The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism,Hindu Nationalism,and other Masks of Deculturation

What follows is basically a series of propositions. It is not meant for academics grappling with the issue of ethnic and religious violence as a cognitive puzzle but for concerned intellectuals and grassroots activists trying, in the language of Gustavo Esteva, to “regenerate people's space.” The aim of the article is threefold: (1) To systematize some available insights into the problem of ethnic and communal violence in South Asia, particularly India, from the point of view of those who do not see communalism and secularism as sworn enemies but as the disowned doubles of each other; (2) To acknowledge, as part of the same exercise, that Hindu nationalism, like other such ethnonationalisms, is not an “extreme” form of Hinduism but a modernist creed that seeks to retool Hinduism, on behalf of the global nation-state system, into a national ideology and the Hindus into a “proper” nationality; (3) To hint at an approach to religious tolerance in a democratic polity that is not dismissive toward the ways of life, idioms, and modes of informal social and political analyses of the citizens, even when they happen to be unacquainted with—or inhospitable to—the ideology of secularism.