Whither Democracy, Secularism, and Minority Rights in India?

Abstract

Indian democracy, which was once considered remarkable in scale and duration, has been weakened by the rise of xenophobic nationalism and threats to religious minorities. Although these trends were evident in the past, they have dramatically increased amidst the growth of Hindu nationalism. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was elected to power in 2014, has promoted or tolerated attacks on women, Dalits, Christians, and Muslims, by members of its party, government, and civil society organizations. The BJP government has also centralized state power and curtailed civil rights and liberties. Clearly, the protection of democracy and religious freedoms are closely inter-twined.

Keywords:

• Democracy
• religious freedoms
• minority rights
• Hindu nationalism
• Bharatiya Janata Party
• India
• violence

The ebbs and flows in the fate of democracy and minority rights in India make it an especially important case for comparative analysis on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB).¹ India, with its 1.34 billion people, is by far the world’s largest democracy, as well as the oldest democracy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It has had democratic institutions since it achieved independence in 1947, after nearly two centuries of British colonial rule. Its constitution describes India as a secular state and protects religious freedoms. Myriad cross-cutting social cleavages based on religion, ethnicity, language, and caste, have historically mirrored the system of checks and balances in the political realm.

And yet India, like so many countries, has recently witnessed the rise of xenophobic nationalism and violence against religious minorities. The United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) 2018 report designates India—alongside Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, and Turkey—as a Country of Particular Concern because of the extent and nature of violations of religious freedoms that the government tolerates or promotes. The report states that an exclusionary conception of national identity based on religion has threatened India’s multicultural and multi-religious identity. The USCIRF attributes responsibility for anti-minority violence to Hindu nationalist organizations, including the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). These concerns are echoed by several other international organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

I will argue that India’s constitutional design and legal regime simultaneously create a secular, democratic state and privilege the interests of the Hindu majority. The constitutional framework has enabled the courts, legislatures, and political parties to undermine religious freedoms and minority rights within the democratic framework. The first part of my paper identifies the features of democracy that have laid the groundwork for Hindu majoritarianism. As I show in the next section of the paper, the BJP’s attack on minority rights and religious freedoms, especially since it formed the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in 2014, is unprecedented in scale and character. Hindu Nationalists have intensified and extended campaigns and policies that conflate Indian and Hindu nationalism. I attribute this to Hindu nationalists’ organizational characteristics and ideological commitments. The third section describes violent campaigns against Christians and Muslims, as well as attacks on civil rights and liberties, under the present BJP-led NDA government. The conclusion discusses why minority rights and religious freedoms are integral to the health of Indian democracy.

Indian Democracy

Indian democracy has survived against the odds. Compared to other large, multiethnic democracies, post-colonial India has an independent judiciary, universal suffrage, and a free and lively press. In some respects, its democracy has become more inclusive. People with more varied identities form parties, vote, and serve as political representatives. The Indian political class has become more diverse with respect to gender and caste. Political parties have grown. Congress won every national election and led every government from 1947 to 1989, except for one brief interlude from 1977 to 1980. The decline of the Congress Party enabled small regional parties, often representing minority ethnic groups and lower castes, to achieve power at the state level and to participate in national coalition governments. In fact, coalition governments depended on the support of state-based parties in every national election from 1989 to 2014.

However, there are several impediments to democratization in India, beginning with poverty and class inequality. Neoliberal reforms have accelerated growth but also deepened class, regional, and rural-urban divides. Social inequities compound class inequality. About 26 percent of Indians and 31 percent of Muslims live below the poverty line. Political power is highly centralized and the state has often been repressive towards political dissidents and religious/ethnic minorities. The government has curbed dissent on grounds that it threatens national stability by invoking Sections 124A (outlawing sedition) and 120B (outlawing criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The British colonial government created a precedent for this repressive activity by arresting MK Gandhi under Section 124A of IPC. Given the draconian nature of these provisions, the Supreme Court has limited their use to situations in which speech incites violent action. Although convictions are unusual, the police frequently harass government critics by arresting them under the anti-sedition law.

India’s police system is governed by an 1861 colonial-era law. When Hindu-Muslim conflicts have occurred, the police has been more apt to side with Hindus who instigate violence than with Muslim victims. The police force is biased against Muslims, because of its predominantly Hindu composition and because it is protected by higher functionaries from being punished for crimes of commission and omission. Police officers are beholden to politicians for professional advancement and therefore apt to be more politically strategic than law abiding. The government has ignored the recommendations of several commissions it has appointed to professionalize the police force and reduce its biases. Under the present regime, there is every reason to believe that police biases are becoming more pronounced.

