Asif Syed Zaman

Laïcité, Love, and Longing: Professional Seminar

Re-asserting Secularism in Modi’s India Silberman School of Social Work

April 2020
Do Now: Think about the quote below. You may write down your
interpretation of it if you feel it is necessary. What does it mean to you
and how do you anticipate that it shaped my social work research?
 A Short Personal
Backstory
• As honoured as I am to be an aspiring social worker, I did not even think about
being one even five years ago. Hats off to you who dreamed about it as little
children! After careful meditation, I was brought into the field.
• I originally wanted to be a history professor, but I was accepted to only two Ph.D.
programmes: the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the University of
California at Irvine. I was supposed to research new explanations for why the
Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 broke out and thus constituted the largest anticolonial
rebellion in the history of mankind.
• Parental pressures and financial concerns caused me to depart from this career
path. I tried going to law school and completed a teaching programme, only to
discover how saturated the social studies profession was in New York state.
• As an Indian Muslim, I love my homeland and have always been curious about the
land where my forefathers lived at least since the time I had to sing “My Country
‘tis of Thee” back in the 1990s in P.S. 173 Queens in Fresh Meadows. This
ancestral attachment drove me to study about Indian history, particularly the
transition from Mughal to British rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Even though my paper may at long parts read like a history paper, it has clearly
defined social work implications.
 Introducing the Hindutva
Movement
• Hindutva is the idea that India should be a Hindu state. Not necessarily a Hindu
theocracy following the Manusmriti (the Laws of Manu), but at least where Hindus
are the primary recipients of citizenship.
• In this parochial construction of history, Muslims are savage outsiders who have
made no contribution to India’s cultural fabric. Consequently, they have no place in a
postcolonial India. According to the most extreme proponents of Hindutva, Muslims
should either be killed, converted to Hinduism, or exiled to the Middle East.
• Advocates of Hindutva are known as Hindutvadis. Disparagingly, they have been
referred to as “Hindutwits” (from a portmanteau of Hindutva and nitwit).
• The Hindutva movement is the product of ideas in the late nineteenth century which
can be traced to Bankimchandra Chatterjee, below, a clerk for the Raj, novelist, and
the author of Vande Mataram, India’s national song. (Rabindranath Tagore, above,
was the author of Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem. These are different songs
with different messages. Even though both tunes were written in Sanskritic Bengali,
Vande Mataram is more of an exclusively Hindu vision, whereas Jana Gana Mana is
more compatible with a secular idea about what India should be.) By the 1920s, they
gained enough popularity to scare Muslims into begin advocating for a separate
nation-state, although it was not until 1931 this would-be country got its name:
Pakistan.
 The India That Could Have Been…
• National poet of Pakistan. To the right, please note his grave depicted on a
Pakistani rupee note from 1981, but would you believe that he was one of the
most ardent believers of Indian secularism prior to World War I (1914-18)? Even
Jinnah was of a secular mindset and would be opposed to partitioning India in
this time period.
• Please look at some of the most beautiful lines of Iqbal’s poetry below.
• On the lower right corner are stamps from Subhash Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind
fauj (Free Indian Army). Although they certainly are controversial figures due to
their collaboration with the Japanese in World War II, they imagined an India for
peoples of all religions that stretched from the Khyber Pass to Cox’s Bazar.
 Hindutva (1930s to 1971)
• Because of the alienation that Muslims such as Iqbal (d. 1938) received
from Hindu nationalists, they increasingly began to advocate for
Pakistan. As part of his dying wish, Iqbal asked Jinnah to take on his
cause. With the Muslim League’s support of Great Britain in World War
II, they received the backing for the plan to divide India into two
countries.
• The partition of India in August 1947 was a bloody process, described
as a vivisection by the Mahatma.
• A Hindu nationalist conspiracy was involved in the assassination of
Gandhi on 30 January 1948, essentially discrediting the Hindutva
movement for about three decades until Congress abused its powers in
the Emergency under Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma; she
was Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter).
• After repeated oppression by the Punjabi military and Muhajir civilian
elites from Karachi and later Islamabad (Pakistan’s capital from 1966
onward), the eastern Bengali wing emerged as Bangladesh in 1971.
A map detailing the
findings of the 1901
Census of India.
Hindu-majority areas
are in pink. Muslim-
majority areas are in
green. Buddhist areas in
yellow. Disregarding
the animists (grey), note
how closely they
correspond to the
successor states of
today.
Partition of India,
1947

