The victory of Hindutva over secularism is marked not only by BJP’s conclusive win, but Yogi Adityanath’s assumption of the Chief Ministership of UP, India’s most populous state. Disregarding the howl of protests and execrations from Secular-Left-Liberals (SLLs), the BJP high command led by PM Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah anointed Yogi Adityanath to this high office. It was like a slap in the face of those who were so used to their word, if not diktat, being heeded for nearly seventy years. Making Yogi Adityanath CM was akin to rubbing their faces in the mud.

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Those still in denial cannot be helped, but several more sensible commentators have immediately gone into damage-control mode. Sadly, they are less interested in salvaging the credibility or political future of the routed, scattered, and discredited, than in saving their own skins. Their aims and intentions, far from being informed by a noble concern with the nation and society, seem far more preoccupied with venal and narrow self-interests.

How to remain solvent, if not relevant in a scenario where they find themselves increasingly marginalised is the challenge they are responding to. 

We notice they deploy three major strategies. First, they argue that in the absence of a secular opposition, it is their job to play the role of the watchdog of democracy. But instead of watchdog, they carry the metaphor forward; they are busy crying, “wolf!” The second strategy is to blame the leaders of the opposition for letting down secularism. In other words, the ideology is not to blame only its practitioners, who did not do justice to it. Finally, they also plead for means to revive this moribund creed. By continuing their attack on Hindutva, they imply that no peace can be made with the latter: the only option, therefore, is to reboot secularism, one way or another.

But why did secularism fail in the first place? There are mainly two approaches to respond to such a question, one rather straightforward, the other relatively more complex. The straightforward answer is that secularism failed because it was never practised in India. In the name of secularism, what was performed was a disguised form of communalism, appeasement of minorities, vote-bank and identity politics, and socially and culturally divisive governmentalism. Taken to its logical conclusion, such an argument implies that what was defeated was not secularism in the first place, but pseudo-secularism or another form of communalism. If secularism was not defeated, then what won? Would SLL coteries concede that Hindutva is not actually communal? That would be virtually impossible. Then the only possible explanation is that one form of communalism defeated another form.

But if secularism was never India’s ruling ideology, then why lament its eclipse in the first place? The initial premise itself, thus, falls apart. 

The more complex reason is that secularism failed because it was not properly grounded or absorbed by Indians. It is not that Indians did not evolve means to live in peace with one another, despite multiple differences in religion, language, community, or ethnicity. Neither is it that Indians wanted endless partitions and religious conflicts, watered by streams of blood. Far from it, we have always accepted dissimilarity and had learned to coexist with those professing radically diverse beliefs. But we managed this not by turning irreligious or impious, but by accepting that there were many systems and paths to worship or the practice of one’s faith. We acknowledged and recognised religious, linguistic, and ethnic heterogeneity. 

Does this mean that Indians did not desire a separation between state power and religious authority? No, but by the same token, we didn’t think that religion was a matter of one’s private belief or faith. How could we, when they found religious distinctions not suspended, but highlighted in political discourse? Religion was everywhere in the Indian public sphere: from electoral battles to legislation, its presence was ubiquitous. Far from being invisible, there was hardly anything as in your face in Indian polity as religion. Given these facts, the notion of secularism seemed rather unconvincing, observed more in its breach than in its practice.

But even more significant is the fact that there is no native, Indian equivalent for secularism. The translation, dharmanirpeksh doesn’t work, sounding utterly strange, like a vain neologism. Even matanirpeksh, which is slightly better, evokes neither understanding nor recognition. Samsarik or Laukika means worldly or this-worldly, not quite indifferent to religion; besides they do not convey the sense of secularism as a political ideology. I found another word in Apte’s Sanskrit-English dictionary, aihika (on page 55), but that is so remote from everyday language as to almost make no sense to most. Would the truer “translations” of secular be adharmik, which has such a negative connotation, and beimaan, another reprobate term, bordering on abuse?

Herein lies the clue to the defeat, if not demise, of secularism in India. In most part, it amounted to little more than adharma. It came to be associated with the politics of insincerity and opportunism. By the same token, its ideological opposite, Hindutva, though a word of recent coinage, lacks the negative connotations of beimaani, despite every attempt to demonise and vilify it. At worst, it means the domination by the majority, which is how most understand democracy. At best, it may mean a dharmik or imandaar polity, which many are willing to give a chance to. The defeat of secularism shows that a large section of people in India think that Hinduism, even its version that goes by the name of Hindutva, is a better guarantor of religious pluralism, social equity, and economic progress than secularism. That is why secularism is the god that failed.

The author is a poet and professor at JNU, New Delhi.