Introduction
The scholarly debates on secularism and secularization have evolved considerably in the last two decades. While the classical theory about secularization (the decline and inevitable demise of religion) as the foreordained twin of modernity has been questioned and revised, narrow definitions about the secular being opposed to religion have given way to more complex formulations.Footnote 1 The Western provenance of secularism is largely acknowledged, but, of late, academic and ethnographic attention has also fallen on its concrete avatars in different parts of the non-Western world.Footnote 2 The varieties of secularism have proved convincingly how Western secularism as a concept and the practices it inspires have undergone unpredictable transformations.
One case often mentioned in this context is that of India, particularly given the country's overwhelming religious pluralism and dominance of a non-monotheistic religion.Footnote 3 The debate on secularism in India has revolved around the visions of two of the country's founding fathers—M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhian secularism was not about the separation of religion and politics/state, but about keeping the peace between diverse religious communities. In his writings at least, the state had little or no role to play in secularism, which rested upon goodwill and mutual tolerance rooted in religious values. ‘Indigenous’ secularism, or what is often referred to in common parlance and state discourses/practices as ‘communal harmony’, is the product of religious traditions. Nehruvian secularism was, inter alia, closely connected to the modern state and its modernizing impulses. The state did not completely separate itself from religion; instead it reformed religion to conform to the demands of modernity and ‘progress’. Nehru's faith was in reason and not in religion, the argument goes.Footnote 4 Both secularisms, however, are inextricably linked to particular imaginings of the nation and agree that secularism is an absolute prerequisite for national integration.
This article will try to advance the research on Indian secularism by studying communal harmony. More precisely stated, it will question the dichotomy between a state secularism and a non-state communal harmony. The article will show that the latter is as much a state project as the former. Further, it argues that Nehru and Gandhi should not be taken to be the ‘originators’ of these secularisms, but should be understood as figureheads used by state power to legitimize these models. The following questions are to be answered: What are the aims and objectives of communal harmony and how do they compare with those of secularism? How and why are state and non-state institutions involved in the communal harmony project? What implications does this involvement have for citizenship in the Indian state? I will begin by comparing and contrasting the projects of communal harmony and secularism by explaining what they seek to achieve and the values attached to each of them. Communal harmony will be understood in this article as a governmental strategy.Footnote 5 Then I will argue that communal harmony's identification with tolerance does not do full justice to the concept and the practices it inspires. Instead, I propose reciprocity.
The second section will demonstrate the involvement of state and non-state institutions in, and encouragement of, communal harmony through an analysis of their multi-pronged response strategy with respect to a communal riot. The article will conclude with the complications that arise from the state's simultaneous involvement in the two secularisms—that is, how the state's constitutional and secular obligation to non-discriminatory citizenship is implicitly jeopardized in this process. The argument is that the state's endorsement of dargah-centred Islamic piety (that is, centred on the tomb-shrines of Sufi saints) as an exemplary site of communal harmony and particular ideas of the Indian nation legitimized by communal harmony ‘problematizes’Footnote 6 the national belonging of certain kinds of pious Muslims.
Communal harmony as governmentality
The following are the gist of some news reports found in Indian media: Hindus help serve iftaar (fast-breaking meal) in Tamil Nadu, Christians help in the construction of a Hindu temple in northern Karnataka, madrasa teaches yoga in Uttar Pradesh, and a Muslim artisan makes an idol of the Hindu god Ram in Kerala.Footnote 7 Such instances can be multiplied and found across India in all kinds of media. These are also actively publicized, promoted, and celebrated in the public discourses and practices of the state, civil society groups, political parties, and religious organizations. They are all projected as examples of communal harmony or communal amity. The latter are the commonly used English translations for various words in Indian languages. To cite a few: sampradayik mel, sampradayik sadbhavana, samudaya/matha sauhardam (the first two in Hindi and the last in Malayalam). While sampradayik can be translated as ‘communal’ and samudaya/matha as ‘community and religion’, the second words mean ‘harmony’, ‘goodwill’, and ‘friendship’ respectively. Importantly, communal harmony is not the same as what is usually understood as secularism in India. Secular is usually translated into Hindi, Urdu, and Malayalam as dharmnirpeksh, ghairmazhab, and mathetharathwa respectively. All the words literally mean ‘non-religious’ (strictly speaking, dharm in Hindi and mazhab in Urdu do not mean religion in the Western sense—the former connotes duty, commitment, and virtuosity, and the latter refers to an Islamic school of law as a guide to ethical conduct). Hence, even in the vocabulary, one can notice the differences in the ideas.
The distinctions between the two categories can be clarified further using the concept of ‘problem-space’. The latter looks at the questions posed by and the stakes attached to a socio-political category.Footnote 8 Indian secularism is concerned about the equal treatment of all religions and is aimed at achieving a host of objectives: national unity; protection of religious freedom and minority rights; reforming of Hinduism, particularly quasi-racist caste practices like untouchability; maintenance of peace; and setting the nation on the path to modernization and ‘progress’.Footnote 9 The values linked to these aims are those that fall, broadly speaking, within the ambit of political liberalism: freedom of belief and expression, legal equality, and tolerance.Footnote 10 Communal harmony, on the other hand, strives to create goodwill and harmony among various communities. The aim is to foster an ethic of coexistence rooted in and/or inspired by religious and cultural values and social imaginaries about a pre-modern India that comprised communities relatively autonomous from the state. The stakes involved here are not as well articulated, as in the case of secularism, but the prevention of communal violence, guaranteeing peace, and social stability are foremost among them. One thing is clear: the reforming, civilizing urge implicit in secularism is absent in communal harmony.
However, both converge on the necessity to strengthen national unity and make common cause in striving for peace. And both are often considered to be the antidotes to communalism, which is usually defined as politicized religion and is often used to describe some groups, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami, which represent Hindu and Muslim communalism respectively. Nationalism and communalism were categories that emerged together and they were conceived as antagonistic to each other.Footnote 11 Although so far I have seemingly advocated a strict distinction between secularism and communal harmony, in practice they are not so neatly separated. Communal harmony works and is successful because it lies outside the realm of the state and its subjects are shaped by religious values, practices, and feelings of camaraderie that transcend narrow sectarian boundaries.Footnote 12 In other words, what is absent from communal harmony is the modern state. Secularism, on the other hand, is fundamentally a state-initiated/dependent project.Footnote 13 It displays the commitment of the state towards certain values of political liberalism. Through its secular practices the state makes those values a reality. But how credible is this distinction? Is communal harmony a non-state project? The fact that the state encourages communal harmony has been noted in academic writings.Footnote 14 But beyond this observation, there has been no academic effort to study this process. Hence this article tries to answer, inter alia, the following question: what concrete forms and discourses does the state promotion of communal harmony assume?
The Foucauldian notion of ‘governmentality’ is useful for understanding communal harmony. Foucault defines governmentality concisely as the ‘conduct of conduct’ and elaborates:
It is not a matter of imposing laws on men, but rather of disposing things, that is to say, to employ tactics rather than laws, and if need be to use the laws themselves as tactics—to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved.Footnote 15
And, significantly, governmentality evidently merges government and rationality and shows how modern governance rests upon an agglutination of institutions and knowledge. Viewed from this perspective, communal harmony shapes certain sensibilities, dispositions, and affects that facilitate the creation and maintenance of peace and stability. It opposes communalism, which, rather than politicized religion, is better redefined as ‘a condition of suspicion, fear and hostility between members of different religious communities’.Footnote 16 Moreover, it is not an exclusively state-initiated/dependent project; rather, several institutions (religious organizations, political parties, etc.) and several discourses (legal, religious, media, etc.) are implicated in it. The state does not occupy the centrality it does in an idea like sovereignty, but the state is not absent either. More importantly, in communal harmony, the part played by the state is crucial.
This article will focus on the role of the state in communal harmony. As the following literature review will show, the principal bone of contention in the debates on Indian secularism is the state. Communal harmony is projected and celebrated as a non-state phenomenon. It is this claim that I dispute. Academic literature acknowledges the role of the non-state actors—from individuals to religious groups and NGOs—as the main or sole players in communal harmony. However, in contesting the assertion about the state's absence, I also try to make sense of the interplay between state and non-state actors in the project of communal harmony. What are the terms of this interaction? Are there any differences between the functions of the state and non-state actors in communal harmony as governmentality? Secondly, Foucauldian governmentality does not account for one crucial factor—state legitimacy. Foucault's account, notwithstanding its advantages, does not take note of the fact that, despite the dispersal of power across society and the part played by non-state actors in modern governmentality, the nation-state remains a power in its own right. Even the governmentalization of the state itself does not diminish the relevance of that reality. The state has a vested interest in reproducing its power by whatever means necessary. Hence, even while analysing the prominence of non-state actors and discourses in the project of communal harmony, I would argue that a full account of governmentality would attend not only to the production, organization, and mobilization of subjects by a variety of powers but also to the problem of legitimizing these operations by the singularly accountable object in the field of political power: the state.Footnote 17
I will return to this point later in the article.
Understanding communal harmony—tolerance, reciprocity, and temporality
Literature on Indian secularism has dealt with the question of the state in three ways. One strand is quite critical and dismissive of the state's role and advances purportedly non-state alternatives like communal harmony.Footnote 18 In the second, Indian secularism is a necessary moral good and a state-linked project through and through.Footnote 19 In the case of some other prominent Indian scholars, the perspective cannot be easily categorized as being state-friendly or otherwise.Footnote 20 Although asking some similar questions—like Nandy, Madan, and Bhargava have done on the role of religion in politics and minority rights, for instance—they tend to adopt distinct positions by circumventing the debate surrounding the role of the state. I will first briefly consider the third and second strands, before going on to take up the first one in detail.
The work of Chatterjee and Bilgrami provides unique interpretations of the history and contemporary predicaments of Indian secularism. In addressing the question of minority rights, Chatterjee's views have evolved from demanding internal democratization and reform in the minority communities, which will nullify the need to impose anything from without, to advocating a ‘political society’ that transcends the framework of state and civil society to create a new third zone of ‘overlap’ covering both.Footnote 21 Bilgrami points out that what became state doctrine post-1947 was originally the Congress Party leadership's perception that their Party was secular because it represented the entire country by virtue of its diverse membership (in contrast to the Muslim League or the Hindu Mahasabha, for instance). That is, secularism was not the product of a ‘negotiation between the substantive commitments of particular religious communities’.Footnote 22 Bhargava unequivocally says that political secularism is ‘a normative doctrine for which the state should be separate from religious institutions to check religious tyranny and oppression, and to promote religious and non-religious freedoms and equalities’.Footnote 23 Indian secularism has a ‘multi-value character’, in order to achieve peace and toleration, and guarantee religious liberty and equal citizenship.Footnote 24 And to realize these values, the Indian model is based on ‘principled distance’, which does not preclude the state's legal and policy-level intervention in religions, and ‘contextual secularism’, which acknowledges that fraught questions such as individual versus group rights ought to be considered case by case.Footnote 25 These two strands are united in their desire for some form of context-sensitive secularism.
In contrast to all the writers cited so far, Madan and Nandy are critical of the Indian state for forcing ‘Western’, ‘alien’, and ‘Protestant’ secularism on the country.Footnote 26 The state is the main villain in their plot. Both work with dichotomies such as tradition versus modernity and faith versus ideology.Footnote 27 And ‘Western’ secularism is inextricably linked to secularization—one of the primary reasons for its failure in an overwhelmingly religious India.Footnote 28 The state is the votary and practitioner of modernity, ideology, and secularization, all of them non-Indian ideas. More importantly, there is a lack of fit between the state's agenda and that of society. In fact, Nandy notes, ‘[Indian] society is now required to adjust to the state’.Footnote 29 The state rides roughshod over tradition and faith and thereby unwittingly creates the pathologies of communalism and sectarianism, which it then combats in the interests of secularism and nationalism. In other words, for Madan and Nandy, there is a vicious circle here—the state as the progenitor of the evils it claims to resist and oppose. After rejecting ‘Western’ secularism, both (particularly Nandy, who does so in more detail) advance a ‘non-Western’ secularism as the alternative.
The alternatives proffered—while Madan names it ‘interreligious understanding’, Nandy prefers ‘tolerance’ or ‘hospitality’—are presented as originating and thriving in domains outside the reach of the state.Footnote 30 These conceptualizations presuppose a ‘strong distinction between the state and the society it governed precisely to view the state as an instrumentality, rather than as an organic growth that should reflect society's cultural habits’.Footnote 31 And in interpreting Indian social reality thus, Madan and Nandy are part of a long tradition of ‘anti-statism’ in Indian political thought.Footnote 32 So what is this Indian vision of secularism? Consider this statement from Gandhi: ‘I consider myself as good a Muslim as I am a Hindu and for that matter I regard myself an equally good Christian or Parsi.’Footnote 33 As Skaria notes, Gandhi's comments on sarva dharma sambhav, usually translated as ‘goodwill towards all religions’, goes beyond the liberal preoccupations with substantive and formal equality among all religions to redefine religion itself as ‘compassion’ (daya) which ‘always gives equality between the self and the other’.Footnote 34 Nandy perhaps best explains the full theoretical implication of what Gandhi hints at: ‘[I]n the ultimate analysis, each major faith in the [South Asian] region includes within it an in-house version of each major faith both as an internal criticism and as a reminder of the diversity of the theory of transcendence.’Footnote 35
The inclusivism and syncretism arguably defining this remark has attracted much criticism. Two interconnected strands of analysis have pointed out the Orientalist origins of inclusivism and sought to interpret the tolerance underpinning syncretism as shaped by the imposition of a hierarchy more than any straightforward equation of religions.Footnote 36 In contrast, Skaria has argued that syncretism is a profoundly secular category and Gandhi was critical of religious miscibility and instead talked about ‘respecting an absolute difference’.Footnote 37 I tend to agree with Skaria's take in this sense: in some respects the state project of communal harmony can be interpreted as an appropriation and distortion of the Gandhian vision.Footnote 38 However, though at several points in this article I try to underscore the divergences between the state project and Gandhi's understanding of sarva dharma sambhav, the focus here will be on revealing how and why the state is involved and the resultant complications. There is no implicit suggestion here that Gandhi, or, for that matter, Nandy or Madan, necessarily agree or endorse everything that goes under the label of communal harmony, even though I use the term to label their views for the sake of textual brevity. In this context it is worth noting that even Nehru waxed eloquent about Indians’ inherent will to peace. He wrote:
There is nothing in Indian history to compare with the bitter religious feuds and persecutions that prevailed in Europe. So we did not have to go abroad for ideas of religious and cultural toleration; these were inherent in Indian life.Footnote 39
This may be interpreted as a one-off remark from a champion of the modern nation-state and scientism, but the fact remains that Nehru's perspective was no less complex than Gandhi’s. Although I am not saying that the views of Nehru and Gandhi about secularism coincide, the dominant discourse's presentation of two contrasting secularisms does not automatically and faithfully reflect the ideas of these leaders. Instead their association with these models should be grasped as part of the process to legitimize them by attributing to each a figurehead. Nehru and Gandhi are drawn into the discursive production of these models. They can be invoked—through names, pictures, museums, memorials, and other paraphernalia connected with them—as and when it is required to confer an air of legitimacy upon state projects.