Although India has a vibrant civil society, the state has long been suspicious of NGOs which receive foreign funding. Since 1976, it has required them to register under the Foreign Contributions Regulations Act (FCRA). The government often harasses NGOs by claiming that they are violating FCRA by using overseas funds for activities that are detrimental to the “national interest.” As described below, these tendencies towards centralizing power and cracking down on NGOs have accelerated.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has strengthened the executive branch of government, undermined the strength and autonomy of political institutions, and emboldened militant Hindu nationalist organizations. His government has ignored and even instigated anti-minority violence. As a result, minority rights and religious freedoms are increasingly threatened and the ties that bind democracy and secularism, under stress since Independence, have become considerably more frayed.

Religious Freedom

India is home to the world’s two major religious communities—Hindus (just under 80 percent of the population) and Muslims, 14.2 percent. In addition, Christians represent 2.3 percent; Sikhs, 1.7 percent; Jains, 0.4 percent and Buddhists, 0.8 percent. As students of Indian politics have noted, India’s social diversity has created the foundation for pluralism. One reason is that religious communities are distributed throughout the country and form minorities in some places but majorities in others. Sikhs are a majority in the Punjab and Christians are a majority in the northeast states of Nagaland, Meghalaya, and Mizoram. Another reason is that Indians hold a number of identities—ethnic, caste, regional, linguistic, and religious. This has prevented any single identity from becoming pre-eminent and, argues Amartya Sen, is the best antidote to violence (Sen 2006). Of course demography alone cannot explain India’s democracy. The post-independence government created ethno-linguistic federal states rather than adopting a single national language, let alone religion.

The pre-independence, anti-colonial nationalist movement, under Gandhi’s leadership, was deeply committed to Hindu-Muslim unity and to recognizing the unique contributions of every religious community. In the aftermath of the brutal inter-ethnic violence that was associated with the Partition, the Indian state sought to ensure the security of its Muslim population. Muslims in turn supported the Congress government and the secular principles it professed. They remain committed to secular, democratic principles.

India’s understanding of secularism involves equal respect for all religious communities, as opposed other forms of secularism that call for the strict separation of religion and state. On the one hand, this led the Indian state to promote religious pluralism, for example, by officially recognizing the major holidays of all religious communities. On the other hand, this understanding of secularism has led the state to intervene in religious affairs, for example, by managing thousands of temples across the country.

The Indian Constitution, which was adopted in 1949 and went into effect the following year, defined India as a sovereign democratic republic, but not a secular one. That only occurred, after much contestation in 1976, as a result of the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution, which described India as both secular and socialist. Although the Indian Constitution supports legal equality of all citizens, regardless of their religion or creed, and prohibits discrimination based on religion, several constitutional provisions and laws privilege the interests of the Hindu majority. For example, Article 25, Subclause B enables the state to provide for the social welfare and reform of Hindu religious institutions. The Constitution also contains a number of directive principles of state policy, including “prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves,” a clear affirmation of the preferences of the Hindu majority.

Post-independence governments have upheld anti-conversion laws, that originated during the period of British colonial rule, and only apply to conversion from the “original religion,” which is assumed to be Hindu. So-called freedom of religion laws restrict conversions out of Hinduism and encourage or coerce conversions into it. A long-standing antipathy to Christian conversions, in particular, is reflected in laws and public policy. The Congress government appointed the Niyogi Commission, which issued a report in 1956 recommending the “legal prohibition” of religious conversions that were not “completely voluntary.” Although the government did not implement this measure for fear of violating the religious liberty provision in the Indian Constitution, the Commission encouraged state governments to pass anti-conversion legislation. Odisha was the first state to pass a so-called “Odisha Freedom of Religion Act, 1967.” It was followed by Madhya Pradesh in 1968. Citing Article 25 of the Indian Constitution, the Supreme Court upheld legal restrictions on conversions in 1977.

This was not the only time the Supreme Court expressed suspicion of Christian conversion activities. It provided a deeply disturbing judgment after Graham Stuart Staines, a Christian missionary, and his two young sons, were brutally murdered by Hindutva activists, in Odisha in January 1999. A trial sessions court sentenced them to death, but the Odisha High Court commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. The Supreme Court upheld the High Court decision and made strong pronouncements against conversion. Although the Supreme Court subsequently expunged some of these statements from the records, it did not change its verdict.

On the face of it, as the term freedom of religion implies, the legislation would seem to prohibit coercion and ensure that individuals freely choose their faith. In fact, its intent and effects are precisely the opposite. It increases the state’s propensity to engage in surveillance and punishment, while undermining religious freedom. In some instances, the state has challenged individuals who said they had converted voluntarily (Jenkins 2008). Asma Jahangir, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief from 2004 to 2010, visited India in 2008 and reported that she did not encounter a single case of forced conversion in Odisha. She also commented on legal ambiguities in definitions of force, allurement, inducement, and fraud, all of which increase the discretionary powers of administrative officials.

