Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia

By Neeti Nair

An insightful history of censorship, hate speech, and majoritarianism in post-partition South Asia.

At the time of the India-Pakistan partition in 1947, it was widely expected that India would be secular, home to members of different religious traditions and communities, whereas Pakistan would be a homeland for Muslims and an Islamic state. Seventy-five years later, India is on the precipice of declaring itself a Hindu state, and Pakistan has drawn ever narrower interpretations of what it means to be an Islamic republic. Bangladesh, the former eastern wing of Pakistan, has swung between professing secularism and Islam.

Neeti Nair assesses landmark debates since partition—debates over the constitutional status of religious minorities and the meanings of secularism and Islam that have evolved to meet the demands of populist electoral majorities. She crosses political and territorial boundaries to bring together cases of censorship in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, each involving claims of “hurt sentiments” on the part of individuals and religious communities. Such cases, while debated in the subcontinent’s courts and parliaments, are increasingly decided on its streets in acts of vigilantism.

Hurt Sentiments offers historical context to illuminate how claims of hurt religious sentiments have been weaponized by majorities. Disputes over hate speech and censorship, Nair argues, have materially influenced questions of minority representation and belonging that partition was supposed to have resolved. Meanwhile, growing legal recognition and political solicitation of religious sentiments have fueled a secular resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780674292864

Book preview

Cover: Hurt Sentiments, Secularism and Belonging in South Asia by Neeti Nair

HURT

SENTIMENTS

SECULARISM AND BELONGING IN SOUTH ASIA

NEETI NAIR

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England | 2023

Copyright © 2023 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover art: Alona Horkova

Cover design: Annamarie McMahon Why

978-0-674-23827-5 (cloth)

978-0-674-29286-4 (EPUB)

978-0-674-29287-1 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Nair, Neeti, 1978– author.

Title: Hurt sentiments : secularism and belonging in South Asia / Neeti Nair.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022018054

Subjects: LCSH: Religion and state—India—History. | Religion and state—Pakistan—History. | Religion and state—Bangladesh—History. | Religious minorities—India—History. | Religious minorities—Pakistan—History. | Religious minorities—Bangladesh—History. | Secularism—India—History. | Secularism—Pakistan—History. | Secularism—Bangladesh—History. | India—History—Partition, 1947.

Classification: LCC BL65.S8 N24 2023 | DDC 201/.720954—dc23/ eng20220927

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018054

Contents

Introduction: After Partition

Hurt Sentiments, Hate Speech, and the Shaping of State Ideology•Resisting and Revisiting the State

1 Gandhi’s Assassination, Godse’s Defense, and the Minority Question

Gandhi’s Way•The Workings of the Congress•Ishvar Allah Tere Naam•Doing and Dying•The Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS•Hurt Sentiments, Muslim Appeasement•Organiser vs. The State•Gandhi as a Brave Hindu•Inside the Constituent Assembly•Secularism and the Minority Question after the Mahatma

2 Hindu Hurt and the Case for Secularism in India

The Sangh Way•Indianization and Its Critics•Riots and Reactions•1971 and the Case for Secularism•Indira’s Way•Neither Anti-God nor Anti-Religion•Secularism Must Be Our Way Of Life•Rama Retellings, Riddles, Recitations•Hum Sab Ayodhya, a Festival for Secularism•Sahmat vs. The Government•Secularism and the Minority Question after Babri

3 Debating the Islamic State in Pakistan

Inside the Constituent Assembly•Interpreting the Objectives Resolution•Rashtro Bhasha Bangla Chai•The Debates of 1956•The Islamic Republic of Pakistan•Detention without Trial•Separate Electorates•The Ideology of Pakistan•Punjab Religious Book Society vs. The State•Secularism and the Meaning of an Islamic State after Jinnah

4 Islam and the Secular in Bangladesh and Pakistan

East Bengal’s Way•Integration or Autonomy in 1966?•The Elections of 1970•The Way of the War•1971 and the Case for Secularism•Inside the Constituent Assembly•Bangladeshi Secularism Was Not against Religion•Sard Lash and a Secular Sindhi Ethos•The Blasphemy Laws of Pakistan•Islam, Secularism, and the Minority Question after 1971

Epilogue: Secularism as Belonging

On a South Asian Secularism

Abbreviations

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

kal dukh se socā kartī thī

socā kih bahut hansī āj āyī

tum bilkul ham jaise nikle

ham do qaum nahīn the bhāī!

in the past I used to think with sadness

today I laughed a lot as I thought

you turned out exactly like us

we were not two nations, brother!

—Fahmida Riaz, Tum Bilkul Ham Jaise Nikle

INTRODUCTION • AFTER PARTITION

ON A COLD December afternoon in 2019, I paused work to listen to India’s home minister, Amit Shah, explain the rationale for the Citizenship Amendment Bill about to be passed through India’s Parliament, where his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had only recently won a massive majority. On my computer screen, Shah shook his finger accusingly and declared that through the bill, the Narendra Modi government intended to undo the wrong committed by the Liaquat-Nehru pact.¹ That agreement of April 1950, known as the Delhi Pact, undertook to protect minorities in India and Pakistan, assure them of their place within the newly divided nations, and end the violence and displacement that had characterized the months and years soon after independence and partition. What did Amit Shah now mean by wishing to undo the wrong committed by this pact?

The Citizenship Amendment Act, which was to enable a quicker path to Indian citizenship for religious minorities—explicitly listed as Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Buddhists, and Jains—in the three neighboring nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, was criticized by the opposition parties for explicitly excluding Muslims (ostensibly because they were not persecuted in Muslim-majority countries) and for excluding persecuted minorities in neighboring Myanmar and Sri Lanka (who were Muslim). The act was widely regarded as having the awesome potential to target and disenfranchise Indian Muslims, often described as illegal and Bangladeshi in the writings and speeches of BJP leaders.

In the weeks and months that followed, citizens across India, frequently led by Muslims, chanted the Preamble to the Constitution, raised slogans of azadi (freedom), narrated episodes of Muslim sacrifice during India’s independence, held public seminars on secularism, opened libraries and reading rooms at protest sites, affirmed the place of Muslims in India, and declared the Constitution Amendment Act of 2019 unconstitutional.

Although the protests spread across India from Lucknow to Chennai, it was Delhi, India’s capital, that bore the brunt of the backlash unleashed against nonviolent protesters. In December, days after the bill passed in Parliament, Delhi police responded to some of the Muslim-led protests by vandalizing the premises of and brutalizing students at the Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university in a Muslim-dominated part of Delhi. In January 2020, when students and activists were brutally beaten up by members of a rival student political party at Jawaharlal Nehru University in the heart of Delhi, the police helped the rioters escape. In February, videos showed the Delhi police assisting Hindu rioters hurl stones and homemade bottle missiles toward Muslim homes and shops during riots in the northeast quadrant of the capital. In a Kafkaesque twist, the police later arrested Muslim and Hindu student activists who spoke for love and harmony between communities; they did not pursue investigations against politicians whose hate speech had called for anti-nationals (desh ke ghaddār) to be shot, on the eve of the Delhi riots. The onset of COVID-19 a few weeks later led to a nationwide lockdown. The largest protests in post-partition India against an explicitly religion-based citizenship law and in favor of secularism were silenced. But what had led to this new and renewed faith in Indian secularism in an age of rampant Hindu majoritarianism?

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EIGHTY YEARS AGO, the president of the Muslim League, M. A. Jinnah, demanded a new constitutional arrangement on the grounds that the Hindu-dominated Congress party did not represent Muslims and was not trustworthy. We stand unequivocally for the freedom of India. But it must be the freedom of all India, and not the freedom of one section or, worse still, of the Congress caucus, and slavery for Musalmans and other minorities, he declared.² In the Lahore Resolution of 1940, later known as the Pakistan resolution, Jinnah argued that the Muslims of the subcontinent constituted not a minority but a nation, and therefore had to be consulted before any arrangements could be made for a new constitution. He asked that the right to self-determination be extended to Muslims.

Although the contours of the Lahore Resolution were never defined—it was interpreted variously even after the creation of Pakistan—Jinnah remained steadfast in demanding the undivided provinces of Punjab and Bengal for what came to be labeled Pakistan, a homeland-to-be for the subcontinent’s Muslims. Yet when Pakistan was conceded, the provinces of Punjab and Bengal were divided to create the maimed, moth-eaten, mutilated Pakistan that Jinnah had unequivocally spurned.³ Punjabis in the districts along the soon-to-be demarcated international border made their claims to territory on lines drawn in blood. All the talk of homeland for the Muslims had been taken literally and seriously, leaving religious minorities afraid. What was said to alleviate the anxieties of minorities was too little, and too late.

