Religious Revivalism in South Asia

Religion, like racism, nationalism and the patronage of 'white-man's burden', has been in use as an instrument of politics for centuries by various communities, nations and regions in their struggle for domination and survival. East, in general, and South Asia, in particular, is no exception, although it received most of its brunt. What is, however, exceptional about the East is that it is predominantly non-Christian and non-white. The regions of religious revivalism are mostly underdeveloped and are locked in the double-bind of a fast growing but distorted 'modernity' and slowly-dying but persisting archaic 'tradition'. The information revolution, in the meanwhile, has amplified the voices that were once rarely taken note of.

Societal evolution becomes even more complex in the East - unlike Western Europe that experienced a distinct historical continuum of clearly defined stages of social formation - as various historical stages got jumbled up in a heterogeneous evolution.
Since both 'modern' and 'traditional' distract and interact, mix and negate and change roles, efforts at drawing lines or analysing social, cultural and ideological phenomena, though categories alien to the Eastern context, are often misleading and, generally, suit ideologies of supremacy of one civilisation over another. In an increasingly globalising world where the developed or dominant live at the cost of the underdeveloped or dominated, the periphery is also divided between various combinations of dominant groups, on the one hand, and the marginalised and dispossessed, on the other.

With the retardation of the processes of formation of nations and due to colonial intervention, the historical personality of the colonised people and nations could not grow in a normal fashion. Consequently, during the colonial and post-colonial eras, search for roots and yearning for the past has resulted either in religious revivalism/radicalism or nationalism informed by ethnicity, culture and, in most cases, religion. Melancholy and alienation over the loss of 'great tradition' or a 'golden era' has been replaced by an aggressive search for new identities and going 'back to the roots'- often mixing ethnicity with religion or bringing the two into conflict - that have assumed, in some places, exclusivist and, in others, exclusionary forms.

Formation of nations and nation-states in South Asia, like social development, had its own peculiar characters - mixing tradition with modern structures - and has taken a different course from, and is far behind, Western Europe. The British colonial intervention in the subcontinent not only destroyed the basis of self-sufficient agrarian communities, but also brought India, as its appendage, into the 'modern age'. Distorting and disrupting the processes of formation of nationalities and nations, the colonialists superimposed their value-loaded administrative structure and encouraged and patronised elites who sought leverage and access by employing ethnic and religious tools.

Consequently, the national liberation movement in the subcontinent had a number of traits, conflicts and trends that were rooted in a very diverse multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious social soil. This could well be seen in diverse political movements and various shades of national liberation movement and its representative leaders, including the Indian National Congress and All India Muslim League, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan and Maulana Azad, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
This is not merely an irony of history that the national liberation movement failed to find a solution to the minority question and a secular Jinnah had to take recourse to Partition on the basis of religion. And, despite the Partition of the subcontinent and creation of Bangladesh, the minorities remain marginalised in the secular Republic of India, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh.

The rise of religious revivalism/radicalism in almost all countries of South Asia shows that new independent states could neither address the concerns of the minorities, nor integrate them in the mainstream. What makes the plight of the minorities even more miserable is that the sections of dominant interest groups from majority religious and ethnic communities have raised the banner of religion to promote their political agenda. The commonality among these aggressive chauvinist paradigms is that they use religion to sell a proto-type of fascist majoritarian argument in order to seek the domination of a majority ethno-religious community by excluding the minority ethno-religious community from the mainstream. Be it Hindutva creed in India, Islamic extremism in Pakistan, Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Monarchist Nepalese Hinduism or Islamic revivalism in Bangladesh, all represent the interests of the dominant groups among the majority community.

As ethno-religious movements become mainstream forces and fan parochial sentiments, they tend to exacerbate communal and sectarian conflicts among different ethno-religious communities by targeting the minorities in their respective countries, on the one hand, and, as a consequence, reinforce interstate conflicts in South Asia, on the other. By fanning religious extremism in their own countries, the forces of Hindutva, Islamic extremism and Sihnala Buddhist nationalism reinforce their chauvinist counterparts both within and without and narrow the space for peace, harmony and cooperation across frontiers, besides eroding the basis of pluralist democracy and the separation of religion from the state in their respective countries.The peoples of South Asia need to shed their 'false consciousness' and come forward to stop the march of the forces of religious extremism for a peaceful, fraternal, civilised and prosperous region.