Bilgrami on Secularism

Bilgrami believes- 

 the term ‘secularism’ is a very specific concept which emerged in a very specific and I would say defining context in Europe.

Actually the word 'secularism' was invented by a British writer named Holyoake in 1851. It had nothing at all to do with Europe but rather was aimed against the Established Church of England, Wales, and Ireland. (In Scotland, the monarch worships as a Presbyterian). Holyoake failed in his mission. Christianity remained part of the Law of England and blasphemy was a criminal offence which could attract heavy punishment.

Indian law students in England became familiar with the ideas of Holyoake (who popularised Comte's theories), Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Beasant, Herbert Spencer and other such radical thinkers. However, British India did not have an offence of blasphemy of the type for which Holyoake was sentenced. Thus any one in India was welcome to preach the gospel of Darwin and deride Religion as the 'opium of the masses' provided no riot or other public order offence resulted.

In this sense, India was and continued to be Secular. There is no Established Church nor does the votary of any sect gain special protection.

Consider the Directive Principle in the Indian Constitution regarding cow slaughter. It is not Religious in nature. It makes no mention of the beliefs or sentiments of the Hindus. Rather, it is based on some supposed economic and scientific benefit gained by having an abundant bovine population.

Bilgrami, however, thinks 'secularism' was invented on the Continent despite the fact that no European nation had that word in its vocabulary.

' if we lose sight of that originary contextual point and rationale for secularism and start re-defining it anew for each context, it makes for nothing but conceptual confusion...
So I have argued that secularism emerged in Europe to repair the damage done by religious majoritarian forms of nationalism that arose in the nation-building exercises after the Westphalian peace and the religious minoritarian backlashes against it.

Was there a single secular country in Europe between 1648 and 1789? No. Not a single one. Each had a geographically delimited Established Church- though some, like Switzerland, and Great Britain, had more than one- within its borders.
The Westphalian peace was about stopping a particular type of endemic, wholly ruinous, war- viz. Catholic vs Protestant conflict. It had absolutely  nothing to do with secularism or abolishing the crime of blasphemy or the practice of throwing atheists into prison.
Spain was one of the main players at Westphalia where it made peace with the Dutch. It continued to merrily burn heretics for a century. The Inquisition was only abolished in 1834.

Bilgrami, however, thinks that Spain was busy kissing and cuddling heretics and encouraging Buddhism and Judaism so as to 'repair the damage done by religious majoritarianism'. This is the 'genealogical context' he believes in.

And a definition of the term should keep faith with that genealogical context. What is that context?

Nations were constructed in Europe by a form of political psychology, a feeling for the nation that came later to be called ‘nationalism’.

Nonsense. Every single nation in Europe arose either out of an expansionary monarchy or, as in Switzerland, or, later on, Greece and the Balkans, out of a rebellion against an Imperial power. No nation was constructed out of a 'feeling for the nation' till after the Great War. Ireland is an example. So is India.

But well before that nomenclature was found for it, this feeling was generated by finding an external enemy within the territory (the Jews, the Irish Catholics, and in general the Catholics in Protestant countries, the Protestants in Catholic countries) and despising it and subjugating it as ‘the Other’, claiming the nation was ‘ours’, not ‘theirs’.

There were Protestants in Catholic majority areas of Ireland. Yet Ireland did not become a nation. Why? Because English soldiers were prepared to unleash a reign of terror upon an unarmed population. Which 'external enemy within the territory' did Prussia or Piedmont face? None at all. Yet the former unified Germany and the latter unified Italy. More generally, an enemy within one's borders is 'internal', not 'external'.

Is there any European country of which it could be said that National feeling was generated by finding a sectarian enemy within its territory? England expelled the Jews in 1290. Did it thereby become a Nation? No. Edward I squandered Anglo Saxon blood and treasure to keep his feudal possession of Acquitaine. Longshanks may have spoken some English but the first King to take his oath in English was Henry IV more than a century after the expulsion of the Jews.

Nazi Germany certainly persecuted the Jews. But it was already a Nation. Indeed, German Jews had demonstrated the highest patriotism in the Great War yet were scapegoated by the General Staff simply as a matter of expediency.

