State Hindutva and Singapore Confucianism as responses to the decline of the welfare state

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Notes

This article draws on my 2001 Masters' thesis in development sociology at Cornell University, and before that on a paper presented for the Confucian Traditions Group of the American Academy of Religion in November 2000. I want to thank the many people who have offered helpful comments on various versions of it. They are too many to name, but I would like to mention in particular Melanie Adrian, Benedict Anderson, Robert Cribb, Holly Gayley, Paul Gellert, Jonathan Herman, Jayant Lele, Anne Monius, Tu Wei-ming and the ASR's referee.

I refer to Indira and Rajiv by their first names throughout the paper, following an Indian convention that distinguishes them from each other and from Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, to whom they were not related.

While PAP leaders had already put forth some of the ideas that they would later implement in the name of Confucianism, especially a distaste for Western youth culture (Barr, 2002, pp. 32–34), they had not yet associated this ideology with Confucianism; nor had they promoted it as state policy.

Michael Barr (2002, p. 47) notes that the “Asian values” debate is often considered a creature of the 1990s, but that it is more correct to identify that decade as “the time when the debate first achieved world prominence.” I am interested in the period in which ideas of “Asian values” (often interchangeable with Confucianism, at least in the eyes of Lee Kuan Yew, the idea's most avid promoter) were incipient. The late 1970s and early 1980s were the period where states first actively promoted them as policy – after the ideas had first been expressed, but before they became widely known around the world.

I focus in this paper on the Congress, even though other parties were and are more strongly associated with militant Hinduism, because (as later sections of the paper demonstrate) the state adoption of Hindutva began with Congress Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s.

The term “communal” refers in India to conflicts between religious communities.