1In Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia, Neeti Nair unravels the historically shifting meanings of secularism, religious statehood, citizenship, censorship, majoritarian demands, and minority rights in the Indian subcontinent. The author takes the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 and the ensuing protests in India as a starting point to chart a longer, intertwined history of secularism and citizenship in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. For Nair, the Pan-India protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act raise a crucial question: “what had led to this new and renewed faith in Indian secularism in an age of rampant Hindu majoritarianism?” (p. 2). Nair shines a light on critical moments of hate speech and censorship in South Asian history, highlighting the continuities of colonial-era laws that are folded into post-colonial governmentality. In this intellectual and social history, Nair engages with the public life of religion in these partitioned countries, how majoritarian beliefs influenced minority rights, and the consequently emerging resistance to state imposition of majoritarian politics. The book is organized into four chapters, an Introduction, and an Epilogue. This insightful and extensively researched book is as timely as it is relevant to the current political moment. At the end of the introduction of this book, the author writes, “[w]e cannot understand the aspirations and challenges faced by Indian secularism or an ‘Islamic state’ in Pakistan and Bangladesh without grappling with the ways in which these aspirations were shaped by their relationships with minority citizens within each nation, and indeed, with each other” (p. 18).
- 1 Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948. He was a Hindu Mahasabha and a Rash (...)
2In the chapters on India (chapters one and two), the author traces the impact of Mahatma Gandhi’s death on Indian secularism and writes that the “climate of hate that was responsible for Gandhi’s murder also enabled the whittling down of minority rights in the Constitution then being drafted” (p. 22). In chapter one, Nair’s close reading of the censored Godse trial1 reveals the connections between the Hindu Right’s demands to end the practice of reserved seats for minorities and the Congress’ elimination of political safeguards for India’s religious minorities. She demonstrates that censoring Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) propaganda as hate speech in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death allowed right-wing publications and activists to claim they were victims of government overreach. Nair’s deft handling of a range of archival sources, including a re-reading of the constituent assembly debates, reveals the distance between the proclamations of Indian leaders and the reality of rights available to minorities in India. Muslim demands for minority rights were seen as polarizing and divisive; ultimately, the new constitution of India eschewed provisions for India’s minorities—like a separate electorate. Moreover, while Jawaharlal Nehru sought to balance the lack of separate electorates by urging the Congress parliamentary board to increase Muslim nominations for India’s first general election, it remained a largely symbolic gesture and continues to impact Muslim representation in the legislature even today. Nair sees this early moment in postcolonial India’s state formation to be about “Muslim abandonment” rather than Muslim appeasement. Her analysis makes clear that Indian secularism in the aftermath of partition and Gandhi’s death was wedded to Hindu majority demands.
3In chapter two, Hurt Sentiments maintains that India’s tryst with secularism was an ongoing affair. The creation of Bangladesh and the turbulent years of the 1970s further clarified this relationship. The period also saw right-wing Hindu intimidation of India’s minorities. During Indira Gandhi’s premiership (1966–1977), according to Nair, there was initially revolutionary hope for secular sentiments in India; however, the Emergency years of 1975–1977 “frittered away the secular energies” (p. 79). Analyzing right-wing tracts, parliamentary speeches as well as debates, and the different amendments to the Indian Penal Code, Nair reveals the chasm that existed between the secular ideal promised by Indira Gandhi’s government and the practice of secularism in India. These fissures between the ideal and praxis of secularism were harder to traverse because the Parliamentary debates revealed the government’s reluctance to define the term secularism and the fact that the term “secularism” was included in the Preamble in 1976, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule.
- 2 Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar was the RSS chief between the 1940s and early 1970s.
- 3 The Organizer is a publication put out by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
- 4 Sahmat is a cultural organization, founded in 1989, that organized a multi-city exhibition called H (...)
4The author’s close reading of Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts,2 the right-wing mouthpiece Organizer,3 and analysis of speeches by Jana Sangh leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, highlights a congruence of ideas shared by all right-wing advocates that demanded the “Indianization” of Indian Muslims, rejected Urdu as a foreign language, opposed reservation for Muslims, and argued that Indian Muslims were disloyal citizens responsible for the partition of “akhand Bharat” (undivided India). Nair argues, in chapter two, that the 1971 war for the liberation of Bangladesh was a war that provided “ammunition” for and fostered debates around the question of secularism and “transformed the atmosphere in India” (p. 100). Tracking the promise of secularism from the 1970s to the crisis of secularism in the 1990s in India, Nair establishes that this period witnessed the shrinking of secularism as a state ideology despite civil society's embrace of secular principles. By considering the aftermath of Ayodhya and the Sahmat Exhibition4 in particular, Nair maps out the landscape in India that ushered in the ascendancy and eventual domination of Hindu right-wing politics.
- 5 Liaquat Ali Khan served as Pakistan’s first prime minister from 1947 until his assassination in 195 (...)
