Introduction by Neeti Nair
In recent years, questions about religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities have reemerged as issues of concern across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. This special issue of Asian Affairs brings together articles by academic and policy experts to examine foundational debates during the drafting of constitutions, the “fundamental law”, to explain how and why questions of state intention and ideology that were passed over during the crafting of these countries’ constitutions have returned to haunt South Asia with greater urgency and consequence.
In the case of Kashmir, Mridu Rai shows how India’s self-professedly secular leaders used a religious lens when it came to securing representatives from Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian Constituent Assembly. Rai emphasizes that there was close to no debate on the meaning of secularism during the drafting of the constitution: “an overwhelming number of members … referred to secularism merely as a frame of mind that was the antithesis of the religious hatred that had precipitated Partition.” Rai points out that the actual passage of Article 306A, which gave Kashmir its special status in the union (article 370 in the final constitution), was accompanied by almost no debate. Neither Jammu and Kashmir’s representatives to the assembly nor Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, then a minister in Nehru’s government, spoke against the now controversial article granting Jammu and Kashmir special status. Rai’s discussion of the precarity of early Indian secularism is of a piece with the “spectre of plebiscite” that was then looming over the future of Jammu and Kashmir, and the figure of the “inassimilable Muslim”: equal heirs to the partition in India.
Pakistan, apparently born as a homeland for Muslims, witnessed founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah declare, in the inaugural session of their constituent assembly, that:
“You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State (Hear, hear). … We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. (Loud applause.)”Footnote1
In the case of Bangladesh, Dina Siddiqi’s close examination of the constituent assembly debates of 1972 reveals that there was little dispute on the principle of secularism during the drafting of the constitution. In the aftermath of a terrible war against Pakistan, it was clear that “the authors of the Constitution were writing against Pakistan and its form of religious nationalism”. Siddiqi quotes a member of the Constituent Assembly saying that secularism would ensure there was “no more hiding behind the cloak/ borkha of Islam.” Yet, there was no antipathy towards Islam in these debates; Bangladeshi secularism only insisted on rejecting the exploitation of religion. However, Bangladeshi secularism, in Siddiqi’s telling, did exclude non-Bangali speaking others. “The question”, to put it in Siddiqi’s stark rendition, “is not just who counts as a minority but which minorities count.” Following the work of Saba Mahmood, Siddiqi calls for the demystification of “secularism”.
In the essay on Myanmar, Christina Fink details the precarity of life for Christians, Hindus, and especially Rohingya Muslims. Although the Rohingya Muslims as a community have been discriminated against for several decades, the viciousness of recent attacks is a new phenomenon. Fink outlines the shifting place of Buddhism in the country’s various constitutions and demonstrates the recent rise in Islamophobia through vivid examples of “Islam prohibited zones” and other restrictions on everyday life. Here, as in the case of the Ahmadis in Pakistan, the disenfranchisement of a particular community, the Rohingya Muslims, appears complete. However, perhaps because of the newness of the situation, Fink ends on a positive note: “there may yet be government efforts to more effectively protect all of the country’s residents, communities may yet see improved relations as the best way to guarantee security, and citizenship and national belonging may yet be reframed so that they are less tied to race and religion.”
As in Myanmar, Muslims in Sri Lanka have been recently targeted, especially since the close of the civil war against the Tamils in 2009. It would appear that a country that had for so long been geared toward fighting an internal enemy now needed another internal enemy. In his overview, Neil DeVotta traces the Sinhala Only language movement, its resulting in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and a civil war that “forced the island away from secularism and towards Sinhalese Buddhist majoritarianism.” Although Sri Lanka’s 1972 constitution gives Buddhism “foremost” place, it also provides freedom for other minority religious communities. However, as with India in recent years, “majoritarian norms … trump the constitutional rules that were supposed to enable such freedoms.” DeVotta draws our attention to the “culture of impunity” that the long drawn-out civil war engendered. Although Tamil Muslims had acted as sources of intelligence for the state during the war, they fell victim to this culture of impunity after the war. DeVotta and Fink’s essays explain how Sri Lanka and Myanmar, overwhelmingly Buddhist nations, share a common fear that Muslims will alter the demographic composition and Buddhist character of their people. This fear has nurtured and grown in a time of Islamophobia worldwide.
