Nationalism, Politicization and Modernization in India
Nationalism and political culture of democracy are other forms of normative innovations which are essentially modern in ethos and have a pan- Indian character. Both of these phenomena are of exogenous nature and pose serious challenges to the primordial normative structure of the Indian tradition.
Nationalism implies the consciousness of one nationhood and its related sense of political identity, which results from political consensus. Its sociological manifestation is the idea of a nation-state. Democracy is a special form of political organization and system of values on which a nation- state can be founded. Both nationalism and democracy in the contemporary form are Western innovations.
In the West, historical origins of democracy and nationalism can be associated with the breakdown of the feudal hierarchical system of estates and rise of the philosophies of the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
This led to a breakdown in the medieval system of patrimonial authority relationships which were replaced by individual authority relationships. These were achieved by a revolution which was industrial and at the same time political.
Before this revolution the norms of hierarchy and holism, which are characteristic of any traditional society, were also present in the Western culture. Rights and liberties were only extended to groups and not to individuals; the system was dissension rather than consensual. Of this system Bendix writes:
The medieval political life depends on the link between hereditary or spiritual rank in society, control over land as the principle economic resource, and the exercise of public authority. All those whose rank or status excluded them from access to control over land are thereby excluded from any direct participation in public affairs. Rights and liberties are extended to groups, corporations, estates rather than to individual subjects; representation in judicial and legislative bodies is channeled through traditionally privileged estates.
The group and estate-based rights as mentioned above, were similar to caste-based rights as acknowledged in the Hindu tradition. Through the social forces unleashed by leaders of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, communal values based on estates gradually disappeared and were replaced by values of freedom, equality and humanism.
These were guaranteed to individuals through recognition of their civil rights within the political framework of democratic nation-states. The materialization of these cultural goals was gradual and was closely linked with the past cultural traditions. Both nationalism and democracy in India have come into being in a different historical context. The cultural consequences of these systems may be as radical for India as it was for the West, but its historical manifestation cannot be identical.
This is for various reasons. First, these values have been derived from an alien tradition and have grown on the soil of India under a colonial patronage, which is a psychologically irksome factor. Secondly, the economic and social structural factors of the contemporary India are not comparable to those of the 17th and 18th century west. Thirdly, for historical reasons these institutional innovations have been interjected in the Indian body-politic in a compressed form which in the West had evolved gradually, and this phenomenon creates new and far greater cultural stresses than it did in the West.
This would be evident if we review the process of growth in nationalism and democracy in India. Historically, Indian nationalism has been a forerunner of democratic polity. Substantively, it was never modeled completely after the Western pattern. From Rammohan Roy to Gandhi, the nationalistic consciousness was oriented towards the Indian tradition; in this matter there were differences of degrees but not of kind.
The national leaders were for modernity but not at the cost of traditional cultural identity. Tilak and Gandhi represent extreme forms of this movement, being the advocates of a kind of nationalism which was deeply embedded in the past Hindu tradition. In the rise of Indian nationalism, the role of Gandhi has specially been of great historical significance, which renders Indian political process of modernization unique.
Gandhi had an uncanny skill to project to Indian masses the many humanistic values of the modern West through traditional cultural symbolism; the kind of nationalism of which he was an advocate was rooted in the Hindu tradition but at the same time was non-communal and to that extent secular; secularism for Gandhi did not mean a-religiosity but the spirit of religious tolerance which he postulated on the basis of universalistic ethic of Hinduism itself His conception of Indian polity was entirely non-communal and yet not secular in the strictly Western sense of the term.
The concepts of communalism and secularism provide useful conceptual tools for the analysis of the role of Indian nationalism in the cultural modernization of the nation. Secularism is a sub-process in modernization.
Its spread implies that various issues and events in personal and social life are evaluated not from a religious point of view but utilitarian. with an increase in the process of ‘secularization’ the various spheres of social life which formerly were guided by religiously ordained norms are exempted from its hold and are increasingly governed by norms which tend to be rational or hedonistic or both.
Increasing nationalism contributed also to rapid politicization in India. This movement was primarily led by the Indian National Congress which right from its beginning took a non-communal standpoint. One year after its founding in 1885, its report stated that “the Congress is a community of temporal interests and not of spiritual convictions that qualify men to represent each other in the discussion of political questions.”
Commitment to this ideal was kept intact by the Congress despite many difficulties, such as heterogeneous nature of its leadership which from time to time consisted of even zealous communal nationalists and the system of communal representation introduced by the Government of India Act 1919 and the historical suspicion or ambivalence in Muslim-Hindu relationship in India. These factors taken together led ultimately to a partial if not the total triumph of communalism —the partition of the country.
In free India, however, secularism has survived despite its many difficulties. The Indian National Congress which came into power as a political party under the leadership of Nehru consistently advocated the need for India becoming a secular state.
