I am delighted to be here this evening to give the Bashir Memorial Lecture under the auspices of the Vakkom Moulavi Foundation Trust. Vakkom Moulavi was, of course, a very distinguished figure in the first half of this century; a personality with a variety of accomplishments-journalist, scholar, reformer, some one who worked both for the downfall of political autocracy and for the demolition of religious obscurantism. About Prof. Bashir, we have heard already from Prof. Koshy, of not only his individual distinction but also of his great contribution to the Vakkom Moulavi Foundation Trust.

It seems appropriate when giving this lecture under the auspices of this Trust, I should deal with the problem which at the moment, it is not an exaggeration to say, is convulsing India. During the last six to eight months we have had what one can only call a rich carnival of hate, tearing apart the national fabric. The whole problem is based on this question of how can we, or should we, keep religion out of public life. It is quite clear that if what we see around us today continues and if we do not succeed in divorcing religion from politics and public life, certainly the India that we have known will vanish, and the India that we hope to see will not become a reality, because unless you keep religion out of politics India can never be a healthy, democratic polity.

In facing this question one immediately comes up against a rather melancholy conclusion put before us by some very distinguished political scientists and sociologists of this country. What they have been telling us is that in a country like India you cannot hope to keep religion out of public life, and that you cannot hope that India will become secular. It is argued that this concept of secularism is an alien, European concept that was imposed on this country by our leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and others who were in the forefront at the beginning of the first years of independence and that, whatever the solution might be, whatever India might become in the future, it certainly cannot hope to be secular in the sense in which we understand it. In fact, these very eminent political scientists and sociologists call themselves anti-secularists and say that if India is to continue and prosper it may be through many ways, but it certainly cannot be on the basis of secularism..

Now, I would like to consider with you this proposition and I would like to take as my text what Prof. Karim said a few minutes ago. He said secularism is not a matter of dictionary definition. I would go along with that, if I may. It is not something that you look up in any dictionary for a definition. It is a question, not of the concept of secularism, but of the process of secularization. How secularism had developed in various parts of the world depends on the context and the culture of that particular area. You need, as my title suggests, a historical perspective I venture to add that it is not just a selfish interest in my own discipline which leads me to say that you cannot understand secularism as it functions unless you have a historical perspective and not depend solely on definitions found in lexicons. Look at the world around. In the erstwhile Soviet Union secularism was understood as atheism. To be fully and truly secular, was thought, one should eliminate God.! Now, as we know, after seventy years of assiduous propaganda, this effort has not succeeded and today church bells are ringing in Moscow and in various other parts of what used to be the Soviet Union. But that definition of secularism as atheism is not accepted anywhere else. Next, take the case of France. There, the idea of secularism has a very limited connotation It concerns keeping the Catholic Church out of education, what the French call laicization. Now that again is a definition which may be tailored to suit the exigencies of French politics and events but it is not obviously a definition that is suited to any other part of the world.

I think we should understand what Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues thought when they spoke of Secularism for India. They were not thinking in terms of what happened in France or in the Soviet Union or what is to be found in books. They were thinking of secularism in the Indian context, of how to develop secularization in a historical perspective. Now what is that Indian context and that historical perspective? I do not need to say to an audience in this town that for centuries this country has been a multi religious society. Christianity came to Kerala and India long before it was accepted in western Europe. We have had in our country Christians, Jews, Zorastrians and of course we have had Muslims. Islam came to India as a religion long before it came as a political force. All the various groups belonging to the different religions in our country in ancient and medieval times reacted positively to each other, they absorbed from each other, they kept their individual ide! ntit ies but they blended with the social order, be it retrograde or be it progressive. Take for example in Kerala itself, the influence of architecture. If you look at the Syrian Christian churches you find the impact of Hindu and Jewish traditions. The same is true in the north. In Gujarat, for example, the mosques that were built bear the influence of Hindu and Jain temples in the vicinity. Architecture, Music, food, dress all show the influence of the various religious traditions. Even language, the Urdu language, for example, shows the impact of both Persian and Hindi.

