The Politics of Religion and Faith in South Asia

At the outset, let me thank the editors of the journal and especially Sasanka Perera for giving me the opportunity to put together this special issue on the politics of faith and religion in South Asia. The cultural as well as political dynamics of South Asian countries manifest closely related colonial pasts, postcolonial histories, multiethnic populations and forms of political leadership and governance. These commonalities are also related to political instability, ethnic violence and a greater role of religion and/or faith in the formation of secular democracies. At the same time, religion in politics does not limit the content of this special issue, which is also deeply invested in examining the politics of religion and faith and the ways in which caste, class, gender, ethnicity, sectarianism and other divides rupture and reframe sacred spaces, discourses or performances. This special issue includes six articles on India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

That religion and faith are central to the lives of ordinary people in South Asia is not something that is contested. The tumultuous history of the societies that composes the South Asian region testifies to the fundamental role that religion and particularly the politics of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ religions has played in shaping ideas of nation, state and citizenship. This brings out the distinction of South Asia as a region as well. South Asia is not merely a region in geographical terms but is also historically, socially and politically deeply interconnected. Not only have boundaries been shifting in the past across the countries that comprise this region, the boundaries themselves are recent and migrations have taken place across the centuries. Moreover, the formation of modern states in each of these countries is connected to the history of others. Pakistan, Bangladesh and India have origin stories that cannot be unlinked from each other.

Policies and politics particularly in relation to minorities in one state tend to have its echoes across boundaries. If Hindu minorities are attacked in Bangladesh or Pakistan, this tends to have reverberations in India. The fact that a minority in one state is a majority in another and that this is not accidental but a product of definite historical choices has major implications for the way in which the politics of religion has developed over the decades in the countries of this region. Thus, the minorities in one country are related by ethnicity or religion to neighbouring states. This often has an adverse effect on the situation of minorities in these states. In some states, minorities are considered a ‘fifth column’ and security considerations rather than the concerns of liberal democracy appear to affect the ways these states treat or deal with these minorities (Kymlicka 2001). Global terror discourses have typically constituted the minorities of some of these states as suspect, including, for instance, Tamils of Sri Lanka or Muslims of India (Manchanda 2010: 1).

As Pfaff-Czarnecka and Rajasingham-Senanayake (1999: 9) argue, there has been an increasing ethnicisation of politics in the South (and Southeast) Asian region as a whole. At the same time, there is something new in recent conflicts and that is the sheer scale on which the processes of globalisation and modern state constitution have given rise to local ethnic clashes. Moreover, what is of interest is the fact that in countries such as Sri Lanka, India or Nepal, the dominant ethno-religious group has developed what may be termed as a ‘minority complex’ and is seeking to regain its position of historical supremacy, which is apparently threatened by the numerically smaller religio-cultural groups in these states.

All these societies have seen violence, hatred and bloodshed in the name of religion. Indeed, as we bring these papers together, we are entering into a new period of crisis in which majoritarianism is not just socially but also politically ascendant in several of these societies, particularly India, whose hold on the idea of secularism and the protection of religious minorities seems specially tattered today. Though India always had a fragile hold on secularism, at least one could affirm that the state made efforts to implement secularism as a policy in the past, even if the society was rife with attitudes and actions that smacked of religious hatred, persecution and discrimination. This was all the more remarkable in the face of the fact that the states around India did not exemplify state secularism or principled dealing with minority religious groups in quite this way.

The non-Bengali hill and plains tribes as well as the Hindus, Christians and Buddhists constitute the main minority groups in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi Constitution established Bengali as the state language and accepted nationalism and secularism as state principles. However, the Pakistan Enemy Property Order of 1965 which allowed the state appropriation of ‘enemy’ (i.e., Indian) properties became, in 1972, the Bangladesh Vesting of Property and Assets Order. This Order has been used to dispossess many Hindus of their property, turning them into second-class citizens. In the case of the hill communities, forced settlement of Bengalis in their midst has led to their eviction or further impoverishment. Bengali nationalism was replaced by Bangladeshi nationalism under Ziaur Rahman in 1975. Islamic ideals were incorporated into the Constitution and secularism as a state principle was dropped. In 1988, by the Eighth Amendment, Islam was declared the state religion. These moves strengthened the feelings of insecurity of the minorities.

