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Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
List of acronyms and abbreviations
Introduction: the tangled web of religion and politics in South Asia
1 The “God Gap?” Public perception on religion-politics mix in South Asia
2 Islam in Afghan conflicts and politics
3 Bangladesh: the return of religion to the political center stage
4 India: from secular to sickular
5 Democracy and Salafism in the Maldives: a battle for the future
6 Nepal: from Hindu monarchy to secular democracy
7 Pakistan: a state for the Muslims or an Islamic state?
8 Sri Lanka: the Buddhisization of politics in the Sinhala-South
Appendix
Index
Recommend Papers

Religion and Politics in South Asia [2 ed.]
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RELIGION AND POLITICS IN SOUTH ASIA

This revised edition of Religion and Politics in South Asia presents a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of religion and politics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The book highlights that in recent decades, religion, religio-political parties, and religious rhetoric have become dominant features of the political scenes in all seven countries. By presenting each country’s political system and the socio-economic environment within which the interactions of religion and politics are taking place, chapters explore various factors that afect both the lives of people in the region and global politics. Designed in an easy-to-follow structure, the book includes sections on the history and politics, major religions and religious composition of the population, legal and constitutional provisions regarding religion, religious freedom and the treatment of minorities, the political landscape, and religiopolitical parties and groups within the countries. In doing so, the book addresses concerns including the efects of religio-political interactions on political stability, human rights, and the implications for internal and external security situations. A timely contribution written by experts in their feld, this book is a useful guide to religion and politics and will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students in South Asian politics, Asian politics, religion and politics, history, and international studies. Ali Riaz is a distinguished professor of political science at Illinois State University, USA, and a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council. His recent publications include Voting in a Hybrid Regime: Explaining the 2018 Bangladeshi Election (2019); Political Violence in South Asia (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Zobaida Nasreen and Fahmida Zaman; and the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Bangladesh, co-edited with Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman (Routledge, 2016).

RELIGION AND POLITICS IN SOUTH ASIA Second Edition

Edited by Ali Riaz

Second edition published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Ali Riaz; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ali Riaz to be identifed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2010 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Riaz, Ali, 1958– editor. Title: Religion and politics in South Asia / edited by Ali Riaz. Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020036214 | ISBN 9780367376000 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367406004 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429356971 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Religion and state—South Asia. | Religion and politics— South Asia. | South Asia—Religion. Classifcation: LCC BL65.S8 R4445 2021 | DDC 322/.10954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036214 ISBN: 978-0-367-37600-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-40600-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35697-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of fgures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments List of acronyms and abbreviations Introduction: the tangled web of religion and politics in South Asia Ali Riaz 1

The “God Gap?” Public perception on religion-politics mix in South Asia Md. Sohel Rana

vii viii x xii xiii

1

28

2

Islam in Afghan conficts and politics Abdulkader H. Sinno

53

3

Bangladesh: the return of religion to the political center stage Ali Riaz

76

4

India: from secular to sickular Anirban Acharya

101

vi

Contents

5

Democracy and Salafsm in the Maldives: a battle for the future Azra Naseem

124

6

Nepal: from Hindu monarchy to secular democracy Subho Basu

141

7

Pakistan: a state for the Muslims or an Islamic state? Farhat Haq

165

8

Sri Lanka: the Buddhisization of politics in the Sinhala-South Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

186

Appendix Index

207 212

FIGURES

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

Increasing religious beliefs and practices in India, 1995–2012 Increasing religious beliefs and practices in Pakistan, 2001–2012 Increasing religious beliefs and practices in Bangladesh, 1996–2002 Public perception on religion-politics mix in India, 2006 Public perception on religion-politics mix in Pakistan, 2001 Pakistani Muslims’ attitude and opinion on religion-politics relationship, 2013 1.7 Public perception on religion-politics mix in Bangladesh, 2002 1.8 Bangladeshi Muslims’ attitude and opinion on religion-politics relationship, 2013 1.9 Public perception on religion-politics mix in Sri Lanka, 2011

33 34 35 37 38 38 39 39 40

TABLES

I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 6.1 6.2

Constitutional provisions regarding religion and politics in South Asian countries Extent of religiosity and public perception on religion-politics mix Religious beliefs and practices in Sri Lanka, 2011 Performance of national political parties in India’s general elections, 2009–2014 Islamist parties’ share of votes in Pakistan’s national assembly elections, 2008–2018 Islamist parties’ share of votes in Bangladesh’s parliamentary elections, 1991–2008 Religious parties’ share of votes in Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections, 2004–2015 Composition of Bangladesh population (in thousands) Bangladesh election results, 1991–2001 Bangladesh election results, 2008 Taxonomy of Islamist political parties in Bangladesh Islamists’ electoral support, 1991–2001 Islamists’ performance in 2008 election Composition of Indian population by religion Electoral performance of major Indian parties between 1952 and 1977 BJP and Congress seats in 543-member Lok Sabha (1984–2019) Decennial rate of population growth in Nepal Nepal’s changing population distribution in various ecological zones

2 31 36 42 43 45 46 84 86 87 88 95 95 103 107 118 145 146

Tables

6.3 Distribution of population in Nepal by religion, 1952/54–2001 censuses 7.1 Pakistan election results, 2018 A.1 Basic indicators of South Asia A.2 Economic indicators of South Asia A.3 Social indicators of South Asia A.4 Religious composition of South Asia A.5 Systems of government in South Asia A.6 Major political parties in South Asia

ix

151 182 207 208 209 209 209 210

CONTRIBUTORS

Anirban Acharya is a professor of practice at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, N.Y.

He holds a PhD in political science from The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Afairs at Syracuse University, and MPhil in Economics from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, India. Dr. Acharya’s research interests include international political economy, international relations, comparative politics, South Asia, and US foreign policy. He is currently working on a manuscript titled “Markets, Capitalism and Urban Space in India: The Right to Sell.” Subho Basu is an associate professor of history at the Department of History and

Classical Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University. His publications include Does Class Matter? (2004); co-authored book Paradise Lost: State Failure in Nepal (2007); and co-edited volumes, Electoral Politics in South Asia (2000) and Rethinking Indian Political Institutions (2005). Dr. Basu is currently working on a manuscript on the political history of former East Pakistan. Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri is a senior lecturer of history at the University of

Colombo, Sri Lanka. He earned his MPhil from the same university in 2000 and his PhD from the Leiden University, The Netherlands. He was the Sri Lankan Studies Chair at the South Asia Institute (SAI), Heidelberg University, Germany. His publications include Adaptable Peasant: Agrarian Society in Western Sri Lanka under Dutch Rule, 1740–1800 (2008). His research interests encompass social transformations in colonial societies, historiography and ethno-nationalist ideologies in Sri Lanka, postcolonial state formation in Sri Lanka, and radical political movements.

Contributors

xi

Farhat Haq is a professor of political science at Monmouth College in Illinois.

Her research interests include ethnic politics, gender and politics, Islam and human rights, and militarism and motherhood. She was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., in 2015–2016. Dr. Haq’s recent publications include Sharia and the State in Pakistan: Blasphemy Politics (2019). Azra Naseem is an independent researcher afliated with the Institute for International Confict Resolution and Reconstruction at the School of Law and Government in Dublin City University (DCU). She has a PhD in International Relations from DCU. Naseem is a regular contributor to international research journals and media commentary on the rapidly changing religious landscape in the Maldives. Md. Sohel Rana is an assistant professor of international relations at Bangladesh

University of Professionals (BUP), Dhaka, Bangladesh. At present, he is a graduate student at the Department of Politics and Government in Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Dhaka. His teaching and research interests encompass comparative politics, political theory, South Asian politics, and Bangladesh studies. He is currently working on democratic backsliding, Islamic revivalism under new authoritarianism, and regime legitimization strategies. Ali Riaz is a distinguished professor of political science at Illinois State University, USA, and a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council. He was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., in 2013. He taught at various universities in Bangladesh, the UK, and the USA and was a broadcast journalist at the BBC World Service in London. His research interests include democratization, violent extremism, Islamist politics, South Asian politics, and Bangladeshi politics. Dr. Riaz’s recent publications include Voting in Hybrid Regime: Explaining the 2018 Bangladeshi Election (2019) and Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence (2016). Abdulkader H. Sinno is an associate professor of political science and Middle Eastern studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2002, was a CISAC postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in 2002–03, a 2009 Carnegie scholar, and a 2014–15 fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Dr. Sinno’s publications include Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (2008) and an edited volume titled Muslims in Western Politics (2009). He has published extensively on Afghanistan’s conficts, Muslim minority political representation in Western liberal democracies, public attitudes toward Muslim immigration, and Islamist parties’ participation in elections.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a great pleasure to see the publication of the second edition of the volume. Since the frst edition was published more than a decade ago, signifcant changes have taken place in South Asian politics and the interplay between religion and politics has become more intense, which required extensive updating and additions to the chapters. Two new chapters have been added to this edition. I am deeply grateful to the authors, those who have taken the time to update their chapters and those who have newly joined us. Without their enthusiastic participation, this project would have not been possible. My colleague and friend Nancy Lind had taken time out of her busy schedule to read the chapters and made suggestions for improvement and clarity. I am deeply thankful to her. Thanks to Dorothea Schaefter, editor at Routledge, for her support and repeated reminder for the second edition. Her persistence and patience for this volume, for the frst and the second editions, have been a source of inspiration. Alexandra de Brauw, of Routledge, deserves special acknowledgment for providing more support and help than I could ask for. I am thankful to Nick Craggs and Chris Matthews for taking care of the production process. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for reading the frst edition and making suggestions for further improvements. My research assistant at Illinois State University, Zunaid Almamun, helped me put together the manuscript and compile the appendices; my sincere thanks to him. Ali Riaz