Even in the evolution of the various religions you see the mutual impact. The Sufi Movement bears the influence of Hinduism, just as the Bhakti Movement bears the influence of Islam. It was Iqbal who said earlier in this century that one should not think of Islam just as a matter of doctrine, for Islam is a way of living. So too is Hinduism - be it rightly or wrongly. There may be many things wrong with Hinduism, there may be similar wrongs in the Islamic way of life; but basically they are both ways of life and they interact with each other. I will give random examples. In 1264 in Gujarat, long before the Muslims became rulers of large parts of India, we find an inscription in Junagadh where there was a concentration of Muslim traders. That inscription says that Allah is Viswanathan. Look at the south, at Tamil Nadu. You have the mosque at Nagore. One of the minarets was built by a Maratha Chieftain. In Kanchipuram, the myth goes, and the myth is still believed in by the p! eopl e of that area, the chariot, the ratha of the great temple of Kamakshy got struck in the mud and it was a Sufi saint who liberated it. We know that a Muslim gave a large donation to the temple of Meenakshi at Madurai. Recently an American scholar has made a detailed study of the cult of Draupadi in various parts of India, both south and north, and he has found that one of the temples to Draupadi in Andhra has Muslim priests. I was told this afternoon that if you go on a pilgrimage to Sabarimalai, at the very foot hills all pilgrims have to pay homage to a Muslim shrine. In fact, again talking of the south at great Muslim festival at Nagore, at the Hindu festivals in Tuticorin and Tiruchirappally, and at the Christian festival at Velankanny you find Hindus, Muslims and Christians all participating. In other words, the popular culture of India down the ages has absorbed elements from all the religions that were practiced in this country without in any way doing damage to themsel! ves or to each other.

Now it can be argued that all this is popular culture bul what about the rulers? Were the rulers not bigots? Particularly we have been hearing day in and day out recently, what about the Muslim rulers, were they not iconoclasts? Let us examine that particular contention. Nobody can deny that we have had bigots- Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs. Bigotry is not something particular to any specific religion. Also, let us look closer at what are supposed to be the glaring examples. It is true that Mahmud of Ghazni destroyed Somnath. He did not do that merely because he was a bigot, he did it because he had heard, and he found what he had heard was authentic, that the Somnath temple was a repository of a great amount of wealth. Take Baber. Baber is supposed to be a pronounced bigot, the man whose general destroyed the temple at Ayodhya and had a mosque built. But Babar won the battle of Paniput and set up the mughal Empire and he did it by defeating the Muslim Lodhi Sultan of Delhi and he! did it with the support of Rajput allies. What one should bear in mind is that in history as in all the social sciences, there are no mono-causal explanations. Human motivation is complex. There are plural reasons why things happen and if there has been bigotry, and I do not doubt that there has been, that is only a single element in an accumulation of causes.

The great Akbar, even the Hindu commentators say, that Akbar was an exception. Now Akbar ordered according to the Ain-i-Akbari, that wherever he went in India, water from the river Ganga should be sent to him for his requirements. Akbar did not do this because he was dedicated or devoted to Hinduism. He did it because, while he might have been and all credit to him, tolerant and magnanimous by nature, he also saw the political advantages in winning over his Hindu subjects. On the other side of the medal, Aurangazeb was, certainly a bigot, but he was also motivated other reasons. If you look at the temples which Aurangzeb destroyed you will find that they are all located in areas which were in political revolt. Religious structures, be they temples, mosques or Gurudwaras are also symbols of dynastic power. The same Aurangazeb who destroyed temples in certain areas also gave land grants and donations to temples in other areas which he thought were loyal to the Mughal Empire. ! If he levied the Jiziya or the poll tax, one of the reasons was that he wanted to keep his Muslim citizens happy and loyal. He did not impose the Jiziya or the poll-tax because he wanted to force Hindus into conversion into Islam. There is documentary evidence to establish that Aurangazeb lamented that Hindus were converting to Islam in order to avoid the poll-tax and his revenue was dropping. You cannot isolate a single reason and say that this is why a person has acted in this way. Take Tippu Sultan for examp le. He is supposed to be a very hawkish Muslim. But he was also the man who restored the Matt at Sringeri after it had been demolished by a Maratha Prince. I do not say that Tippu had a hidden strain of tolerance; he might have had; but he also wanted law and order and peace in his dominions. Do not therefore try to find single causes to explain any event in historical developments. In history as in all social sciences one cannot generalize and say that only the Muslims were bigots.

