In late February President Donald Trump visited India for talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As he departed Delhi, India’s capital, Trump praised Modi’s India for its commitment to religious tolerance and freedom.
Officially India is a secular country. Indian secularism is not about excluding religion from public life. Instead, it seeks to ensure that as far as possible the State remains religiously neutral. Past presidents of India have included Hindus, Muslims and other denominations. A Sikh has held the post of Prime Minister. Independent India’s first education minister was a Muslim cleric. One of its recent defence ministers, George Fernandes originally trained to be a priest before becoming a train unionist and spoke 10 languages.
Of all Indian cities, Delhi is perhaps the most multicultural and multi-confessional. Founded in around 730 AD, Delhi was the capital of empires of nominally Hindu and Muslim persuasion. The Mughal Muslim king Akbar had a Hindu wife who scandalised the Court by maintaining a small Hindu temple in her quarters. Akbar started his own religion, known as Deen-i-Ilahi, and conveniently appointed himself as prophet.
Syncretism has always been the religious order of the day in India’s capital, home to people from many ethnicities and faiths.
It is also my ancestral city. My family are known as Dilli-wala (Delhi native). So many of my elders in Sydney were also Dilli-wala’s, regardless of their religion. No matter where they settle, whether Karachi or London or LA or Sydney, a Dilli-wala remains a Dilli-wala. My parents are both in this category even though one identifies as Pakistani and the other Indian.
Of course, Delhi is no utopia of religious tolerance. From time to time, conflict and violence do erupt. My father grew up in a district called Gurgaon during the 1940’s. When rioting broke out following the 1947 Partition and the influx of distraught Hindi and Sikh refugees from Pakistan into Delhi, my paternal grandfather decided to take his family to a town on the border of India and West Pakistan. I’ve heard stories of my young father and aunt travelling in a horse drawn carriage attempting to flee across town and avoid Hindu mobs. Their trusty driver, himself a Hindu, led them to safety and even lied to one mob that stopped the party that his passengers were Hindus.
'Syncretism has always been the religious order of the day in India’s capital, home to people from many ethnicities and faiths.'
In this case, as with so many others, it is outsiders who all too often initiate the trouble. Violent extremes don’t sit comfortably with Delhi natives. The most recent violence was in response to a campaign of peaceful protest against changes to India’s citizenship laws. These changes would grant citizenship to asylum seekers from neighbouring countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh) except Muslims.
This could well affect ethnic or sectarian minorities such as Hazara Shia refugees fleeing violence and terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such a blanket ban takes little account of the nuances of various intra-Muslim tensions, traces of which also exist in India itself. The laws are clearly designed to be an exercise in confessional engineering aimed at marginalising India’s largest minority community.
The quiet peaceful protests were met with extremely hostile and provocative rhetoric from political leaders of Modi’s party. The ideological leanings of this party are often referred to as Hindutva. This divisive ideology seeks to transform India into a Hindu theocracy. Among its early followers were the assassins of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.
Hindutva regards India’s Abrahamic communities — Muslims, Christians and Jews — as a foreign cultural and religious force that must be kept in check. Christian communities, including those in southern India whose presence goes back over 1,700 years, are often targeted for their social service work among poor low caste Hindu communities.
It would be most inaccurate to imagine the recent Delhi pogrom to be a wire between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. A young Hindu boy tells of how his Muslim neighbours protected him and other Hindus from attack. A Sikh man and his son transported around 100 Muslim women and boys to the relative safety of a Sikh neighbourhood. Sikhs handed Muslim men Sikh turbans to wear so as to confuse Hindutva thugs. Meanwhile the Catholic Archbishop of Delhi called on all Christian churches to provide shelter to Muslim and other citizens fleeing the violence.
The divisive and foreign Hindutva ideology goes against the culture and spirit of Delhi. Recently Modi’s party were trounced in local elections. Almost always the violence and hatred is caused by outsiders and resisted by the Dilli-walas. But with an openly sectarian government in power, the locals might yet become infected.
Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney based lawyer and blogger.
Main image: Protests against CAA in New Delhi (Wikimedia commons)