Yet even after the military supervised the evacuation of religious minorities in parts of West Pakistan and East Punjab—an evacuation perceived as forcing unwilling people to move out of their ancestral homelands, but deemed necessary, given the prevailing violence—this did little to change the reality of religious diversity in India and Pakistan. Substantial religious minorities remained in provinces such as Sindh, and in both sides of divided Bengal, in the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, the Madras and Bombay presidencies, the princely states of Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir—indeed, in every galli-mohalla, street, and neighborhood across the length and breadth of the subcontinent.⁴

Three quarters of a century later, several questions remain: How did religious minorities fare in these lands that were divided in their name? Did the 40 million Muslims who remained in what became India find representation in electoral institutions such as Parliament? If Pakistan was to be a homeland for Muslims, and later an Islamic state, were its religious minorities represented in institutions such as the National Assembly? How did its Constitution guarantee Muslims and non-Muslims fundamental rights such as equality of status and freedom of thought, expression, and belief?

There are many ways to analyze the trajectory of the subcontinent’s religious minorities and the national projects of state-led secularism and building an Islamic state; several historians have done so, though seldom in a comparative vein.⁵ In this book, I situate the state ideologies of India, Pakistan, and, later, Bangladesh in the divisive politics that marked their creation.⁶ I analyze the stress of contemporary demands that India be secular or Hindu, that Pakistan be secular or Islamic and theocratic, and that Bangladesh be both secular and devoted to Islam, the faith of the majority. I explore whether and how the Constituent Assemblies of India and Pakistan accommodated the concerns of minorities in 1947, and during subsequent critical events.⁷ I study the invocation of hurt sentiments, deployed by a wide range of political actors, such as Nathuram Godse in his justification of Gandhi’s assassination, as well as the states of India and Pakistan in their attempts to regulate the expression of hate speech in the aftermath of violent partition. In so doing, I show how debates around hurt sentiments shaped and were shaped by rival ideologies: of secularism or a Hindu Rashtra in India and on the substance of an Islamic state in Pakistan. Hurt sentiments, like a sensitive weathervane, also offer us one measure of the ability of secular winds to sometimes withstand the stormy petrel of Hindu hate in India in the immediate aftermath of partition. But what are these hurt sentiments, where do they spring from, of what are they composed, and what makes them abide and abate?

Hurt Sentiments, Hate Speech, and the Shaping of State Ideology

The phrase hurt sentiments is often used in lawsuits, allegedly because the litigants’ sentiments are hurt by a publication or speech, film, or cartoon. The idea that Indians were especially predisposed to having their sentiments hurt or wounded was first elaborated upon by the Law Member in the East India Company, Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his draft note on the Indian Penal Code in 1837, almost two centuries ago. Macaulay held that there was "no country in which the Government has so much to apprehend from religious excitement among the people. In framing the chapter of the penal code on offenses relating to religion and caste, he argued that the British wished to allow all fair latitude to religious discussion, and at the same time to prevent the professors of any religion from offering, under the pretext of such discussion, intentional insults to what is held sacred by others. We do not conceive that any person can be justified in wounding with deliberate intention the religious feelings of his neighbours by words, gesture or exhibitions."⁸

Thus, the promotion of sentiments or feelings of enmity or hatred that could spur unrest between different subjects became the reason to enact Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalized such speech or writing and resulted in a term of three years’ rigorous imprisonment for the convicted. Indians, the British reiterated, were especially prone to their sentiments being hurt by offensive publications or speech.⁹ Yet the British were not alone in making such assumptions. In Section 295A of the IPC, a new law in 1927 that criminalized the insulting of religious beliefs with deliberate and malicious intention, Indian legislators acting in concert with British lawmakers shared this view of Indians’ propensity to be easily offended. To the conscientious objections of legislators from a journalistic background who were wary of too many curbs being placed on speech and expression, other legislators, especially lawyers such as Jinnah, offered further restrictions, such as imprisonment without bail. Little did Jinnah and most of the legislators realize how excessively and frequently these laws would be used in the future.¹⁰

