Religious liberty under threat as India celebrates 75th anniversary

National Post, 19 August 2022

At India’s 75th the idea of India as a privileged republic for Hindus has more currency now than it did in 1947.

The assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie caused an upsurge of interest in The Satanic Verses, the novel for which the late Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence upon him. Absent the stabbing though, it would have been his earlier novel, Midnight’s Children, that got attention in recent days.

Midnight’s Children is about characters born at midnight on August 15th, 1947, the moment when the Dominion of India and Dominion of Pakistan became independent. Sir Salman himself was born in 1947. The Booker prize-winning 1981 novel examines the Indian project through the literary device of “midnight’s children” who have special psychological powers.

India marked its 75th anniversary of independence this week and some of the tensions of 1947 have returned. Independence was bittersweet for many of those — including Mahatma Gandhi, who would be assassinated six months later — who led the fight for it. Sweet because of sovereignty transferred from the British Raj; bitter because of partition, dividing the British colony into India and Pakistan and (latterly) Bangladesh.

The dream of an India which included both Hindu and Muslims as full citizens within a religiously neutral state was rejected by the Muslim League. It feared that minority Muslims would be second-class citizens, or worse, in a majority Hindu India. Thus partition took place, with the consequent migration of millions of Muslims from India to Pakistan and Hindus in the opposite direction.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the idea of peaceful partition and population shifts seemed plausible. The map of Europe had been redrawn, partitioning it into a free part and a Soviet part, and as Poland was shifted west on the map, a good number of Germans had to migrate westward out of the new Poland into Germany.

On the subcontinent partition was not peaceful, leading to Hindu-Muslim riots and lethal violence. Estimates are that as many as 20 million people migrated, and the resulting dead are estimated to be hundred of thousands, or perhaps even several million. Enmity was sown between India and Pakistan, with permanent military hostility and occasional wars.

The Muslim minority in India is enormous, some 200 million. Only Indonesia (230 million) and Pakistan (212 million) have more Muslims. Bangladesh has 153 million. After independence it seemed as if India — declared a republic in 1950 — could accommodate its Muslim minority in the world’s largest democracy. For most of the twentieth century the worst fears of Muslim persecution in a majority Hindu India were not realized.

Yet at India’s 75th the idea of India as a privileged republic for Hindus has more currency now than it did in 1947. The BJP government of Narendra Modi, prime minister since 2014, has favoured “Hindutva,” a Hindu nationalism that sees India as a Hindu state, with authoritarian measures justified to preserve that Hindu character. That means that religious minorities — primarily Muslims, but also the country’s Christian minority (2.3 per cent) — has their civil and political rights curtailed.

Harassment is reported frequently. For example, late last year the Indian government suspended Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity from receiving foreign donations, meaning the sisters had to ration the food they provided to the starving. An international backlash put an end to that bureaucratic bullying, but the message to all non-Hindu citizens of India was clear. If the sisters who serve in the slums can be targeted, anyone can.

India is rightfully proud of its new president, Droupadi Murmu, who took office last month and is the first “tribal” to be head of state. “Tribals” or members of the “Scheduled Castes” or “Scheduled Tribes” occupy the lowest place in the traditional social hierarchy. The term “Dalit” or “untouchable” was also used and Gandhi famously used the term “Harijan,” meaning “children of God”.

By whatever name, Murmu’s ascension is a remarkable step, hard to imagine in 1947. Yet she is a BJP member who also advances Hindu nationalism to the detriment of religious liberty.

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