Returning to Nandy, consider carefully how he concludes the argument defending ‘tolerance’:
Whether a large enough proportion of those belonging to the other religious traditions show in practice and at a particular point of time and place the same tolerance or not is a secondary matter. Because it is the imputation of presumption of tolerance in others, not its existence, that defines one's own tolerance in the Gandhian world-view and praxis.Footnote 40
More precisely stated, Nandy is claiming that ‘tolerance’ presupposes ‘tolerance’. It need not be actually reciprocated in real space and time, but it is assumed. The important point to note here is that ‘tolerance’ is not an end in itself. ‘Tolerance’, in an ideal situation, presumes and elicits ‘tolerance’. In other words, what we are talking about is reciprocity. A ‘tolerant’ act must, ideally, lead to a reciprocal act of ‘tolerance’. Every act cited earlier in this article—a Muslim artisan building a Hindu idol, Christians helping with the construction of a Hindu temple and so on—is to be viewed from the angle of reciprocity and exchange. Each of them is to be considered, in the frame of reciprocity, as a ‘gift’. ‘Freedom and obligation’ and ‘generosity and self-interest’ intermingle and are inherent in any act of giving.Footnote 41 What has been received—real or virtual—has to be returned. Even a word of gratitude can be seen as a return gift.Footnote 42 And it is such reciprocity that builds goodwill among various religious communities and creates peace.
The tradition of reciprocity is not alien to the subcontinent. Mauss analyses dānadharma (the law of the gift) in ancient Hindu texts and an anthropologist observes how ‘South Asian society has developed transactional thinking perhaps further than has any other.’Footnote 43 Still Gandhi writes:
Hindu–Muslim unity will be a very cheap and tawdry affair, if it has to depend upon mere reciprocation. Is a husband's loyalty dependent upon the wife’s, or may a wife be faithless because the husband is a rake? Marriage will be a sordid thing when the partners treat their conduct as a matter of exchange pure and simple.Footnote 44
So is he rejecting reciprocity? No, he is opposing a model of reciprocity not derived from and shaped by moral values. It is for this reason that in this and several other instances, he repeatedly draws on metaphors of marriage, kinship, and friendship to stress the ethical dimension and obligations inherent in relationships.Footnote 45 One cannot deny that reciprocity is a part of all these relationships, but it is a reciprocity defined by a lofty moral value like love. The relationship itself is cemented by a reciprocity rooted in absolute moral duties. But Gandhi decries reciprocity that takes the form of crude bargaining devoid of any moral principles. A marriage starts to fall apart when the couple treats each other as separate individuals in a buyer-seller relationship that necessitates exchange. Here reciprocity is not defined by mutual care and love. Such models of exchange deny the fundamental indivisibility underlying a marriage and, extending the analogy to our case, ‘interreligious understanding’.
How does the gift build peace? Why do Gandhi and Nandy advocate reciprocity as the way to peace? Sahlins’ reading of Mauss is pertinent here. The former points out how ‘the gift is alliance, solidarity, communion—in brief, peace. . . the gift is the primitive way of achieving peace that in civil society is secured by the State’.Footnote 46 But the gift does not do it in the way the state does it. The gift ‘does not dissolve the separate parties in a higher unity’, nor does it ‘specify a third party standing over and above the separate interests’.Footnote 47 Instead the spirit of solidarity built by reciprocity maintains peace, thereby circumventing the need for a state. The awareness of mutual dependence for existence and development is created and sustained by the gift. This obviates the necessity of a state. It is worth recalling here Gandhi's views on communal violence in British India. He disagreed with dominant nationalist perspectives that considered Hindu–Muslim violence to be the result of the British policy of divide-and-rule and held that it was the colonial state's neutrality that sustained religious violence. Instead of immediate exchanges, Hindus and Muslims relied on the neutral, third party arbitration of the colonial state. Direct dealings might not have ended violence, but it always had the potential to develop Hindu–Muslim trust and honour, which the presence of the state as a mediator could never produce. Gandhi's suspicion of the state, in fact, extended to the post-colonial state too and any form of third party arbitration that undermined immediacy.Footnote 48 So while reciprocity may contain within it the seeds of peace, mediation by the modern state does not guarantee the same. Gandhi, in contrast to Sahlins, does not see the state as an agent of peace, but as a force that aggravates conflict. And if the presence of the state in communal harmony as reciprocity is any indication, there is in fact a case to be made here for what Chakrabarty has called the ‘the archaic in the modern’ with the emphasis on trying to ‘think about this phenomenon analytically’.Footnote 49 The state has not replaced reciprocity, as Sahlins seems to imply, but has recruited it as a strategy of governance.
Moreover, the arguments in favour of communal harmony, à la Sahlins’ and Mauss's ‘primitive society’, involve a crucial temporal dimension too. It is noteworthy that a ‘primitive society’, in an evolutionary pattern of development that moves from simple to complex and primitive to advanced, denotes the infancy of society. Infancy is a stage of life that has to be transcended in the move forward. ‘Primitive society’ shows the unsophisticated, infant past of modern society. Communal harmony too refers to an India in its infancy, one that predates the state projects of colonialism and secularism. It represents an ethic of coexistence that is part of Indian culture.Footnote 50 Communal harmony is inextricably bound with the traditions of India, free of the corrupting influence of modernity and the machinations of the modern state. But, importantly, communal harmony as the presentation of an India in its infancy is not a temporal marker in the sense of an ideal past that has been left behind. Neither is it about reliving a glorious past in modern India. Communal harmony, or the state to be more precise, strives to sustain the infancy and abort the potential for development inherent in it. The nation must retain its infantile innocence in order to ward off the evil of communalism. Growing up—irrespective of the form an ‘adult’ India takes—implies a loss of the purity and righteousness of a communally harmonious society. I will elaborate this point further in the next section where the focus on children in communal harmony projects by state institutions will be analysed.
Contrary to the model of communal harmony, Indian secularism clearly articulates the necessity for ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’. It harps on the need to overcome the past and present, and to create a better and qualitatively new future. The work done in the present accelerates the movement into a distinct future. Secularism may well be the ‘adult’ India that has left behind the infantile simplicity of communal harmony. Change, improvement, and difference are the key words here. In sum, as it is imagined, communal harmony and secularism occupy different temporal frames. The state, however, remains the power that needs both.