The management and control of hurt sentiments enabled by these colonial-era laws served many purposes. During partition, when an unprecedented flow of humanity crossed newly created international borders, there were insistent calls to make India entirely Hindu and Pakistan wholly Muslim. As minority populations were forced out of ancestral homes, they moved into areas where they were part of a majority, seeking safety in numbers. It is at this moment that Gandhi, a veritable one-man peacekeeping force, began walking through riot-torn Bengal, Bihar, back in Bengal, and then Delhi. Gandhian secularism, forged in the fires of partition, strove to build an India where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsis could belong in equal measure. Not only did Gandhi stay in villages recently denuded of their religious minorities in east Bengal and in especially dangerous mixed neighborhoods in Calcutta, but in the months after partition he also pressured the All India Congress Committee to pass a resolution affirming India’s status as a democratic, secular state where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the state, irrespective of the religion to which they belong.¹¹ This reliance on the Congress party, now in government, to do what he perceived as critical to the survival of India (and, therefore, Pakistan) has not been acknowledged or analyzed.¹²

Gandhi insisted on reading from the Quran, the Gita, the Bible, and other religious texts at his signature prayer meetings. These quintessentially Gandhian actions, examined in Chapter 1, irked the likes of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, who argued that Hindu sentiments had been hurt by Gandhi’s readings from the Quran. For Godse and other Hindu Mahasabhaites of his persuasion, the Quran did not belong in Gandhi’s prayer meetings. Nor did Muslims belong in India. The question of who belonged where in 1947 had become a matter of life and death.¹³ The Liaquat-Nehru Pact of April 1950, signed by the prime ministers of Pakistan and India, sought to bring closure to these arguments by affirming the place of minorities in both India and Pakistan. It is this question that Amit Shah and Narendra Modi sought to reopen with the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.

Godse, along with other members of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), organizations to which he had belonged, charged that Gandhi and the Indian National Congress had hurt Hindu sentiments and appeased Muslims by granting territory for Pakistan—territory that, they argued, belonged to an Akhand Hindustan (undivided India). But this charge of Muslim appeasement erased the role played by the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS in leading the demand for the partition of the Punjab, and in asserting that the Hindus and Muslims constituted two nations.¹⁴ Godse’s defense statement was censored; however, the charge of appeasement at the heart of his defense continued to be repeated and amplified in right-wing forums such as the RSS periodical the Organiser, and in Kalyan, the largest-selling Hindi journal devoted to the spread of sanatan dharma, a traditionalist interpretation of Hindu religion and culture.¹⁵

Furthermore, several of the demands raised by Godse during his trial, such as the abolition of separate electorates and any kind of reservation or quota for Muslims in Parliament, and the supersession of Urdu by Hindi, were long-standing demands of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Paradoxically, at this founding moment, which was often hailed for embodying a transformative and secular spirit, the Congress conceded these demands of the Hindu Right, just as it had echoed the Hindu Mahasabha call for partition from March 1947.¹⁶ The Congress-dominated Constituent Assembly did away with special reservation for minorities. In contrast to a substantial body of scholarship, my close reading of the Constituent Assembly debates shows that in 1947 it was not partition as much as the Gandhi murder trial and Godse’s defense statement the following year that resulted in the lack of minority safeguards in the Indian Constitution.¹⁷

My reading of these momentous Constituent Assembly debates reveals a recurring emphasis on seeking the goodwill of the majority community, forgetting the bitterness of the recent past, and forging a new secular future.¹⁸ Sardar Patel, the chairman of the Advisory Committee on Minorities and deputy prime minister, reminded his fellow drafters:

We are playing with very high stakes and we are changing the course of history. It is a very heavy responsibility that is on us and therefore I appeal to every one of you to think before you vote, to search your conscience and to think what is going to happen in the future of this country. The future shape of this country as a free country is different from the future that was contemplated by those who worked for partition. Therefore, I would ask those who have worked for that to note that the times have changed, the circumstances have changed and the world has changed and that therefore they must change if they want salvation. Now I need not waste any time on the question of separate electorates … trust us and see what happens.¹⁹