The first protests of minorities began to be organised, under the banner of Hindu, Boudha, Christian Oikya Parishad. The movement began as a protest against the Eighth Amendment, but later demanded the abolition of all discriminatory laws, such as the Vesting of Property Act. Outmigration to India has been a long-standing response of Bangladeshi minorities to discrimination by the state. This has only reinforced the idea among Muslim Bangladeshis that Hindus have no loyalty to the country. Attacks against Hindus and their places of worship increased after the Babri Masjid demolition. National parties for the most part have sought to consolidate the majority and have failed to incorporate minority needs in party agendas (Mohsin 1999).

The 1956 Constitution of Pakistan incorporated fundamental rights for all citizens and special rights for minorities (including the right to be governed by their own personal laws) reminiscent of the rights instituted in the Indian Constitution. However, these were rendered problematic when placed alongside the Objective Resolution, which opened the way for the incorporation of Islamic provisions. In particular, the foundation of Pakistan on Islamic principles and the requirement that the Head of State had to be Muslim decisively neutralised any provision of equality for minorities. Later provisions (1973) ensured that both President and Prime Minister had to be Muslim. The stipulation that no law was to be enacted that went against Islamic injunction and that existing laws would be brought into conformity with such injunctions further weakened the legal position of the minorities. The Islamic provisions outlined here were reiterated by the 1973 Constitution, which also declared Islam as the state religion of Pakistan. Though it was stated that these provisions would not affect the personal law of non-Muslims or their status as citizens, the Islamisation of the Constitution had been effectively set in place.

As Haq shows in her opinion piece in this issue, President Zia introduced the Hudud Ordinances prescribing Islamic law punishments for different offences. The incorporation in the 1980s of the Blasphemy laws in the Pakistan Penal Code radically widened the scope for the targeting of minorities, including Ahmedis who were prohibited from calling themselves Muslim, from describing their places of worship as mosques and from preaching or propagating their faith (Zia 2010). The Pakistan judiciary has not effectively protected minority rights, and the electoral system successfully denies minorities meaningful political representation. Hindus, particularly, are viewed as a fifth column and become a target whenever there is violence against Muslims in India. Christians too have suffered several attacks following the US-led war in Afghanistan. The smallest communities such as the Bahais or Parsis are affluent and well-connected and so protected to a degree against the majority. However, Ahmedis are severely restricted in their enjoyment of religious and political rights (Hussain 2010).

In Sri Lanka, all discussions of minority groups and their relationship with the state has been dominated by the Tamil conflict. Indeed, the Tamils of the northern and eastern provinces consider themselves a nationality rather than a minority. Sri Lanka does not have a glowing record when it comes to institutionalising minority rights. There is no affirmative action for the ethnic and social minorities. The Sinhala majority has an almost exclusive monopoly on state power, and Sri Lanka is effectively a majoritarian democracy. The Constitution does ensure that no citizen shall be discriminated against on grounds of race, religion, language, caste, sex and other grounds. Further, though Sinhalese is the official language of the state, both Sinhalese and Tamil are designated national languages and persons can be educated in either of these languages (Uyangoda 2010). An Official Languages Commission was set up in 1991 to provide institutional support for the implementation of language legislation. However, officials of the state rarely transact in Tamil and the Commission is only a recommendatory body.

The protracted civil war in Sri Lanka between the LTTE, fighting for a Tamil nation, and the state altered the discussion on minority rights considerably. The authoritarian Tamil Tigers unwilling to concede internal democracy brought into focus the limits for emancipation of projects of self-determination. Moreover, Muslims and Upcountry Tamils, considered as Tamils of recent Indian origin, have kept away from the LTTE. They have been more pragmatic in trying to enter into coalition alliances with the main parties. The military defeat of the LTTE has thrown doubt on the political survival of minority rights campaigns. If regional autonomy is considered at all it would involve only minimum devolution. Minority political parties appear to have accepted their second-class status, on the grounds that war with the state has brought them nothing (Uyangoda 2010).

Nepal is an untried democracy with continuing difficulties of power-sharing and over-centralisation. The political sphere sees the domination of the caste hill Hindu elite males (CHHEM) compose mainly of the Chhetri, Bahun, Thakuri and Sanyasi castes, and other ethnic and caste groups are disadvantaged and marginalised. Linguistically too, the policy of instruction in Khas-Nepali in schools has disadvantaged non-native Nepali speakers (Lawoti 2010: 282). Though protection of the rights of minorities has now become a part of the Constitution, some judicial rulings in the recent past have tended to go against the interests of marginalised groups.

