The urge to make pointless changes

For the last several hundred years most nations have struggled with what Marxists call “state formation”. Indeed, it forms an entire branch of Marxist studies.

India, in most things, has had the opposite problem. It inherited a strong state in 1947 but, for well-known and well-understood reasons, struggled to form a cohesive nation.

The Congress saw this as a political challenge, not least because of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who demanded a religion-based nation. India’s diversity also contributed to the Congress approach as did the initial skirmishes caused by the precipitate departure of the British.

By the end of the 1980s, barring Kashmir, the nation project had been mostly completed. The Northeast had been persuaded to become part of the Indian nation as had been the Sikhs, some of whom had waged an insurgency for a Sikh nation (Khalistan) throughout the 1980s.

India was now a proper nation with state. This was an extraordinary achievement at a time when other states were collapsing or other nations being redefined.

One of the most important contributors to this achievement was the utter and complete rejection of the notion by almost all Indian political parties of a national or state religion and the acceptance of the idea by the Indian state that religion did not matter in the overall scheme of things. 

This does not mean the Congress did not bring religion into its politics. Of course it did. But it did ensure that it didn’t have a place in the Constitution, except pictorially, in the first edition.

Rashtra and Rajya

Some Hindu social and political groups have always challenged this approach. They say India is the only place where 1,000 million Hindus live and it should therefore be a Hindu rashtra.

Emphasising the obvious is not only unnecessary, it is also the sign of deep-rooted insecurity. The RSS, for example, which is the largest of the Hindu groups mentioned above, worries about “national purpose”, which it thinks is absent in India. It believes that declaring India Hindu rashtra will somehow help in this creation of a national purpose. Will it?

Rashtra, meanwhile, means nation. It does not mean state, which is Rajya. Most critics don’t know the difference, whence the anxieties.

Although so far they have not used the term Hindu Rajya, the question that the RSS/BJP must answer is whether they are using the terms interchangeably. I don’t think so, but an unambiguous clarification would help enormously.

It is possible some of them do and talk about it in an ignorant sort of way. But that is also not a cause for great concern.

Reason: Article 15 of the Constitution ensures that the State will not discriminate between citizens on the grounds of “religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth, or any of them”. This is sufficient guarantee for non-discrimination.

I cannot see any BJP or other government being able to change that even if they take out secular and insert Hindu Rashtra in the Constitution. So declaring India a Hindu Rashtra would be an empty gesture.

For that reason alone, it need not be done. It would be as pointless as adding ‘secular’ to the Constitution by the Congress was.

It need not have been done. It did not make the Indian state any more or less secular, just more angst-ridden.

Barro’s research

In this context, I would recommend that everyone read the writings of Robert Barro, who is said to be a contender for the economics ‘Nobel’ this year. He has studied state religions in detail (data from 188 independent countries) and come up with some interesting findings, not the least of which is that having a state religion makes no difference to economic growth, which is agnostic to religion but responds positively to religiosity.

https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.nber.org/papers/w10438.pdf and http://www.nber.org/papers/w9682.pdf.

He also says that “greater concentration of religious adherence is positively related to state religion, and most of this relation seems to reflect causation from religious concentration to state religion, rather than the reverse.” This concentration is what is driving the RSS/BJP, although to what end it is not clear.

Finally, Barro says that “state religion is more probable when the population adheres to a monotheistic religion. We find this effect for Muslim adherence”.
 

Three words — monotheistic, Hinduism, Muslim — should ignite a thought in the minds of at least some people in the BJP, if not the RSS.