The state and communal harmony
The claim that communal harmony is necessary and successful because it is a sphere that lies beyond the state is empirically indefensible. True, non-governmental organizations, religious groups, and others are among its principal votaries and promoters. And a vast and rich volume of literature and folk traditions endorse—and various historical figures (such as the Mughal Emperor Akbar and the poet-mystic Kabir) embody—communal harmony. But this argument ignores the fact that the state, through its institutions and discourses, actively promotes and implements communal harmony as a governance strategy. The larger point is that communal harmony need not necessarily be perceived as the antonym of state secularism and ipso facto a moral good. The aim here is to answer the following questions: How and why is the state involved in the project of communal harmony? What are the circuits through which the communal harmony discourse travels between the citizenry and state, and between civil society and state? What is the distinction—in terms of object, aim, moral, and political valences—between state and civic discourses of communal harmony? What kind of governmentality is produced from the movement of communal harmony between civil sites and the state?Footnote 51
On 2 July 2009, three people were killed—one Hindu and two Muslims—and several more injured in a ‘communal clash’ between Hindus and Muslims in Mysore in the southwest Indian state of Karnataka. After nearly four hours of mayhem, the police opened fire to disperse the rioters and regain control of the situation. One of the dead, a 13-year-old Muslim boy, was allegedly killed by police fire, though the police denied it and said its personnel fired into the air and not at the people. Post-mortem reports confirmed the police version of events, it was claimed. Section 144 of the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure was invoked to ban the congregation of more than five people in the riot-hit areas and battalions of armed personnel were posted to keep the peace. Days after the riots, the police arrested several people (mainly activists of the Popular Front of India, a Muslim-led political movement) on charges of inciting the violence.Footnote 52 The Popular Front of India, in turn, accused the police of acting to further the ‘Hindutva agenda’ of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Karnataka government.Footnote 53 The most senior police official in the region pointed out that ‘it was a surprise since Mysore is not known to have seen such violence. . . We had to use force. There were thousands of people clashing. We did not cause casualties. All the deaths occurred due to clashes.’Footnote 54 Apparently, the rioting began after the carcass of a pig was found inside Muslim-owned premises. The exact nature of the building was disputed. While the Popular Front of India described it as a mosque, the state administration said it was an under-construction Arabic school (which had faced opposition from a local Hindu temple committee and whose building work was stayed by the municipality).Footnote 55 But whatever the immediate cause of the Mysore riots, there had been widespread discontent among Muslims in the wake of police action against them earlier that year. The local legislator said: ‘The violence was a result of the tension in April [2009] when 84 Muslims were arrested and “falsely” accused of desecrating temples and the home of a former Mayor.’Footnote 56
More than a month after the riots, on 29 August, the police department, the National Foundation for Communal Harmony, and the Alert Citizens Team (a group formed after the 2008 Mumbai attacks which worked closely with the state to ‘create harmony, brotherhood and peace’) announced the organization of a sadbhavana rally to spread ‘the message of communal harmony’.Footnote 57 The senior police official who made this announcement said that the rally was being held on the advice of the federal Ministry of Home Affairs. Beginning at 9 am on 1 September, about 1,000 schoolchildren (from schools run by Hindu, Christian, and Muslim organizations and trusts) marched through a 2.5 km stretch in the riot-affected areas wearing white caps and ethnic clothes, to symbolize peace and Indian culture.Footnote 58 The children were aged between 12–17 (that is, from grade eight to pre-university). Displaying photographs of those affected by the riots, schoolchildren dressed as Hindu and Christian priests and a Muslim imam led the rally along with senior police officials and state bureaucrats. Police personnel and mounted police marched alongside them. The schoolchildren sang religious songs and the police band ‘played songs promoting national integration’. ‘The highlight of the rally was the thought-provoking and meaningful messages on the placards carried by the students’—prominent were slogans written in Kannada (the main language of Karnataka), English, and Urdu such as:
Humanity is [sic] essential than caste and creed; Unity is strength; Self introspection leads to truth; Indian first, then religion; Nature has not created discrimination; Enmity is evil, be united; Do not quarrel, wash your mind of ignorance; Energy lies in friendship, avoid fighting; Say with proud [sic] I am Indian.Footnote 59
The rally culminated in the grounds of a college where a senior police official addressed the participants: ‘Children are the future of this country and they are the real messengers of communal harmony and against terrorism.’Footnote 60
Later that day, a seminar on the ‘principles of non-violence for harmony and national integration’ was organized by the same trio behind the sadbhavana rally. A Hindu monk, the local Catholic bishop, and the Muslim qadi (judge) jointly inaugurated the seminar by lighting a lamp; a sadbavana song was played, with all present joining in. A Hindu religious leader said that ‘four agents, religious leaders, fearless media, a honest police force, and an enlightened public’ secured peace in society.Footnote 61 Present at the meeting was a Karnataka state minister, senior police officers, and other important public figures. The minister exhorted the hundreds of gathered people to ‘follow the path tread by our ancestors. . . maintain communal harmony and work towards building a strong and prosperous society’. A senior academic at the meeting observed, ‘criticising other religions without understanding the essence of their own religion would create friction in society’.Footnote 62 Another speaker compared all religions and the principle of humanity that binds them to an orange—peeling the skin reveals the various segments tightly held together. Documentaries on communal harmony were screened during the seminar and there was interaction with people from the riot-hit areas.Footnote 63
Before analysing the context and the aftermath of the Mysore riots, I will give a brief overview of the communal situation in Karnataka. Unlike several parts of North India, Karnataka does not have long history of communal riots. The first major communal riot was reported in 1981—almost three decades after the state's formation on the basis of the principle of linguistic homogeneity (Kannada) in 1956.Footnote 64 However, with the rise of Hindu nationalism across India in tandem with the anti-Babri Masjid agitation, riots became increasingly frequent in Karnataka. Yet, even in the late 1990s, a scholar noted that ‘communal antagonism has seldom had any importance’ in Karnataka and doubted that the Bharatiya Janata Party would come to power in the state.Footnote 65 But by 2006, in the wake of widespread anti-Christian violence in the coastal regions of the state, concerns were expressed that Karnataka ‘may be the next Gujarat’, an allusion to the horrendous state-sponsored pogrom of Muslims in that Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state in 2002.Footnote 66 Parallel to all these developments was the growth of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Karnataka, once a stronghold of left-of-centre parties such as the Janata Dal and the Congress, until it became the first state in south India to have a Bharatiya Janata Party government in 2008 (it was voted out of power in the 2013 assembly election). One factor, which is perhaps unique to the communal situation in Karnataka, is how Kannada and Hindu nationalisms have joined together in adopting a strident anti-Muslim stance. Although Kannada is the language spoken by the majority of the state's population, there are significant linguistic minorities such as Tulu, Konkani, and Urdu (spoken by Muslims). And a major strand of Kannada nationalism has sought to present Kannada as the language of Hindus and Karnataka as a Hindu state whose days of glory ended with the advent of Islam in the region. Although there is ‘no perfect consonance’ between the ideologies of Hindu and Kannada nationalisms, there is ‘enough of an overlap’ that protests organized by Kannada groups against an Urdu news broadcast on the national television channel rapidly mutated into anti-Muslim violence in the state capital of Bangalore in 1994.Footnote 67
Returning to the Mysore riot, it is especially noteworthy that there were conflicting versions about the incident. There is little consensus on how and where it all began. Although the alleged desecration of a Muslim space provided the immediate backdrop, claims of unjust targeting of Muslims by the police during an earlier flare-up seem to have played a pertinent and provocative role in Mysore. Comments by the legislator point in this direction. The uneasiness of a vulnerable minority in a Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Karnataka made the situation more combustible. In fact, as we have seen, the very nature of the desecrated site is unclear. As Brass has noted, many riot situations are marked by this ‘ambiguity’ and ultimate inability to pin down the ‘truth’ about the incidents.Footnote 68 The discourses of the politicians, state agencies, and the media produce the riot.Footnote 69 That is, such discursive processes converted a relatively small incident in Mysore, whose precise contours remain vague and perhaps will never be known, into a ‘communal riot’. The Mysore incident is drawn into a ‘grand interpretive framework’ that defines it as reflecting the deeper socio-political problem of communalism and activates a set of strategies necessary to address such categorical events.Footnote 70 However, it may not be possible to pinpoint an ‘institutionalized riot system’ in Mysore, which also denotes a limitation of this framework that mainly focuses on local factors.Footnote 71 Why do riots occur in places like Mysore, a city that does not have a long history of communal violence, unlike some of its north Indian counterparts? The answer to this, I believe, should be sought in the complex interplay of national-, state-, and Mysore-based facets of communal mobilization. As pointed out earlier, the Karnataka situation worsened when the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2008, as did the feelings of insecurity among religious minorities, especially Muslims. And the incidents involving the arrest of Muslim youth in Mysore were perceived as a fall-out of Bharatiya Janata Party rule. Nevertheless some of the elements identified by Brass as those that form part of the network that strives to keep the locality aware of Hindu–Muslim relationships is present in Mysore too—the Popular Front of India and the Bharatiya Janata Party.Footnote 72
Turning to the response of state institutions, two stages are clearly discernible, both of which aim at bringing the situation under control and maintaining peace. The first is cracking down on crowd violence with the routine strategy of policing and the invoking of relevant legal provisions. It is a strict law-and-order approach—use force to disperse rioters, impose curfews and prohibitory orders against the assembly of people, and arrest people involved in the violence. Again, typically, there are allegations of police high-handedness (despite official denials), as in the case of the Muslim boy who was alleged to have been killed by police fire. Historically, various avatars of the Indian state have used force and other tactics to deal with crowds in the form of religious processions, protests, and so on.Footnote 73 But, as Chakrabarty has noted, the crucial difference between Mughal and British handling of crowd action and the modern Indian nation-state lies in the interpretation of the nature of the problem—for the former it was primarily a matter of order, while for the latter it is an essentially political problem.Footnote 74 The second aspect of the state's response is particularly relevant for this article. This involves state mobilization of a large cross section of the population, particularly children, religious leaders, and prominent public personalities, to perform communal harmony and help in keeping the peace. State and non-state actors openly collaborate in the effort. The highlighting of Indian traditions of peace and reciprocity (symbolized in dress and slogans, for example) and the necessity of patriotic fervour that surpasses religious differences are meant to drive home the message that the riot is an aberration. Communal harmony, represented in the events organized, is what characterizes the ‘normal’ situation in India.
