Secularism is now the bedrock of Hindu scepticism about their entire intellectual and spiritual heritage and the widespread disdain for their own ancient traditional rituals.
When one thinks of the advance of European secularism, we remember the great philosophers and scientists who disputed scriptural certainties to assert the supremacy of reason and scientific empirical knowledge. However, secular ideology was preceded by the supremacy of a Christian worldview for almost 1,600 years. Christianity had become the undisputed state ideology of Rome by the third quarter of the 4th century AD. The recent work of historian Professor Peter Heather of Cambridge University, affirms the forceful promotion of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Imperium. It achieved exclusive ideological sway in the decades following its inauguration by Emperor Constantine in 312 AD and doctrinal formalisation by him, rather than the church, at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. In subsequent centuries, brutal military campaigns remained the modus operandi for enforcing the edict of Christ, whether in the Germanic lands by the formidable iconic Holy Roman Emperor, Charlamagne (slaughtering 30,000 German pagans) beyond in the Slavic lands of eastern Europe during the Middle Ages and the Americas, but its spread faltered in Bharat.
The onset of its substitution by secularism in Europe, following the 18th century Enlightenment, was associated with one profound collateral sociopolitical outcome, the consequence of its unprecedented intellectual dynamic. Religion was not repudiated as such, but an attempt began to consign it to the private domain. Isaac Newton, emblematic of the triumph of scientific reason, was a deeply committed anti Trinitarian of Arian conviction. The pioneer philosopher polymath of modern Europe, Renee Descartes, sought to affirm the fundamental integrity of Christian truth by arguing some a priori human knowledge, beyond the empirical scientific, could only be of divine origin. Yet, the long and highly consequential retreat of European Christianity had begun. Its historical advance as the official state ideology, despite occasional political setback, had remained unstoppable well beyond the 19th century progress of scientific ideas.
Nevertheless, the unthinking dominance of a scientific temper and the scepticism associated with the secularism that was replacing it did not penetrate popular mass consciousness unequivocally. An aside on the effectiveness of Christian ideology for rulers is its two-fold ontology. The first was one single fount of earthly monarchical divinity, with Jesus and an Almighty as its exclusive source, with all alternatives and divergences condemned as apostasy and advocates killed. It thus automatically and irrefutably delegitimised all rival divine claimants to rulership, the drawback of polytheism, which therefore proved dispensable. The second potent feature was the person of the emperor and monarch as the embodiment of divine rule and anointed by the grace of the Almighty as well. These two features are more unquestionably also characteristic of Islam and why rulers of communities with less exclusivist faiths were often the first to embrace it in most societies that were to subsequently become fully Islamised.
All political orders originate through the use of political power, which invariably means force of arms, but also espouse ideological endorsement as the essential counterpart for durable, legitimacy and cajoling voluntary popular compliance. The modern European political class of the 18th century supplemented existing Christian ideology eventually for the right to rule with “nationalism”. Its essential European ideological political incarnation was the success of massive imperial conquest to demonstrate racial supremacy as well. The masses of European society proved highly receptive to this depiction of their anointed, privileged place in the world. It also constituted an essential ideological admixture to sustain the political legitimacy of a deeply self-centred imperialist European ruling order and the huge domestic socioeconomic inequality over which it presided.
The successor to Christianity as the dominant ideological global interpretive construct created by the Enlightenment was to be secularism. The transmission of a secular form of self-knowledge and understanding of society itself to non-western societies, India most of all, was achieved by the hugely successful programmes to brainwash its elites through education and relentless politicised propaganda. It was so extraordinarily successful in India eventually that the standard bearers of secularism and insistence on its unquestionable intellectual, moral virtues, as well as its imperative desirability, were its own entire elite, including India’s Sangh Parivar though, of course, not all its adherents. The ideological conviction of India’s political and social elites that secularism was to be adopted and defended indefatigably was reinforced vastly by a diabolical accident of history. For Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors, adoption of secularism as the ideology of the state was a potent instrument for restraining Hindu identity and aspirations. This cynical subterfuge became almost unavoidable because Jawaharlal Nehru declined the population exchange offered on a religious basis by Pakistani leaders after Independence. Secularism then became the overarching political stratagem with which to reassure India’s Muslims, unsettled by the turmoil of partition. It was left to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, to introduce secularism as a central constitutional principle by imposing it illegitimately, in total violation of constitutional and procedural norms. By then, political calculations on the significance of the Muslim vote bank, to be mobilised by repudiating and restraining Hindus, was becoming the governing dynamic of Indian political life, to be contested by the BJP eventually.
Hindus have experienced unremitting calamity for over a thousand years as a result of invasion by rapacious Muslim and Christian looters and despoilers. They lost all their heritage in northern India and it was permanently extinguished beyond the western border imposed on Hindus in 1947. So much that defined Hindu civilisation was erased, from Somnath and Nalanda to Mathura and Kashi Vishwanth. Huge numbers of the individual repositories of the memory of Hindu civilisation and legacy, through prodigious feats of memory, were slaughtered or enslaved, along with millions of other hapless Hindus. They were turned into harem concubines or subject to hard labour that ended their lives prematurely.
The British conquerors did not engage in routine mass killings and enslavement, although the actual reality of their rule was devastating enough. But the British resort to indentured labour was a pretty close approximation to legal slavery. The greatest irony is that the descendants of indentured labourers, from Africa to the Indies, have become some of the most committed loyal advocates of Britain.
The 200-year period of British conquest and rule is turning out to have been extraordinarily consequential and not merely for its massive plunder. British colonial rulers originally planted the seeds of what has since become the catastrophe of India’s contemporary caste political dynamics. Every possible division among India’s Hindus was identified and accentuated assiduously by Britain’s colonial administrators and the church operating on their behalf. They institutionalised anti Brahmin hatred across India, especially south of the Vindhyas, Maharashtra and Punjab, most of all, where bitter hatred for Hindus is consuming its very protagonists, the Sikhs themselves. The cynical British intrusion into Indian society resulted in the lasting entrenching of secularism, which has since become the auto-da-fe (act of faith) for Hindus, a veritable coup d’état against Hindu consciousness and identity.
As noted, secularism is now the bedrock of Hindu scepticism about their entire intellectual and spiritual heritage and the widespread disdain for their own ancient traditional rituals. The openended, and “humanist” perspectives of the Hindu past and all its ontological interpretation of life, which had derived from reflections of noble sages over thousands of years retreated. They are increasingly on the anvil for hammer blows of permanent destruction. Yet, Christian secularism has no bearing on Hindu perspectives on the nature of life and its sustenance. The espousal of reason, scientific progress and practical adaptation to changing societal conditions of life are entirely integral to the Hindu Dharmic worldview, not external to it, as in the case of Christianity and Islam. Unfortunately, secular consciousness continues to destroy the Hindu sense of the self, which has to be rooted in the traditional historical legacy and intellectual reflections of their ancestors. They’re becoming flotsam cast to the winds, vulnerable to every fanciful transient fashion and whim, willing to turn against the foundations of their own material security, an empowered national political order, against each other and, in the end, against themselves. The contrived recent NEET protest, sponsored by India’s foreign adversaries, is only the most recent example.
*Dr Gautam Sen formerly taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