Much later when statistics and numerical forms of discourse came to be deployed in the study of society, and notions of majority and minority came into currency, this European form of nation-building came to be called ‘majoritarianism’.

Nonsense.  Majoritarianism is only meaningful if universal suffrage exists. But this is a relatively recent development. It is not the case that 'statistics and numerical forms of discourse' had any salience prior to Woodrow Wilson's 14 point program. Even then, it was soon discovered, ethnic cleansing works wonders to very quickly change demographic reality. Majorities can turn into minorities quite easily- ask the Palestinians. What matters is who has the better guns and more ruthless soldiers.

And naturally there were (often violent) minoritarian backlashes to this phenomenon. As a result, it then came to be felt that this religion-based civil strife (between majoritarianism and minoriarianian reactions to it that was the method of nationalism in Europe) could only be constrained and repaired if religion itself was put at a remove from the institutions and laws that make for governance. Thus it is that secularism emerged in a very specific context of post-Westphalian Europe.

Every word of this is utterly false. Religion was disintermediated because it was worthless shite. People stopped believing some venal priest could damn one to Hell if you didn't give him money. On the other hand, smart clerics could always find a way to garner support and ensure their own position- e.g by setting up excellent Schools and Colleges. In other words, Religion was able to get by without the threat of damnation in the same way that any other organised interest group could flourish.

No secularism emerged in post Westphalian Europe.  On the contrary, the historian R.G Asch concludes that- 'by defining the confessional rights of rulers and subjects, the Peace of Westphalia tended to perpetuate confessional divisions in the Empire, and hindered the process of privatizing religious differences, which became the usual basis for the development of religious freedom in the other multi-confessional societies of Europe during the eighteenth century.' 

The power of Religion fluctuated in different kingdoms according to the whim of the monarch or the temper of the Prelacy. Prussia, under Fredrick the Great, was quite tolerant for its time. But, a century later, Prussia was also the centre of the anti-Catholic 'kulturkampf'. Secularisation or laicisation was a marked feature of nineteenth century European polities which were preoccupied by the threat posed by Revolutionary sentiments on the one hand and the need to build up State power and authority for military purposes on the other. To a certain extent, the territorial possessions of the Papacy became an obstacle for 'have not' nations-in-the-making like Germany and Italy. Emperor Napoleon III had to be defeated before the Papacy was shorn of its territory. Subsequently, there was the fear the Catholic Church would seek to revenge itself upon the new Nations that came into being. However, the valour shown by Catholic officers and soldiers in the Great War dispelled fears regarding Catholic 'disloyalty'. The same point could of course be made about the Jews who were nevertheless scapegoated. However, the Jews were much less numerous.

England never put 'religion itself...at a remove from the institutions and laws that make for governance.' It was quite unnecessary to do so. The Whigs were able to appoint Latitudinarian Bishops. The Church itself proved willing to give up excessive wealth and permit legal and administrative reforms. Gladstone, notoriously a High Church man, was able to disestablish the Irish Church thus making a similar move in Wales inevitable. Finally, during the Thirties, Oswald Moseley and his Fascists campaigned against residual tithe obligations in rural, Depression hit, England. The subsequent Tithe Act saw the Government pay off the Church for its entitlements while pushing the cost onto affected farmers in terms of long term taxation. 

To this day, Bishops of the Established Church sit in the Upper House of Parliaments as 'Lords Spiritual'. So what? They are sensible people and are well worth listening to. Speaking generally, they are very well educated and have a profound knowledge of English history. Thus they are aware that Religion has always had a Social and highly utile context.  Indeed, the Anglican Bishop- like his peers in every other Religion- believes that sacred duties encompass a highly secular concern with bread and butter issues affecting the most vulnerable and marginalised sections of Society.

There are many 'Left-Liberals' in the Anglican Church. They will listen sympathetically to the ranter who holds Religion to be 'the Opium of the Masses'. However, they never lose sight of their own Church's sacred mission to the 'fex urbis'- the dregs of the City- for whom no Prophet has come entirely in vain.

And if we lose sight of that originary contextual point and rationale for secularism and start re-defining it anew for each context, it makes for nothing but conceptual confusion.

