Narendar Modi became persona non grata for the American liberals who wanted to pursue human rights as a foreign policy objective when news about the Gujarat massacre started to break 2002. There were reports that the US State Department, a natural habitat for American liberals, wanted to decline Modi’s American visa, who was serving as the Chief Minister of Gujarat, a state in Western India where Muslims were slaughtered like sheep by Hindu extremists.
The turnaround in American attitudes towards Modi became palpable when Modi became Prime Minister for the first time after the BJP swept the parliamentary elections in May 2014 for two reasons. The US estimated that Modi’s India could act as a market for American military and consumer products, and Modi’s India could act as a bulwark against the rising power of China. Now, Modi shares a place at the high table with Western political leaders in several multilateral forums. The economic prospects of India-US relations and India’s military and strategic potential against America's superpower rival, China, has led to a turnaround in Modi’s fortunes from persona non grata to an Asian political leader most favored by Washington.
After the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, Zia became Washington’s darling. Economic and military aid flowed into Pakistan, and Zia’s stature as a leader of the Muslim world received quite the boost.
I can quote a somewhat similar example from the history of the US-Pakistan relationship. When Pakistani military dictator General Zia-ul-haq staged a coup and ousted the elected government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, he emerged as persona non grata for the American liberal President, Jimmy Carter, who refused to deal with a military dictatorship known for its human rights violations and repression of political workers in Pakistan in the short period before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
After the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, Zia became Washington’s darling. Economic and military aid flowed into Pakistan, and Zia’s stature as a leader of the Muslim world received quite the boost, as many powerful western and Muslim states started to share high tables with the Pakistani military dictator. Just like the case of Modi, Zia’s regime’s criminal track record of human rights violations in Pakistan was conveniently forgotten.
I know that no serious historian will acknowledge this analogy as a valid historical comparison. But I can’t put off this habit of my fertile mind of connecting the dots, even where a diversity of historical situations does not make comparison a plausible academic activity. Two commonalities between the above mentioned situations are undeniable. First, both Modi and Zia found themselves on the wrong side of the American liberal foreign policy tradition, right before they were embraced by Washington as their partners in their anti-communist crusades and great power rivalries.
If Modi sweeps the parliamentary elections again in 2024, there is every likelihood that the Indian secular tradition is gone for good.
Second, both Modi and Zia started to get a place on the high tables of world politics after they were embraced by the American foreign policy and security establishments. India is a rising economy and undoubtedly, this is a factor in Modi’s rise as an international player. In the 1980s, Pakistan was a rising military power, thanks to Washington, and this was a factor in Zia’s rise as an international player in the Muslim as well as in Western world.
But frankly speaking, this is not the reason for me to write this piece. I want to make another comparison between Modi and Zia and their Washington connection. Modi can be described as a political leader who emerged as the destroyer of Indian secularism, which is the foundational ideology of the Indian anti-colonial independence movement. If he sweeps the parliamentary elections again in 2024, there is every likelihood that the Indian secular tradition is gone for good.
What’s the connection with Zia? Zia is a character in Pakistan’s political history who emerged as a destroyer of the Islamic modernist tradition with which the leadership of the Muslim independence movement was associated. This Islamic modernist tradition was the guiding ideology of the Pakistan state machinery until Zia took over. That is not to say that fundamentalist Islam was not asserting itself in Pakistani politics before the Zia era. Islamic modernists, who carried the tradition of preserving religious diversity in Pakistan society. They made an unsuccessful attempt to synthesize British liberalism with Islamic modernism, and were in ascendance in public life, in the bureaucracy and the Army. Zia put an end to this. Both Islamic modernism and Indian secularism grew under the shadow of the liberalism of the British colonial regime. Mutually, they were poles apart in their political attitudes but both of these ideologies shared some perspectives on seeing religious diversity a natural and historical phenomenon in the social life of the newly independent states of Pakistan and India.
Why it is always Washington which assists rulers in India and Pakistan who emerge as destroyers of relatively liberal political traditions? Why is it that in the times of strong military ties between South Asian states and Washington, that fundamentalism of one or other type takes root in Pakistan and India?
Both the Islamic modernism of some of Pakistan’s founding fathers and Nehru’s Indian secularism were the diametric opposites of the fundamentalist versions of religiosity that started to take root in Indian and Pakistani societies just after independence. The origins of this Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism could be traced back to revivalist movements in both religions during the British colonial era.
The obvious question to be asked if we accept this comparison as a legitimate exercise in political and historical analysis is why it is always Washington which assists rulers in India and Pakistan who emerge as destroyers of relatively liberal political traditions? Why is it that in the times of strong military ties between South Asian states and Washington, that fundamentalism of one or other type takes root in Pakistan and India? Of course, one cannot ignore the social and historical contexts in which these fundamentalist traditions have a strong basis in Pakistani and Indian society.