The response strategy of state institutions closely follows the one outlined in the Guidelines on Communal Harmony, a document issued by the federal Ministry of Home Affairs in 2008 to all state governments. It is the revised and latest version of a document that has been in existence since the mid-1990s.Footnote 75 The 25-page document outlines the measures, both legal and otherwise, to be taken by state governments to maintain communal harmony and to prevent and/or contain communal violence. Besides using law-enforcement agencies, the Guidelines call for the establishment of ‘peace committees’ comprising ‘prominent citizens, community leaders’ and ‘women’ to ‘oversee the situation’ in communally sensitive areas. The ‘peace committees’ should be ‘immediately activated’ if there is any violence, ‘with the aim of defusing the situation’.Footnote 76 The Guidelines also suggest media management strategies. The state should provide the media with relevant data on communal violence and monitor the reportage to ensure that it does not ‘provoke sentiments and passions’. Also noteworthy is the part played by the National Foundation for Communal Harmony, founded in 1992 as an autonomous body within the federal Ministry of Home Affairs, and dedicated to:
Promoting communal harmony, strengthening national integration, fostering unity in diversity through collaborative social action, awareness programmes, reaching out to the child victims of communal violence, encouraging interfaith dialogue for India's shared security, peace and prosperity.Footnote 77
Towards achieving these ends, the National Foundation for Communal Harmony organizes cultural activities, gives awards to people or institutions that contribute towards communal harmony, provides financial help to child victims of communal violence, conducts studies on communal harmony, and so on.
State institutions have been set up with the explicit purpose of promoting communal harmony. They are part of a wide repertoire of governance strategies deployed by the state to keep the peace in a religiously plural society. The various arms of the state and non-state actors work together to encourage communal harmony in order to prevent or contain the outbreak of communal violence. They are mutually reinforcing elements of communal harmony, as is governmentality. The argument is not that the state produces communal harmony; instead, it tries to shape subjects with certain sensibilities, embodied dispositions, and affects that are conducive to the creation and maintenance of communal harmony. The state seeks to fashion its citizens in such a way that they become proponents and practitioners of the ‘interreligious understanding’ and ‘tolerance’—or, more precisely stated, reciprocity—that define communal harmony. In post-riot Mysore, the procession; the children dressed up us priests and imams; the slogans on the placards about patriotism, friendship, and humanity; the seminar as a space for religious leaders to come together; the speeches and the songs praising India's traditions of peace and goodwill—all represent a communally harmonious society. It is the ideal that has to be aspired to, after a brief deviation from the norm that is the riot. The ethic of peaceful coexistence is performed for the public to see and emulate.Footnote 78 All the elements of the post-riot performance are clearly and readily identifiable as integral to the plot of communal harmony. Similarly, the instances of communal harmony mentioned earlier in the article—madrasa teaching yoga, Christians building a Hindu temple, and so on—are also to be treated as performances. The point is that these practices are not the manifestation of some invisible core, but that they themselves constitute that core. It is through them that communal harmony is constructed and projected as an Indian tradition. Using performativity to understand communal harmony serves another purpose too. Each performance presupposes an audience; in fact, the former simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by an audience. Hence the repetitive enactment of practices of communal harmony in various public forums, with the open backing of state institutions, fashions the audience's ideas about communal harmony and encourages them to take appropriate dispositions towards it. The audience learns what to expect and what is expected of them in the performance of communal harmony. In other words, the post-riot events in Mysore not only staged communal harmony, but also brought about or induced it in the audience. Finally, such practices are iterable, that is, the state can orchestrate the performance of communal harmony not only in a post-riot scenario, but in any other context. For instance, the National Foundation for Communal Harmony stages an annual ‘communal harmony campaign’ in the last week of November, which includes ‘cultural programmes, debates, seminars, symposia, slogan, painting competitions and marathon involving children of various communities. . .’ to spread communal harmony.Footnote 79
How can we account for the importance placed on children in performing communal harmony? In Mysore, they are the most visible and prominent participants in the peace rally and steal the show with their sheer numbers—almost 1,000. It may also be recalled that the police official who inaugurated the post-rally meeting said: ‘Children are the future of this country and they are the real messengers of communal harmony.’ The Guidelines on Communal Harmony and activities of the National Foundation for Communal Harmony also address the subject of children and communal harmony. The Guidelines note: ‘“Catch them young” should be the philosophy for promoting the concept of communal harmony’ and ‘inspiring literature should be distributed’ and ‘various competitions and talks’ on the topic should be organized in schools.Footnote 80 Children are the main focus group of the National Foundation for Communal Harmony. Besides helping child victims of communal violence, in order to ‘inculcate values of harmony, fraternity, brotherhood, tolerance, co-operation and non-violence in children, which help in promoting peace, unity and social harmony’ the National Foundation for Communal Harmony has established over 6,000 ‘Sadbhavana clubs’ in schools in ‘communally hyper-sensitive districts’ across the country.Footnote 81 The police official could be seen as repeating the ‘catch them young’ philosophy of the Guidelines and the National Foundation for Communal Harmony.