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

ABVP ACMC ADRA AL AP AQIS BBS BJP BJP BJP BJS BKM BNP BNP CAA CBS CEC CIA CPB CPI CPI-M CPN (UML) CPN-U CTG DMK DQP EBP

Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad All Ceylon Makkal Congress Adventist Development and Relief Agency Awami League Adhaalath Party Al Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent Bodu Bala Sena Bangladesh Jatiya Party Bharatiya Janata Party Bodu Jana Peramuna Sri Lanka Bharatiya Jana Sangh Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish Bangladesh Nationalist Party Bharatiya Navshaki Party Citizenship Amendment Act Central Bureau of Statistics Chief Election Commissioner Central Intelligence Agency Communist Party of Bangladesh Communist Party of India Communist Party of India-Marxist Communist Party of Nepal (Unifed Marxist Leninist) Communist Party of Nepal (United) Caretaker Government Dravida Munnetra Kazagham Dhivehi Qaumee Party Eksath Bhikkhu Peramina

xiv

Acronyms and abbreviations

EC FATA FSC HuJi-B IDL IMB IMTKNB INC HI IJOF IOJ ISA ISAF ISI ISIL IUML JHU JI JIB J&K JMB JMJB JP JP JRB JS JSD JUI JUP JVP KGB KN KPK LOC LSSP LTTE MDN MDP MEP ML MMA MNUA

Election Commission Federally Administered Tribal Areas Federal Shariat Court Harkatul Jihad al Islam Bangladesh Islamic Democratic League Islamic Movement of Bangladesh International Majlis-e Tahafuz-e Khatme Nabuwat Bangladesh Indian National Congress Hefazate Islam Islami Jatiya Oikya Front Islami Oikya Jote (United Islamic Alliance) Islami Shashontontro Andolon International Security Assistance Force Inter-Services Intelligence (Pakistani intelligence agency) Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as Daesh, Islamic State) Indian Union Muslim League Jathika Hela Urumaya Jamaat-i-Islami Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh Jammu & Kashmir Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh Jatiya Party Jumhooree Party Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini Jamiyyath Salaf Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal Jamiatul-Ulama-e-Islam Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Pakistan Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Sri Lanka Freedom Party) Committee for State Security (Soviet and later Russian intelligence agency) Khatme Nabuwat Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Line of Control Lanka Samasamaja Party Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Maldivian Democracy Network Maldivian Democratic Party Mahajana Eksath Peramuna Muslim League Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal Muslim National Unity Alliance

Acronyms and abbreviations

MP MQM MRM NATO NDA NDF NEFIN NGOs NGP-A NLF NPLP NPPP NRC NSS NWFP OBC OIC OR PDPA PML (N) PML (Q) PNA PPM PPP PR PSP PTI RPP RSS SAARC SAC SAD SBP SC SLFP SLMC SP SS SSP ST SWP TLP TNSM TULF

Member of Parliament Muttahida Quami Movement Maldives Reform Movement North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Democratic Alliance National Democratic Front Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities Non-Governmental Organizations Nepal Goodwill Party (Anandidevi) National Labor Federation Nepali Congress Nepal People’s Power Party National Register for Citizens National Security Services North West Frontier Province Other Backward Classes Organization of the Islamic Conference Objectives Resolution People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-i-Azam) Pakistan National Alliance Progressive Party of Maldives Pakistan People’s Party Proportional Representation (electoral system) Praja Socialist Party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Rastriya Prajatantra Party Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Suf Advisory Council Shiromani Akali Dal Sinhala Bhasa Peramuna Scheduled Castes Sri Lanka Freedom Party Sri Lanka Muslim Congress Socialist Party Shiv Sena Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan Scheduled Tribes Swatantra Party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan Movement for the Implementation of Muhammad’s Shariah Tamil United Liberation Front

xv

xvi

Acronyms and abbreviations

UMN UN UNCTAD UNDP UNF UNF UNFGG UNP UP UPA UPFA VDC VHP VKA VLSSP WRP WVS

United Mission of Nepal United Nations United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Development Programme National United Front, Afghanistan United National Front, Sri Lanka United National Front for Good Governance United National Party Uttar Pradesh United Progressive Alliance United People’s Freedom Alliance Village Development Committee Vishwa Hindu Parishad Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram Viplavakari Lanka Samasamaja Party World Religion Project World Values Survey

INTRODUCTION The tangled web of religion and politics in South Asia Ali Riaz

The interplay of religion and politics is often described as a volatile mix;1 and political scientists and politicians have long insisted that these two entities should remain separated from each other. Over recent decades, the ground realities have changed dramatically. Religion, once consigned to the so-called private sphere, has moved into the public arena. Since the 1980s, religion and religio-political forces have become potent infuences in the domestic politics of many countries irrespective of geographical location, stages of economic growth, and systems of governance. The growing importance of religion as a marker of identity and a tool of political mobilization is reshaping the political landscape in an unprecedented manner. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Asia – one of the world’s most populous regions with more than one and a quarter billion people. Here live the world’s largest populations of Muslims and Hindus, with a signifcant number of Buddhists. Religion had played a key role in South Asian politics even before the recent resurgence; the partition of India in 1947 is a case in point. In fact, one can fnd many instances in the long history of South Asia even if they are not as dramatic and as cataclysmic as the partition. Equally important to note is that colonial rule created a context in which religiously defned subnationalism, or “communalism,” emerged.2 The postcolonial states in South Asia seem to have been faced with a dilemma on how to deal with the issue of religion. On the one hand, states have maintained a distance from religion while they also have provided an institutional role for faith in their respective constitutions (Table I.1). As states in the region have struggled to fnd a judicious balance between the absence of religion in politics and the use of religious symbols to bolster their power, political parties, particularly religiopolitical parties, have garnered support.

2

Ali Riaz

TABLE I.1 Constitutional provisions regarding religion and politics in South Asian countries

Country

Religion and State

Freedom of Religion

Constitutional Provisions Relevant to Religion and Politics

Afghanistan

Islamic Republic, Islam is declared as the religion of the country. President must be a Muslim.

Article 3, Article 35, Article 45, Article 118, Article 119, Article 149

Bangladesh

Secularism declared as a state principle in 1972, dropped and replaced with absolute faith in Allah in 1977, Islam declared the state religion in 1988, secularism reinstated in 2011, Islam remains state religion. Secular Republic, per 42nd Amendment to the constitution of 1976, although nondiscrimination based on religion was incorporated in 1950 constitution. Secular state, per 2015 Constitution; was a Hindu Kingdom according to the 1990 Constitution; declared secular state in 2007. Secularism is defned as “protection of the age-old religion and culture and religious and cultural freedom.”

Guaranteed in constitution, Article 2; blasphemy is considered in Hudud Laws and restricts religious freedom. Guaranteed in constitution, Article 41; blasphemy laws included in Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, and under Digital Security Act 2018.

Guaranteed in constitution, Articles 25–28; blasphemy laws in various penal codes and Criminal Code of Procedure imposes restrictions.

Preamble; Article 17; Articles 25–28

Guaranteed in constitution, Article 23; blasphemy law is included in Article 26 (3) and in 2017 Penal Code, poses restrictions.

Article 4, Article 23, Article 26 (3)

India

Nepal

Article 2, Article 41

Introduction

3

Country

Religion and State

Freedom of Religion

Constitutional Provisions Relevant to Religion and Politics

Maldives

Islam is state religion, “No law contrary to any tenet of Islam can be enacted” in the Maldives. Only Muslims are allowed to hold citizenship; constitution stipulates that the president must be Sunni Muslim and has the “supreme authority to propagate the tenets of Islam.” Cabinet ministers must be Sunni Muslims. The constitution states that members of the People’s Majlis (parliament) and the judiciary must be Sunni Muslims. Islamic Republic, Islam is the state religion; only a Muslim can be the president and the prime minister; constitution stipulates the “country’s duty to foster the Islamic way of life.”

Freedom of religion is almost non-existent as it is not guaranteed in the constitution. The ‘Law on the Protection of the Religious Unity’ restricts freedom among Maldivians’ of religion.

Article 9, Article 10, Article 16, Article 19, Article 36, Article 59, Article 109, Article 149(c)

Guaranteed by constitution, Article 20; blasphemy laws under various penal codes and Criminal Code of Procedure restricts religious freedom. Laws adopted in 1974 declared Ahmadis, a Muslim denomination, as non-Muslims. Guaranteed in constitution, Article 10, Article 14(1)(e); blasphemy laws are within the criminal codes.

Article 1, Article 2, Article 20, Article 31, Article 41, Article 91

Pakistan

Sri Lanka

Buddhism is accorded “the foremost place” in the constitution.

Article 9, Article 10, Article 14(1)(e)

4

Ali Riaz

The role of religion in South Asian politics can no longer be treated as a marginal issue as the recent developments in various countries demonstrate. In India, we have witnessed the meteoric rise to and continuation in the power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent decades, particularly since 2014 and consequent systematic violent campaigns against Muslim community in connivance of the state. In Pakistan, the Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) has become an important political force since 2001, and newly emerged hardline Islamist parties appeared a formidable force in the 2018 election. The Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) came to power in Bangladesh in 2001 as a coalition partner, and the Hefazate Islam (HI) has gained strengths since 2013. Radical Islamization of Maldives with schism between conservatives and hardliners through the past decade especially ahead of the 2018 election is another example, while the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) of Nepal is campaigning for reversal of Nepal to a Hindu state. In the case of Afghanistan, the resurgence of Taliban in recent years has been fueled in part by its ability to ofer religion as a source of good governance. Besides, evocation of religious rhetoric by a wide range of political parties in almost all countries is easily discernable. The region has also witnessed a signifcant increase in religious-inspired violence, sectarianism, and militancy. In recent years, religious minorities have faced legal and extralegal persecution in more than one country.3 Although normative discussion on the relationships between religion and politics has a long history in sociology and political philosophy, it remained on the periphery of political studies. In recent decades, particularly since the late 1990s, the topic gained salience in comparative politics. Bellin argues that two factors have contributed to this attention: First, the increasing methodological sophistication of specialists in this subfield has linked the study of religion to broader theoretical questions in political science. Second, real-world events have put religion front and center in current affairs, posing puzzles that demand explanations from our field if we are not to lapse into scholastic irrelevance.4 Often the state of secularism and the challenges to secularization have served as the point of departure in addressing the theoretical questions. Among the realworld events, terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 is a prominent one, but also the rise of various nationalist movements tied to religion and the growing infuence of Evangelicals in the domestic politics of the United States contributed to the interest in the interactions between religion and politics. There has been a phenomenal increase in popular and academic discourse as well as media coverage on this topic. However, the media coverage is fraught with shortcomings. The coverage lacks, among other things, a probing analysis of the sociopolitical contexts of this new trend. The media have often presented a lopsided picture, adding to existing misconceptions about many religions, particularly Islam. The trend further accentuated after the spectacular and sudden emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as Islamic State, ISIS) in

Introduction

5

2014. A large body of analyses in the past two decades have addressed the religionpolitics nexus contemporaneously without providing the necessary background or have exclusively focused on the security dimensions. One of the key weaknesses of the media coverage, as well as the academic discussions that preceded and succeeded the events of 9/11, is an essentialist view of religion; that is, portrayal of religion as a monolithic category. Unfortunately, despite the availability of nuanced academic studies in the past decade, simplistic perspective is still the dominant approach. When we speak of any religion, we tend to ignore the simple fact that no religion, be it Christianity or Islam or Hinduism, can be monolithic. To view a religion as monolithic, unchanging, and immutable is simply fawed. The adherence to some basic tenets by followers of a religion does not necessarily mean that there is no variation within the religion itself; instead every religion is multivocal; denominational diference is the most obvious indication of the presence of diferent worldviews, but there are more than denominational diferences. Social diferentiation provides diferent interpretations of the religion and consequently shapes the role of religion in personal and social lives. It is against this background that this volume discusses the interaction of religion and politics in seven South Asian countries, namely, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The purpose of this volume is to examine an apparently simple question: why and how has religion become a potent political ideology in these countries? The answer to this seemingly simple question is vastly complex at a number of levels, not only because it involves different religions, the major ones being Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but also because of the variations in social and political structures of these countries and their political journey over the past century. The specifc circumstances of these countries are diferent; but in recent decades, religion, religio-political parties, and religious rhetoric have become dominant features of the political scenes of all of these countries. Additionally, there are some broad and larger questions that transcend national boundaries and religious diferences. As the authors of the various chapters of this volume address the contours of the relationships between religion and politics and the mechanics of the rise of religio-political forces within each of these countries, they are mindful of a set of larger questions, such as how is this phenomenon connected to the overall political developments of the last decades? How does the infuence of religion afect the state and legal systems? What roles have events outside the region played in this new trend? The authors agree that comprehending these developments requires an understanding of political systems and the socio-economic environments within which the interactions are taking place. The analyses of the various factors infuencing interactions between religion and politics, and their impact on the lives of the people of the region and global politics, constitute the core of the chapters, but these analyses are interlaced with basic facts about the countries under review to allow the readers to understand local contexts. In this introduction, I do not want to reproduce the arguments made in various chapters. Without undermining the signifcance of the particularity, I will address

6

Ali Riaz

several issues in rather general terms and provide a synoptic view of the larger questions, addressed in various fashions, in the chapters that follow.

The political landscape A cursory look at the political landscape of South Asia demonstrates that religiopolitical parties are integral parts of the respective countries of the region, although organizational strengths and the degree of their infuence vary remarkably. The largest of these parties is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. The defning characteristic of the party is its adherence to the ideology of Hindutva, which insists on the role of Hindu religion in public life. The party is not alone in advancing the cause of the Hindutva ideology; a number of other political platforms, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Shiv Sena (Soldiers of Shiva), the Bajrang Dal (the Army of Hanuman), to name but a few, work in unison with it. They are referred to as the Sangh Parivar.5 In Pakistan, among the religion-based parties, the Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan (JI) is the oldest, but not the exclusive representative of religio-political forces.6 The party has shared power with military regimes in the past and demonstrated its mobilizational capacity on various occasions. The JI is currently a member of a six-party coalition named the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). The MMA, which participated in the 2002 election but eclipsed in late 2000s, was revived in 2017 with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) (Assembly of Islamic Clergy, Fazl-ur-Rahman Group), the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (S) (Assembly of Islamic Clergy, Sami-ul-Haq Group), the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (Assembly of Pakistani Clergy), Tehrik-e-Jafaria Pakistan, and the Jamiat Ahle Hadith as members. In 2019, the Jamiat Ulema-eIslam-Fazl (JUI-F) challenged the government of Imran Khan. The JUI-F fexed its muscle and organized several large-scale demonstrations. Press reports suggest that the JUI-F’s support base lies with the Islamic seminaries namely, madrasas. A similar political force has emerged with signifcant infuence and enormous mobilizational capacity in Bangladesh since 2013. The Hefazate Islam (HI, Protector of Islam), a conservative Islamist alliance of smaller political parties, emerged out of the privately operated Deobandi madrassahs. It has, in large measure, displaced the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), the oldest Islamist party of the country, as the most infuential Islamist force. The HI’s relationship with the government led by Sheikh Hasina has changed from hostility to a close ally while the JI is facing the wrath of the government. The JI until 2011 weathered the political storm and was the kingmaker in the 1990s.7 It was a member of the ruling coalition led by the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) between 2001 and 2006. There are several other smaller Islamist parties who represent the broad spectrum of religio-political parties. The number of Islamist parties have grown signifcantly in the past decade, especially since 2014. Transnational Islamist terrorist groups have also established their footprints. In Sri Lanka, religious ideology is blended in almost all parties’ ideological stance toward national issues. Two major parties, the United National Party (UNP)

Introduction

7

and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), not only represent the ethnic Sinhala population but also the dominant Buddhist tenets. Tambiah’s seminal work has clearly demonstrated that in the 1960s and the 1970s, the two major political parties have adopted the Buddhist restoration as essential planks of the party platforms, “therefore the two major Sinhala political parties, the UNP and the SLFP, not only grew closer ideologically regarding Buddhist restoration but also became alternative choices in subsequent elections.”8 Buddhist monks have always played a key role in Sri Lankan politics, but in the early 2000s, the monks have launched their own political platform – the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) – to further their cause, such as making Buddhism the state religion.9 The striking similarity between the BJP and the JHU, both ideologically and organizationally, is an issue that deserves to be noted. The JHU, like the BJP, acts in unison with its afliates.10 Other parties, for example, the Muslim National Unity Alliance (MNUA) and the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, (SLMC) have tried to highlight Muslim concerns. The issue of religion has come to the forefront after the series of bombings at the churches and hotels on Easter Sunday in 2019 killing at least 269 people. A local clandestine Islamist group with connection to an international terror organization claimed responsibility. The attack has further strained the relationship between the majority Buddhist and minority Muslim community, and Buddhist politicians and extremist organizations are reportedly fueling the persecution of the Muslims. Maldives’s tumultuous political developments since its journey toward democracy in 2008 are far from ideal. The success in bringing an end to the three-decades-long authoritarianism did not translate into a functioning democracy; instead despotic behavior of the elected leaders has become the hallmark of governance. The biparty politics also created a competition among politicians for using religion as the legitimizing ideology. Strict Islamic laws have been implemented. The country also witnessed a serious uptick in radicalization of its youth and contributed to the world’s highest number of foreign fghters per capita to the ISIL. The Nepalese political scene is somewhat diferent, as is its history. Declared a Hindu state in 1959, that religion remained the state ideology of Nepal until 2006. Religion was a signifcant element of state-building in Nepal. Nepalese constitution adopted in 2015 declared it a secular state. Avowedly religio-political parties have emerged in the late 1990s, for example, the Nepalese afliates of the Indiabased Hindu political party Shiv Sena, locally known as Pashupati Sena, Shiv Sena Nepal, and Nepal Shiv Sena. Since the promulgation of the constitution, the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) has demanded that the country should be reverted back to a Hindu state. In 2017, Nepal’s Election Commission removed reference to “Hindu state and monarchy” clauses from Rastriya Prajatantra Party, saying that they contradicted constitutional provisions of a republican system and secularism. Additionally, there are many political groups and parties outside mainstream politics in these countries, which profess a religion-based political ideology to achieve political objectives including capturing state power. In recent decades, clandestine radical and militant groups have emerged in large numbers in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh challenging their respective states. Some of these organizations

