What we owe to the Mahatma (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 1 : Society
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Secularism

Context

•  Two related but equally distinctive conceptions of secularism developed in India:
•  one constitutional, the principled distance model;
•  The other, the communal harmony model, attributed to the Mahatma.

Secularism in India and Europe

Secularism in Europe

•  The background of the emergence of political secularism in Europe is profound religious homogenisation — dissenters, and adherents of non-dominant religions, were expelled or exterminated during and after the wars of religion.
•  Rulers publicly confessed allegiance to one of the many churches in these predominantly single-religion societies, thereby consolidating a strong alliance between state and the dominant church.
•  Trouble began, however, when this church became increasingly politically meddlesome and socially oppressive.
•  The key issue then was how to tame the power of this church. The state’s disentanglement from the dominant church (church-state separation) was necessary to realise a number of goals, including the enhancement of individual liberty and equality.
•  But for this secularism, tackling religious diversity was simply not an issue, because it had already been liquidated in all kinds of ethically undesirable ways.

Secularism in India

•  By contrast, in India, deep religious diversity was not an optional extra but part of its social, cultural and historical landscape.
•  Gandhi understood this and never tired of stating it: India is “perhaps one nation in the ancient world which had recognised cultural democracy, whereby it is held that the roads to one and the same God are many, but the goal was one, because God was one and the same.
•  The roads are as many as there are individuals in the world... The various religions were as so many leaves of a tree; they might seem different but at the trunk they are one”.
•  Gandhi dismissed the idea that there could ever be one religion in the world, a uniform religious code, as it were, for all human kind.

Deep sociability

•  This was viable because for Gandhi, all humans had a fundamental desire for what might be called deep sociability.
•  They value human relations as an end in itself. They desire a constructive relationship with others.
•  The world’s religious diversity, the impossibility of there ever being one religion for humankind, makes mutual respect, equal regard and communal harmony a necessity.
•  Gandhi believed that this can become a reality by virtue of the human quality of deep sociability.

Gandhian secularism

•  Gandhi felt that a large part of the responsibility for maintaining communal harmony lies with communities themselves.

•  But there are times when this communally sustained harmony is disturbed, even breaks down.

•  When this happens, the state has to step in. And for this to be possible, it cannot already be aligned to any one religion but must be distant from all.

•  Secularism then marks a certain comportment of the state whereby it distances itself from all religio-philosophical perspectives in order to promote a certain quality of sociability and fraternity between communities.

•  This makes Gandhian secularism distinctive.

•  Unlike modern Western secularisms that separate church and state for the sake of individual freedom and equality and have place for neither community nor fraternity.

•  The Gandhian conception demands that the state be secular for the sake of better relations between members of all religious communities, especially if they are mutually estranged.

•  The Gandhian conception is indispensable in times of religious disharmony.

Way forward

•  Yet, the realisability of Gandhian secularism depends on faith in popular wisdom traditions which in turn is sustained by a certain idea of popular moral agency.
•  When good, god-loving, ordinary men and women free from the trappings of power, wealth and fame — precisely what makes them ordinary and good — get together, they release non-violent creative energies that morally sustain and improve our world.
•  It seems that such men and women have gone missing in our times.

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Prelims Questions:

Q1. With reference to the ‘Vigyanika’, consider the following statements:
1. It is an International Science Literature Festival.
2. It is being coordinated by the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Science and Technology

Select the correct answer using the code given below.
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: A
Mains Questions:
Q1. What do you mean by the concept of Gandhian secularism? Do you think it is relevant in present context? Critically comment.