Laws passed by BJP state governments in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, impose the stiffest penalties for the conversion of Dalits (also known as Untouchables and Scheduled Castes), women and tribals (also known as Scheduled Tribes).² Gujarat increased the penalty for conversion by Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), minors or women of up to four years imprisonment and a fine of up to $2,174. In Himachal Pradesh fines were doubled to $1,087 and up to three years imprisonment when the offenses concerned minors, women, and SCs and STs. By heightening scrutiny of Hindus who convert, the law popularizes the notion that Christians and Muslims are ruthless foreigners who take advantage of gullible, passive victims. In fact, many Dalits freely converted out of Hinduism to escape rigid caste stratification. One study, based on extensive interviews with Dalit women from the Bangalore slums, found that they had freely converted to Christianity and that conversion had increased their sense of dignity and well-being (Shah and Shah 2018).

The Indian Constitution also makes a problematic distinction between remedial measures to protect and promote the interests of the lowest castes and of religious minorities. It created a system of reservations, akin to but more far-reaching than affirmative action in the US, which reserves seats in legislatures, government jobs, and higher educational institutions for historically disadvantaged castes and tribes (SCs, and STs). Reservations have expanded over the years to include Other Backward Classes (OBCs.) By contrast, the Constitution and various laws define Christians and Muslims as religious minorities who are not entitled to reservations. Paradoxically, the government initially restricted reservations to SCs on grounds that the caste system was peculiar to Hinduism, although it acknowledged that caste discrimination is widespread amongst Indian Muslims and Christians. However, it later extended the SC designation to Sikhs and Buddhists on grounds that these religions were extensions of Hinduism. In a problematic gesture of inclusion, the Constitution states that Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists should be considered Hindu, thereby assimilating these distinctive faiths into Hinduism while excluding Christians and Muslims.

A 2015 Supreme Court judgement held that Dalit Christians and Muslims who “reconverted” to Hinduism would be entitled to reservation benefits, as long as they could prove that their forefathers were SCs. By using the term “reconversion,” the Court legitimated conversion to Hinduism on grounds that people were forcibly converted out of it. The Court also provided material incentives, in the form of reservations, for Dalit Muslims and Christians to convert to Hinduism.

The fact that the Constitution, various laws, and dominant understandings of secularism have never adequately protected religious freedom for minorities in India has given political leaders and jurists enormous discretion. State governments (headed by both Congress and the BJP) have enacted laws and policies that prohibit cow slaughter and restrict conversions out of Hinduism. Prospective political candidates often inflame Hindu-Muslim tensions to gain the electoral support of the Hindu majority.

Unlike Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India’s first prime minister, Gandhi fueled ethnic and religious tensions during her second term as prime minister from 1980 to 1984. Unable to fulfill her promises of poverty alleviation, she engaged in a populist, personalist style of governance and appealed to the Hindu majority for political support. Gandhi also inflamed tensions in Punjab and brought about the growth of Sikh militancy. She was tragically murdered by her Sikh bodyguard. Immediately thereafter, groups of Hindus, including some Congress party members, brutally murdered 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi and 8,000 Sikhs in other north Indian cities. In this respect, the pattern resembled the anti-Muslim violence organized by the BJP in the following decade.

The Congress Party-dominated United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments (2004–2009, 2009–2014), under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s leadership, sought to reverse this trend. They created several commissions, most importantly the Sachar Commission, which documented extensive inequities between Hindus and Muslims. These commissions found that programs to increase access to public sector employment, development credit, higher education, and political representation, had benefitted Dalits and tribals but not religious minorities; thus they recommended a range of educational, social, and economic programs to alleviate discrimination. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh initiated a 15 Point Program to improve the conditions of minorities. Congress also supported a 4.5 percent reservation for minorities within the OBC category. However, few of these measures were implemented. The proposal for minority reservations was quashed in the courts and proved so controversial that the UPA government did not revive it.

Clearly constitutional and legal provisions to safeguard Hindu interests reflected elite biases and, in turn, contributed to the Congress government’s inconsistent and inadequate approach to minority rights. The BJP was heir to this legacy, and it highlighted the flaws in Congress policies and exacerbated institutional biases. However, the growth of Hindu majoritarianism and distrust of minorities was by no means inevitable. If there are loopholes in the Constitution which can be interpreted to support the Hindu majority at the expense of religious minorities, other Constitutional provisions can be interpreted quite differently. To better understand the growth of religious sectarianism necessitates an exploration of the ideology and organization of Hindu nationalism (Basu 2015).

Hindu Nationalism

The BJP is a direct descendant of the Jan Sangh Party, which was formed in 1951. The Jan Sangh joined the Janata government in 1977, but then it split off and formed the BJP in 1980. Both parties were relatively small and marginal. The BJP’s fortunes began to rise amidst the Congress Party’s decline after the 1989 elections. To mobilize Hindu support, the BJP joined other Hindu nationalist organizations in a movement that was designed to shore up anti-Muslim sentiment. Hindu Nationalists claimed that a 16th-century Muslim ruler had demolished a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram and replaced it with the babri masjid (a Muslim mosque) in Ayodhya. A two year-long campaign culminated in Hindu nationalists organizing thousands of its supporters to demolish the mosque in December 1992. Seventeen hundred people were killed in the accompanying riots.