The thoughtful and erudite chairman of the Drafting Committee, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, stayed quiet during this consequential debate.²⁰ Not long before, in an outline for a constitution published in March 1947, he had affirmed the need for effective representation for minorities and asserted that there could be no quarrel over the principle of weightage for minorities. Using a cricketing analogy, Ambedkar held there to be a difference between the defeat of a team by a few runs, a defeat by a few wickets, and a defeat by one whole innings. The defeat by one whole innings would be a complete frustration, which when it comes about in the political life of a minority depresses and demoralizes and crushes the spirit of the minority. This had to be avoided at any price.²¹ Ambedkar added, Unfortunately for the minorities in India, Indian Nationalism has developed a new doctrine which may be called the Divine Right of the Majority to rule the minorities according to the wishes of the majority. Any claim for the sharing of power by the minority is called communalism while the monopolizing of the whole power by the majority is called Nationalism.²²

Nehru, too, was keenly aware of the problems inherent in majoritarian democracy. Although he strongly favored removing political safeguards for religious minorities in the Constitution, he asked the chairmen of the Congress’s state election committees to pay special attention to selecting representatives of minority communities in adequate numbers for the first general election of 1951: "The principal minority is the Muslim, and we have to make special efforts to put up good Muslim candidates, even taking the risk of the loss of a seat or two.… We should try to give them representation in accordance with their population."²³ However, this suggestion to make special efforts was no substitute for ameliorating systemic discrimination, which grew with time as if to keep pace with the state ideology and rhetorical flourishes of Indian secularism.

At the time of the first general elections, Muslims could not stand for election as individuals without their loyalty to India being called into question. Hate speech and the invocation of Hindu hurt sentiments, especially the vitriol that flowed from the pen of journalists such as K. R. Malkani, editor of the Organiser, played a key role in marginalizing Muslims as political actors. The Indian state responded by placing curbs on the press, emulating colonial-era norms and practices of censorship of news because law enforcement was so utterly unprepared for the scale of violence that had unfolded. These curbs were duly challenged during the drafting of the Constitution, when Assembly members arrayed considerations of freedom of speech against the need to preserve law and order.²⁴ Yet the continuing validity of laws such as Section 295A of the IPC helped cut some especially bigoted writers down to size. After Gandhi’s assassination, Muslim hurt sentiments were given some protection by the Indian state even as Muslim demands for political safeguards were cast aside at the behest of Hindu hurt sentiments.²⁵

Through the 1950s and the 1960s, however, as the Indian state continued its experiments with censorship, the meaning of secularism began to change in response to the rising drumbeat of hurt sentiments as well as events on the ground.²⁶ The work of censoring writings and speeches that might hurt religious sentiments—of Muslims and Hindus, Sikhs and Christians—continued unabated under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi, even if the writings had little relationship to public order concerns. Wary of the charge of being anti-Hindu, Nehru was quick to ban Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold, an original effort at reinterpreting the Ramayana and the first book banned in independent India. He also diluted, via Article 370, the special safeguards accorded to India’s only Muslim majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, and had Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah arrested for raising the unresolved question of its autonomy.²⁷ At the same time, he did not follow through on a resolution to ban communal organizations in April 1948, shortly after Gandhi’s assassination, a matter several political commentators found inexplicable.²⁸

Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, accorded the RSS some legitimacy by inviting its chief, M. S. Golwalkar, to participate in consultations with other opposition members at the height of the twenty-two-day Indo-Pakistan war in September 1965.²⁹ On the question of Muslim personal law reform, Congress leaders called for Muslim leaders to take the initiative, but their passing the baton to conservative leaders among the Muslims made this task slow and arduous.³⁰ Secularism, as state ideology, appeared untethered, unclear.

Chapter 2 situates the 1966 publication of Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts—a book that reiterated the post-partition charge of disloyalty against Muslims and popularized the term mini-Pakistan in the public sphere—within a context of growing communal violence across north India, amid the repeated accusations of the Jana Sangh and the RSS that the Congress government’s version of secularism meant Muslim appeasement.³¹ Soon right-wing media were referring to minority educational institutions such as Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University as mini-Pakistans, havens for antinationalist, separatist sentiment, and traitorous Muslims. Indira Gandhi sought to meet the charge of being anti-Hindu by adopting overtly religious symbols, such as visiting the Tirupati temple after her election victory in 1971. But growing acceptance of Indian secularism as equal respect and an integral ideology of the state came, paradoxically, from the civil war outside India’s borders.