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have built widespread networks within these countries and in the region. While Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups (e.g., Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami, Lasker-iJangvi, Jamaat-ud-Dawa/Lasker-i-Tayeba, Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan) have drawn international attention, a Hindu militant group called Abhinav Bharat has also emerged. Bangladesh has attracted international attention because of the activities of clandestine Islamist militant groups such as the Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh and Ansar al Islam. The presence and infuence of the religio-political parties are the most obvious indicators of the use of religion as a political ideology but should not be the only indices in measuring the scope and depth of religion’s role in society and politics. Understanding the interplay of religion and politics warrants further exploration, particularly the role of the state and society. The adoption of a state religion, as in the case of Nepal in 1959, Pakistan in 1972, Bangladesh in 1988 and/or granting a special signifcance to one religion, as in the constitution in Sri Lanka in 1972, are testimony to religion’s political role. In Afghanistan, the constitution and the Political Parties Law ban parties that “pursue objectives that are opposed to the principles of the holy religion, Islam,” and thereby shrink the political space for those who may oppose religion’s public role. These measures bring religion to the fore to begin with and then privilege one religion over another. These examples are not entirely unique to South Asia; European history over the last couple of centuries ofers many examples of how the Continent has tried to grapple with the question of the relationship between state and religion. Perhaps that question is yet to be decisively resolved. One of the basic creeds of the United States Constitution, the separation of church and state, has been explained in various ways, and in recent years an increasingly vocal community has contested this fundamental constitutional tenet. Equally important is the public discourse which accepts religion’s role within daily lives and naturalizes the role through various social practices and institutions. This is refected in popular culture – “the public space in which a society and its constituent individuals and communities imagine, represent, and recognize themselves through political discourse, commercial and cultural expressions, and representations of state and civic organizations.”11 Once naturalized, various social groups adopt it as their own and engage in competition to represent it. In the Indian context, the consequences of the naturalization of a Hindutva ideology provide us with an excellent example: Non-Hindutva politicians can [now] compete over who is a more authentic Hindu. School children can be taught a history where militant Hinduism is normalized and minority religions such as Islam (and as a corollary, Indian Muslims) are alienated. Government employees can join Hindutva organizations and the prime minister can pronounce, in a cavalier manner, that the Muslims are a source of “problems” everywhere in the world.12 The public discourses are then adopted by political parties of various creeds, whether or not these parties subscribe to religion as a political ideology. Mainstream

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political parties in South Asia never shied away from using religious idioms in its political campaigns. These discourses, whether reproduced by the political parties or social organizations, form the basis of politics. Therefore, discussions on political ideology should not be confned to those groups which play the pivotal role in realpolitik but should also extend beyond; it is necessary to be understood in the broadest sense of the term.

Contextualizing the religion–politics nexus The discussion on why religion has gained salience in South Asian politics must be prefaced with two important, well-known, facts. First, the growing religion– politics nexus is a global phenomenon: “around the world, religion is leaving, or refusing to accept, its assigned place in the private sphere.”13 This is a complete reversal of the prediction made in the 1960s that religion would eventually collapse and that most of humanity would be either atheists or agnostics.14 The classic and perhaps the most quoted example of the claim is the cover story of the international news magazine Time on April 8, 1966, entitled, “Is God Dead?” The trend, insisting on the return of religion to the political sphere, began in the 1980s, almost two decades ago. Jose Casanova, basing his analysis on empirical data, argued that in the 1980s, religion was “deprivatized” in a number of countries around the world.15 Similarly, Jefrey Hadden, in 1987, challenged the basis of the claims that religion was supposed to lose ground and insisted that these claims are based on a doctrine rather than results of systematic inquiry.16 Peter Berger argued passionately in 1999 that “the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false.”17 By then it had become well accepted within some academic circles that the claim in the 1960s and the 1970s of the gradual decline of religion in public life as a result of modernization and the consequent expansion of secularism was premature and, perhaps, misplaced.18 Berger further argued that Certain religious institutions have lost power and influence in many societies, but both old and new religious beliefs and practices have nevertheless continued in the lives of individuals, sometimes taking new institutional forms and sometimes leading to great explosions of religious fervors. Conversely, religiously identified institutions can play social or political roles even when very few people believe or practice what the institutions represent.19 However, even in 1999, some held on to the idea that religion had lost its public role and that the concept of God had ran its course.20 The claim that religion has returned to public life was grounded on empirical data but was also was intrinsically related to a larger debate on the validity of secularization theory. This theory, which has its intellectual roots in classical sociology, particularly in Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, insisted that the signifcance of religion would decrease in modern times.

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Each [of the previously mentioned theorists] believed that religion is in a fundamental sense an illusion. The advocates of different faiths may be wholly persuaded of the validity of the beliefs they hold and the rituals in which they participate, yet the very diversity of religions and their obvious connections to different types of society, the three thinkers held, make these claims inherently implausible.21 In its earlier articulations, perhaps until the early 1980s, the secularization process has been viewed as a strictly linear, unidirectional process; but since then, the concept has undergone some revisions. In any case, the increased visibility of religion in political and public life does not mean the death of secularization theory, because secularization is a complex, multifaceted process and involves various dimensions of individual and social life. The critics of secularization theory are missing this point, and in recent years, “The tone of many of these critics was just as self-righteous and triumphant as the theory’s proponents had been two decades prior.”22 Notwithstanding the debate on secularization, in our discussion on religion and politics in South Asia, it is necessary to be mindful of the global dimension of the phenomenon because of the potential impact of developments outside the region (i.e., the fact that South Asian countries may have been infuenced by trends and tendencies occurring elsewhere). Globalization, particularly the development in communication technologies, has allowed the religio-political groups (like any other organized groups) to learn from each other, adopt successful strategies, and avoid failed tactics. This constitutes, in the words of Scott Thomas, “emulative linkages.”23 I argue that in the case of South Asia, it is imperative that we examine these developments within a comparative frame. Because the religio-political forces are often infuenced by developments elsewhere in the region, either they are encouraged by, provoked by, or used as an excuse for their actions. These actions are not only limited to immediate events, such as riots, but also in adoption of a long-term strategy. There are many examples, perhaps most telling is that of the JHU: “the JHU [in Sri Lanka] has certainly benefted by observing closely the Hindutva forces [in India].”24 The second issue that deserves to be noted before the specifcs of South Asia are discussed is that the religion–politics nexus is not an anti-modernist phenomenon. The rise of religio-political forces in South Asia, as elsewhere, must be distinguished from religious revivalist movements. Take, for example, the countries with Muslim majority populations where we have witnessed the growing strength of Islam as a political ideology and Islamists as formidable political forces within domestic political arenas. These societies had experienced occasional Islamic revivalist movements, some of which can appropriately be termed as “fundamentalist.” Those movements emphasized the need for the spiritual purifcation of the adherents. Fundamentalists, as individuals and as a group, are concerned frst with the erosion of religion and its proper role in society. On the contrary, Islamism pursues political objectives. The advocate of Islamism “provides [a] political response to

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today’s societal challenges by imagining a future, the foundations for which rest on re-appropriated, reinvented concepts borrowed from the Islamic tradition.”25 Islamists emphasize specifc courses of action to improve their political power and adopt various strategies to assert themselves on the social and political plane. These features are not unique to the Islamists. They are like any and all other religiopolitical forces: Islamists use much the same political language and make similar use of archaic political iconography as do the Serb nationalists of Karadzic, their notion of authenticity is analogous to the Hindutva of the communalist Right in India, and they combine together the political mysticism of the secular Zionist Right with a mild form of the doctrine of divine election propounded by Jewish fundamentalism.26 These similarities are important in the sense that we can draw parallels between the Hindutva ideology in India, Islamism in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and Buddhism as propounded by the Sri Lankan state and its politicians. The Sri Lankan case, that is the issue of political Buddhism, warrants clear explication. The following explanation from Tambiah is worth quoting, despite its length: [A]s the energies of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism were translated into concrete policies and programs of language, education, employment, peasant resettlement, territorial control of the island and so on, the substantive soteriological, ethical, and normative components of doctrinal Buddhism qua religion was weakened, displaced, even distorted, while the religio-political associations of Buddhism as set out in the monkish chronicles (the Mahavamsa, Culavamsa, and so on), which bound it with the Sinhala people, with the territory of the entire island, and the political authority dedicated to the protection of Buddhism, assumed primacy. Thus Buddhist fundamentalism and revivalism progressively transformed into Buddhist nationalism ends up as a political Buddhism from which religious core and inspiration as set out in doctrinal Buddhism are either privatized or leached out in favor of a political affirmation of a collectivity that sees itself as homogenous and majoritarian and for whom doctrinal Buddhism is a possession owned as a legacy, an object that is appropriated or (to use a Freudian term) “introjected,” but not more generally serving for many persons as an ego-ideal and mental discipline for personal salvation.27 What the quote reveals is that the religion is no longer a moral practice, but a political agenda of transformation. When the Nepalese monarchy claimed itself as the reincarnation of Lord Vishnu and thereby limited the sovereignty of its citizens, it was echoing the Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi: “No individual, group or class will be vested with the political power and the right to govern. Sovereignty belongs to God alone and humans merely constitute the subjects of God.”

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Be it an Islamist or a Hindutva ideologue, or a political Bhikkhu,28 they draw on religious referents – terms, symbols, and events taken from the respective religious traditions – to articulate a distinct political agenda. But these signs and symbols are reconstituted, traditions are reworked, and norms are redefned. The use of history and traditions occasionally led analysts to believe that these movements advocate a retreat to a “glorious past” – an antimodern phenomenon and an antimodernist movement. There is very little to support the claim that these forces try to “de-modernize.”29 Instead, these responses are anchored in a modernist paradigm. Religion, as it is understood today with all the trappings of institutions, is a result of Western modernity. Talal Asad, in his seminal work entitled Genealogies of Religions, “insisted that the universal terms in which we refer to ‘religion’ today disguise its specifc Eurocentric provenance.”30 John Bossy has noted the point that the invention of religions in the modern sense of the term, its deployment as a category of universal history, “would have been impossible before the social and political transformations of late sixteenth-/early seventeenth-century Europe.”31 In other words, “religion” is a European modernist construction. In the context of South Asia, Peter van der Veer has argued that the very category of “religion” is a direct result of British colonial practices and shaped by the rational modernist paradigm.32

Three arguments about religion-politics nexus In response to the question as to why religion has become a powerful political ideology in South Asia, I will make three arguments. They are: 1

2

3

Although the interplay of religion and politics in South Asia has received heightened attention in academic circles and the media in recent years, it is not an aberration; instead, it has long historical antecedents. The abject failure of secular liberal states in South Asia, as in many other parts of the world, to deliver developmental goods and services has delegitimized the states and ruling blocs. This engendered an environment within which religion has appeared as both an ideology of the ruling class and as a counterhegemonic project. The appeal of religious identity is a result of ontological insecurity and existential uncertainty faced by individuals because of the pace and nature of globalization in recent decades.

These arguments are explained in detail next.

Historical antecedents Religion has long been part of the political ecosystem in South Asia, particularly since the colonial era. The dominant narratives of the anti-colonial movement in South Asia insist that it was a secular nationalist movement par excellence until a “Muslim separatist” ideology emerged in the early twentieth century. Interpretations of

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various political actions during the colonial era are shaped by this meta-narrative. This is precisely because of what Partha Chatterjee described as the derivative nature of the discourse of nationalism. It had incorporated many of the presuppositions and objectives of the West, particularly the binary division of secularism and religion. Drawing on the ideology of Enlightenment and premised on the idea of modernity, the nationalist movement was described as an entirely secularist project. Within this frame of reference, religion was seen as a retrogressive idea; therefore, its importance as a discursive mode and a tool of mobilization was to be seen as an aberration, or at least received little attention. But not all within the society accepted this separation between religion and politics. Instead some framed them as two separate domains: outer and inner, materiality and spirituality. While such a dichotomous division, by itself, may have been shaped by the discourse of modernity, Indian elites have tried to create a diferentiation, according to Partha Chatterjee. He argues that the colonized elites have attempted to protect the inner, spiritual domain of national life from the impact of modernity. The separation between the outer and the inner, between materiality and spirituality as two compartmentalized arenas, was not always the case. The “inner” cultural domain found ways to infuence the “outer political and economic domain” and vice versa. Imageries and discourses originating in the realm of the inner domain (culture) were used as political strategy and tools of mobilization. This took place within mainstream elite politics as much as within subaltern political activism. Gandhi’s repeated use of Hindu religious idioms and symbols, such as ahisma, Swaraj and Rama Rajya, are cases in point. Misra has correctly pointed out in his exploration of identity and religion in the Indian subcontinent that “Gandhi’s vision of an ideal nation was Rama Rajya – a political conception where equality would prevail but Hindus would be the distributors of the equality and guardian of its spiritual unity.”33 This is consistent with the Gandhian philosophy that religion is not alien to the individual existence or to the existence of the nation. Although Gandhi’s practices were syncretic – he quoted from the Bible, the Qur’an and the Upanishads at his legendary morning prayers, and promoted the notion of “equal respect for all faiths” – he stages his national vision, his bodily comportment, and his superior will power within an essentially upper-caste Hindu register of cultural practices.34 In some respects, Gandhi was not an exception, although he might have been more successful in blending religion with politics. One of the most signifcant events in colonial India that supports the presence of religion in a nationalist movement is the Sepoy Mutiny. “Secularist historians have taken great pains to describe Hindu–Muslim unity during the Great War of Independence or the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and subsequent phases.”35 Until recently, the dominant narrative has emphasized that the rebellion was caused by economic factors and an uprising “nationalist” in nature. William Dalrymple provides a diferent interpretation of the uprising in his book, The Last Mughal: The

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Fall of Dynasty.36 Drawing on rebel documents in Urdu and Persian which survive from the sepoy camp and palace in Delhi, he reveals that it was “a war of religion.” He states There were no doubt a multitude of private grievances, but it is now unambiguously clear that the rebels saw themselves as fighting a war to preserve their religion and articulated it as such. The two [rebellion against foreign domination and religion] are closely linked: but what the rebels most objected to in the foreign domination of their country was the way the British threatened their religions – the words din and dharma [the Muslim and Hindu words for religion] appear constantly in rebel proclamations, and were used as war cries by the combatants. They certainly appear far more regularly than secular declarations of the right to self-government or economic freedom, both of which are occasionally mentioned, but far less frequently than concerns over British intentions to impose Christianity on them.37 The religious discourses had permeated other resistance movements in India, local and national, before and after the Sepoy Mutiny. The Santhal Rebellion in Bengal between 1855 and 1856 provides credence to this statement. Ranajit Guha explained that “religiosity was . . . central to the hool (santhal rebellion).”38 There was a religious aspect to the solidarity of the peasant resistance in other instances, too. In Bengal, peasant uprisings led by Sayyid Nisar Ali, alias Titu Mir (1782– 1831), and the Faraizi movement, founded by Haji Shariatullah (1781–1840) and led by his son Dudu Miyan (1819–62), were not only replete with religious symbols, but had religion as the central element of their endeavors. To date, among the Muslim population in Bengal, Titu Mir is a folk hero who died for the cause of religion and independence, in that order. The economic motivation was an “important factor behind most peasant unrests,”39 but religion provided them with a “code of ethics, including political ethics”40 and their messages were wrapped around anti-colonialism. The admixture of religious and anti-colonial messages is also evident in the history of Sri Lanka. The Buddhist revivalist movement which emerged in the 1840s and continued for some time had these two elements entwined in the same fashion that we saw in the Sepoy Mutiny and peasant resistance in India. In the case of Sri Lanka, one can go back further – to the sixteenth century as Portuguese colonialism began and the Muslims were persecuted in the western coast. In the 1840s, what began as a debate on the relations between the colonial state (British) and “national” religion (Buddhism) was later transformed into a rebellion. “The ‘rebellion’ of 1848 had its religious undertones, to the extent that some members of the rebel leadership articulated the widespread resentment at the British decision to abrogate the traditional association of Buddhism with the state.”41 The 1848 rebellion, in some measure, was similar to the two previous rebellions of 1818 and 1834 when monks played the key roles of organizing and leading them. Tambiah’s argument that “Sinhala Buddhist revivalism and nationalism, in the form that we

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can recognize today, had its origin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”42 is apt. These instances show that religion has served the purpose of ideology in political activism at diferent times and at diferent places throughout colonial South Asia. But it would be erroneous to consider them as an unambiguous assertion of religion in politics. The presence of religious icons in these movements, the use of religious idioms in political discourses, and the evocation of religious texts in fashioning the messages do not make all of them the same. Taj ul-Islam Hashmi’s contention that there are two distinct modes of the use of religion, religion-as-aim and religion-as-reason, is worth recalling here. In dealing with the peasant movements in East Bengal between 1920 and 1947, Hashmi contends Sometimes peasants are mobilized in the name of restoring their faith, in movements with “religion-as-aim,” but often religion becomes the frame of revolt in movements with “religion-as-reason.” The first category of movements involves peasants in a holy war (jihad or crusade) against the “enemy of the faith.” The “enemy of peasants” is easily converted into the “enemy of the faithful” when the peasants concerned suffered religious persecution in the hands of the same exploiting class(es).43 In the second instance, religion is utilized as a mobilizational ideology to establish justice sanctioned by religion. The long and tumultuous history of South Asia reveals that religion has played both roles in the past. Having arrived at this stage of analysis, one can ask why such a distant history should matter in understanding contemporaneous development. The answer is twofold. First, antecedents create traditions upon which the political architecture is built. Postcolonial South Asian history is not entirely a break from the past; instead, it represents a continuation of colonial practices in many ways. This is not only in the sense that the successor states have inherited the colonial state structures, for the political cultures of these countries also bear the marks of colonial traditions. Even in those countries which have not experienced colonial rule (e.g., Afghanistan and Nepal), the historical tendencies have been extrapolated from the past to the contemporary situation. Second, these antecedents have become part of the collective memory and contribute to the historical consciousness of the members of the respective societies. The past shapes and molds the present discourses in various ways. Both ofcial narratives and collective memory serve as a vast reservoir which the activists tap into for collective actions.

The failure of the state and the crisis of hegemony There are a number of studies which have attempted to examine the causes of the return of religion to the public domain. Three studies are worth recalling here. In a work published in 1990, Emile Sahliyeh insisted that two factors are key in this regard: social upheaval and economic dislocation connected to the processes of

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modernization.44 In 1994, Mark Juergensmeyer argued that “In many parts of the world [the] secular state has not lived up to its own promises of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social justice.”45 William Miles’s study published in 1996 reafrmed these fndings and added that the “religious dimension to group identity and statist politics” are additional factors.46 Over the past decade, social scientists have compiled a clearer picture. We can say that the lack of performance legitimacy of the ruling elites (i.e., the inability of the secular elites to deliver common goods); the brutal authoritarianism that results in an erosion of the civil society and hence leaves the religious centers (e.g., mosque, temple, church) as the only viable public space; uneven economic development including urbanization; rupture in the hegemony of secularist politics; and the politics of expediency of secular parties, are pivotal in the global rise of religio-political forces.47 The importance of religious centers in the event of the absence of other avenues of political expression needs to be highlighted. These institutions not only provide physical and moral space, but can provide moral leadership, exercise moral authority, and provide a logistical basis for mobilization. Importantly, these factors are not mutually exclusive, and their simultaneous occurrence is not necessary. Comprehending the abject poverty in South Asia and the inability of states to take care of the marginalized sections of society requires no statistics; anyone familiar with the political economy of these states understands this. According to one estimate, in 2015, at least 261 million people were living below the poverty line in South Asia, with 176 million in India alone.48 It was estimated in 2004 that roughly 40 percent of the global poor live in South Asia. Despite impressive economic growth in recent years, the region has the highest rates of malnutrition and the largest numbers of undernourished children in the world. Sufce to say that India has the largest number of school-age children who have either not attended or have dropped out of schools. An authoritarian system of governance has remained the defning feature of Pakistan since the 1950s; Bangladesh was under military rule for 15 years (1975– 90); until recently, the Nepalese monarch had the power to frustrate the democratic aspirations of the people at his will; and Sri Lanka’s uninterrupted democracy lacks any substantive participation from the Tamils. These failures have delegitimized the states and the ruling blocs. As the ruling blocs no longer enjoy hegemony over the masses, conficting tendencies have emerged within the societies. On the one hand, the ruling blocs resort to various means to continue their hold over power, while religio-political forces attempt to demonstrate that failure is inherently connected to the secularist liberal ideology. In the absence of a hegemonic ideology, religion becomes a candidate to fll the vacuum. The public discourse is then flled with religious symbols and idioms. The political events of Pakistan and Bangladesh, between 1972 and 1977, are the clearest proof. The oscillation between Islamic symbolism and secularism under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s regime (1972–75) sowed the seeds of Islamism in Bangladesh; in Pakistan, it was the wavering between socialist rhetoric and Islamic symbolism of the government of Zulfqar Ali Bhutto (1972–77) that created opportunities for

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the Islamists to colonize the political arena. In India, the Congress lost its appeal to the masses as the Indira Gandhi regime (1971–77) turned more authoritarian and used religion for short-term gains. One can hardly disagree with Varshney that in the 1980s, the Indian Congress, “once a powerful organization associated with founding and building the nation, [became] . . . a rusty, clay-footed, colossus.”49 Additionally, “By the late 1980s, there was an organizational and ideological vacuum in Indian politics. Organizationally, the Congress was listless. Ideologically, it was not obvious what it stood for.”50 In all these instances, religio-political forces have emerged as the key players within mainstream politics. The crisis of hegemony of the Pakistani ruling elites has two sources: the mode of its governance (coercion as opposed to consent), and confusion about the identity of Pakistan. Although these two aspects are closely related, due to space constraints I will briefy highlight just the latter, which is more pertinent for our discussion here. Since Pakistan’s inception, the elites had difculties in answering the question whether it was a state for the Muslims or an Islamic state. During the early years, especially when the founding leaders were alive, the policy proclamations indicated that secularism would be the guiding principle of the country.51 But, as I have argued elsewhere,52 Islam as a mobilizational tool outlived its purpose as soon as Pakistan was created. The first generation of Pakistani leaders, namely Jinnah and Liaquat Ali, understood that in earnest. Their emphasis on the secular nature of the state faced resistance from the same forces (e.g., Jamaat-i-Islami) that opposed the Muslim nationalist movement in India. For them the secular charade of Muslim League leaders is no longer necessary because there is no one with whom to compromise. The pretense must be discarded and a theocratic state built. They saw the establishment of Pakistan as their prize. In the early days of Pakistan, Islam was invoked nominally to hold the precarious balance between various segments of this loose coalition. The situation changed in subsequent years, as the elites faced challenges from the ethnic nationalities (i.e., Bengali, Baluch, etc.) based in various parts of Pakistan. The solution was to elevate Islam to the pedestal of “national identity” and insist that “Islam” was the raison d’être of Pakistan. Thereafter military regimes have used the religion as a tool to garner popular support and/or legitimacy. The diference between General Ayub Khan’s rule (1958–69) and General Zia-ul Haq’s rule is only a matter of degree in the use of religion. The introduction of the Shari’a Laws in 1998 by the Nawaz Sharif regime, for example, failed to provide the moral legitimacy to rule the country. In Nepal and in Sri Lanka, the ruling blocs, for almost similar reasons, adopted religion as the raison d’être of the state. The monarchy in Nepal has always claimed that there exists a theologically sanctioned mystical bond between the monarch and his subjects. Thus, religion was already granted a central place in Nepal’s polity. In Nepal, the goal of religion as an ideology was to emphasize the homogeneity

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of national religio-cultural tradition, to preserve a social stratifcation process, and to build national identity. Sri Lanka, in a similar vein, had adopted the Buddhist Sinhalese identity since its inception and provided an institutional and legal contour in the 1960s. This has politicized religion as much as it has made the polity subservient to religion.

Globalization and ontological insecurity The phenomenon called globalization has been discussed, dissected, and debated in various ways. While its meanings and processes remain contentious, there seems to be a broad agreement among social scientists as to its impact. The most profound impact of globalization has been dislocation, both cognitively and spatio-temporally. The unsettling efects of globalization are true for individuals and nation-states alike. The pace and speed of globalization has destabilized the sense of certainty and security that individuals enjoyed for decades. With the compression of time and space, individuals now face a new world where boundaries have disappeared and their identities are in fux. Anthony Giddens, in his sociological analysis of high modernity, insisted that modernity brings a fundamental change: it breaks down the protective framework ofered by the community and tradition. In a situation like this, Giddens argues, “The individual feels bereft and alone in a world in which she or he lacks the psychological support and the sense of security provided by more traditional settings.”53 Giddens has explained this situation with two key theoretical formulations: “ontological security” and “existential anxiety.” Ontological security, according to Giddens, is the basic need of individuals for “a sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly within the perceptual environment of the individual.”54 It refers to a “person’s fundamental sense of safety in the world and includes a basic trust of other people.”55 “To be ontologically secure is to possess, on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness, ‘answers’ to fundamental existential questions which all human life in some way addresses.”56 The absence of these answers accentuates existential anxiety. Giddens further argued that the doubt and insecurity inherent in our time favor a resurgence of religion.57 The framework provided by Giddens is immensely helpful in understanding the role of religion in various societies in recent decades. Catarina Kinnvall has aptly demonstrated how ontological insecurity has played a key role in the resurgence of “religious nationalism” in India, both Hindu and Sikh.58 Kinnvall argues that collective identities can help individuals who feel vulnerable and experience existential insecurity to reafrm their threatened self-identity. She argues that individuals facing ontological insecurity seek afrmation of their self-identity by drawing closer to any collective that is perceived as being able to reduce insecurity and existential anxiety. This collective could be religion, nationalism, or ethnicity. She adds: Religion, like nationalism, supplies existential answers to the individual’s quests for security by essentializing the product and providing a picture of