The BJP was elected to national power and formed a coalition government for the first time from 1999 to 2004. Although Prime Minister Vajpayee was considered a moderate, he enabled Hindu nationalists to gain control over key educational and political institutions. Under his watch, Hindu nationalists orchestrated what is often termed a pogrom in Gujarat in 2002. According to government figures, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed. The BJP’s motivations were partly electoral: it had performed poorly in prior local elections in Gujarat and needed broad-based support. The scale of the violence reflected the combined strength of Hindu nationalist forces, their success in defeating, repressing and coopting left, secular and lower class and caste movements, and the capitulation of the opposition Congress Party to Hindu nationalism.

The BJP won a majority of seats and returned to power in 2014. The elections reversed the roles of the Congress Party and the BJP. In 2014, the BJP won 31 percent and Congress only 19 percent of the popular vote, inverting the 1991 national election results, in which Congress secured 37 percent of the vote and the BJP and its allies 19 percent. The BJP articulated and strengthened a disaffection with the first generation of political leaders and particularly with the Congress Party. People voted for the BJP because they were angered at having to pay bribes for basic goods and services when major public officials were getting away with serious public corruption. They were angered that the Congress Party was so determined to maintain the Gandhi family’s monopoly on power that it thwarted the emergence of other party leaders. They were frustrated by a lack of new jobs, India’s crumbling infrastructure, and inadequate electricity supplies.

The Modi government has sought to align Indian nationalism with Hindu nationalism. In its 2014 parliamentary election manifesto, the BJP stated that Hindus who were fleeing persecution from other countries would find a home in India. In keeping with this promise, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which has not yet been passed, seeks to bring religious considerations to bear on the acquisition of Indian citizenship. Whereas the Citizenship Act of 1955 denies citizenship rights to all “illegal” immigrants, the proposed bill excludes “minority-religious individuals”—specifically Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, and Christians—from “Muslim-dominated countries”—specifically Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan—from the category of “illegal immigrant.” The Bill further reduces the requirement for immigrants to be naturalized, from 11 to just 6 years of residence in India. If the Bill is passed, it would exclude such persecuted Muslim minorities as the Rohingyas from Myanmar, Ahmadiyyas from Pakistan, and Uighurs from China.

Two factors distinguish the BJP from Congress and other political parties. First, whereas Congress is ideologically eclectic, the BJP has an unwavering commitment to Hindu nationalism. Although the BJP has made short-term compromises, it has steadfastly pursued the long-term goal of Hindu domination. Second, the BJP has more extensive civil society networks than any other political party. The most important of these is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organization that was formed in 1925. Inspired by European fascist groups, it promotes Hindutva (Hindu dominance). It describes itself as a cultural rather than a political organization, although it is implanted in both the state and civil society. The other major RSS affiliate is the Visva Hindu Parishad (VHP), its religious organization, which undertakes charitable work, conversions of minorities into Hinduism, and protest activities. VHP activists have regularly participated in BJP election campaigns in state and national elections. The BJP has benefitted from the VHP’s engineering violence to polarize the electorate along Hindu-Muslim lines.

The RSS wields enormous influence over the BJP—from training its top-ranking leaders, to organizing its electoral campaigns, to shaping its ideology and worldview. The RSS has intervened to mend rifts within the party in various states. It has helped ensure that the national BJP, unlike most Indian political parties, has never split. The BJP under Modi’s leadership is more closely tied to the RSS than it was under the previous NDA government. Although Atal Behari Vajpayee was an RSS member, his relations with the VHP and other militant Hindu nationalist organizations was strained. By contrast, Modi has strong ties to the RSS and its affiliates and the RSS is responsible for Modi’s rise to power. It assigned Modi to the BJP in 1985 and supported his becoming general secretary of the party, chief minister of Gujarat, and ultimately prime minister of India. It defended Modi’s candidacy for prime minister, despite opposition by senior BJP leaders. It organized movement-style campaigns suffused with anti- Muslim rhetoric and expressed a commitment to the core Hindu nationalist agenda in some key states like Uttar Pradesh (UP) in the 2014 general elections.

Thanks to the current government’s patronage, RSS shakhas (training camps) have expanded dramatically. Its affiliates have become stronger and new civil society organizations that share its world view have emerged. The militant Shiv Sena, a member of the present NDA government, has grown and become more assertive. So has the RSS student organization, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP; All Indian Student Council). As described below, the ABVP has organized a series of attacks on Indian students and faculty who criticize government policy. The Bharatiya Gau Raksha Dal (Indian Cow Protection Group), which was created in 2012, has branches in nine Indian states and two union territories. Gau raksha vigilante groups have attacked Muslims and Dalits, who they accuse of consuming beef and killing cows. They work closely with Hindu nationalist organizations like the RSS, as well as the smaller Hindu Sena, and Bajrang Dal.