One of the consequences of this phobia against Islam is a tendency to view all manifestations of religion with anxiety. This is particularly evident in recent media coverage of Islamist politics in Bangladesh. The next essay by Ali Riaz details why the grand narrative of a formerly secular Bangladesh falling into an Islamist camp is, fundamentally, a false narrative, that omits more than it reveals. Riaz offers a useful corrective to commonplace characterizations of the “Islamic” and the “secular.” Following Talal Asad, Riaz views religion as an “historical product of discursive processes.” He traces the lived experience of Islam in Bengal historically, and in the present. Riaz argues that secularism as a state principle was a top-down imposition in the 1972 Constitution that could never be accepted in a nation that had not yet experienced secularization. In conclusion, he points to the wide variation in objectives and practices of Islamist political parties and social movements in Bangladesh and thereby compels the reader to move beyond a superficial understanding of contemporary politics in Bangladesh.
Raza Rumi seeks to achieve a similar aim in his essay on the transformation of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws over time. Rumi considers the case of Ghazi Ilam Din (d. 1929), a Muslim from Lahore who was sentenced to death for murdering a Hindu who had published an account of the Prophet Muhammad that Ilam Din believed to be blasphemous. It was after the colonial law courts had acquitted Rajpal of the charge of creating enmity between religious communities that Ilam Din decided to take matters into his own hands. Ilam Din is celebrated in Pakistani textbooks and popular cinema as a model Muslim.
Raza Rumi’s essay details the blasphemy laws introduced during the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq and shows how “the law itself provides complainants, vigilantes and mobs the moral high ground”. Aided by a flawed education system, these loosely-framed laws have led to extra-judicial killings of persons accused, or of persons seen as aiding those accused, of having committed blasphemy. It appears that the criminal justice system in existence in Pakistan is geared towards pandering to the sentiments of the mob. Rumi then turns to whether or not there is a specific penalty for blasphemers in the Quran and the hadith and finds a variety of interpretations among Islamic scholars on this question. He believes that “at its core” the blasphemy laws “involve a curious junction between the inherently secular nature of modern democracies and the inevitably religious outlooks of the electorates in some of those democracies.” In conclusion, he considers the possibilities for reform of these laws.
The final essay by Cassie Adcock uses the specific case of cow protection in India to make a larger point about the efficacy of reports issued by the US Department of State’s Office of International Religious Freedom and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Adcock asks if “policy based on their account [is] likely to lessen anti-Muslim violence in India” and concludes that this is extremely unlikely. Adcock demonstrates that from colonial-era cow protection debates to the debates surrounding Article 48 of the Indian constitution, from later-day judgments of the Supreme Court to very recent protests against anti-beef laws, the matter of banning cow slaughter has always been entwined with non-religious, material considerations. She concludes that a policy focused on religious freedom “exaggerates the homogeneity within religious communities, as it overstates the opposition between them; it also tends to sidestep aspects of a conflict that do not lend themselves easily to a narrative of religious difference.” Most importantly, these policies “run the risk of reinforcing the very sectarian stereotypes and divisions that they seek to undermine.”
The articles in this volume approach the question of religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities from a wide number of angles and will provide readers with new questions to consider and areas of research to pursue. The juxtaposition of articles on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka and the individual and collective failure of these states to manage the problems faced by their respective religious minorities provides us with new insights into the entangled relationships between these postcolonial states of South Asia, while also explaining the pressures exerted by internal, formerly dormant constituencies.
One of the interesting lines of tension revealed here is the insistence with which founders turned to other South Asian countries, only to mark their difference from the other. So, Mridu Rai concludes her discussion of the most common meaning of secularism during the Indian Constituent Assembly debates with the dictum: “Secular India was essentially not-Pakistan.” Siddiqi’s interlocutor and drafting constituent assembly member Professor Anisuzzaman remarks that “The Bangladeshi constitution was NOT modeled on the Indian one – the latter incorporated secularism much later … ” Although there are nation-specific studies of discourses around the protection of minority rights, there is hardly any comparative historical scholarship on the way ideologies were shaped and continue to be shaped against the ‘other’ across their backyard, as it were. I hope that this issue will initiate more comparative conversations on South Asia, a region that has been deeply interconnected historically, and will always remain so.
This special issue is the product of a conference held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC in January 2018. I would like to thank Taylor and Francis, Routledge, the Royal Society for Asian Affairs and the Woodrow Wilson Center for their sponsorship of this conference, Michael Kugelman for his tremendous help organizing the conference, and all the authors for their respective articles.
Notes
1 Address of the Founder of Pakistan Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah on 11th August, 1947 to 1st Constituent Assembly. Kept out of circulation for years, the address is now on the home screen of the Pakistan National Assembly webpage. http://www.na.gov.pk/en/index.php (accessed 26 April 2018).