Freedom of conscience should be valued

M Rajivlochan

Historian

THE recent ‘failed’ efforts of the SGPC to retain control over some gurdwaras and set rules for the proper practice of religion are at one with the numerous imbroglios around religion that we witness in India routinely.

Such efforts are confusing, confounding and, above all, embarrassing for the public at large. For, such confusion simply does not harmonise with what might best be called the propensity of the Indians to be diverse.

Take another example. By now, the Supreme Court would have spent more than 50 man-hours listening to various sides on the hijab ban. The discussion revolved around issues such as what is the essential practice of a religion and freedom of conscience as guaranteed by the Constitution.

However, the crux of the matter — whether it be the question of the hijab or who controls places and practices of worship — has remained untouched by lawyers, petitioners and sundry other Indians who are weighing in on the matter in different ways. The key to this issue is whether any religious group can force an individual practising that religion to follow one practice or another or litigate on their behalf in a court of law. Such corporatisation of religion has been foreign to Indic culture.

A significant part of the confusion comes from the fact that India has had a very individualistic society, where even the Abrahamic religions have had great difficulty in enforcing any uniform rule about what acceptable practices should be.

For thousands of years, the Indic civilisation has celebrated the life and freedom of the individual and not that of the group. The lack of any organised church in the three major Indic religions — Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism — is only one of the signs of this unique focus on the individual. We in India love to talk of unity in diversity, yet we have not cared to articulate any possible reason for the immense diversity that characterises Indian life.

Even the Constitution of India was based on the freedom of the individual rather than freedom of any religion, caste or religious group. The Motilal Nehru report, which set about to make the first draft of the Constitution, avoided any reference to ‘parties’ or partisan groupings of any sort and insisted that in free India, the individual would remain the focus of all norms. This is in contrast to the western tradition of liberal democracy that has been defined by a willingness to share political power with groups which are very diverse, whether in terms of ethnicity, language, caste or religion. In the West, with primordial identities having been diluted considerably during the political and economic churning of the 19th century, the focus in politics was on what came to be known as ‘political parties’. In India, the individual is the centre of all such norms.

In India, even the most basic primordial identity, that of religion, has been historically perceived from the perspective of the individual rather than the group. A humongous variety of religious sects, groupings and belief systems exist across the spectrum here, whether it be Hinduism or Islam, the two largest so-called ‘groups’.

Sociologist Louis Dumont pointed out in the 1970s that each group (and within it the subgroups) has its own unique perspective on the world; all are driven by individuals.

Since Indians tend to take their culture for granted, it was left to rank outsiders, the British, to point out that historically, religion as a defining category for a social group has been rather diffuse in India. The report of the Census of India, 1911, observed, “In India, the line of cleavage is social rather than religious.” About Indians, the Census Commissioner wrote: “Fearing many gods himself, he is quite ready to admit that there may be others of whom he has no ken, and it seldom occurs to him to differentiate himself from his fellows, merely because they invoke a different deity in the time of trouble.” The Commissioner noted that in India: “No one is interested in what his neighbour believes, but he is very much interested in knowing whether he can eat with him or take water from his hands.”

The 1911 Census report observed that it was not just within the rubric of what was called Hinduism that there was enormous diversity; the lines between Hindus and Muslims were not too strong either. There is an interesting bit in the report that tells us about groups of people in various parts of India whom it is “difficult to class definitely either as Hindus or Muhammedans. There are many so-called Hindus whose religion has a strong Muhammedan flavour. Notable among these are the followers of the strange Panchpiriya cult, who worship five Muhammedan saints, of uncertain name and identity, and sacrifice cocks to them, employing for the purpose as their priest a Muhammedan Dafali fakir. Throughout India, many Hindus make pilgrimages to Muhammedan shrines such as that of ‘Sakhi Sarwar’ in Punjab, Pakistan.”

Exasperated at this confusion, the official noted how his staff of Census enumerators had even classified some people as “Hindu-Muhammedans”, because as the Indian staff, embedded within the local society, knew these people were locally identified as “Hindu-Muhammedans”.

Coming from a society with rather strong belief systems, the British officials were flummoxed at having to classify people who did not entertain particularly strong beliefs about anything. In places where it mattered to them the most, as for instance, the army, the British quickly used the rod and forbade the wearing of caste marks or any kind of religious symbol by the recruits. They, however, saw no reason to interfere with social organisations.

The fact remains that ‘freedom of conscience’, enshrined in the Indian Constitution, is responsible for the immense freedom Indians take for granted. It includes freedom from any church. To devalue and ignore this feature of our life and culture can create serious stress for Indians.

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