During the 1971 war, as Muslims from both wings of Pakistan sought to shape the way the war was perceived, especially by Muslims in the Arab world and within India, secularism came to acquire, not the meaning ascribed to it by its detractors on the Hindu right as Muslim appeasement or by Islamicists as anti-religion, but instead an inclusive meaning—as equality and respect toward all religions, as a deep sense of belonging for all religious communities. Tajuddin Ahmad, Bangladesh’s prime minister in exile, regularly gave recitations from the Quran, the Gita, the Tripitaka, and the Bible in his broadcasts from Radio Bangla Desh; these were, in some measure, a poignant reminder of Gandhi’s readings. As West Pakistani armies unleashed havoc on East Pakistani Bengalis—both Muslim and Hindu—the Indian media in one voice declared the war to be the death knell of the two-nation theory, the theory that Hindus and Muslims constituted two nations and that had provided the rationale for the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan. The case for secularism was won on the battleground of public opinion in a war fought by Pakistan in the name of Islam.

The tide in favor of secularism also influenced political discussion and law reform within India. So, it transpired that on the eve of amending the Criminal Law Amendment Act the following year, the Indira Gandhi government claimed that two events in 1971—her election victory and the war—had decisively proved the victory of secularism over the two-nation theory. How could the Jana Sangh now interpret secularism as Muslim appeasement when the Mukti Bahini had fought the Pakistani army to create a secular, independent Bangladesh?

From a position of untrammeled strength, Indira Gandhi’s government now responded to the sharp accusations of Muslim disloyalty in Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts (which by then was available in translation in regional languages) by adding Section 153B to the Indian Penal Code. This law criminalized anyone who made or published any imputation that any class of persons cannot, by reason of their being members of any religious, racial, language or regional group or caste or community, bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India. At the same time, the government also amended Section 153A of the Criminal Amendment to include a ban on any exercise, movement, drill … knowing it to be likely that the participants in such activity will use or be trained to use criminal force or violence against any religious, racial, language or regional group or caste or community.³² Indian secularism, it would appear, was on the ascendant, fighting back against the aggressions of the Hindu Right by instituting new laws, even though the law was never wielded to ban Bunch of Thoughts, a telling omission. The addition of secular to the Preamble of India’s Constitution four years later in 1976, at the height of the Emergency, is notable for the detailed debate on secularism in Parliament at the time. These debates reveal that parliamentarians of all political parties hailed secularism as an ideal even as they deplored its weak implementation in practice; they also acknowledged that the problem of minority representation did not disappear with the abolition of separate electorates and reserved seats in the Constitution, and the much-vaunted good-sense and sense of fairness of the majority in which Sardar Patel had vested hope.³³

Following the ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988, the 1990s witnessed a surge in cases alleging hurt Hindu sentiments in courts across India. To better understand this phenomenon, I turn to the earliest of these cases: the banning of an exhibition organized by the cultural organization SAHMAT titled Hum Sab Ayodhya (We are all Ayodhya). Designed to combat the BJP monopoly over Rama and Ayodhya, the Sahmat exhibition sought to showcase Ayodhya as having always been home to religious diversity. The heated parliamentary debates around the exhibition and its subsequent ban reveal the fault lines in civil and political society in the 1990s that would enable the mainstreaming of Hindutva as a way of life.

After these debates on Sahmat, the scholar Partha Chatterjee asked if the defense of secularism were an adequate, or even appropriate ground on which to meet the political challenge of Hindu majoritarianism.³⁴ This study of hurt sentiments and state ideology suggests that it is not possible to pit secularism against Hindu majoritarianism. The Congress government’s charges in Sahmat vs The Government of the NCT of Delhi are evidence of the Hindu majoritarian slant in Indian secularism. The hurt Hindu, once again on the ascendant, was dictating terms to reshape the state ideology of Indian secularism. After the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the ground beneath the secular Hindu’s feet had shifted, more dramatically, to the right.³⁵

Indian secularism, as state ideology, did not remain static: it had evolved in response to intra-communitarian debates among and within religious communities and inter-party critiques, as well as critical events such as the war of 1971 and the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992. In a similar vein, across the border, the contours and contents of an Islamic state, or the frequently referenced ideological state, were shaped by intra-communitarian debates as much as they were by the exigencies of ruling over two wings of Pakistan, which were products of very different economic, cultural, and ideological constellations.