But that is what Bilgrami is doing. He has taken up a word invented by a mid Victorian Englishman who was punished for blasphemy and has applied it to some imaginary event which supposedly occurred in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century.

So I find all these efforts by Indian academics who claim that there is an Indian secularism or those who say secularism existed in Ashoka’s reign or in Mughal India or in mediaeval Andalusia, are confusing other things with secularism. There is a great tendency among us to try and say that all things they find to be good are the same good thing. That is a form of confusion and conflation.

No it isn't. If a country has no law against blasphemy and no Established Religion then it is secular. England is more secular now it has abolished the offence of blasphemy. Northern Ireland isn't as much because it still has a blasphemy law.

Bilgrami is of Indian origin. He is an academic. What he has said is true only of himself. But then he probably thinks he is American because America had an 'external enemy'- the Indian- 'within its borders' and so it became a Nation. That's the real story of the Boston Tea Party. The Americans were killing Red Indians and cuddling and kissing Mad King George's booted Hessians.

And what I’ve been advising is that we should understand secularism in the Indian context as just that, a correction to the strife that emerges out of such majoritarian nationalism.

Why not understand secularism in the Indian context by referring to the country most like it- viz. Pakistan? Why did Pakistan become less secular in the Eighties? The 'strife that emerges out of majoritarian nationalism' had broken up the country. But that strife was based on language, not religion. The Bengali Muslim was as devout, if not more so, than the Punjabi or Pakhtoon. Few Bengali Muslims touched alcohol whereas General Yahya was off his head on drink.

Zia, by contrast, was an abstainer and had solid middle class family values. He saw religion as a unifying factor and thus promoted it above 'secular' values. No doubt, there was a geopolitical element to his thinking. However, the fact is, Bhutto type 'Socialism' had a destabilising and divisive effect. People of good family were thrown into jail for no reason. Industrialists who had done a lot for the country were accused of looting the nation. It was Bhutto, not some General, who classified the Qadianis as Kaffirs. Zia may have employed brutal methods but it was a case of kill or be killed. The 'Secular' PLO handed Bhutto's sons missiles capable of bringing down the President's plane. I have no idea why they thought this was a cool thing to do. Did they think the Pakistani Army would collapse and start weeping and renounce Religion?

Bilgrami is puzzled that people find solace in Religion and that it draws people together so that they can do worthwhile work. This type of collective work creates strong bridging and bonding ties which express themselves as patriotism and the desire for improved public good provision at all levels of Government.
Countries where religious ties sweeten social intercourse and enable beneficial Social Capital formation start to rise up on their own. Colonies where no such religious ethos develops remain sunk in poverty.

It is a real question when such a form of nationalism really set in in India.

Nonsense! Modern Hindu Nationalism emerges from the 1890's onward and continues to serve as an ideological cement and social solvent- more particularly with reference to regional and caste based divisions.

I actually don’t believe that it really set in deeply till the 1980s, and that is why there is only marginal use of the term ‘secularism’ in the period of the national movement because nationalism in India was not intended to be of the European variety that I just mentioned.

Indian nationalism was of the Irish variety. Ireland is in Europe. Nehruvian India was as dull and puritanical as Da Valera's Ireland.

It was rather an anti-imperialism that tried (and to some extend succeeded) to mobilize inclusively bringing in Muslims as well as Hindus into the mass movement for freedom.

It was a racket aimed at getting jobs for the boys and patronage for contractors and tariff protection for industrialists financing the show. The Muslims, who were highly talented and had a good ethos, fell prey to 'minoritarian' thinking- but, at least initially, so did the Hindus. The first type of collective political action under the Raj featured caste based 'Sabhas'. Thus the Bihari Kayastha had his own Sabha demanding protection from the Bengali Kayastha and so forth. Young reform minded people- like Rajendra Prasad- saw however that this sort of 'minoritarianism' vitiated relationships within the caste while alienating those outside it. The conservative Bihari Kayastha would have no truck with the reformer who wanted to do away with 'purdah' and the taboo on crossing the black water. However, the moment Gandhi came along and prominent Kayasthas like Brajkishore Prasad sacrificed everything to work for the uplift of the masses, all Bihari Kayasthas could unite in a feeling of pride and emulation of such leaders. 'Minorities' are Society's black holes. They pull you in and crush you and swallow up all 'Enlightenment'. The Muslims in Hindu majority areas who trusted to the genius of Jinnah and Liaquat etc found out, too late, that they had cut their own throats. True, some who emigrated to Pakistan did get a better life. However, Pakistan too was capable of pursuing stupid economic policies because it too had world class economists.

