by Amar Sohal
Concerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. My published work complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri politician Sheikh Abdullah, and the nonviolent Pashtun activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Revising the common view that they were mere acolytes of their celebrated Hindu colleagues M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, my recent book, The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India’s Partition (Oxford University Press, 2023), argues that these three men collectively produced a distinct Muslim secularity from within the grander family of secular Indian nationalism; an intellectual tradition that has retained religion within the public space while nevertheless preventing it from defining either national membership or the state. At a time when many across the decolonising world believed that identity-based majorities and minorities were incompatible and had to be separated out into sovereign equals, Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan thought differently about the problem of religious pluralism in a postcolonial democracy. The minority, they contended, could conceive of the majority not just as an antagonistic entity that is set against it, but to which it can belong and uniquely complete. For if the project of unity requires the majority to appeal to the minority, it is ultimately for the minority to uphold any such appeal. Stressing this structural truism, I show that refusing the disempowering status of minority need not always produce a politics of separatism and can instead steer societies towards unequivocally shared conceptions of sovereignty.
Premising its claim to a single, united India upon the universalism of Islam, champions of the Muslim secular mobilised notions of federation and popular sovereignty to replace older monarchical and communitarian forms of power. But to finally jettison the demographic inequality between Hindus and Muslims, these thinkers redefined equality itself. Rejecting its liberal definition for being too abstract and thus prone to majoritarian assimilation, they replaced it with their own rendition of Indian parity to simultaneously evoke commonality and distinction between Hindu and Muslim peers. Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan achieved this by deploying a range of concepts from profane inheritance and theological autonomy to linguistic diversity and ethical pledges. Retaining their Muslimness and Indian nationality in full, their crowning notion of equality-as-parity challenged both Gandhi and Nehru’s abstractions and Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s effort to constitutionalise existing enmities by creating Pakistan.
Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan suggested that by forcibly delinking Hindu from Muslim in every possible way, Partition’s unavoidable violence was destined to turn India’s imperfect social equilibrium, both resilient and unstable in equal measure, into something worse: irreversible antagonism. Animated by a deep historicity, the Muslim secular recognised not just the shift in historical time from imperial to popular rule, but that enmity—as much as amity—had long defined the volatile familial relationship between Hindus and Muslims. To allow amity to flourish in this imperfect scenario, ethical Indians had to find ways of allaying enmity as much as was possible. Therefore, in sum, Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan’s alternative federal constitution—which catered as much for regional difference as religious autonomy and national inclusivity—was shaped significantly by social and moral considerations. In a wide discussion about modern South Asia’s formative ideological conflict, my book shows how their rendition of parity—much like the anti-caste, Dalit intellectual Ambedkar’s demand for affirmative action—extended the limits of democratic theory in and beyond South Asia.
My current work explores how a set of postcolonial Hindu nationalists engaged in fraught experiments with conservatism, secularism, and ideas of Pakistan. Just as they sought to undo the inclusive social compact at the heart of the Indian constitution with visions of a majoritarian state, sectarian violence and war often provoked these figures to explore a less antagonistic relationship with the “other”. They almost evidence, therefore, the maxim of their bête noire, Gandhi, who claimed that actively courting violence on the battlefield can generate moral transformations.
Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation 