Relationship Between State and Religion in India: A Sphere of Indifference, Contradictions, or Engagement?

Abstract

While religious liberty has become one of the frequently deliberated and contested categories in our contemporary global world, its public presence as a state policy has had a long history in the Indian subcontinent. Tracing its origin back to Ashok’s period in third century BCE, this chapter explores the relationship between state and religion from then until now. A close look at Indian history indicates that there have been highs and lows in the relationship between the state and different religions. Conversion of rulers from one Indian religion to another and a relatively successful presence of Muslim and Christian imperial powers in India meant that the subcontinent witnessed mixed articulations of relationship (both positive and negative) between the state and different religious traditions. When a religious tradition becomes a ‘dominant’ (to employ M.N. Srinivasan’s ideas in Sanskritisation theory) religion, that is, the religion of the powerful, the empire/state’s attitude towards the religious other changes substantially. It varies from official patronage granted to certain religious traditions to destruction of famous religious sites—especially those associated with the previous crown—and from the accommodation of religious others to the persecution of religious monks and other adherents. The hostility among the Indian people towards the internal religious other would soon be directed towards the external religious other since twelfth century CE, though such an attuite was not totally incongruent to how the external rulers engaged with the religious other and their culture in most instances. In the modern era, while the constitutionally stated position of the democratic Indian state to religion includes both neutrality/indifference (i.e. Nehruvian dharma-nirapeksata) and equal treatment of all religions (i.e. Gandhian sarva-dharma-samabhava), the range of religious freedom citizens enjoy in India constitutes a wide spectrum that differs from one issue to another, from federal government to provincial state governments, and from one provincial government to another. This chapter seeks to unpack the complex relationship between the Indian democratic state and religious traditions in India in different historical periods, geographical locations, political contexts, and demographic milieus. It takes issue with the idea of political neutrality of Indian nation state as enshrined in the Indian constitution and examines other ideas such as ‘preeminent religion’ or ‘first and foremost religion’ for their scope to include different kinds of policies and legislations enacted by elected governments to address the issues and concerns of the Hindu majority in India. From the viewpoint of state-religion relationship, we can identify different ideological constellations in independent India such as the so-called secular Congress, Hindutva BJP, communist governments, anti-Brahmanic Dravidian, and other secular regional parties that were elected to power at different levels and in different places. The policies they adopted towards both the Hindu majority and the religious minorities of India can be anything but religiously neutral. It means that the relationship between secular democratic Indian nation state(s) and religions in India, as elsewhere in the world, is never a settled affair, nor is it an inactive field. It is rather a terrain of engagement and complicity between state and religion and a site of operation that accommodates contradictions of approaches and conflicts of political interests. This dynamic and ongoing relationship not only brings about an intersectional civil space negotiated between what is politically profitable, democratically desirable, and electorally possible, but also places religious citizens and their reasonings in the public square. Whichever party it may represent, the elected political class always seeks to produce, though in significantly varying degrees, an optics of neither betraying the interests of the religious majority nor disfavouring the legitimate/felt needs of the religious minority, thereby carefully crafting a rhetoric of inclusive governance. How does this rhetoric affect the adherents of different religious communities in India and how do state policies impact liberative journey of the socially excluded communities (especially the Dalit and tribal people) among the religious minorities are million-dollar questions which the chapter seeks to answer among other issues outlined above, thereby attempting to narrate the relationship story between state and religion, a story that is unique to India and its people.