Free India adopted a Constitution which guarantees individual and collective freedom of religion and lays down that there should be no state discrimination on the ground of religion in public employment and education; it further provides that state as such must be neutral to religious goals and should not levy taxes for religious purposes or encourage religious teachings in educational institutions wholly financed by the state.
It, however, does provide for special seats in the Legislative Assemblies and the House of the People for the members of the scheduled castes and tribes, on purely humanitarian considerations. Thus, Constitution of India offers us a normative structure of secularism and democracy which form essential parts of the Great tradition of modernization in India.
However, the enactment of the secular ideals in the Constitution does not imply ail actual conformity to its norms in public life and relationships between major Indian communities. Its proper evaluation is necessary. It may be pointed out that the Hindu community right from the beginning of the British rule took a more liberal attitude towards various social legislations which abolished many of its pseudo-religious customs by law. It even tolerated legislation affecting the caste system quite early in the 19th century, as we mentioned above.
After independence, much legislation regarding reforms in customs of marriage, untouchability, inheritance, etc., have been accepted without much opposition. This may partly be explained by the universalistic nature of Hindu religion itself, but it is mainly due to the emergence of enlightened elite in the Hindu society with rational commitment to nationalism.
The case of other major Indian community, the Muslims, as we analyzed above, has been fundamentally different. This creates dis-balances in the processes of secularization in India. There are also other inconsistencies in the growth of secularism in India. Despite claims made for religious neutrality, the state in India has often intervened in the religious matters; this particularly holds in case of management of temples and religious institutions, such as monasteries and monastic heads.
Enactment in this sphere, of course, existed from the British times; for instance, in Bengal in 1810 and in Madras in 1817 regulations were passed for regular administration of temple endowments by the government. These were subsequently revised, until in 1960 the Government of India appointed a Hindu Religious Endowments Commission to examine the administration of Hindu religious endowments and suggest steps to improve their management.
Following the Commission’s report in 1962, legislations have been enacted in many States of India, which previously did not have such legislation (Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab) for the management of temple endowments and steps have also been taken to rationalize the methods of learning and training of the Hindu priests through theological colleges and encouragement of Sanskrit teachings.
In the political sphere too, many political parties and groups have continued to voice communal point of view on contemporary issues. Political parties like the Hindu Sabha, Rama Rajya Parishad, Jana Sangh and Muslim League which directly or indirectly have communal orientations are active in the political arena; some of them like the Jana Sangh and the Muslim League have even increased their political influence in many parts of the country, sadhus and religious leaders conducted a violent movement against the killing of cows and in many States parochial movements based on caste, regionalism, and linguistic affinities voice degrees of particularistic identities in political processes. Since secularism implies a universalistic world-view, these contemporary movements in India do not harmonize with its value system.
Despite these difficulties secularism has been accepted widely as the national policy in India. Majority of the political parties and even the Jana Sangh which is often accused of being communal in orientation profess to be secular in outlook.
As Donald E. Smith says “It is meaningful to speak of India as a secular state, despite the existence of the problems India is a secular state in the same sense in which one can say that India is a democracy. Despite various undemocratic features of Indian politics and government, parliamentary democracy is functioning, and with considerable vigour. Similarly, the secular state; the ideal is clearly embodied in the Constitution, and it is being implemented in substantial measure.”
The ambivalence which we find in the Indian political system on the issue of secularism is also evident in the functioning of democratic polity. The contemporary democratic tradition in India is a natural outgrowth of political reforms introduced by the British from time to time. Its major landmarks as Norman D. Palmer has mentioned are: the Indian Council Act of 1861, Lord Ripon’s Resolution on Local Self-Government of 1882, the Indian Councils Act 1893, the Morley Minto Reforms of 1909, the Montague- Chelmsford Reforms of 1918, the Government of India Act of 1919 and the Government of India Act of 1935.
The last Act was never enforced but has substantially influenced the federal nature of the parliamentary system as adopted through the Constitution. Despite this linkage with the British heritage, democracy in India cannot be said to be patterned entirely on any foreign model. This obtains both in case of the formal pattern and the processes of democratic functioning.
The Indian Constitution recognizes the diversities in the Indian tradition through its emphasis on federalism and decentralization; it has an imprint of the Gandhian philosophy in its recognition of the need for village panchayats, cottage industries and to a great extent its emphasis on a welfare state embodies the central values of humanism and tolerance preached by Gandhi.
During the previous decade and a half the functioning of democracy in India has further vindicated the extent to which it is rooted into the basic textures of traditional particularistic values represented by caste, kinship and other parochial identities.
Pressure groups based on universalistic identities of political and economic interests as operate in the Western democracy are replaced in India by groups which have quasi-universalistic if not fully particularistic identities. From a sociological point of view these manifestations are not necessarily symptomatic of malfunctioning of democracy in India.
In fact, these are natural manifestations of the stuff of which Indian democracy is made. Its gradual replacement by more advanced and universalistic group-identities would take place only through advancement and change in the Indian society. This gradual change will further contribute to the Indianization of politics and democracy in India.