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totality, unity and wholeness. The fact that God has set the rules and made them difficult to contest relieves the individual psychologically from the responsibility of having to choose.59 In the context of South Asia, ontological insecurity has become an issue of great importance, because of the mode of its interactions with the global economy. Countries, and by extension their citizens, have remained perpetually at the receiving end of the global economy. The neo-liberal economic agenda and political and economic cosmopolitanism have furthered their marginalization. Thus, a resistance to this process was called for. In the absence of a viable leftist critique of globalization and political forces to mount resistance to this process, increasingly religion became the only mode of resistance. It is not surprising that the religio-political forces in South Asia have gained further ground after these countries adopted a neo-liberal economic agenda. While ontological insecurity emanating from the process of globalization has contributed to the resurgence of religious identity, the globalization process has also facilitated its proliferation. The use of global information networks is a testimony to it. Interestingly, the advocates of religious identities, on the one hand, criticize globalization as a homogenization process while they resort to the same strategy, on the other. They argue that religious identities provide what Foucault describes as “a plurality of resistances.”60 But the Hindutva discourse of the Sangh Parivar is built on an upper-caste Hindu identity – a single uniform narrative; the Nepalese construction of Hinduism is oblivious to minorities such as Janjati; the Pakistani state has not only declared the Ahmadiyya non-Muslims but considers the Shi’as to be outside the Muslim community; Buddhist–Sinhala identity in Sri Lanka is intolerant of the multi-vocality of Sri Lankan society; and the Bangladeshi Islamists insist that the syncretistic tradition of Islam in Bangladesh is un-Islamic. I would like to take these arguments further by drawing attention to two issues: predatory identity and majoritarianism. It is a truism to say that security is closely linked to identity politics. However, identity cannot and should not be viewed as a catchall phrase. Indeed, a quest for identity is deeply ingrained in the desire for certainty: who we are/who I am. This identifcation depends on defning the “I” as much as it depends on defning the “other.” They are simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary, in the sense that the construction of “I” also constructs a group to which he or she belongs. By defnition, some are then left out. Kinnvall notes, “Increasingly ontological security for one person or group by means of nationalist and religious myths and traumas is thus likely to decrease security for those not included in the nationalist and/or religious discourse.”61 This pairing of “I” and “We” is natural. But importantly, this endeavor may result in what Amin Maalouf has described as “deadly identity”62 and Arjun Appadurai has described as “predatory identities.”63 The defning characteristics of the deadly identity are “negative, antagonistic and chauvinistic.” Importantly, this identity fears multiplicity, perceiving a danger that threatens the “I” with dissolution. It thrives on extermination, and if it does not fnd an external target to slaughter, it

20 Ali Riaz

slaughters itself.64 In Appadurai’s formulation, predatory identities’ “social construction and mobilization require the extinction of other, proximate social categories, defned as [a] threat to the very existence of the same group, defned as we.”65 In South Asia, the violence by religio-political groups (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), the state’s complicity in pogroms (cf. Gujarat 2002) are indicative of the construction of “predatory identities.” Signifcantly, in South Asia, there is a reciprocity among these deadly identities; that is, construction of one helps to shape the other. The construction of a virulent Hindu identity in India helps to shape the Muslim identity in Bangladesh, and vice versa. The violence in Bangladesh after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in India is an illustration of this reciprocity. One important aspect of the construction of predatory identity is the use of the majority–minority discourse. The binary of majority–minority in South Asia can be traced back to the colonial census, the administrative and political measures. But in any case, “both minorities and majorities are products of a distinctly modern world of statistics, censuses, population maps and other tools of state created mostly since the seventeenth century.”66 These numbers are used to create an epistemic insecurity (i.e., the survival of the community is at stake). In South Asia, it is the numerically larger community which continues to argue that the “minority” constitutes the threat. The Hindutva ideologues and activists insist that the minority Muslim community poses the threat to the “Hindu nation”; the Bangladeshi Islamists go after the Hindus as they are the “enemy within”; the Christians are the mortal threat according to Islamists and the Pakistani state. These arguments are framed as the arguments of the majority. In India, the BJP’s rhetoric of democracy, rights and nation is based on a simplistic majoritarian principle and runs along the following lines: since Hindus are the majority, it is “natural” and “democratic” that their “rights” should be promoted by the Indian state which hitherto has been “pseudo-secular” because of its appeasement of minorities!67 In Sri Lanka, since 1956, ethnic majoritarianism has become entrenched among the major parties, so much so that “there is no scope for minorities to get justice through parliamentary methods.”68 Thus as we can easily see, it is not so difcult to fnd similar arguments in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, despite the differences in the religious composition of the majority. In each instance, they argue that they are not only speaking for the “majority,” but also for the nation. The religion, nation, and the majority are then merged into one and the same. In conclusion, let me summarize the arguments I have made thus far. To begin with, I insist that despite the contemporaneous importance of the growing infuence of religion as a political ideology in South Asia, the discussion on this issue must be contextualized within the broader global trend and historical antecedents in South Asia. The history of colonial South Asia shows that resistance movements are replete with the use of religious idioms and symbols. I have also argued that it would be erroneous to consider the interplay of religion and politics in

Introduction

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South Asia, as elsewhere, as an anti-modern movement to return to the glorious past. Instead, this should be considered and explained as a modernist response, particularly to globalization. In the face of ontological insecurity engendered by the processes of globalization, collective identities provide comfort. In South Asia, religious ideologies have succeeded in ofering an alternative, in large measure, because of the lack of hegemony of the ruling blocs. These factors are deep-seated and structural and therefore cannot be addressed overnight. As long as these issues remain, religion will continue to appeal as an alternative ideology to a signifcant proportion of citizens.

Contributions in this volume The volume includes seven country studies and an analysis of popular perception regarding the interplay of religion and politics in South Asia. The details of the interactions of religion and contemporary politics in seven countries, namely, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are presented in each chapter. Although the authors have focused on the contemporary interactions of religion and politics in the respective countries, in so doing, they have taken the mid-1940s as a milestone. In the background of the growing importance of religion, the rise of religiopolitical forces in politics, and increasing display of faith among South Asian people, Md. Sohel Rana in Chapter 1 analyzes the people’s perspectives on the religion-politics relationship in South Asian nations particularly in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, representing three major religions – Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Through an exploration of the extent of religiosity revealed in a series of public perception surveys conducted by various organizations, he examines whether the growing religiosity has implications for politics, particularly elections. The discussion shows that increasing religiosity leads to increasing tendency among the populations to support “political parties with religious beliefs.” However, South Asians citizens do not necessarily hail the “religious political parties” with signifcant electoral support. It concludes that the South Asian populations tend to support religious values in public life and practice faith in their personal lives but avoid giving their electoral support to religious parties. Abdulkader H. Sinno, in Chapter 2, argues that the interplay of religion and politics in Afghanistan has a long history, although many observers have come to appreciate it only in the twentieth century, particularly after 1979. Islam is, and has been for centuries, the ofcial religion of Afghanistan, the moral basis and reference for its diverse cultures, the foundation of national unity, and a hegemonic presence in every Afghan’s life. Islam unifes Afghans because it emphasizes faith over ethnicity in a mostly (i.e., 99 percent) Muslim country. Additionally, Islam and its symbolic use played a major role in mobilizing support against the plans of neighboring superpowers – such as British and Russian – to annex Afghanistan to their empires. The diferent types of Islamic rhetoric and symbols used by political actors in Afghanistan provide distinct advantages and liabilities. The strategic use