Hindutva organizations have received extensive foreign funding from diasporic Indians. Although the NDA government has not restricted these contributions, it has used the provisions of the FCRA to block foreign funding for a large number of secular, progressive NGOs—11,000 since 2014. It has also targeted foreign faith-based organizations like Compassion International, which has provided tuition, free meals, and medical care for tens of thousands of children for over 48 years.

The current government is more responsible than any previous government of tolerating and precipitating violence. Although Congress Party leaders have engaged in anti-minority violence (for example against the Sikhs in 1984) the Congress government did not condone this. By contrast, Modi has been silent when Hindu nationalists have perpetrated violence and has only spoken up belatedly and under pressure from politically influential forces. The current NDA government, to a much greater extent than its predecessors, has encouraged violence through discourses, policies, and laws. It has become increasingly common for high-ranking BJP leaders and government officials to engage in hate speech, which often provokes violence.

Not surprisingly, Hindu-Muslim violence has escalated since the BJP-led NDA government came to power in 2014. According to government data, communal (Hindu-Muslim) violence increased by 17 percent (from 644 to 751 incidents) from 2014 to 2015 (Jain 2016). In 2017, there were 822 communal incidents, which killed 111 people and injured 2,384. Communal incidents have been greatest in UP, (155), Karnataka (105), Maharashtra (105), Madhya Pradesh (92), Rajasthan (65), and Gujarat (55). The last four states are ruled by the BJP.

Hindu Nationalists and Religious Freedom

Hindu nationalists have long spearheaded attempts to prevent conversion out of Hinduism and to promote conversion into it. In 1954, the Jan Sangh organized week-long protests, which it termed the Anti-Foreign Missionary Week, against Christian conversions. The government responded by appointing the Niyogi commission which, as described earlier, took a strong stand against conversions. The VHP organized a massive campaign against the alleged conversion of Dalits to Islam in Meenakshipuram, Tamil Nadu in 1981. The following year, it created the Jan Jagran Abhiyan (Campaign for People’s Awakening) to warn Hindus that Muslims and Christians were organizing an “international conspiracy to devour Hindus” (Katju 2003).

BJP governments either strengthened existing legislation or passed new, more restrictive anti-conversion laws in several states. Himachal Pradesh was the only state where a Congress rather than BJP government introduced such legislation. Five BJP state governments have passed laws which require community members to inform the police and administration if they suspect that pastors, nuns and clergymen are proselytizing. The laws passed in Gujarat in 2003 and introduced in Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh in 2006 made conversions that were deemed to have entailed force or allurement non-bailable and cognizable. Rajasthan soon followed suit. These laws required individuals to inform the district magistrate about their intention to convert (in Gujarat, a month before the conversion, and in Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, within a specified time afterwards). They allowed district magistrates to investigate cases and determine whether conversions entailed force or coercion. They introduced harsh penalties for those who violated the law. The jail sentences in these states were between two and five years. In 2014, Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu proposed that Parliament enact national anti-conversion laws (Rao and Sinha 2014).

The assumption that conversion out of Hinduism is coercive, whereas conversion to Hinduism rectifies past injustices, underlies the VHP’s mass reconversion ceremonies, tellingly named ghar wapsi (homecoming or return to the flock) (Harris 2014). The VHP claims it has converted 500,000 Christians and 250,000 Muslims to Hinduism; Christian leaders believe these figures are inflated but demand an official investigation.³ Some of the people who were “reconverted to Hinduism claim that they were threatened with violence if they failed to comply (Bengali and Parth 2014).

Hindutva activists have often made conversions a pretext for anti-minority violence. They assaulted six Christians at a Pentecostal Church in Ajmer district, Rajasthan, in January 2007. They attacked Christian hospitals which they claimed were conducting illegal abortions and selling Christian babies in Madhya Pradesh in February 2007. From June to August 2008, they organized three attacks on Christians in Uttarakhand. The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) investigated allegations of harassment of Christians in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, two BJP-ruled states, and found that Hindu nationalists were raiding Christian homes on the pretext that they were proselytizing and the administration was doing nothing to stop this.⁴

In the aftermath of Odisha’s passage of the Freedom of Religion Act, Hindu nationalist organizations engaged in large-scale conversions of Dalits and tribals to Hinduism and molested Christians who refused to “reconvert.” These efforts intensified after the BJP formed a coalition government in 2000. There were several attacks on Christians in 2007, and again, more seriously in August-September 2008 in Kandhamal district. Two incidents among many acts of savagery stand out: Hindutva activists burnt to death a young Hindu woman working in a Christian orphanage and gang-raped a nun. Investigative reports claim that the government ignored warnings that violence was likely and refrained from issuing arrests and providing adequate relief to the victims. By September 2008, more than 40 people had been killed, over 4,000 Christian homes destroyed and 50 churches demolished. Around 20,000 people were living in relief camps and more than 40,000 people went into hiding (Jahangir 2009).