That the judiciary has an important place in defining the role that religion will play in politics in the countries of this region is also evidenced by a recent judgement of the Supreme Court of India. In an important judgement, a divided court decided that in a secular democratic polity, appeals to religion or caste and the like need to be kept out of the electoral process. These are divisive markers of identity that threaten the basic consensus necessary for the survival of democracy in complex societies. On the other hand, the minority judgement held that religion, language, caste and other identities are part of the social life of the nation and are also associated with particular histories of discrimination, disadvantage and marginalisation. Governance itself is a mechanism for the amelioration of such injustices, and thus if calls in election for votes on the grounds of caste or religion are prohibited, this amounts to reducing democracy to an abstraction and suppressing the voicing of the legitimate concerns of citizens.

In the face of all this tumult, what is clear is that ‘religion’ is hardly disappearing from the countries of South Asia. At least, the ethnicisation of religious boundaries in the political domain remains extremely significant, even if within the communities themselves, fluidity of faith and practice are tolerated. The limit of that tolerance is itself questionable as groups come into conflict over the purity of faith and there are sectarian as well as other differences that emerge. All the while, religious boundaries are sharpened and become the basis for struggling against or making claims on the state. Yet, faith as a personal project of spirituality and salvation should not be completely effaced as some of the voices in this issue, particularly of the khana badosh and hijras of Lahore, manifest. The papers and opinion pieces in this issue cover a range of interesting ideas under the overall theme of ‘Politics of religion and faith’ and are located in the different countries and societies of South Asia such as Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India, including their borderland regions. The authors have interpreted the main theme in different ways and from varying perspectives.

To begin with, in his overall analysis based on a refined reading of the literature, Surya Prakash Upadhyay makes a cogent argument that given the way religion and politics have intertwined in South Asian countries, secularisation in the western sense has not been achieved and the formations of secular democracies in this region take a different trajectory. He points out the many commonalities that the countries of the South Asian region have in terms of their sociopolitical and economic circumstances as well as their cultural and political dynamics. These common trajectories are obviously linked with the shared pasts of these societies, their precolonial and colonial pasts, as well as the interconnections in their postcolonial histories. The role that religion has played in shaping the secular democracies of the region has ensured that political instabilities and ethnic violence are part of the processes of nation-formation and development.

Upadhyay looks at the political histories of each of the countries of the South Asian region in his efforts to answer the question: Are scholars right in opining that in South Asia, and India in particular, secularism has failed because it has been forcibly planted upon an essentially religious society? In a carefully articulated critique of this position, Upadhyay argues that this view does not take into consideration the larger forces that play a role in undermining secularity. When one brings these into the picture, it becomes difficult to hold religion responsible for the crisis of secularism. Other forms of discrimination and marginalisation such as on the basis of region, language, caste and gender also curtail the secular breadth of political life. Moreover, the failure of secularism must be traced to an amalgam of several factors including the weakness of states and their unwillingness to stand by or operationalise secular principles, historical legacies of prejudice and exclusion and the complexities inserted into the social situation by the scarcity of public resources. When religion becomes a part of this matrix, the efforts towards secularism and affirmative action by modern states mean that the majority feels threatened by the potential loss of power and privilege and tends to react sharply and often with violence.

Shashank Chaturvedi in his piece ‘Khichdi Mela in Gorakhnath Math: Symbols, Ideas and Motivations’ employs the technique of examining through an event—the annual Khichdi Mela of the Gorakhnath Math of Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh held on the occasion of Makar Sankranti—the complex webs of ritual practice and political patronage that surround the math. The Gorakhnath Math is one among several shrines of the Nath sect spread across South Asia. In Gorakhpur, it is part of the Gorakhnath sacred complex which includes the Math (monastery), the Peeth (site of tantric power) and the Mandir (temple). The history of the complex shows an intricate engagement of Hinduism and Islam and it is itself located in the heart of a Muslim-dominated neighbourhood. However, as the author shows, since the 1930s onwards, the temple has gradually rejected its location within a shared Hindu-Muslim aniconic and guru-centred devotionalism and become the site of a more muscular Hinduism. Indeed, a recent text on the philosophy of Gorakhnath claims that Islam had contributed little to the spiritual culture of the Hindus.

