Pakistani Christians took to the streets of Lahore on Sunday to protest a rash of violence against their community over the weekend. (Sources: New York Times, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post)

Analysts available for comment:

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., and the former High Commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain.

CONTACT: akbar.ahmed@theglobalexperts.org

Location: North America

Languages: English; French; Pashto; Urdu

Christophe Jaffrelot, Ph.D. is a French political scientist and expert on South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan. He is the former director of CERI at SciencesPo in Paris, France’s foremost center for research on international politics, and served in this role from 2002-8.

CONTACT: christophe.jaffrelot@theglobalexperts.org

Location: West Europe

Languages: English; French

Samina Ahmed, Ph.D. is South Director of the International Crisis Group. She oversees the group’s work in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. Her team focuses on political, security and stability issues in South Asia, like Islamic extremism, domestic and regional terrorism, domestic insurgencies and the risk of inter-state conflict.

CONTACT: samina.ahmed@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Islamabad, Pakistan

Language: English, Urdu

Hassan Abbas, Ph.D. is a former Pakistani government official who served in the administrations of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1995-6) and President Pervez Musharraf (1999-2000). He is currently the Quaid-i-Azam chair and professor at Columbia University’s South Asia Institute.

CONTACT: hassan.abbas@theglobalexperts.org

Location: North America

Languages: English; Panjabi; Urdu

Naveed Ahmad is a journalist at Gulf News in Islamabad, Pakistan. He served as a Geo News Correspondent for many years and worked with multiple media agencies around the world. Ahmad specializes in investigative reporting on security affairs, civil-military relations, diplomacy, energy and religion.

CONTACT: naveed.ahmad@theglobalexperts.org

Language: English

Rene Guitton is an author of books, theater and television scripts. Along with his day job, this relentless traveler with a degree in journalism, who studied theology and exegesis, is currently doing research on today’s major monotheistic religions, on philosophy and various schools of thought.

CONTACT:rene.guitton@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Paris, France

Languages: English, French

PARIS

In contrast to most South Asian countries, modern India has always been officially “secular”, a word the country inscribed in its Constitution in 1976. Secularism, here, is not synonymous with the French “laïcité”, which demands strong separation of religion and the state. India’s secularism does not require exclusion of religion from the public sphere. On the contrary, it implies recognition of all religions by the state. This philosophy of inclusivity finds expression in one article of the Constitution by which all religious communities may set up schools that are eligible for state subsidies.

India’s secularism, therefore, has more affinities with multiculturalism than with “laïcité”. Its emphasis on pluralism parallels the robust parliamentary democracy and federalism that India has been cultivating for 64 years.

But today, secularism is in jeopardy in India. The main threat comes from the rise of Hindu militancy and its consequences not only for electoral politics, but also for the judiciary and society at large.

The rise of Hindu nationalism

The core belief of the Hindu nationalist movement, whose key organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was founded in 1925, is that the Indian identity is embodied in Hinduism, the oldest and largest religion of India. For decades the RSS has worked at the grass roots level, recruiting children who are taught to fight religions founded outside India (including Islam and Christianity), and forming new fronts (that include student, labor and peasant groups).

The RSS and its offshoots consistently criticized pro-minority policies. But it mostly remained a marginal player until the 1980s when the ruling Congress Party was again assailed by the old Hindu nationalists’ critique of ““pseudo-secularism.

The RSS supported party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mobilized on claims that the government and courts favored Muslims, and also demanded the (re)building of a temple where the Babri Masjid mosque was constructed in 1528 at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.

This campaign culminated in the demolition of the mosque by a Hindu mob in 1992. It was accompanied by widespread wave of communal riots aimed at polarizing the voters along religious lines. It contributed to electoral gains for the BJP, and in 1998-2004 the party was in position to head a new national-ruling coalition.

Towards an ethno-democracy

The 1980s-90s were a turning point in the India’s secularism. This period could have been a parenthesis, since the Congress Party regained power in 2004, but India has never returned to the balance of religious co-existence and compromise that prevailed in its first three decades of independence.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid and the communal clashes that accompanied the BJP’s rise to power have never been addressed properly by the policy and judiciary. Muslims were massacred in numbers unprecedented since India’s 1947 partition; about 1,000 were killed in Bhagalpur in Bihar State alone in 1989, and violence rose to the level of pogroms in Gujarat State in 2002 when about 2,000Muslims were killed after 59 Hindus burnt alive in train coaches in Godhra, Gujarat. Inquiry commissions prepared reports that were either never made public or not followed by serious action. In most democracies, the kind of violence Gujarat experienced in 2002 would have resulted in at least a “Justice and Reconciliation” commission.

And minorities must cope with marginalization. Christian Tribals are victims of violence , especially in Orissa and Gujarat, where they are requested to (re)convert to Hinduism. Muslims face discrimination in the job and housing markets, and Muslim ghettoization is increasing in northesern and western India. On the political scene, Muslims are marginalized with less than six per cent of MPs in the lower house of Parliament while representing 13.4 per cent of the population. In 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh commissioned a report on the status of India’s Muslims by a committee names after its president, Justice Rajinder Sachar. But none of the Sachar Committee’s key recommendations to improve Muslims’ situation has been implemented perhaps from political fears that the BJP will again denounce “pseudo-secularism”.

India is gradually moving away from multiculturalism toward a type of democracy exemplified by Israel and Sri Lanka, known as “ethnic democracy”, where minorities are treated as second-class citizens. With this transformation, India may well lose one of the key pillars of its soft power, the quality of its multiculturalism – and more alarmingly, perhaps also its adherence to the rule of law.

This piece is part of the series “Religion & the Public Space”

Christophe Jaffrelot is a French political scientist and expert on South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan. He is the former director of CERI at SciencesPo in Paris, France’s foremost center for research on international politics, and served in this role from 2002-8.

Dr. Jaffrelot has written frequently about nationalism in India and Pakistan, and the political roots of Hindu-Muslim conflict. He chairs the Asia Group at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is frequently called upon to provide policy-level advice on developments in South Asia.

He currently serves as co-director of the CERI research project ‘The End of Violence‘, and is also a participant in the ‘Economic Reform and Regulation‘ project.

He holds a doctorate in political science from the Institute of Political Studies (IEP) in Paris, and has previously studied at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO).