caste cage. The survey reveals that all religious beliefs, even those opposed for religious reasons, are governed by hierarchies and caste boundaries. Caste, as Ambedkar rightly pointed out, is the ‘antisocial social truth from India. This caste has become sclerotic, prospered and proliferated in India’s competitive democracy deserves further reflection. The strict number of surveys and censuses cannot explain the extent of the problem, much less design methods for its dismantling.

Third, both the issue of caste and making women the frontier of segregated religious diversity in India has caused groups or communities to powerfully transcend individual rights. The individual, as the Constitution declared and made manifest, was the bearer of rights. In the reality of the legal redefinition of religious life in India, and over the course of seventy years, the individual today seems entirely exhausted and defeated. Even his claims seem to be liberal piety (even “foreign”) in an environment engaged in a deep social conservatism.

Finally, and to come back to Gandhi and Savarkar, the inter-dinner goes to the heart of what has been called “assimilation”. The uniformity of cultural and social practices and total obedience to a national project of assimilation (French laïcité) are what Gandhi is opposed to. The aggressive incorporation of distinction as pursued and monitored by the state has made the Mahatma the uber-individualist, balking at inter-dinner as hypocrisy at best. Gandhi recognized them (including the conversion and shuddhi) as part of a dangerous, even violent, assimilation project that could only have one winner in India.

The Pew Inquiry, despite all the celebration of India’s religious diversity, has left the question open as to whether Savarkar and his assimilative project will win.

Dr Shruti Kapila teaches modern Indian history and world political thought at the University of Cambridge. Twitter: @shrutikapila. Opinions are personal.

(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)

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