This particular site gained considerable prominence from the 1990s onwards when it emerged as a microcosm of an evolving Hindutva politics especially shaped by the then mahant-in-waiting Yogi Adityanath. He set up a youth force which constitutes a politico-religious outfit, the Hindu Yuva Vahini. On the occasion of Makar Sankranti, the Math is visited by thousands of devotees from far and near. Yogi Adityanath reaches the sanctum sanctorum at 4 am in saffron clothing and commences the ritual process. After the Yogi offers khichdi to Gorakhnath Baba, he comes out and raises his hands in blessing of the devotees. Volunteers, particularly of the Yuva Hindu Vahini, are present in large numbers and help in managing the event. While the Math is a site of assimilation for diverse devotees across social and economic levels and the simplicity of the offering—a handful of rice and turmeric—aids this inclusive capacity what is also not hidden in the Makar Sankranti celebrations, particularly with the very visible presence of the Yogi, his sevaks and the Yuva Vahini is the powerful interplay of politics, culture and religion.

Aditya Ranjan Kapoor’s article ‘Reforming the “Muslims”: Piety, State and Islamic Reform Movement in Bengal’ takes as its focus the historical processes that set up and the activities that define the shrine of Furfura Shareif in the Hoogly district of West Bengal. What is highlighted is the fluid nature of Islam and of faith, which cannot be contained by rigid definitions, and is embedded in specific social and historical contexts. Furfura Shareif is the shrine of Abu Bakr Siddique, an Islamic reformist who emerged during the colonial period. The shrine is a major religious site for Muslims of the region and following Abu Bakr Siddique’s death, one of his sons migrated to Dhaka, thus including the former East Pakistan within the range of the shrine’s influence.

The article looks at the intersections of the state, popular piety and reform movements and is able to trace the ways in which they shift, converge or diverge in different sociopolitical contexts. In the case of the influence of the Furfura Shareif, the changes have articulated with colonialism and postcolonialism, with the place of Muslims in contemporary West Bengal as well as with the location of the community as a whole as a vulnerable minority in the context of India. Especially at the point of initiation of the movement, there was an emphasis in its teachings on purity of faith, on strict adherence to the tenets of Islam and abandonment of local accretions in social and religious practices. While these notions remain central to the teachings of the pirs today, the exclusive slant of the initial doctrine has been slowly discarded in the case of India. In Bangladesh, the activities of the Furfura pirs attempt to effect a sharp distinction between themselves and other available Muslim sects. There is also convergence in the kinds of activities pursued on both sides of the border since the 1990s. Given the increasing withdrawal of the state from social welfare and the incorporation of NGOs as an arm of the state in the provision of services to the public, pirs in both India and Bangladesh have become involved in a range of social welfare and educational activities.

Megan Sijapati looks at narrative tropes that represent Muslims in relation to the national identity in her paper ‘Muslim Belonging in Hindu South Asia: Ambivalence and Difference in Nepali Public Discourses’. Traversing across different kinds of public discourses and the lived reality of Muslims in this Hindu-dominant state, she shows how for Muslims of South Asia, and Nepal particularly in this case, religious belonging is continuously negotiated and experienced in varied ways. In the nineteenth century, Nepal considered itself a Hindu realm. By the middle of the next century, new assertions of ‘Hindu’ state identity emerged and this has been followed by increased turbulence and more agitations by the religious minorities for greater representation and firmer rights. While for the Nepali janjati or tribal communities, indigeneity has been the basis for their struggles, this could not work for the Muslims. Though Muslims have been in Nepal for over four centuries, the label of migrant clings to them and they have been subject to unequal rights and lack of recognition for most of this period.

One of the ways to understand this is to look at how Muslims are perceived in the public imagination. As Sijapati analyses, the first image of Muslims in Nepali society is as cooperative partners in a Hindu secular state. As such, Muslims are viewed as willing to assimilate into Hindu culture harmoniously, without expecting any reciprocal gestures from the Hindus. The ‘good’ Muslim might pray to Allah, but equally knows the essence of the Gita, Ramayana and other Hindu religious texts. There is, however, a second representation that hovers at the level of public culture, of Muslims as traitors with loyalties to a global network of radical Islam rather than to Nepal itself. At the level of lived Islam, diverse strands of Muslim thought and practice compete with each other. There are complex pressures for internal unity within, but these are heuristically separable from the construction of Muslims as a ‘community’ either by the surrounding society or by the state. In the present situation, things become even more complex. The adoption of a ‘secular’ Constitution by no means signals the end of the battle for the Muslims. Sijapati argues that secularism itself has the effect of reifying religious boundaries and differences, and it is possible that the transition from monarchy to secular state may disguise or deny rather than necessarily diminish the issues of safety and belonging faced by Nepali Muslims.