But the rhetoric about children being the future of a nation and the necessity of taking care of them is not unique to India. These discourses can be rehearsed in every context of initiation into the nation—from education to a healthy diet. With regard to communal harmony, however, the role of children is intertwined with the question of temporality. As noted in the previous section, communal harmony is not encapsulated in a linear notion of time. Instead it assumes the eternal recurrence of the same traditional Indian ethic of peaceful coexistence. It is the original and perennial condition of the country. Communal violence only momentarily punctures that flow. In India children are not human beings to be shaped or conditioned in the manner their society desires, they are born with memories of their past lives and ‘the samskaras [they] may have formed in the mother's womb’.Footnote 82 In the context of communal harmony, children embody India's eternal condition of peaceful coexistence. They perform that past, which merges with the present and future, making differentiations impossible. The eternal child annuls the vivisection of national temporality. They are born with the memories of a communally harmonious India, which are to be retained and nurtured. The future citizens of India do not merely grow up and mature, they are expected to maintain their childhoods for eternity. Hence the focus on children is not merely about shaping children into subjects of communal harmony and patriotic citizens of the future. In other words, the task is not to progress from one stage of ignorance to that of awareness and maturity, but deliberately to prevent or withhold that development.
The links between communal harmony and nationalism will now be analysed. The argument that secularism and nationalism emerged together and the way in which they are linked to each other in the battle against communalism is pertinent here.Footnote 83 The nation is imagined as being dismembered by communalism, as in the case of Pakistan. The riot—the violent avatar of communalism—is perceived as a quotidian experience of the nation falling apart. Nationalism, on the other hand, unites the country and is near-synonymous with secularism. As noted at the beginning of this article, both secularism and communal harmony converge on the question of national unity. In fact, in common parlance and state discourse, communal harmony is often used along with national integration. Communal harmony is a prerequisite for national integration. In Mysore, the theme of communal harmony is inextricably tied up with national integration: it is found in the name of the seminar: ‘Principles of non-violence for harmony and national integration’; in the slogans on the placards in the procession, which speak about friendship, peace, unity, and humanism as realizing the nation; and so on. The children impersonating religious leaders, the presence of representatives of various Indian religions at the seminar—all ‘perform’ a nation united through and by its religions.
Communalism is the antagonist here too. And when it is treated as being in opposition to communal harmony, it does not refer to politicized religion alone. More important here is the communalism that is a ‘condition of suspicion, fear and hostility between members of different religious communities’.Footnote 84 Communal harmony as reciprocity is the antidote to this form of communalism. The goodwill, amity, and ethic of coexistence it creates and nurtures are indispensable to winning the battle against communalism and uniting the country. But the state's simultaneous promotion of secularism and communal harmony is not a totally innocuous phenomenon. The next section will elaborate on this argument.
Moreover, communal harmony can be interpreted as supplementing the state's efforts to tackle the violence. Peace is first re-established by clamping down on the rioters (the force of law), then it is followed up by the rally and the seminar to inculcate the values supposedly necessary to pre-empt any future violence. Two kinds of subjects are sought to be fashioned here—communal harmony calls up a citizenry that abides by the moral values of reciprocity and simultaneously watches out for elements that undermine communal harmony. The state seeks to interpellate citizen-subjects who, so to say, police themselves and practise the virtues of communal harmony. All the speeches at the seminar and the slogans at the rally resonated with this theme. People are reminded of their heritage of communal harmony shaped by religious unity and tolerance. At the same time, they are also hailed as guardians of communal harmony. The civil society group, Alert Citizens Team, and the speech about citizens being ‘agent[s] of peace’ suggest this dimension. The ‘peace committees’ envisaged by the Guidelines on Communal Harmony ‘oversee the situation’. In other words, they are to be the eyes and ears of the state against any potential breach of the peace.
Also note that the state's role in organizing the rally and the seminar is very conspicuous. The events are widely publicized as being jointly managed by the state and civil society and police officers play prominent roles on the stage. This achieves several objectives at the same time. First, although itself the main organizer of the events, the state and its representatives are the ones who exhort and call upon the citizenry and civil society to practise communal harmony. Differently put, there is a subtle division of labour here: the citizenry realizes communal harmony, not the state. The latter dons the role of facilitator and advocate. Furthermore, the state's manifest presence in organizing the post-riot programmes celebrating communal harmony helps divert attention from the violence it unleashed on the citizenry. That is, the state allies itself with the virtue, irrespective of what it really does or provokes. The state has to be the source of the call for communal harmony so that, in another incarnation, it can resort to violence. I will return to this last point presently in relation to the question of state legitimacy.
Although the precise cause of the Mysore riot remains obscure, one thing is evident from the discourse—there was resentment among Muslims. This can be gauged from the legislator's comments and the heightened passions following the death of the Muslim boy said to have been killed by police fire. To this can be added the larger context of the Bharatiya Janata Party's rise to political power in Karnataka and the increasing communalization of the state's public sphere since the 1980s. As the Popular Front of India statement said, the Mysore events were ‘only the latest episode in the series of discriminatory and communally motivated state interventions started since the installation of BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] state government in power’.Footnote 85 So both before and after the riot, there was evident discontent among Muslims. At stake is the following question: can the state be trusted to deal impartially with volatile situations such as that in Mysore? The resentment felt by Muslims suggests otherwise, and therefore the state's capacity to represent the society is challenged. More precisely, it denotes a legitimacy deficit. Hence it is not a mere coincidence that calls for communal harmony reach a crescendo when the state's legitimacy is at its weakest point in the wake of communal violence. All the communities involved, particularly the one that suffered the most (Muslims), blame the state and its machinery for failing them. To take another example, the National Foundation for Communal Harmony was established in February 1992, when the Hindu nationalist campaign against the Babri Masjid was at its zenith and the indifference and inability of the state to intervene and stop it was strikingly evident. Most narratives about the crisis of Indian secularism invariably refer to 1992 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid as the turning point in the history of that crisis. Differently put, the crisis of secularism is also a crisis of the secular state. Crisis here is a euphemism for legitimacy deficit.
Importantly, communal harmony frames the problem of communal violence as the result of the breakdown of the former—and the solution is more communal harmony. This ‘depoliticizes’ communal violence.Footnote 86 What is ironic here is that there is a simultaneous implicit recognition and rejection of the political nature of communal violence. It was noted earlier that there has been a historical shift in state perceptions about crowd violence, from ‘disorder’ to a political problem. Yet the answer to the latter is not to be sought in the political, but in communal harmony as depoliticization. More precisely stated, communal harmony diminishes or even dismisses the complex and multi-layered historical origins of communal violence and the powers that produce and contour it. The recognition of this history and its entanglement with power (particularly state power) is obscured by communal harmony. In Mysore, the riot was presented as being propelled by the disintegration of communal harmony, not by the state's failure to address growing discontent among Muslims. And, when communal harmony is the solution to violence, it replaces the need for political solutions that address the complex reasons behind violence with calls for establishing practices of reciprocity. Communal harmony is presented as being able to minimize or wipe out violence by creating goodwill and amity between various communities, as is evident in its performance in post-riot Mysore. Thus communal harmony as governmentality cannot be disentangled from the question of state legitimacy. When it is championed by the state, it helps deflect attention from the latter's failures and its refusal to deal with—if not complicity in—the violence. There is a ‘complex economy of seeing and not seeing’ at work here.Footnote 87 In enjoining the citizenry to ‘oversee the situation’, the state is demanding that the citizenry looks away from the state's violence. This is the discursive domain that comprises the simultaneously state-legitimizing and civil-disciplinary effects of communal harmony and is part of the logic of communal harmony as governmentality.