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EARLY DEBATES IN PAKISTAN, too, were marked by the experience of Hindu-Muslim relations in undivided India. Because the demand for Pakistan had arisen out of the need to safeguard Muslim minority rights, later styled a nation, Pakistan’s founders were initially protective of the need to safeguard the rights of their own new minorities—Hindus in Sindh and East Bengal, and Christians in Punjab. Jinnah’s promise to the first session of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 (You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State) resonated with some minorities, who were still of two minds about where they might fully and safely belong.³⁶

Yet only six months later, Jinnah’s insistence on having Urdu as the one national language of both wings of Pakistan led to his being booed by at Dhaka University by an audience of students, most of whom were members of the Muslim League. Bengalis, a linguistic majority in the new nation of Pakistan, could not believe their ears. Such chauvinism for Urdu—a language spoken by a tiny elite—was not acceptable to students whose lives and careers were at stake and for whom Bengali, with its vast literary corpus, was the language of their entire world. Meanwhile, Jinnah’s new nation was also being courted by a miraculously no-longer-hostile section of society: the ulema. Now that Pakistan had been conceded and created, those who had opposed Jinnah as a kafir wished to play a role in drafting its Constitution.³⁷ However, the presence of substantial, vocal, and persuasive religious minorities—Hindus in East Bengal and Sindh, and Christians in Punjab—as well as a significant contingent of Muslims, rendered any easy move to an Islamic state, however defined, impossible.

Jinnah’s unexpected death in 1948 produced a vacuum. Chapter 3 opens with the varied responses to the compromise devised by Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister: the 1949 Objectives Resolution. Passed despite the considerable objections of Pakistan’s religious minorities, especially Bengali Hindus, the resolution promised to enable the Muslims of Pakistan to order their lives in accordance with the teachings of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and Sunna. It also, simultaneously, promised that adequate provision would be made for the minorities freely to profess and practice their religions and develop their cultures.³⁸ The resolution sought to balance the demands of the ulema, who conceived of Pakistan as an Islamic homeland, with those in favor of a secular Pakistan, such as had been envisioned in Jinnah’s remarks at the inaugural session of Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly.

One of the reasons it took Pakistan nine years to draft its first Constitution was that West Pakistan, which was Punjabi dominated, did not want to accept the numerical majority of East Pakistan, comprised of Bengalis, in a future national assembly. And on the question of rights for religious minorities, the two halves of Pakistan spoke in starkly contrasting voices. In West Pakistan, the largest religious minority, the Christian community, demanded the retention of separate electorates and referred to this as a solemn promise made by Jinnah when they were still divided on whether to vote with the Muslim League in favor of Pakistan. In East Pakistan, however, Hindus were the largest minority, constituting almost a quarter of the population. In East Pakistan, Bengalis (including Hindus) demanded joint electorates, believing that only joint electorates could account for the Bengalis’ demographic majority in a united Pakistan, and that it was time to retire the divisive politics and demand for separate electorates that had been fueled by the two-nation theory. Both groups—Christians in West Pakistan and Hindus in East Pakistan—grounded their reasoning in the Objectives Resolution.³⁹

The Objectives Resolution would be incorporated as the Preamble to Pakistan’s Constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973, and made justiciable by General (turned President) Zia-ul-Huq in 1984. Through the twists and turns of Pakistani politics, the resolution provided an easily movable anchor for diverse interpretations of the place of Islam, Muslims, and non-Muslims in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. However, the efforts undertaken to enable Muslims to order their lives in consonance with the Quran have not always been commensurate with what the ulema desired, and attempts to provide adequate support for minorities to practice and profess their religion have satisfied neither the minorities nor Pakistan’s secularists.⁴⁰ The articles in Pakistan’s 1956 Constitution that proclaimed that the state would be named an Islamic republic and that the head of state would be Muslim, were resolutely resisted, and not only by Pakistan’s non-Muslims.