Hindutva organizations in Karnataka have attacked Protestant organizations since 2003. After the BJP assumed power in the state in 2008, Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena activists vandalized thirty churches (Satish 2008). The police supported the perpetrators and harassed the victims. The violence resulted in the injuries of seventy-one people, including forty-five policemen. The NCM issued a report to the Prime Minister’s office strongly criticizing the BJP government in Karnataka for its failure to control communal violence. It stated that there was no evidence of Christians engaging in forced conversions.

Hindu nationalist attacks on the Christian community have continued since 2014. According to one Christian human rights organization, there were 348 attacks on Christians in 2016 and 260 attacks from January to May 2017 (Thomas 2017). Those who engage in these attacks do not feel the need to prove that Christians are engaging in forcible conversions. The point of the attacks is to warn Christians that their religious identities make them suspect. Thus, the targets are often people attending church services and celebrating Christmas.

Beef Ban Violence

The RSS has long campaigned for a total national ban on cow slaughter, and BJP state governments in UP, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand all adopted laws fully or partially banning it in 2003. The Maharashtra and Haryana governments increased the penalties and jail terms for beef possession and cow slaughter in 2015. The Gujarat government increased the maximum punishment for cow slaughter from 7 years to life imprisonment and increased the penalty for transporting beef from 3 to 10 years in March 2017 (Najar and Raj 2017). Currently, 24 out of India’s 29 states have regulations prohibiting either the slaughter or sale of cows. These laws have encouraged Hindutva activists to engage in violence against Muslims and Dalits whom they suspect of cow slaughter and beef consumption.⁵

National government officials have demonstrated their support for a national beef ban-- indeed, Home Minister Rajnath Singh has done so quite explicitly. Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi remarked that “those who want to eat beef can go to Pakistan.”⁶ In May 2017, the Ministry of Environment imposed a ban on the sale of cows and buffalo for slaughter at livestock markets across India. The following month, the national government issued new regulations requiring that any person selling livestock produce a written guarantee that it would not be slaughtered. These regulations effectively ban the sale of buffaloes as well as cows for slaughter.

Narendra Modi is indirectly responsible for beef ban-related violence. During the 2014 election campaign, he attacked the Congress Party for introducing a “pink revolution,” that he claimed resulted from increased cow slaughter. He delivered fiery speeches on the subject during his campaign for the 2015 elections in Bihar. In September 2015, in what came to be known as the Dadri lynching, after a rumor that a man named Mohammad Akhlaq had slaughtered a cow and consumed beef, a mob stormed his home in Delhi, murdered him and wounded his son. Modi waited eight days before addressing the crime, and then declared that, while such events were unfortunate and undesirable, the national government could not stop them. He lambasted the opposition for accusing the BJP of communalism. He neither visited the family of the deceased nor condemned comments of his political allies that exonerated the murderers.

Following pressure from the United States, Modi issued a second statement, in which he proclaimed that his government would ensure complete freedom of faith. He subsequently instructed BJP head Amit Shah to dampen the enthusiasm of BJP leaders for a nationwide beef ban, but not to interfere with the decisions of state governments. Unsurprisingly, Modi’s statements did nothing to stop the wave of attacks on Muslims who were accused of consuming beef and killing cows. Modi spoke up again after a video that went viral showed a group of Hindu men brutally beating several Dalit youth who were skinning a cow carcass in Una Gujarat in July 2016. The assailants were not deterred by Dalits’ claim that the cow was already dead. Modi criticized the actions of cow vigilante groups and acknowledged that cows often died not because they were slaughtered, but because they consumed plastic on roadsides. However, he ignored the close ties between what he termed “anti-social” vigilante groups and BJP state governments. Days after Modi’s speech, the Haryana government created a police task force in each district to detect cow smugglers and licensed gau rakshas to assist the police (Raj 2016).

Hate Speech

The past few years have witnessed attacks on free speech and increased hate speech. India fell two ranks on the World Press Freedom Index, from 136 to 138 among 180 countries from 2017 to 2018.⁷ New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV), a respected independent television station that has been sanctioned by the Modi government, found that hateful and divisive language by high-ranking politicians (elected representatives—MPs, MLAs and chief ministers—as well as party leaders and governors) had increased almost 500 percent in the four years since Modi took office and that BJP politicians had made 90 percent of the hateful comments.⁸

The overwhelming majority of political leaders who engaged in hate speech were not reprimanded for their actions and a large proportion of them were repeat offenders. In several cases, hate speech by BJP leaders paid rich political dividends. To cite a few examples, in the 2014 national election campaign, Giriraj Singh exhorted those who did not vote for Modi to go to Pakistan. He was subsequently elected MP and made a Union Minister of State. Yogi Adityanath, when he was an MP from UP, issued vitriolic attacks on Muslims, including ascribing increased violence in western UP (which was actually instigated by Hindu nationalists) to Muslim population growth. He was subsequently appointed Chief Minister of UP. Anant Kumar Hegde, a BJP MP from Karnataka, gave a speech in March 2016 in which he said, “As long as we have Islam in the world, there will be no end to terrorism. If we are unable to end Islam, we won’t be able to end terrorism.”⁹ In September 2017, Hegde was named Union Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. All of these leaders have continued to engage in hate speech since their appointments. After becoming minister, Giriraj Singh suggested that Congress had chosen Sonia Gandhi as its leader because she was white and urged Hindus to have more children to counteract Muslim population growth.¹⁰ Three months after being made union minister, in December 2017, Hegde declared that the BJP planned to sponsor removing the term secular from the Constitution.

