Keep religion away from the state


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Introspection in the wake of the Peshawar attack suggests that mixing the state and faith is dangerous and threatens the very fabric of a secular society

 

Bangaluru, Dec 19, 2014: The horrible massacre in Peshawar this week has unleashed a gust of wind beneath the wings of bigots. While some point to how the child victims were from military families (suggesting poetic justice for Pakistani armed forces that promoted terrorists), others have been using it as ammunition to attribute the massacre to religious tenets. 

 

If the assailants were from the Pakistani Taliban purporting to wage religious war, one should also remember that every single victim was Muslim too. The attack is not about religion. It is about the attempt to terrorise in the name of religion - something that bigots of every faith worldwide seek to do by hijacking religion.

 

The collective grief across humanity is a stark reminder of how valuable the secular character of the Constitution of India has been for our society. India’s understanding of the word "secular", like many matters Indian, is different from how it is understood elsewhere in the world. It is more about wearing a badge of non-discrimination, than about the State pretending that religion does not exist. 

 

The word "secular" was inserted into the Preamble of the Indian Constitution only in 1976 (during the Emergency). Looking back, it was an important move. It was three years after Pakistan re-wrote her Constitution for the third time since 1956, endorsing that she would be an Islamic State. The concept of Pakistan was an Islamic State in which minorities would be tolerated - an example that some in India want to emulate - with a majoritarian religious state that condescends to tolerate minorities.

 

It is the deeply divisive effect of such an approach that led to the dissolution of the Israeli Parliament just about ten days ago. The right-wing Prime Minister headed a fragile coalition that included parties that had won elections with a mandate of pursuing peace. Yet, he wanted to shove down a law that would enshrine Judaism in Israel’s constitutional laws to officially treat non-Jews as second-class citizens. Contrary to popular Indian belief, today, Muslim and Christian Arabs indeed can and do hold constitutional positions in Israel, which would have been disturbed. 

 

A couple of years ago, Orthodox Christian politicians started a campaign to amend the Russian Constitution (which officially recognises freedom of religion) to insert a clause that reads: "Orthodox Christianity is the basis of national and cultural originality of Russia". Even within Christianity there is enormous conflict between Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians. It is in this environment that the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita was sought to be banned by right wing Christians in a Russian province, and the constitutional courts rejected the ban.

 

Even a benign and compassionate faith like Buddhism, famed for convincing emperors to abjure war and violence, has led to massacres when mixed with matters of State. A Burmese Buddhist monk was featured by Time as the "Burmese Bin Laden" in a cover story titled "The Face of Buddhist Terror" when Muslims were slaughtered.

 

A republic is typically expected to be founded on reasoned bargain and dialogue within a society to arrive at a societal contract. On the other hand, by necessity, faith transcends reason. Over time, faiths erode, giving way to cults. Therefore, mixing the State and faith is a recipe for disaster. 

 

When the state bears a faith, the healthy tension that would keep a constitutional republic on its toes often translates into an unhealthy tension between the law and the religion, with one disregarding the other. To keep the religionists happy, Saudi Arabia is forced to be glacial in its pace of social change. In Israel, although the Chief Rabbi asked Jews not to pray at the disputed Temple Mount, bigots kept sending worshippers, fanning conflict and a hike in casualties. Religionists typically take up arms against the State when ignored. Like right-wing Christian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik did in 2011, exploding a bomb and meticulously killing nearly a hundred in a bid to fight Islam. 

 

The Dalai Lama recently observed that religion has become a divisive force. He has segregated the Tibetan "government in exile" from his spiritual role. Our own PM has had to reprimand his flock for getting distracted by religion from his poll-winning development agenda. That is the only way to go. 




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