In his paper on B. R. Ambedkar’s deployment of Buddhism as a cultural resource in his struggle against untouchability, Kalinga Tudor Silva argues that Ambedkar’s Navayana Buddhism was created as a force for emancipation and a moral foundation for the Dalit struggle against inherited discrimination and stigma. While discussing the various reasons for Ambedkar to choose Buddhism rather than any other religion such as Islam, Christianity or Sikhism, Tudor Silva also analyses how Ambedkar could not merely take over Buddhism but had to reinvent it in order to make it a vehicle of moral and social transformation for the Dalits. This involved four strategies or steps: (1) the invocation of the idea that kinship and Buddhism were interrelated and together they provided the mutuality of support and generosity that would be a bulwark for the ‘untouchables’ against Hindu tyranny; (2) the separation of this Navayana Buddhism both from its historical forms and its contemporary expressions visible in other parts of South or Southeast Asia; (3) the interpretation of the Buddhist notion of karma as responsibility for future actions rather than past ones because the latter cripples the spirit of change and legitimises the old order; and (4) the understanding of dukkha (suffering) and nibbhana (salvation) in terms not merely of the experience of the individual but of the collectivity as a whole.

This analysis lays the foundation for the author to argue that it was precisely the reformulation of Buddhism in this way as a part of a campaign against the caste system that explains why contemporary Buddhism in Theravada Sri Lanka has failed to problematise social inequality. The way in which Buddhism developed in Sri Lanka ensured that the monastic order was largely structured by caste and these differences were visible in ritual-related activities as well. The revival of Buddhism by a leader such as Dharmapala in the nineteenth century asserted Sinhala Buddhist identity. Though comparable with Ambedkar as a Buddhist activist and perhaps even influencing him in some ways, Dharmapala linked the survival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka to the Sinhalese ethnic community. This eventually led to the development of a hegemonic ethnic Buddhist identity which has had deep consequences for the evolution of the Sri Lankan state. Moreover, the horizontal solidarity of ethnicity created by Sinhala Buddhism actually suppressed rather than problematised forms of social inequality whether based on caste, class or gender. In the Indian case, neo-Buddhism has led to the ethnicisation of caste as discrete Dalit groups; both come together in a rejection of hierarchy but also embrace the democratic project of equality, justice and human rights. In the Sri Lankan case, on the other hand, ethnic Buddhism has associated itself with a hegemonic nationalism and concealed internal differences, while consolidating a single identity that emerges in violent confrontation with others, such as Tamils.

In her insightful opinion piece on Pakistan ‘Sacralising the State and Secularising Sharia’, Farhat Haq contrasts the development of Sharia for some 1300 years with the ways in which that concept changed in the nineteenth century. For centuries, Muslims accepted that the Sharia was a guide to salvation and the good life and they saw no contradiction between that and the idea that the ‘human understanding of that path’ was flexible and plural. Schools of jurisprudence developed and dissension was not unusual. In the nineteenth century, what occurred was the codification of parts of the Sharia such that ‘law’ was pulled out of tradition and history and reified. Once the confidence of independence waned in the postcolonial states constituted in the twentieth century and faced by declining economic and social transformation, these states seem to have developed hardened understandings of political Islam and experienced growing authoritarianism. This is what Haq refers to as the ‘Shariatisation of politics’ in states such as Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, the late 1940s and early 1950s was a period of excitement but the hope that Muslims would be able to build a good society was soon belied. As Haq argues, one needs to ask not what Islam did to the Pakistani state but what Pakistani state did to Islam. The employment of Islam to sacralise and legitimise the state weakened democracy and strengthened authoritarianism. This is so despite the fact that Islamist parties have little role to play in parliamentary politics. The power of Islamic forces comes from the expansion of blasphemy laws, the introduction of the Hudud ordinance (with Islamic punishments for various offences) and the reliance of the state on religion to buttress its claim to appropriate greater economic resources for the military.

There are parallels and lessons here for contemporary India. Indeed, one might say that there is a cautionary tale for India here. Indian society is encountering the growing assertion of Hindutva forces. Cow vigilantism has been rife throughout the country with victims being harassed and arrested and perpetrators celebrated as heroes. Rallies of Dalits have been attacked. While overt political legitimacy for the Hindutva brigades is still absent, the silence of the state in the face of increasing vigilantism and attacks on minorities is effective enough in making such forces stronger. The state is silent only on this internal strife; in contrast, there is an increasing rhetoric of and reliance on the language of war (on ‘terror’; on states such as Pakistan that ‘sponsor’ terror; on the economy in the wake of demonetisation, itself configured as a war on the financing of international ‘terror’), military action and the ‘strategic strike’. This strategy subtly allows the ideology of war to fill the ‘legitimacy’ gap in the internal stifling of liberties. One must assume, without being so informed explicitly, that in a country apparently at ‘war’, civil liberties will be curtailed if not willingly surrendered.