To conclude this section, I would like to briefly engage with an influential thesis on the positive correlation between peace and inter-communal bonding.Footnote 88 Varshney argues that the presence of ‘associational’ (organizational contexts such as trade unions, business associations, political parties, and so on) and ‘everyday’ (outside organizational settings) engagements among people belonging to various religious groups have helped in preventing violence in certain Indian cities.Footnote 89 Conversely, their absence—especially of the ‘associational’ form—has played a role in stoking the flames of violence in other cities. Varshney is basically speaking about the networks of reciprocity built by ‘associational’ engagements that foster goodwill and prevent the outbreak of communal violence. The distinguishing characteristic of this realm, which he calls civil society, is its status as a ‘non-state space of collective life’.Footnote 90 My data, however, would qualify Varshney's claim by adding that the state can help create, sustain or co-opt ‘non-state spaces’. In other words, state institutions can encourage the development of subjectivities that aid the establishment of such spaces. The citizen-subjects not only perform their roles as peacekeepers, they also watch out for those who breach the peace and thus become the foot soldiers of the state against communal violence. Furthermore, the state strives to shore up its legitimacy deficit by presenting itself as the votary of such ‘associational’ forms of life. That is, they ought to be seen as part of the strategy of governmentality, ‘not a matter of imposing laws on men, but rather of disposing things, that is to say, to employ tactics rather than laws, and if need be to use the laws themselves as tactics’.Footnote 91
Citizenship and the politics of communal harmony
Why do I claim that the state's involvement in the projects of secularism and communal harmony leads to complications? What are the resultant complications? Briefly, the state's promotion of communal harmony is at odds with its commitment to the principles of citizenship inscribed in India's secular constitution. While the state endorses communal harmony, it cannot uphold the constitution's secular philosophy of universal and non-discriminatory citizenship. This section will explain this claim through examples of Islamic reform movements.
It has been noted already that communal harmony is coupled with imaginings of the nation. The very existence of the Indian nation as an ‘imagined community’,Footnote 92 its territorial integrity, and political sovereignty all hinge on the existence of communal harmony. The latter unites the nation's diverse religious communities. And communal harmony understood as reciprocity promotes the feelings of goodwill and friendship among communities that are necessary to sustain peace and thereby national unity. This implies that the position within the nation of subjects who have reservations about reciprocity is called into question. Their national belonging can be implicitly derecognized and ‘problematized’.Footnote 93 The state's involvement in the communal harmony project endorses the ‘problematization’. Here I will examine the major and oft-reproduced strand of the discourse on Islam in India. It seeks to present the Sufi-oriented, dargah-centred piety—popular across the subcontinent and among both Hindus and Muslims—to be the ‘indigenous’ Islam, ‘rooted’ in Indian soil, and an exemplary manifestation of reciprocity.Footnote 94 Indian Islam in practice ‘is heavily underlined by elements which are accretions from the local environment and contradict the fundamentalist view of the beliefs and practices to which Muslims must adhere’.Footnote 95
Dargahs (tomb-shrines of Sufi saints) are examples of this ‘syncretic’ element. They are intimately linked to the history of the expansion of Islam across the subcontinent. The Sufis (most of them linked to important dargahs as custodians or disciples of the saint) were mediators in more than one sense: they were the primary forces behind spreading the teachings of Islam among the unlettered, non-Muslim masses of South Asia. They also mediated between the people and their rulers by virtue of their spiritual position and financial status as landowners, especially under colonial rule.Footnote 96 However, none of these factors accounts for the celebration of dargahs in communal harmony. Dargahs are perceived to represent ‘syncretism’, that is, forms of religion that cannot be easily pinned down to one identity such as Hindu or Muslim.Footnote 97Dargahs symbolize the confluence of Hinduism and Islam by being spaces patronized by affiliates of both religions.Footnote 98 They provide a space for exchange and thereby exemplify communal harmony. Moreover, dargahs also denote the ‘Indianness’ of Islam, which is perceived to be an ‘intrusive’ religion that came from across the borders.Footnote 99 In fact, arguments about ‘indigenous’ Islam stem from a ‘distinctive angle of vision’ that strives to prove that Muslims are loyal and patriotic citizens of India.Footnote 100
Importantly, state institutions are important players in the field of dargah-centred piety. Particularly noteworthy is the National Foundation for Communal Harmony's programme Samanvaya (Sanskrit for ‘confluence’ or ‘union’), which funds the organization of ‘inter/community [sic] festivals’ for ‘promoting better understanding, communal harmony and national integration’.Footnote 101 Those mentioned are important examples of ‘syncretism’ in India—the Nauchandi festival in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh; the annual urs (death anniversary of the Sufi saint) of Dewa Sharif in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh; and Phool waalon ki sair (procession of the florists) in New Delhi.Footnote 102 All these festivals have traditionally involved the participation of both Hindus and Muslims. The Nauchandi festival in Meerut, to look at one of them more closely, dates back to the late seventeenth century and is nowadays organized by the Meerut municipal corporation as a fair that lasts for more than a month and attracts traders and visitors from across the country. The National Foundation for Communal Harmony's interest in this event is triggered presumably by the fact that two places of worship—Hindu and Muslim—are located in the area of the fair. The Nauchandi temple and dargah of Bala Mian face each other and most visitors to the fair ‘pay obeisance’ at both, irrespective of their religious backgrounds.Footnote 103 It manifests the reciprocity that is the core of communal harmony. When the National Foundation for Communal Harmony organizes meetings in connection with the festival, it is to encourage the evident spirit of reciprocity as something that leads to peace and harmony. Relevant also is the fact that New Delhi, Barabanki, and Meerut (particularly the latter two) are also infamous for communal violence.
The Islam that is focused on dargahs is often at loggerheads with another version of the religion that has its roots in various reformist movements that developed in British India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 104 And, importantly, one of the main targets of the reformist Islamic tradition was dargah-centred piety. From outright condemnation as shirk (associating partners with the one God, or polytheism) and bid‘ah (wrongful innovations) to calls for reform of certain ‘un-Islamic’ practices such as music (sama), using of amulets (ta‘wīdh), and prostrations (sujūd) before the saint's tomb, reformist Islam in its various forms has been concerned with this type of piety.Footnote 105 Interestingly, an ethnography of rituals at a dargah in Gujarat indicates that reformist criticism of it is not propelled by the ‘influence of Hinduism’, but by deviations from Islamic norms.Footnote 106 Taxonomies of reformists versus Sufis are not entirely accurate because many important reformist ulema (Islamic scholars) were also Sufis who encouraged visits to dargahs, provided certain ‘un-Islamic’ practices were reformed or dropped altogether.Footnote 107 Suffice to note that the celebration of dargah-centred piety in popular, official, and even academic discourse has coexisted with an alarmist response to Islamic reformist trends.