On the other hand, those Muslims who simply worked for the betterment of the masses found they had nothing to reproach themselves with. Hindus also learnt that voting for a Brahman or Kayastha because you are of a similar caste is foolish. You have to vote for people who know how to raise up the masses because they themselves come from humble backgrounds. At the same time we have to recognise that religions which are based on 'costly signals' (e.g. which practice tithing) can develop a better commercial ethos and wider trust based networks. Let them rise up and regulate their own institutions. Commerce is not a crime. Theft is. Socialism does not mean stealing everything you can get your hands on and then giving a pious sermon about Secularism. True Socialism means a proper scientific invangination of the diametrics of the post-Kristevan Chora within a wider context of gender sensitivity, environmental sustainability and murli-ing Manohar Joshi in a secular post-Westphalian manner.

No doubt there were figures like Savarkar who wanted to mimic European nationalism, but it would be a travesty to say (not that it has not been said, Perry Anderson’s recent invective being an example) that Gandhi’s and Nehru’s and many others’ efforts were no different, in the end, from a Hindu majoriarain nationalism. 

Of course, the partition is proof that their form of inclusive nationalism was not in the end successful.

What? The Hindus get a Hindu majority country without any separate electorates or other constitutional protection for Muslims and you say they were not successful? What more could they have dreamed of?

But the reasons for its failure are very complex and varied.

Muslims in Hindu majority areas made a mistake in trusting Jinnah. They were supposed to get reservations more than proportionate to their population which would have translated into a high Banzhaf power index. Since there were plenty of smart Muslim politicians, the Hindus might well have been perfectly happy that this community was over-represented. I am perfectly happy to see Muslim actors do well in Bollywood and Muslim cricketers get chosen for the National team because I like Bollywood movies and care a lot about test matches. I want to be able to vote for a Muslim who says- 'I will be the best M.P ever. Then I will be the best Minister. After that, I'm going to be Chief Minister and in ten years transform this State into the most progressive in India. After that, I will be P.M.'  I don't want to vote for a Muslim who says 'I'm friends with so-and-so. A vote for me is a vote for him.' How can I be sure this Muslim is not wrong in his choice of patron? What is to stop him accepting some sinecure and forgetting about the promises that were made to get him elected? I don't want a guy joining the cricket team who is the Captain's best friend. I want a guy who is determined to become Captain and crush Australia in the Test Series.

What I am sure is false is that its failure gives a kind of retroactive proof that religious majoritarianism and religious minoritarian backlashes to it defined Indian society and defined the anti-imperialist nationalism of the freedom movement.

How is this false? It is what happened. I suppose what Bilgrami means is that this course was not inevitable. Certainly, if Hindus had spent all their time quarrelling with each other inside their Caste Associations about 'purdah' and 'kala pani' and never developed any sort of Pan-Indian patriotism or sense of Social Responsibility, then they would have been too frightened of Muslim domination to permit the British to leave.

I think we need a distinction that is very seldom made by social theorists between antecedents and roots. I have been trying to make this distinction central to our understanding of the issues around secularism in India. Antecedents are earlier phenomena that have affinities to something that occurs later. Roots are the organic causal grounds of something that occurs later. I would argue that the Mahasabhite elements in the Congress-led national movement are mere antecedents to the kind of (European style) Hindu majoritarian nationalism we have seen since the late 1980s and disgracefully flourishing now in contemporary Indian society today.

