The myth of a liberal India.

AuthorSharma, Vivek S.

American leaders visiting India are often quick to point out that both India and the United States are liberal, secular democracies. The implicit message is that the two states share something fundamental, and that this will reduce friction as their relationship deepens. However, just because India is democratic and secular does not mean that either the Indian state or Indian society share common values with the United States, despite political rhetoric to the contrary. As the American strategic relationship with India deepens, the question of what "democracy," "secularism" and "liberalism" actually mean in India and how they differ profoundly from their meanings in an American context will become increasingly important. India's political system is best understood as a communalist democracy, as opposed to a liberal democracy, and this distinction renders comprehensible trends and patterns of behavior in Indian politics that appear to outsiders to be antidemocratic.

In the United States, "secularism" is a primary component of the larger political tendency of "liberalism." In the American model of secularism there is a sharp line between church and state. The notion that religion is properly an individual concern is central to the broader structure of the state and society. This fundamental point is often obscured in Western media reporting about secularism, democracy and liberalism in India: in the West the notion of group rights (religious or otherwise) was eroded in favor of individual rights. This shift is the very foundation of liberalism. It is not that corporate and communal groups do not exist or do not have constitutionally recognized roles in the state and in the formation of policy in the West (for example, labor unions in Germany and Scandinavia). Rather, the notion that the state's laws apply to one and all in precisely the same way is basic to its entire organization. It is critical to understand that in India this is not and has never been the case.

Neither the Indian state nor its society is liberal, although it is indeed democratic (about which more will be said below) and is, in some sense, secular (in that there is no established religion and the state is officially equidistant from all religions, at least in law). Indian society is profoundly aliberal in the sense that a variety of group identities, above all kinship but also caste, region, language and religion, are profoundly important to how society organizes itself and how it interacts with the state. Indeed, both the Constitution of India and its corpus of law, legislation and judicial precedent are permeated by aliberal notions of group and communal rights of varying sorts, including those that relate to religion. The Government of India, for example, has performed the traditional role of a Muslim state (and continued the policies of its British and Mughal predecessors) by providing a subsidy to Muslim citizens performing the Hajj--a practice that was ruled unconstitutional by the Indian Supreme Court in 2012 on the grounds, among others, that it violated the teachings of the Koran.

It is important to note that most of the founders of the Indian republic (Nehru above all) aspired to create a liberal society and did not foresee the extent to which it would, over time, evolve in a decidedly aliberal direction. The codification into...

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