A related point to note is that reformist Islam is often perceived to be of non-Indian origin. If the authentic expression of ‘indigenous’ Islam revolves around the dargah, its opponents could only come from without. Ironically, this idea pushes under the rug the entire history of reformist Islam in South Asia, which dates back to Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi in the seventeenth century. Throughout the next centuries, diverse personalities and movements—the scholar Shah Waliullah of Delhi, the ulema of Farangi Mahall in Lucknow, the madrasa at Deoband, Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh college, Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and his movement, to name the more famous among them—decisively shaped and renewed Islam under the adverse circumstances created by British rule and put the subcontinent in the forefront of the global Islamic revival.Footnote 108 As I will presently argue, these traditions are ‘problematized’ and implicitly denationalized when state institutions champion dargahs as paragons of communal harmony. This argument, with varying degrees of sophistication, even has its champions in academic discourse. Let us consider one article that studies the influence of ‘Saudi Wahabbi propaganda’ on the Indian reformist group Ahl-e Hadīth.Footnote 109 The author argues that intra-Muslim rivalries in India have been fuelled by the Ahl-e Hadīth's financial and doctrinal dependence on Saudi Arabia, which often goes beyond theological loyalty to defend the domestic and foreign policies of the Saudi state.Footnote 110 More importantly for the argument of this article, the ‘“Saudi Arabisation” of Islam and Indian Islamic culture that the Ahl-i Hadith seeks to promote also inevitably further widens the cultural chasm between Hindus and Muslims’.Footnote 111 This is mainly the result of the Ahl-e Hadīth's ‘increasingly aggressive’Footnote 112 criticism of the dargah-centred culture of ‘Indian’ Islam—the author acknowledges that the group has been against such piety since its origins in North India in the late nineteenth century, but has been ‘exacerbated’Footnote 113 by its links to the ‘Wahabbis’. In Sikand's argument there is a peculiar way in which theology is mapped onto geography. Opposition to the ‘indigenous’ version is more likely to come from outside the nation—or, at least, its Indian provenance is questionable.Footnote 114
What is noteworthy here is that the subjects of reformist Islam, in being critical of dargah-centred piety, develop dispositions that run counter to those sought by communal harmony. Objections to dargah-centred piety are often based on the latter's non-conformity to certain interpretations of Islamic scriptures. This non-conformity may or may not be the result of ‘syncretism’, but the critique's rationale is mainly theological. Differently put, subjects of reformist Islam cultivate pious sensibilities that embody a critique of dargah-centred piety. This could involve the performance of certain embodied practices at dargahs that comply with their readings of the traditions, for instance, not doing sujūd in front of the saint's tomb. If a devotee visits a dargah and prays to Allah in the presence of the saint, but desists from doing sujūd to the latter, it might not be possible to condemn this practice according to some prominent schools of reformist Islam in the subcontinent (Deobandi, for example). Avoiding dargahs altogether and attacking them as shirk could be another response. The Ahl-e-Hadīth position is closer to this interpretation of the scriptures.
Equally significant, such reformist subjectivities also subtly contradict the doctrine of communal harmony.Footnote 115 While communal harmony interpellates subjects who patronize dargahs and the reciprocity that they represent, reformist Islam fashions subjects who have an adversarial relationship to communal harmony—expressed by not going to dargahs or by objecting to them, or by practising what, in their perspective, are scripturally sanctioned dispositions. It is this nuanced and complex politics of piety that the discourse of communal harmony dubs anti-national and unpatriotic. Reformist Muslims thus become communalists who are suspicious, hostile, and fearful of other religions and, by attacking dargah-centred piety, prompt other Muslims to follow suit. Hence they are deemed to be not part of the national imaginary. More precisely stated, such subjects are ‘problematized’—that is, their subjectivities are identified, characterized, and analysed as being unacceptable (in various registers—morally, politically, and, most importantly, nationally), and treated as something that requires a solution that could try and shape them differently (one that conforms to communal harmony and the nation-state).Footnote 116 The point to be noted here is that this process does not create those subjectivities, which are already socially and historically extant, nor does it merely represent them. Instead, as Foucault notes, ‘[problematisation] is the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought. . .’.Footnote 117 Reformist Islamic subjectivities are thus ‘problematized’ vis-à-vis established imaginaries of the nation-state. They are entered into the domain of disloyalty/loyalty and belonging/non-belonging to the Indian nation because of their theological objections to communal harmony as reciprocity. The ‘responses’ to such malignant subjectivities can take the forms, inter alia, of more discursive and institutional promotion of communal harmony, or more stringent applications of the law. The point is to change them into complying subjects.
On the other hand, the secular state is constitutionally obliged to grant citizenship to all, irrespective of religious affiliations, who have their domicile in India.Footnote 118 It is also committed to national unity and opposed to communalism. The secular state cannot segregate its citizens or derecognize any of its subjects. This commitment is scuppered when the state underwrites communal harmony and ‘problematizes’ subjects who object to reciprocity and places them beyond the geographical imaginaries of the nation. They are implicitly expelled from the nation and its citizenship. Some scholars have noted how the Indian nation and Indians are imagined to be synonymous with Hinduism and Hindus and virtually remove non-Hindus (read Muslims) from that imaginary.Footnote 119 However, my claim here goes beyond that. I am arguing that the state actively colludes in that imaginary even as it works against its own constitution. The state can be seen as violating its commitments to equality and justice.
In other words, rejection of reciprocity and endorsement of exclusivity, inspired by particular interpretations of tradition, are not among the range of possible modes of living justifiable in terms of the grammar of communal harmony. And given the close connections between nationalism, communalism, communal harmony, and secularism, such modes of living which lie beyond the pale automatically call into question one's citizenship in the Indian nation. The state's role in the communal harmony project adds to the complication. Even while guaranteeing citizenship to all, irrespective of their religion and in conformity to its secular principles, the state undermines that same position when it entangles itself in the project of communal harmony. It is a curious and irreconcilable contradiction underpinned by different temporalities. While one swears by progress and modernity, the other tries to maintain an ideal past—and the state is implicated in both. The state's endorsement of communal harmony simultaneously derecognizes and ‘problematizes’ its citizens as those who need to be refashioned and retrained before they can be entered into the rolls of the nation.
Conclusion
This article has sought to unpack the concept of communal harmony, prove the role of the state in promoting it, and spell out the implications of the state's involvement for citizenship in the Indian nation. Secularism and communal harmony in India are governmental strategies with distinct aims, although they join hands when it comes to the questions of peace, stability, and national integration. Both also converge on the need to shape particular kinds of subjectivities to help combat communalism, which is the antonym of nationalism. While secularism tries to fashion subjects in accordance with the demands of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’, the other strives to shape them in keeping with the ‘Indian’ values of ‘interreligious understanding’ and ‘tolerance’ (in other words, reciprocity). However, they are not mutually exclusive categories when viewed from the perspective of the state. The state, through its institutions, is decisively involved in both. While the role of the state in secularism is undisputed, communal harmony is often understood as a world-view and set of practices that is totally separate from the state. The article also pointed out that the association of Nehru and Gandhi with these two projects does not necessarily reflect their complex positions on inter-religious relations and peace. Instead, they are better understood as ‘mascots’ used to confer legitimacy upon the two projects of governmentality.
In post-riot Mysore, communal harmony supplemented the state's efforts to maintain peace by the force of law. State institutions mobilized a cross-section of citizens, particularly children, to perform India's perennial ethic of peaceful coexistence among religions. It was performed by the people and for the people with the specific aim of shaping subjectivities conducive to promoting communal harmony. But communal harmony not only supplements the law, it also helps shore up the diminished legitimacy of the Indian state. By ‘depoliticizing’ the causes of and solutions to communal violence, communal harmony deflects attention from the role of the state (its actions and inaction) in fomenting or preventing communal violence, which affects the state's claim to represent the entire society. Communal harmony pushes under the rug the legitimate grievances of religious minorities and the culpability of state officials and institutions in communal violence—and proposes reciprocity as the sole panacea for the evil of communalism.
Finally, communal harmony undermines the state's obligation, stressed in its secular constitution, to provide non-discriminatory citizenship. Given that communal harmony as reciprocity is an unavoidable precondition for national integration, any opposition to it could implicitly jeopardize one's membership of the Indian nation. To make this point, I considered the case of dargah-centred piety as an example of ‘Indian’ Islam and communal harmony, and the various theologically informed Islamic criticisms of such piety. The latter's objections to dargahs and the cultivation of alternative Islamic subjectivities are often interpreted as unwelcome intrusions from ‘outside’ the nation and thereby not to be accommodated. And when the state endorses communal harmony, which ‘problematizes’ reformist Islamic subjectivities, it contradicts its own constitutional promise to provide citizenship, irrespective of a person's religious views, and implicitly denationalizes those subjectivities.