5Beginning with the time of the Partition of British India and later the establishment of Bangladesh, Nair offers her assessment of debates around the place of religious minorities and the state ideology of secularism as well as Islam in both these countries. In chapter three, studying the ideological debates surrounding the founding of Pakistan, Nair argues that Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s inaugural address promised equality for religious minorities but that there were contestations around Pakistan’s relationship to Islam from the start. In analyzing Pakistan’s Objectives Resolution (1949) and ensuing debates in the Constituent Assembly, Nair highlights the internal critique from Muslim politicians of an Islamic state that tolerates feudalism and does not stand for social justice and equity. This young Pakistan was working towards a just and tolerant state where Muslims could direct their lives according to Islamic principles and where safeguards existed to enable non-Muslims and other historically oppressed groups to belong. According to Nair, “(a)t every landmark in Pakistan’s early history as an independent nation, there was a significant constituency in favor of a more secular Islamic state, a state that would take extra care to safeguard the rights of its religious minorities” (p. 240). However, there were compromises made to these promised provisions—like the linguistic chauvinism prevalent in declaring Urdu as the national language, challenges from the Pakistani ulema, concessions made by Liaquat Ali Khan5 that were part of the Objectives Resolution of 1949, the subsequent martial rule, and the blasphemy laws. As a result, in Pakistan, as Nair pithily puts it, “(r)eligion, now, was very much a business of the state” (p. 195).
6The fourth chapter of Hurt Sentiments provides a deep historical framework to understand the Bengali language movement of 1948–1952, the formation of a secular Bangla identity that transcended religious affiliation, the gradual separation of East Pakistan, and the genocidal, religiously motivated violence of 1971 that led to the final split. In this chapter, Nair’s reading shows us that secularism meant resistance to communalism in newly liberated Bangladesh but was not against God or religion. However, the author notes that there was ambiguity accompanying the principle of secularism as established in the new Constitution of Bangladesh, and those in power exploited this lack of clarity. With the assassination of Mujibur Rahman and other founders of Bangladesh, the foundational promises of a secular state did not come to fruition. The book offers a nuanced reading of the conversations around religious diversity, constitutional equality for Christians, Hindus, and other minorities, the role of war and violence, and, ultimately, the place of secular ideology in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
- 6 See Jaffrelot (2021).
- 7 See Varshney (2022).
7This book is part of ongoing scholarly conversations around secularism's conceptual and experiential place in the subcontinent. Its historical spadework is significant in a time of rising “ethnic democracies”6 and “democratic backsliding.”7 Recent works, both intellectual histories that focus on Indian leaders, like Sushmita Nath’s The Secular Imaginary: Gandhi, Nehru, and the Idea(s) of India (2022) and Taylor C. Sherman’s Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (2022) revisit the ideas espoused by the founding fathers and their understanding of the place of secularism in a multireligious nation-state. Importantly, there is a broad range of literature on secularism in India. Scholarship that categorizes secularism as an imperial imposition (Nandy 2007), secularism as intertwined with nationalism and caste (Tejani 2008), secularism as a question of minority difference (Prakash 2007), secularism as tolerance (Chatterjee 1994), secularism as humanism (Bhargava 1998) to name a few ways we can categorize the various debates on secularism in India. Nair appears to be in conversation with Shabnum Tejani, who wrote Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History back in 2008. Tejani argued that the scholarship on secularism was mired in “presentism” and dominated by sociological and political science scholars and elaborated on the need for a historical examination of secularism. Nair’s Hurt Sentiments picks up Tejani’s call to trace the historically situated and contested meaning of secularism in South Asia. One limitation of this work is its focus on the “founding fathers” and the State Ideology of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. We only get the perspective of the political and intellectual elites and their engagement with secularism. The book begins and ends by bringing up the 2019 protests by the “ordinary person on the street”—people who, according to Nair, were critiquing and “rose to challenge the Indian state’s obvious lack of commitment to secularism” (p. 242), however, the “ordinary” person and their understanding of secularism does not find much space in this text.
8In Hurt Sentiments, Neeti Nair elucidates the South Asian version of secularism, which is not about the separation of state and religion but rather a secularism that “respects all religions” (p. 247). While this insight of Neeti Nair's that secularism in South Asia is understood as equal respect for all religions is not unique, her arguments about the contestations around the meaning of “secularism” in a time of majoritarian politics are relevant for imagining how just and plural democracies in South Asia should function. By taking stock of the life and fate of this indigenously inflected secularism over a seventy-five-year period, Nair highlights the intellectual debates, individual political players, and the different historical moments that shaped the status of minority rights in the subcontinent. Nair’s comparative lens helps shine a light on the interconnected and intertwined histories of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. It throws into relief the contemporary responses and their antecedents to growing religious fundamentalisms in South Asia. It asks us to consider the question: What does it mean to be secular in South Asia? For Nair, secularism is belonging.
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