Let us turn to Mahmud of Gazni, again Mahmud of Gazni demolished the Somnath Temple for a multiple accumulation of reasons. The same Mahmud of Gazni also destroyed mosques in Central Asia as he had heard there was a great amount of wealth in those mosques. He had in his service a Hindu general called Tilak. I do not think Tilak was involved in the destruction of Somnath. But it is well within the possibility that Tilak was involved, in the destruction of mosque, in Central Asia. It was a Hindu general who knocked down the famous Bodhi Tree at Bodh Gaya and later one had to bring a sapling from Sri Lanka. The Sikhs in 1764 destroyed all the buildings including mosques in Sirhind when they conquered it. You get, therefore, not just Muslims as bigots, you get Hindu bigots as well. The Rajatharangini tells us that in the 11th century Harsha of Kashmir - this js not the great Harsha of Kanauj - destroyed Hindu temples because he wanted the wealth and the loot in those temples; b! ut the same Harsha of Kashmir ate pork in public in order to annoy his Muslim subjects. You have this desire for wealth to be found in rulers of all religions. In those days as today the main interest of rulers is the pursuit of power and once they acquire that power they would like to maintain that power. If Muslims destroyed Hindu temples, we have sufficient evidence in history of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples and Jain temples. We have within the Muslim fold quarrels between Shias aid Sunnis as we have with the Hindu fold quarrels between the Shaivaites and the Vaishnavites. If you do not generalize about the followers of a particular religion and if you are not simplistic enough to try and find single causes for large developments, then you are forced to the conclusion, any honest scholar will be forced to the conclusion that the popular culture which transcended religious diversities, that popular culture was not in any way damaged by the rulers who might have functioned occasionally as bigots but who are motivated by an accumulation of reasons which are common to our day as well as to their times and which is prevalent among the rulers of whatever religion.

Therefore you can say that if you look at Indian history right down to, say about the 18th century, you find that there is no Hindu culture or Muslim culture, but there is an Indian culture, both an Indian popular culture as well as an Indian high culture, and that whatever the religion to which people belonged and whatever the weaknesses of their own social habits and customs, yet a religious entity was not a force in Indian public life. One might almost say like Molieres M. Jourdeu talking prose that the Indian people were secular without knowing it.

So the Indian people had the rudiments of secular culture. I am not saying they were fully secular. Secularism is more than tolerance and more than live and let live. Secularism has a large number of other aspects. Basically, while the Indian people kept their identities in their religious practices they allowed themselves to be influenced by other religions and, by and large, they did not hold it against anybody that he or she belonged to a different religion.

If that is so up to the 18th century, why are we today in our Predicament? The answer lies in what happened during the last hundred to a hundred and fifty years. When the British came to India it happened circumstantially, just a matter of chance, that because the British were a naval power they landed in the coastal areas of Bombay, Madras and Bengal, areas where the majority of people happened to be Hindus who took advantage of the avenues of trade and commerce and the education in the English language which the British brought with them. By the time the British moved into the hinterland of India into the zones of Muslim influence, what is today Utttar Pradesh, and was then known as the United Provinces and the Punjab, the Hindus had a good lead, they had an advantage and they were well to the fore.

By the mid 1880s after the revolt or 1857, with the development of national sentiment in India, the British, thinking in terms of 19th century Europe said India was not a nation. In Europe in the 19th century nationalism or nationality was thought to be based on two criteria, ethnic uniformity and a single language. You all have to be of particular ethnic stock and you need to have one language like the French language, the German and the Italian. That attitude continues even to this day. We read about the concept of ethnic cleansing in what used to be called Yugoslavia. All the people of one language should get together. By applying these two standards of ethnic purity and a single language, the British refuted the concept of Indian nationality. What was the Congress talking about? What did leaders like Banerji and Tyabji mean by saying that India was going to be a nation? India was not and could never be a nation because she did not have a single language. She had a multi! plicity of languages and there was no question of any ethnic purity in India. But if India was not a nation, what was if? The British answer was that India was a cluster of religious communities. India consisted not of Indians but of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and the followers of other religions. And the British went on to say that these religious communities in India could never get on with each other. In other words, as one British imperialist put it, the animosity of centuries is always simmering beneath the surface in India. So it is the British interpretation of India, it is the influence of British historiograp hy that gives credence to the idea that India consists basically of Hindus and Muslims and they are always at each others throats. This is supported by the fact that it is the Hindus who had taken advantage of the early years of British rule and one regrets to say it was supported also by the fact that Hindus tended to live in isolation. In their social ways of life they would not intermarry, they would not even dine together and they kept themselves apart. There might have been the rudiments of secular practice but there was no fully secular practice. That is why the poet Rabindranath Tagore said in the days of the Swadeshi Movement in l906 when everybody was alleging that the British were accentuating the differences between Hindus and Muslims, that this may be true but should not be exaggerated in his famous sentence "Satan cannot enter unless there be a flaw". What is the point in blaming the Satanic British? It is because Hindus and Muslims live and le! t li ve but do not get together really, that the British were able to take advantage of it.