Hate speech by BJP leaders is mostly directed at minorities and much of it has focused on cow protection. There is a clear link between BJP leaders’ hate speech, and violence. The fact-checking site India Spend reported that 97percent of gau raksha attacks since 2010 occurred under the current government. They counted 76 attacks from May 2014 to December 2017, compared to only two instances from 2010 to May 2014. In Chhattisgarh, where cow slaughter and transporting beef is banned and subject to stiff fines and jail time, BJP Chief Minister Raman Singh vowed to hang those who kill cows.¹¹ The BJP promised in its campaign for the 2017 Legislative Assembly elections in UP to shut down all illegal slaughterhouses and restrict mechanized ones. Upon being sworn in as Chief Minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath announced a zero-tolerance policy on matters related to cow smuggling and slaughter. The police and bureaucracy not only shut down all illegal and mechanized slaughterhouses, but also many of the legal ones. Adityanath’s orders unleased extensive violence. Three meat shops selling meat and fish were burned in the city of Hathras.

Chief Minister Adityanath has also engaged in hateful attacks on Christians and women. The right-wing Hindu Jagran Manch, with which he is closely affiliated, is trying to stop Christian schools in the city of Aligarh from celebrating Christmas. Adityanath has created “anti-Romeo” squads which patrol the streets, allegedly to protect women from sexual harassment; in fact, they harass and attack couples who they think are transgressing conservative social codes.¹² The VHP and various other groups have organized a major campaign against “love jihad,” which supposedly entails Muslim men coercing Hindu women into romantic relationships, converting them to Islam and abusing them (Bhatnagar 2015; Bidwai 2014; Faleiro 2014; Sarkar 2014). The “love jihad” campaign seeks to regulate and control women’s sexuality and to depict Muslim men as treacherous predators.

Free Speech

Hindu nationalists have sought to censor writers, artists, and scholars who have challenged religious orthodoxy and government policies. They have justified surveillance, punishment, and physical assaults by claiming to prevent their critics from inciting violence. The Modi government has repeatedly curbed dissent on grounds that it is “anti-national,” a vague allegation that authorizes arrests under the provision of antiquated colonial laws. While Hindu nationalists have sought to silence critics of religious orthodoxy and of government policy, they have also openly engaged in hate speech. Authorities have used the sedition law to silence critics, although these charges rarely result in convictions. The Indian police registered 112 cases of sedition across the country between 2014 and 2016, but they only two led to convictions. In its 2016 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of retaining criminal penalties for defamation.

One of the most widely publicized and ominous uses of the anti-sedition law occurred in February 2016 at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, involving a student-organized public meeting of poets, writers, and activists to oppose state repression in Kashmir. After the ABVP alleged that the speeches were anti-national, the police raided the university and made several arrests, including student union president Kanhaiya Kumar. At Kumar’s court appearance, government lawyers attacked and threatened him, his supporters, and journalists who had covered the case. The government subsequently engaged in reprisals against several JNU faculty who had criticized its actions. Although the police admitted that they had no evidence against Kumar and the court released him on bail, the Modi government did not condemn the arrests.

ABVP attacks on critics of government policy, whom the ABVP alleged were seditious, continued. Most notable was Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student at Hyderabad University, who committed suicide in January 2016 after being harassed by ABVP activists. Following this, the ABVP attacked an Amnesty International meeting in Karnataka in August 2016 and disrupted talks by government critics in Jodhpur and Delhi in February 2017. The police did nothing to stop the attacks at Delhi University and did not file charges against any of the assailants.¹³

Conclusion

Clearly, there was never an ideal, golden age of unblemished Indian democracy. Many of the flaws at its founding are still evident today. If India benefitted from the strong political institutions it inherited from Great Britain, it has been marred by other aspects of the British legacy, including antiquated colonial laws, which deem protest seditious, and a centralized state, armed with repressive powers that are deemed necessary to national stability. Although India describes itself as a secular, democratic nation, several constitutional provisions and laws, including anti-conversion and cow protection legislation, fuel anti-minority sentiment.

And yet threats to religious freedoms and democratic rights are not simply a continuation of past trends. They are unprecedented. Executive power has expanded and the state has strengthened civil society organizations with which it is affiliated and given them quasi-judicial functions. At the same time, the government threatens and harasses NGOs which are champions of civil rights and liberties, environmental protection, and minority rights. As result, civil society is less able to hold the state accountable.