Mahendra Lawoti’s opinion piece is a detailed analysis of the question as to whether secular or religion-based states are better able to protect civil liberties and religious freedoms of minorities. Through a comparative study of the countries of South Asia, he argues that India has overall managed to secure the empowerment and liberties of the minorities through a variety of institutional and other mechanisms and processes, primary among them being the provisions of its secular constitution. On the other hand, the other countries of South Asia cannot be called successful in this regard. Pakistan is the least protective of minorities in terms of stemming violence against them, promoting secularism or securing minority rights. Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka lie somewhere in between these two countries, though the position of each has varied over time.

Of course, even India has done better when it comes to ethnic or linguistic minorities as compared with religious ones. Lawoti uses the rankings of the US-based Freedom House to think about where each country lies on the scale of political freedom, ranging from authoritarian and non-democratic at one end to liberal democracy on the other. A country judged as an electoral democracy, such as Sri Lanka after 1981 or Bangladesh in recent times, is considered only partly free because the holding of regular elections by no means ensures that civil liberties are protected or enhanced by the state. Lawoti argues that India’s record would not have improved if it had chosen the path of a Hindu state; in all likelihood, the position of minorities would have declined. In sum, secularism is a significant contributor to the consolidation of democracy in a country even if it is not the only one.

Not all the papers turn to the engagement of religion with the politics of the state. In his paper ‘Spiritualising Marginality: Sufi Concepts and the Politics of Identity in Pakistan’, Amen Jaffer explores Sufi shrines as locations for the enunciation by marginalised groups of an alternative religious subjectivity. Drawing from fieldwork in urban shrines and among the khana badosh groups and hijra families in Lahore, Jaffer analyses the narratives and rituals of these communities in relation to the shrines, and their political significance. There are hierarchical arrangements of influence around shrines and in many ways these reproduce social inequalities of caste, class and gender, including for instance the dominance of the highly placed Syeds. At the same time, even if at the bottom of the hierarchy, the performance of particular ritual roles within the shrines offers marginalised groups the possibility of access to some power and legitimacy, however temporary or partial.

However, the significance of the shrine-based practices is not limited to discovering in them the possibilities of transcending the social order. Jaffer is also keen to understand how individuals and groups subject to humiliation and violence are able at the level of the everyday to carve out for themselves a life worth living. Thus, the creative employment of relationships with the shrine is part of the political project of forging a dignified selfhood. As Jaffer argues, elements of Sufism are appropriated by the khana badosh and the hijras to construct narratives about the self that contest the marginalised position accorded to these groups socially. He notes that this is important to record even as the general lack of power in society of the khana badosh and the hijras permits them few alternative paths of recognition. Moreover, the use of Sufism for the project of self-dignity cannot be viewed as merely instrumental on the part of these groups. Hijras and khana badosh are deeply committed to the beliefs and practices of Sufism and experience it at an emotional and affective level.

This brief foray into the deeper spiritual aspects of faith is much needed in an issue that is otherwise compelled to speak to the politics of religion and religious boundaries in their more overt form across South Asia as a whole, and India in particular. India’s commitment to secularism and democracy is under increasing stress today. The growing curtailment of fundamental rights of speech and expression, continuous curfew and the blacking out of various media including the Internet in Kashmir, the use of the deadly pellet-gun whose victims have included numerous women and children, the controversies over Bharat Mata, nationalism and anti-nationalism in which various academics have been involved and even faced suspension, the rows in JNU and Hyderabad University all speak of the overall trampling of freedoms of life, assembly or liberty. In the midst of this, we had a recent Supreme Court judgement that by a slim majority held that elections in a democracy are a secular exercise and that seeking votes in the name of religion, caste or community amounted to corrupt practice and could lead to the disqualification of a person thus elected. These contradictory shifts speak of a nation at a critical point in its history and what happens here will have implications for other South Asian countries as well, which are in any case also contending with their own current predicaments over terror, discrimination against minorities, religious conflicts and similar issues.