Modern Hindu Nationalism is about getting rid of stupid caste based, or regional, prejudices to improve life chances for everyone. Some Mahasabha types are clearly stupid and rustic. We want to disintermediate them. The Nehru dynasty appeared to be helping us and so we were loyal to them. Then they lost their touch and kept getting assassinated. Still we were afraid the BJP would turn out to be a bunch of cow worshipping morons. Atal reassured us. Modi went one better and did a good job in Gujarat. That is the whole story. Roots don't matter at all. What are Sonia Ji's roots? Who cares? She did a good job by putting in Manmohan. If only Rahul had shaped up and taken over the Commonwealth Games- the way his dad took over the Asian games- we would have given him a chance to prove himself. After all- as he now reminds us- he is a Brahman and a Shaivite. Nothing wrong with them roots.

Q. How are philosophical questions about the nature of law bound up with debates between the secularist and multiculturalist?The term ‘multiculturalism’ emerged relatively recently in academic discussions. It emerged in the West in the third quarter of the 20th century, primarily as a result of political, social, and legal issues around ‘minorities’ that had accumulated in European countries (though academics in Canada came to be it’s most zealous students) as a result of large-scale migrations to them from their erstwhile colonies ever since the Second World War when they were reconstructing their war-torn economies and needed labour power (after loss of male lives in the war), especially for the most menial forms of labour. If you read the first few pages of Essay 2 in my book Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, I try to explain why multiculturalism as a concept seemed necessary because the concept of secularism, despite the fact that it was meant to address the damage done by (religious) majoritarianism, seemed insufficient to address the demands of minorities. 

Bilgrami lives in a world where concepts become necessary to address social problems. The rest of us think concepts are simply solutions to a coordination problem. So, rather than say 'fuck r we to do with them rag-heads?", we can speak of the problems of multiculturalism in the age of Social Media.
But talking like this solves nothing. Enforcing the law does.

  In recent years, as a result, the two concepts are seen to be in opposition to one another.   And secularism is often used as a stick with which to beat the idea of multiculturalism, a stick wielded not only by right-wing nationalists in Europe but also by liberals. In fact, the diagnosis I give in my book for why philosophers like Charles Taylor want to re-define secularism today as merely a kind of neutrality and equi-distance between different religions and cultures (i.e., as something that is virtually synonymous with multiculturalism) is that if you equate secularism with multiculturalism by definition, then the former cannot be wielded as a stick to beat the latter with. This is an interesting theoretical move, not because it is correct, but because it shows the fear among intellectuals to say what might in some contexts be true:, viz., secularism is doing bad thing.

A problem arose because of competitive virtue signalling which pretended to be putting the needs of the poor woman from a particularly abject minority above everything else because of some supposed historic crime we are all complicity in. Naturally, people found it annoying and reacted by voting for Trump or Farage or anyone else willing to call a spade a fucking jigaboo.

 On the question of law, one issue has simply been this: Can minorities be exempted from certain laws on cultural or religious grounds? (Can Sikhs in Britain be exempted from the law requiring that all wear helmets when riding on a motor-cycle?   Can laws or rights enshrining ‘free speech’ be put aside if an Indo-Anglian novelist publishes a book or a European journalist publishes a cartoon that a religious culture finds ‘blasphemous’?)

The short answer is 'Yes- if there is a binding precedent and a fundamental right is at stake. Absent such a precedent and in matters affecting third parties the answer is- No! Don't be silly. Next question'.

Secularists give one answer, a negative one, multiculturalists give another.

Which is why multi-cultis are on the run everywhere you look.

And what I try and do in the essay I mentioned above is to analyze the two different concepts of law and legislation that these two positions assume in disputing each other.

One concept is that the law is the law. The other is that it isn't at all.

Some, famously Dicey, think that it is in the nature of a law that it applies to everyone and you can’t make exceptions without being arbitrary. Why do they think this? What is it about the concept of a law that it is seen to have such a form of generality? And what alternative conception of legislation do multiculturalists assume in denying secularists their understanding of the law? These are questions that need to be pursued with some care. That essay merely begins to do so by laying out some alternatives philosophical conceptions of the nature of law and legislation to explain this dispute.

Do these philosophical conceptions themselves have any legal validity- i.e. could they be used in making a persuasive argument in a court of law? If yes, then they are not philosophical at all. If not, they are worthless.