But how the Western political bloc strengthened Zia against relatively liberal Pakistan political forces by providing him a permanent place on international high tables throughout his 11 years of dictatorial rule has been well documented. Now the US is providing the same kind of strength to Modi. He has become a permanent presence in the Western political bloc’s military and political meetings. India’s rise on the world stage is certainly a good election gimmick for BJP, just as Zia used the Washington connection to consolidate his grip on power structures in Pakistani society.
Many Pakistani liberals idealize the time when Jinnah himself struggled to preserve religious diversity in Pakistani society by personally visiting many leading Hindus in Karachi in order to convince them not to migrate. Gandhi and Nehru were no less inclined towards giving special privileges to Muslim communities in independent India. Gandhi even paid the price for this position with his life.
The ideology of secularism that was invented during the anti-colonial independence movement in British India was patently different from western and especially American concepts of secularism. Western secularism ascended to power by defeating religion in the public and intellectual realm; Western secularism developed a certain kind of repulsion towards everything religious. There is something inherently different in the Indian model of secularism, and this is what makes Indian secularism more acceptable to people who are not anti-religion, at least at the conceptual level. Nehru didn’t preach a complete disengagement from everything religious. The Indian state continued to engage with different religions and their institutions.
The people of the subcontinent have historically always attached great emotional attachment to whatever religion they professed and practiced. This prevented both Nehru and Jinnah from crafting a model of secularism and religious modernity that allowed the independent states of Pakistan and India to continue to engage different religions, while making an attempt to remain neutral and impartial in religious matters. Of course, both models failed and thus paved the way for the advent of fundamentalism as official state ideology.
An ahistorical perspective on religion always leads towards the advent of fundamentalism of one or the other kind. With the help of history, we can contextualize and historicize religion as a social reality. Islamic revivalism in colonial India only broke the historical links that connected present day Muslim societies of Pakistan and India with past historical processes, which consisted of mundane social realities and historical particularities.
Hardly any obstacle remains in the way of the Sangh Parivar's mission to make India a Hindu-only nation. After reading Jaffrelot’s book, it becomes clear that India was on a path to become a “Hindu Pakistan,” as someone in India suggested a few years ago.
In Pakistan society, the historiography tradition is not very strong. In India, we have such towering historians like Ramila Thapar, Irfan Habib and many others. These historians suggest that the subcontinent has an indigenous tradition of secularism quite older than western secularism, which is only a few hundred years old.
I remember growing up in a locality in Sadar Bazar in Rawalpindi city, where old religious buildings—the Christian church, Shia Imam Bargah, the Ismaili Jamat Khana, a Deobandi Mosque and a Hindu Mandir—were all located at a stone’s throw from each other. There was a time when all of these institutions functioned as places of religious assembly and prayers. Now our cities are in the grip of fear and anxiety.
Indian secularism hardly has any reality beyond the text of the Indian constitution inscribed on paper. No book has captured that change more accurately than Christophe Jaffrelot’s “Modi’s India: Hindu nationalism and rise of Ethnic democracy.” The book effectively describes how Sangh Parivar is changing the nature and structure of the Indian political system from a secular parliamentary democracy to a Hindu ethnic democracy that functions only for only one religious community and gives birth to an exclusionary ideology of nationality.
The Supreme Court has been neutralized, secular opposition parties are almost non-existent, the military has been co-opted into the Hindu nationalist framework; civil society and human rights organizations have crashed and the media is on its knees. Hardly any obstacle remains in the way of the Sangh Parivar's mission to make India a Hindu-only nation. After reading Jaffrelot’s book, it becomes clear that India was on a path to become a “Hindu Pakistan,” as someone in India suggested a few years ago.
In Pakistan, no religious party has the slightest chance at winning the parliamentary elections. But at the grassroots, the atmosphere is no less toxic than India’s.
The killings and torture inflicted on Muslim communities in India compelled Islamist ideologues in Pakistan that what was happening in India was a confirmation of the two-nation theory. The Hindu majority is itself saying that Muslims are a separate nation.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that Islamists and Hindu ideologues are absolutely correct. How will their positions affect foreign relations in the subcontinent? How will the culture of religious extremism in one country affect the culture of religious extremism in the other? Suppose that there are acts of lynching in India; will there be corresponding lynchings in Pakistan?
In Pakistan, no religious party has the slightest chance at winning the parliamentary elections. But at the grassroots, the atmosphere is no less toxic than India’s. But as a South Asian reading Jaffrelot’s book, I fell into a spell of deep depression and pessimism. It feels like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. I decided to put my question before the author himself. “Is there a possibility that secular forces in India will stage a comeback?” I sent Christophe Jaffrelot a question through Linkedin Messenger. His reply was short and concise, “The point of no return has not been reached yet,” said Jaffrelot in response to my question.
There might still be hope for normal life in this part of the world. I offer a silent prayer for India.