The nature of anti-minority violence has changed. In the past, political parties were responsible for instigating what are termed riots or communal violence in order to polarize voters and win elections. Although pre-electoral violence continues, it is not just the work of political parties and is not confined to elections. Many different groups are instigating multiple, repetitive, unpredictable acts of violence. Rumors that Christians who are attending religious services are forcibly converting people or that Muslims are consuming beef and transporting cattle is often a pretext for violence. Although such violence is the result of long term Hindu nationalist organizing, it appears to be spontaneous. Moreover, the timing of attacks is so erratic that they would be difficult to control, even if the political will to do so existed.

As Hindu nationalism has grown, so too have its targets. They are not just Muslims and Christians, as they were the past, but also Dalits, women, and critics of the regime. In opposing Christian conversion, beef consumption, and Hindu-Muslim romantic relations, Hindu Nationalists depict religious minorities as dangerous, predatory outsiders and Hindus, especially Hindu women, as their victims. Underlying this logic is the notion that the most horrific acts of violence are defensive rather than aggressive and that Hindus will only be safe in a nation that privileges their interests.

Although Hindu nationalism has always competed with secular nationalism, it has been especially successful in supplanting an appreciation of diversity and pluralism with a uniformity of identity and belief in the current xenophobic global political climate. Like other right-wing populisms, it appears to be a democratic response to undemocratic liberalism. As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, the most serious threats to democracy are not the products of coup d’états, the imposition of martial law, or the suspension of constitutions, but rather the work of elected politicians (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). These politicians centralize power, undermine representative institutions, and attack minority rights in the name of democracy.

Precisely because Hindu nationalists capitalize on flawed understanding of minorities, religious freedoms, and secularism, it is imperative that we radically redefine these terms. This entails expanding our understanding of democracy to include social justice and economic redistribution. It means redefining religious freedom to mean freedom for all religious communities, not just Hindus. It entails redefining the terms majority and minority, so that they are not determined by peoples’ religious identities, but a host of other criteria, including class, broadly defined. The logic of majority victimization, that many Hindu nationalists express, founders when confronted with the cruel reality of Muslims’ educational disadvantages, economic subordination, and political under-representation. Democratic struggles must always be struggles for the socio-economic rights of the majority—which in the Indian context include Dalits, women, Muslims, Christians and the poor. The stakes have never been higher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amrita Basu

Amrita Basu is the Paino Professor of Political Science and Sexuality, Women’'s and Gender Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of two scholarly monographs, Two Faces of Protest: Contending Modes of Women’s Activism in India (University of California Press, 1992) and Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has edited or co-edited seven books. Her scholarship focuses on social movements, women's activism, and Hindu nationalism.

Notes

1 I am grateful to M. Christian Green, Monica Duffy Toft, and Sapna Patel for inviting me to present this paper and to Timothy Shah for his comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Amna Pathan for research assistance and Mark Kesselman for editorial advice.

2 Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) is a constitutional designation of historically disadvantaged, low status and low-income groups. According to the 2011 census, SCs and STs comprise about 17 and 14 percent, respectively, of India’s population. The Constitution supports reservations for SCs and STs in public sector employment, educational institutions, and political office. In keeping with constitutional guidelines, a number of laws prohibit discrimination and punish its occurrence and legislation provides resources to reduce socio-economic disparities between SCs, STs and other groups.

3 “Church Leaders Debunk Hindu Group’s Claims,” UCANews.com, January 15, 2016.

4 ^. “Christians Not Safe in MP, Chhattisgarh,” The Indian Express, June 19, 2006.

5 “India: ‘Cow Protection’ Spurs Vigilante Violence,” Human Rights Watch, April 27, 2017.

6 “Those Who Want to Eat Beef Should Go to Pakistan: Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi,” Hindustan Times, May 22, 2015.

7 “Deadly Threats from Modi’s Nationalism,” Reporters Without Borders, July 2018. https://rsf.org/en/india.

8 Jaiswal, Nimisha, Sreenivasan Jain, and Manas Pratap Singh, “Under Modi Government, VIP Hate Speech Skyrockets—By 500%,” NDTV.com, April 19, 2018.

9 “Union Minister Anant Kumar Hegde Says Secular People Don’t Know Their Parental Blood,” Outlook India, December 25, 2017.

10 “List of BJP Leaders Who Made Controversial Remarks,” Economic Times, January 2, 2018.

11 “Will Hang Cow Killers: Raman,” The Tribune India, April 2.

12 “‘Hindu Rashtra’ to ‘Love Jihad’: A Look at UP CM Yogi Adityanath’s Most Controversial Remarks,” First Post, May 19, 2017.

13 Shafi (2017); “India: Protect Universities and Academic Freedom from Threat of Violence and Intimidation—Say Human Rights Groups,” South Asia Citizen Web, February 22, 2017.