The most concerted challenge to the articles proclaiming Pakistan’s Islamic credentials came from Muslim members belonging to the Awami League of East Pakistan. These leaders elaborated on the concept of an Islamic state as embodying an ethic of justice and of equity, a state of perfection yet to be attained. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman explained that Bengalis wanted not a signboard or a label that Pakistan was an Islamic state, but clear steps to show how such a state could be attained—for instance, the abolition of feudalism, which was incompatible with Islam, was an ideal that we cherish.⁴¹ Awami League leaders such as Suhrawardy, along with Bengali Hindus, queried the indeterminate role of the ulema, prophesizing that their role would be akin to that of Frankenstein, gradually devouring every domain of the state. The persistent use of Islam by some West Pakistani elites to undermine the demographic majority of East Bengal dominated the years preceding 1971. The opposition parties in East Bengal led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Maulana Bhashani were both strategic and sincere in proclaiming their allegiance to the state ideology of Islam; it was wartime atrocities committed in the name of Islam and a purported Islamic brotherhood that moved the needle in Bangla Desh toward enshrining secularism as one of the founding principles of the state.

Pakistan’s loss of its eastern wing led to renewed emphasis on the state ideology of Islam in the Pakistan Constitution of 1973, while the oil crisis of 1973 moved Pakistan closer to the source of necessary petrodollars and Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia.⁴² The new prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, allied himself with Islam to meet the criticisms of the opposition rallying against him, but this was tempered with an awareness of the cachet that attached to invocations to secularism. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Bhutto proclaimed that secularism, in the sense of tolerance and the rejection of theocracy, is inherent in Islamic political culture. Despite this, a year later he moved the Second Amendment in the National Assembly, declaring that Ahmadis were to be regarded as non-Muslim.⁴³ An overreliance on the army led to Bhutto’s undoing; pandering to the most conservative sentiment proved to be of no avail.

Bhutto’s nemesis, General Zia-ul-Huq, relied on an Islamization that was a far cry from the state-sponsored lip service for an Islamic state in the 1950s. Zia instituted new blasphemy laws to boost his authority domestically at the same time that his regime fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The inability of Zia’s successors to amend or repeal these blasphemy laws has been the result of their being held hostage to the demands of Islamist groups that are a legacy of Pakistan’s role in the cold-war era and in the more recent war against terror. The constant management of allegedly hurt sentiments, increasingly fueled by individual litigants’ recourse to badly drafted laws, has come to a head: the hurt Muslim is dictating terms to reshape the state ideology of Pakistan, much as the hurt Hindu is being weaponized in India.

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THE HISTORIOGRAPHY on the early years of Bangladesh has been dominated by the question of identity. Should loyalty to Islam or a Bengali identity take precedence in the fashioning of a national identity?⁴⁴ My intervention on this question dwells on a founding moment when both religious and linguistic markers were equally important, but the category of religion was subject to greater critical scrutiny in Bangladesh because it had been ill used by the West Pakistani elite to rule over East Pakistanis. The Bengalis’ growing awareness of this strategy resulted in their formulating an indigenous, Bangladeshi secularism. This secularism, as I describe in Chapter 4, was honed and polished through Bangladesh’s experience of wartime atrocities, directed toward Hindus and those deemed insufficiently Muslim. Such a secularism could not be distant from Islam; indeed, in practice, it entailed equal respect for all religious communities, but with a place of preeminence for Islamic norms and rituals.

Both in theory and in practice, Bangladeshi secularism was not sufficiently instantiated and developed at the time of Bangladesh’s founding in 1971. Recourse to political Islam, after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman less than four years later, was made possible because Bangladeshi secularism had hardly been given a chance at implementation; furthermore, it was perceived to be tied to India’s apron strings although, in empirical terms, it had emerged out of a bloody war whose primary victims had been Bangladeshis. The emphasis on equality and respect toward all religions that had defined Bangladeshi secularism under Mujibur Rahman, at least normatively, was forgotten in the subsequent legitimation and strategic courting of religious parties by the military regimes of Ziaur Rahman and H. M. Ershad. Instead, secularism came to mean anti-Islam or anti-religion, a label foisted on its adherents by increasingly powerful religious parties. The avowal of such a nonindigenous understanding of secularism, a colloquial conception of secularism that views it as antithetical to religion, by a Bangladeshi writer such as Taslima Nasrin led, thus, to an expected denouement: lawsuits and exile.

Resisting and Revisiting the State

As instances of vigilantism headline newspapers in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, old debates on the cause of this escalation