http://indiatoday.digitaltoday.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16154&issueid=73 *Religious beliefs determine Political Identity in India. The only way to escape it is if people exit their birth communities*
Remember the advertisement for a mobile phone in which a young sarpanch ends a feud in his village between two warring factions, by replacing all names with phone numbers? "Kya idea hai, sirji,"- no group identity, no group conflict. From irrational group affiliations to rational unique individuals in one administrative stroke. An idea that could transform India? Snappy ad, yes. But snappy advertisements are an art form-it would be a very foolish consumer who takes them literally. When the French government banned the wearing of head-scarves (and other "conspicuous religious symbols") in state-run schools, my students at Delhi University found it odd and puzzling. As did most Indians, I imagine. In the French context it was an attempt to enforce the absolute separation of state and religion, but in India, it looked very much like state interference in religious beliefs. Secularism has taken different forms in different contexts. In Indian secularism, the state treats all religions equally; in French secularism, the state maintains strict separation from religion. Of course, the latter requires the continuous regulation of what constitutes religious as opposed to non-religious practices/institutions, in order to decide whether the state should or should not be involved. This means, paradoxically, that the state is continuously engaging with religion. While French democracy enshrines the abstract citizen at its centre, most non-Western democracies have intertwined group identity with individual citizenship. Your Indian identity is shot through with your regional, caste, religious and linguistic loyalties. The right to wear a turban or a head-scarf to school is in fact precisely the test of secularism in India. The French state thinks like the young sarpanch-eliminate the public expression of difference, and you eliminate conflict. But of course, as French suburbs burnt in November 2005, in violence that combined two challenges to abstract citizenship, race and religion, it was the violent imperialist history of France that stalked the streets. *Conflict is not produced by difference, it is the failure to acknowledge difference, especially difference arising from a history of unequal power relations*. *Take that phone number-far from ending difference as it claims (na jaat paat, na bhed bhav), it merely institutes a new set of differences-a mobile phone number, a particular company's mobile phone number.* >From what the dictionary says, religion is "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs." So why should the state, which is about the political organisation of human societies, have anything to do with it? The trick, of course, lies in that bit about "ritual observances" and "moral code." No religion is a religion unless there is more than one individual following those ritual observances and that moral code. There has to be some way of ensuring observance. This requires an internal policing mechanism. Since there is more than one religious community in all modern societies today, the observances and moral code of one may impinge on those of another. And since all religious communities today have long histories of conflict with other religious communities, every moment of the present is already loaded with buttons that go straight to that history. Click. Replay. So if any degree of order is to be maintained in society, this means an external policing mechanism. Religious communities have institutions that own property and control resources. *In addition in India, the laws of the religious community into which you are born determine how family property will be inherited—which needs both internal and external policing mechanisms. Internal policing mechanisms can be institutions like caste panchayats*. But more often, policing is all-pervasive and amorphous, conducted typically through families. The external policing mechanism is the state. What distinguishes it from other institutions is that it has a monopoly over legitimate means of coercion. It can force you to pay taxes and prevent you from avenging the murder of a loved one. This state is not located above all religious conflict. It is by no means a neutral umpire. So its policing is meant to achieve specific results, depending on what political capital is at stake. So let's ask that question again-should the state be completely divorced from religion? Answer number one: as we saw in France, a complete divorce is impossible. In order to maintain the separation, the state must continually define and engage with "the religious". Answer number two: if it were possible, what does it mean to remove the external force while leaving the internal mechanisms intact? There would then be no outside to religious identity, no space to contest the tyrannies of communities. *There has to be an outside into which religious dissenters can exit. In that case, should the state penetrate religion totally, reform all religions along the lines of constitutional values and citizenship rights?* But how to trust the state which has its own vested interests against selected groups of citizens? People displaced by dams have no citizenship rights; nor do people who do not have sex the "natural" way. Besides, India is a democracy. So what people think matters, especially if those people invoke religion, and they certainly will if the state tries any such thing. Of course, they can be silenced. Both France and Turkey follow this strategy. But that's just slamming the lid down tightly on a cauldron about to explode. You see the problem. *What we call religious identity today in India is constituted by state practices. Take away the state, and you have no religious identity. Religious beliefs, yes, identity no.* What your marriage means, how you will inherit property, how your children will be assigned guardians-all of this is determined by laws governing the religious community into which you were accidentally born. These laws are administered by the state. In modern democracies, religious communities are political units because numbers are crucial in order to have access to power. Why, otherwise, would it matter if tribal people convert to Christianity? Or Dalits to Buddhism? Because it is an act of secession, a blatantly political move. It is a deliberate exit from one community into another. It is misleading to think of "religion" as a private business between you and your God(s). If it were, a woman walking into the Sabarimala shrine would not shake the foundations of Hinduism. Private beliefs are private, but "religion" is not private. *If you do have private religious beliefs, they have nothing to do with your religious identity, which is public.* One way to escape this inexorable gaze of the state would be to slide under its radar. If more and more people chose to exit the communities of their birth, and evaded state regulation of their private lives, there would be spaces of relative freedom. The implications of living like that are huge, but it's worth thinking about. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. 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