N.B.: Puducherry was spelled as Pondicherry in

the French times. The new spelling is an
assertion of the local Tamil identity. If used in a
constructive way, the role of regional identities
(e.g. Gujarati, Tamil) may help counter the role of
communal (i.e. Hindu-Muslim) divides.
 Hindutwits from 1980s Onward…
• By the 1990s, Hindu nationalist continued went from an ideological fringe to one that gained
considerable acceptance in Indian society.
• The bipolar world of the Cold War of the 1980s gave way to the even more chaotic, divisive, multipolar
planet we have today.
Timeline
• 1992: Babri Masjid demolished
(masjid is the Arabic word for mosque, as it appears in the Qur’an, from the word for prostration sajdah).
• 1996: First BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, “Indian People’s Party”) gov’t formed. It lasts only 13 days.
• 1998: First stable BJP government established under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was notorious for
nuclear saber-rattling with Pakistan.
• 2002: Two thousand Muslims are killed in Gujarat after being accused of burning a train carrying Hindu
pilgrims. The chief minister (India’s equivalent to an American governor) of Gujarat (the same area
which gave birth to Krishna of the mythic past and Gandhi of the historical one) was Narendra Modi.
• 2004: Indian National Congress returns to power in the political fallout of the riots.
• 2014: Modi was elected prime minister.
• 2019: Modi re-elected prime minister. Controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill allows people of all
religions to enter India as refugees but deliberately omits Muslims. Muslims who had been living in
Assam since at least British times face possible expulsion to Bangladesh. Kashmir undergoes martial
law and a media blackout.
• 2020: Coronavirus diverts attention from Modi’s suppression of human rights. Meanwhile, just as Jews
were unfairly targeted in Medieval Europe during the Bubonic Plague of 1247, Muslims have been Bhai is a Hindi / Urdu word for
accused of being responsible for the outbreak by ignorant Hindu mobs. Possible riots may take place in
May when the shelter-in-place order will be suspended. “brother.”
 Ahimsa (nonviolence) is an
idea from the Jain religion,
but it definitely has dharmic
elements that the rioters
could have learned from, let
alone all of humanity.
Gandhi could learn from it.
Why could not they?
What does it mean if
Gandhi is on most of India’s
circulating currency, but his
ideas are not deeply studied?
 Would you believe that the
late Dr. Huntington was
against the war in Iraq?
His controversial
theory, rather conveniently,
was abused by the Bush
Administration (r.
 What can social workers do about this?
• Local Partition and Gandhi museums
can foster cooperative networks with
organisations such as the Anti-
Defamation League, the Simon
Weisenthal Centre, various Holocaust
museums, the Rwandan Genocide
Museum
• Engage in tolerance education, group
therapy (e.g. psychodynamic,
humanistic, kinesthetic) interfaith
dialogues, and conflict resolution.
• Be politically active with the Indian
National Congress, the Aam Admi Parti
(Common Man’s Party), and other
secular parties.
 According to the Oxford English Dictionary the bulbul is “any of various Asian or
African songbirds of the large family Pycnotidae, specifically an Iranian bird admired
for its song. It is commonly translated as nightingale, as I have done below.

To contextualise that
“United We Stand”
image from the last
slide, please note the
English translation.
Before we go,
a verse from the Torah
comes to mind. This is one that I
have seen displayed near the
United Nations building in
Manhattan. Furthermore,
President Eisenhower made a
reference to the passage in his
notable 1961 farewell address
regarding the military-industrial
complex.

Peace be upon
you all, dear
elders, colleagues,
and friends!