Moreover, the Congress also tragically fell into the trap. The Congress also from 1885 onwards began to think in terms not of a transcendent Indian identity but Hindus and Muslims acting in partnership.

It should be remembered to our eternal shame that communalism is India's unique and distinctive contribution to the vocabulary of Political science. In other countries of the world communal means a common thing. But in India communalism has developed to mean real or supposed political and social identity based on a particular religion. Such communal feeling ended up with the miseries of partition and the murder of the Mahatma. Secularism, a long standing tradition of Indian history was in the years, particularly from 1850 to 1947, pushed into the background.

Now the effort from 1947 is to revive that tradition, that tradition of Indian culture and to set aside communalism which in the historical perspective is shallow and skin deep. Nehru and others contended that India must be secular because that is the only possible foundation for a civilized society, the only possible social cement for a democratic community, the only logical, rational and scientific position for anybody to take, but they were taking that position not on the basis of some theory adapted from the west, but on the basis of trying to make Indian historical experience meaningful. Yet since 1947 Indian communalism has grown. One obvious indication, is that in the first Lok Sabha elections only one Hindu communalist, Shyam Prasad Mukherji, could get elected; but now the strength of communal parties in the Lok Sabha runs into three figures. It is the result of a cluster, of reasons, economic, political social and psychological. Every political party tends to look ! on p eople belonging to different religions as useful in helping them in collecting votes. There is the sociological reason that middle class consumerism has spread and one of its offshoots has been this clinging to obscurantist traditions. There are again the defensive reaction to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and the envy of the great amount of money coming in from the Gulf. There is also the influence of the non-resident Indians. It is strange that our people, go abroad, settle abroad, do well abroad, but because of one might call the culture shock, they tend to cling to obscurantism in their beliefs and they tend to support communal parties in India.

However there is also the weakness of the state in enforcing secularism. It has been hesitant and faltering in being secular in its attitude. otherwise, why should they have put down in the Directive Principles of State Policy that cow slaughter should be banned? Why did they not enforce the resolution of the Constituent Assembly that all communal political parties should be banned? Above all, why did they not enforce a common civil law code? When you do not have a common civil law code, if you deny to the women of Islamic faith the right which belongs to other Indian women, you are violating the basic tenets of the constitution regarding equality before the law. The argument that the state cannot interfere with personal laws cannot hold water because the British revised and in some cases abolished some aspects of Muslim criminal law. Surely, what one should emphasize is the need for equality before the law, the need for equal rights for all women. Whatever one might say ab! out the Shah Banu case and the law which the Government sponsored in order to revoke that judgment, yet, the fact remains that any denial of equal rights to women immediately violates articles thirteen and fourteen of the Indian Constitution. It was the Kerala high court in 1988 which decided that the decision that divorced Muslim women should not be given maintenance beyond the period of Idda, does not hold. I think it is necessary for us to look at the whole question of personal law not from the point of view of saying we must have uniform personal law because that strengthens national identity, which it does, but we must look at the whole question of personal law from the point of view of gender equality. The state should circulate a draft Common Civil Law Code which might make changes in Hindu law and in the Islamic law and in the personal laws of other people belonging to other religions.

What do we do now? Communalism has grown not just in the years of British rule but in the period since. One should therefore really get back, one should really return to the healthy tendencies of the past. Tagore said once, "The muffled foot-steps of the past beat in our blood". Muffled by the dark patches in our history of the last 150 years, it is those foot-steps which we will need to hear again. We must pick up again those rudiments of secular practice and strengthen them with education, with democracy, with legal reforms, with social justice and with economic development. We must proceed on the age-old beaten tracks, but strengthen them to make India a forward looking egalitarian society with religious pluralism, full civil liberties and equal opportunities. That is what the historical perspective teaches us, that is the optimism which our long past can give us in our present travail.

Thank you.