Religion in South Asian politics

Religion has become an important player in the political development of South Asia

I will begin with a discussion of India before going on but briefly top their nations in the Subcontinent. Having tried hard to create a nation out of extreme diversity, India had initially succeeded. That was the conclusion reached by Indian-American historian Sunil Khilnani in his book, The Idea of India. The thesis developed in the book was based on the assumption that India had created a system of governance that had, by and large, accommodated religion, language, caste and ethnic adversity into political economic structures that were inclusive. The Indian constitution whose principal author was the untouchable lawyer Ambedkar granted several rights to the people who were not mainstream Hindus. This began to change, first gradually and then quickly as Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained political power.

Modi, after having served as the Chief Minister of Gujarat in India’s west, became prime minister in 2014. By winning the majority of seats in Lok Sabah, the lower house of the Indian parliament, Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was able to form a government of its own. Previous administrations were coalitions of several parties with Congress in the lead. Modi came to Delhi with a reputation of being a Hindu communal leader. In 2002, a fire in a train killed 59 Hindu pilgrims. Although there was uncertainty about the cause of the fire, violent Hindu mobs targeted the Muslim community, leaving more than 1,000 people dead, several burned alive. Modi, as Chief Minister, could have prevented the slaughter but he looked the other way, allowing the mob to pick up Muslims from their houses.

By winning a larger majority in the 2019 elections compared to the one in 2014, Prime Minister Modi and the BJP decided that India was ready to adopt Hindutva as the governing philosophy. This approach held that India was a Hindu nation and should, therefore, base governance on the Hindutva concept of governing. Adopting that as the governing approach, India began to give a low status to minority religions even when their numbers were large as was the case with the Muslim population. In 2021, the numbers of Muslims were estimated at 200 million in a population of 1.4 billion people.

Hindu extremists in Indian politics sharpened their attacks on Muslims, encouraged by senior functionaries in the Modi government and the BJP. According to a report filed on February 8, 2022, by New York Times journalists from the city of Haridwar, “before a packed audience and thousands watching on line, the monks had called for violence against the country’s minority Muslims. The monks’ speeches in one of the holiest cities promoted a genocidal campaign to ‘kill two million of them’ and urged an ethnic cleansing of the type that targeted Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.” The event was organised by Yati Narsinghanand, a Hindu extremist, who continued to make speeches that were regarded as spreading hate. He saw India’s Muslims as the enemies of the Hindu state and, given their higher birth rate compared to the Indian average, was likely to turn India into a Muslim state within a decade or two.

Once regarded as fringe elements in Indian politics, the extremists were more blatantly taking their message into the mainstream. This provoked hate in a push to reshape India’s constitutionally protected secular republic into a Hindu state. Modi remained silent. “You have persons giving hate speech, actually calling for genocide of an entire group, and we find reluctance of the authorities to book these people,” Rohinton Fali Nariman, a recently retired Indian Supreme Court judge, said in public lecture. “Unfortunately, the other higher echelons of the ruling party are not only being silent on hate speech, but almost endorsing it.”

Hindu extremists have celebrated Nathuram Godse, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin. Pooja Sahkun Pandey, a monk at the Haridwar temple, held reenactments of Gandhi’s assassination, firing a bullet into his effigy as blood runs down. Godse was a member of the Rashtriya Swamyamsevak Sangh, RSS, a century-old rightwing Hindu group that borrowed heavily from the Nazi Party in Germany. Modi is also a member of the RSS. The current campaign was led by Narsinghananad, an extremist, who gained attention following the adoption by Parliament of a citizenship amendment seen as discriminatory against Muslims. When the Muslim community protested, Narsinghananad called for violence using the language of a “final battle”. He had no problem encouraging his followers to murder Muslims. “They are Jihadis and we will have to finish them off.” His agenda, and of those who agreed with him, was to rework the Indian political system. “This Constitution will be the end of Hindus, all one billion Hindus,” he said in one address. “Whoever believes in this system, in this Supreme Court, in these politicians, in this Constitution, in this army and police – they will die a dog’s death.”

The next test for the rise of Hinduism came in February 2022 when Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and one of the most impoverished one, began a month-long voting process to elect a new provincial legislature. Modi had given the job of chief minister of the state to Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk. He was regarded by some as a potential successor to the prime minister. He went on television to cast the election in terms of “80 versus 20” – a thinly veiled reference to the rough percentage of Hindis in the state compared with Muslims. Would this approach work for the BJP? It did. The BJP won the state although with a narrower majority it had in the earlier provincial assembly.

Coinciding with the elections in Uttar Pradesh were those in several other Indian states including the one in the state of Punjab that neighbours Pakistan. There, the BJP lost to a small political party, Aam Adami Party, that governed Delhi, the Indian capital. It is not surprising that the appeal of Hindutva did not work in the Indian Punjab as the state has a large presence of Sikhs in the population. India’s Sikh population has been restive for decades. Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister at the time, was assassinated by her Sikh guards after she ordered the military to take over the Sikh temple in Amritsar that, along with several places in Pakistan, are the holiest sites for the Sikh religion.

The holiest is the temple in Kartarpur, two miles inside Pakistan from the Indian border. Pakistan decided to rebuild parts of the Kartarpur gurdwara and allow the Indian Sikh citizens to approach it without going through the hassle of procuring visa to enter Pakistan. The moved was welcomed by the Sikh community. Also attracted to the site are the members of the large Sikh diasporas including those in Canada and the United States.

Religion has not only caused a major upheaval in Indian politics, it has also entered India’s relations with Pakistan. Religion has also raised its head in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s neighbour in the northwest of the country. There, the new Taliban government has declared that it would be governed according to the principles laid down in the Sharia. A third neighbour, Iran, is already a state run by Islamic clerics. Religion, in other words, has become an important player in the political development of South Asia.