ABSTRACT
Both India and Pakistan were born on midnight in August 1947. Conventionally, India is considered to be a ‘secular’ and Pakistan a ‘religious’ nation-state. However, both were conceived of as secular polities at independence. In recent years, the ‘idea of India’ (Khilnani 1997) as a ‘secular, sovereign, and democratic republic’ has been challenged by the Hindu ‘nationalist’ Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP is committed to the articulation of an explicitly Hindu nationalist discourse centred on Hindutva and has succeeded in capturing state power. Pakistan was similarly envisaged as a secular nation-state by its founder, the Qaid-e-Azam Muhammed Ali Jinnah. However, in this chapter it will be argued that the colonial construction of the category of ‘religion’ leading to the genocidal violence of Partition make a separation between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ variants of nationalism difficult in South Asia. Even Sri Lanka, spared the horrors of Partition, has witnessed three decades of conflict and war between competing forms of nationalism rooted in the religious traditions of ethno-linguistic communities. Given the difficulty separating religion and nationalism in South Asia, it is argued that the adoption of Western notions of secularism premised on the notion of the separation of politics and religion is unsuitable for the region and that the Indian understandings of secularism as Sarva Dharma Sambhava (‘let all religions flourish’) could have been the basis for a unified state at the time of independence if it had institutionalized minority political representation.