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of a traditional Muslim language facilitates mobilization better than nationalist and other symbols. To take some examples from recent history, during the resistance movement against the Soviet invasion (1979–89), Islam emerged as an ideology of resistance and the resistance leaders used Islam as a mobilization tool because it provided legitimacy. One of the key factors in the Taliban’s success in achieving power (1994–2001) in a short span of time was because the organization framed itself as the most Islamic of all organizations in Afghanistan, defned its goal as bringing religious law to the land, and used its Islamic image to undermine rivals in Pushtun areas. Sinno concludes that the strategic use of religion plays an additive role in the ability of some Afghan political actors to legitimize their actions, mobilize support, undermine rivals, attract foreign aid, and control populations. Not all Afghan political actors can use religious language or sanction – only those who transcend divisions within a local, tribal, sectarian, ethnic, or national space and do not have a history of behavior considered “un-Islamic” can beneft from its advantages within that space, but not necessarily beyond it. The Bangladesh case, discussed in Chapter 3, shows how religion assumed a greater signifcance in the politics of the country despite inclusion of secularism as a state principle. This is a result of eforts from the above by the state and pressure from below because of the ubiquity in religion in social life and religious organizations over a long period of time. While the Islamization process has its roots in the legitimacy crisis of the military rulers of the country who usurped power in 1975, post-2013 history shows that it is not limited to the military rulers alone. The growing authoritarian bent of the incumbent has made it reliant on conservative Islamists. The acquiescence of the secularist parties has allowed the process of providing space to Islamist parties to continue, and use of religious rhetoric in politics has become the norm. Thanks to two major parties (Bangladesh Nationalist Party – BNP and the Awami League – AL) of the country who befriended Islamists for immediate political gains. Although the Islamists have very little electoral support, they have played a signifcant role, albeit disproportionately, in the past decades. The chapter also shows that within the Islamist political landscape, more conservative forces are gaining grounds. While the domestic political environment (e.g., the crisis of legitimacy of the regimes, political expediency of so-called secularist parties, and acrimony between major parties) was pivotal in allowing the rise of Islam as a political ideology, external factors (e.g., the Afghan War, the rise of political Islam elsewhere, and the short-term migration of Bangladeshis to the Gulf) have played key roles, too. India, often identifed as the largest secular democracy, has witnessed the gradual erosion of democracy and secularist principles in the past decades. The rise of the Hindutva ideology and myriad organizations under the aegis of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have undermined the values, principles, and institutions which help a country to become inclusive of citizens irrespective of their religious identity. Anirban Acharya, in Chapter 4, examines the pathway to the current environment where religion is at the forefront of Indian politics. He has aptly showed that collective religious identities have formed and congealed since independence. It is in

Introduction

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this context, he further argued, that religious identities are mobilized for electoral success, which is interestingly identical to the cases of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In post-independence India, there are several issues which demonstrate how religious identities and groups have shaped public policy. Acharya explores these through the status of Kashmir since 1948, the Shah Bano case and the related actions of the Indian parliament with the Khalistan movement, and the Babri mosque controversy. He locates the highly discriminatory Citizens (Amendment) Act 2019 within these broad political developments. In Maldives, as Azra Naseem describes in Chapter 5, there is an ongoing clash between Salafsm and democracy, and it has become a defning characteristic of both political and religious practices. The matter of contention between various political forces is who can represent the “authentic” Islam. This battle, in large measure infuenced by political benefts, has not only created an environment conducive to the spread of radical and militant versions of Islam but has weakened the resolve to moderate their positions. For example, as Naseem noted, the rhetoric of “defending Islam” played an important role in the 2013 presidential election. Despite recent escalation, the growing salience of religion is a result of the long period of authoritarian rule of Mamoon Abdul Gayoom. The future trajectory depends on the commitment of political leaders to democracy and ability to address the growing disparity which is serving a source of radicalization. In Nepal, religion played a central role in defning the state formation process, Subho Basu argues in Chapter 6. Since the inception of the modern Nepali state in 1769, monarchs have presented themselves as the custodians of Hindu cultural identity. They subtly invoked the idea of divine right to govern by cultivating the popular myth that monarchs are incarnations of Lord Vishnu. In the postcolonial era in South Asia, the monarchical regime sought to justify its existence through developmental policies. The idea of the monarch as the custodian of a distinctive Hindu national culture had been contested by other actors, ranging from democratic political parties and Maoist revolutionaries to international nongovernmental organizations and associated social movements. The struggle for democratization of the Nepali polity increasingly became also a movement for the separation of state from religion. This political contestation led to a new realization among democratic forces that Nepali society is a mosaic of diverse religious practices and not a monolithic Hindu society. Thus, Nepal was declared a secular polity when democratic forces fnally accessed power in April 2006 and codifed it in the constitution in 2015. In other words, in Nepal the relationship between religion and polity is crucially related to a process of transition from royal absolutism to democracy. Pakistan, established as the homeland of Muslims in 1947, has a tumultuous history insofar as the role of religion in politics is concerned. Farhat Haq, in her analysis in Chapter 7 focuses on the paradoxical nature of the role of Islam in Pakistan, central and marginal at the same time. The chapter goes beyond the widely held perception of Pakistan as a place where infuence of radical Islamists is growing and explains the various dimensions of lived Islam which is shaped by various

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actors, for example Sufs, ulama, and Islamists. The questions which have dogged the nation since its independence remains the question of identity: is Pakistan an Islamic state or a homeland for the Muslims? The chapter also examines the performance of the Islamist parties in elections and the role of religious rhetoric in shaping the political landscape. In Chapter 8, Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri examines the rise of the SinhalaBuddhist ethno-religious nationalism in Sri Lanka since the mid-1950s. He argues that this ideology became the rallying point ahead of 1956 parliamentary election and delivered the victory to the emergent political force. This political force was organized around the rural landowning middle class. This marked the beginning of an era in which religion became a pivotal issue in the electoral politics and political discourses. The victory march of this ideology was interrupted for almost two decades, but in the mid-1980s it reappeared on the political scene, largely through social and intellectual organizations. This flled in the void created by the weakening of left political forces and shaped the entire political landscape. In the backdrop of the escalating ethnic crisis, mobilization of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism became a tool for mobilization and electoral victory. The “Temple Politics,” that is, using the temple as a site of political activities, became all too familiar in the late 1990s. This has helped Mahinda Rajapaksa win the presidential election in 2005 and paved the way for the victory of his brother Gotabhaya Rajapaksa in November 2019.

Suggested readings Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). Brass, Paul (ed.), Routledge Handbook of South Asian Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 2013). Chiriyankandath, James, Parties and Political Change in South Asia (London & New York: Routledge, 2016). DeVotta, Neil (ed.), An Introduction to South Asian Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 2020). Guneratne, Arjun and Anita M. Weiss (eds.), Pathways to Power: The Domestic Politics of South Asia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2014). Jalal, Ayesha, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Malik, Yogendra K., Charles H. Kennedy, Robert C. Oberst, Ashok Kapur, Mahendra Lawoti, Syedur Rahman, and Ahrar Ahmed, Government and Politics in South Asia, 7th edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013). Talbot, Ian. A History of Modern South Asia: Politics, States, Diasporas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

Notes 1 Jacob Neuser, “Introduction: Religion and Politics – A Volatile Mix,” in God’s Rule: The Politics of World Religion, ed. Jacob Neuser (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 1.

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2 Barbara D. Metcalf, “Hindu Ethnonationalism, Muslim Jihad, and Secularism: Muslims in the Political Life of the Republic of India,” in Prospects for Peace in South Asia, eds. Rafiq Dossani and Henry Rowen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 218, 215–38. 3 Since 2014, Muslims in India are facing persecution by the state and the supporters of the ruling BJP. The Cow Protection vigilante groups have attacked Muslims all around the country and killed many on baseless allegations that they were transporting beef or have slaughtered cow. In some instances, these groups have claimed that they are acting on behalf of the government. The Citizens Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019 has all the markers of religion-based discrimination. The Shia Hazara community in Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan, has faced systemic violence in the past decade. In Bangladesh, Hindus have faced significant persecution in the past decade. Land grabbing with the support of the ruling party has increased exponentially. 4 Eva Bellin, “Review Article – Faith in Politics: New Trends in the Study of Religion and Politics,” World Politics, 60 (2) (January 2008): 315–47. 5 For a schematic presentation of the social and political organizations affiliated with the BJP, see Zafrul-Islam Khan, “Hindu Fundamentalism in Contemporary India: A Muslim Perspective,” in The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought, ed. Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 520, 509–26. There is a growing body of studies on the BJP and its role in Indian politics. These authoritative studies include The Sangh Parivar: A Reader, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); for an incisive analysis, see Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave, Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 6 For a historical background of the JI, see Seyyed Vali Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); other authoritative studies on JI include Mumtaz Ahmed, “Islamic Fundamentalism in South Asia: Jamaat-i-Islami and Tablighi Jamaat,” in Fundamentalisms Observed, eds. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 457–531. 7 Very few academic studies have been conducted on the Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami. Among the available ones, notables are Bhuian Md. Monoar Kabir, Politics and Development of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh (Dhaka: A. H. Development Pub. House, 2006); Maidul Islam, Limits of Islamism: Jamaat-e-Islami in Contemporary India and Bangladesh (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 61. 9 For the background on JHU and its political agenda, see Mahinda Deegalle, “JHU Politics for Peace and Righteous State,” in Buddhism, Conflict and Violence in Modern Sri Lanka, ed. Mahinda Deegalle (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), 233–54; and Neil DeVotta and Jason Stone, “Jatikha Hela Urumaya and Ethno-Religious Politics in Sri Lanka,” Pacific Affairs, 81 (1) (2008): 31–52. 10 DeVotta and Stone, “Jatikha Hela Urumaya,” 31–52. 11 Hansen, The Saffron Wave, 4. 12 Dibyesh Anand, “The Violence of Security: Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Representing ‘the Muslim’ as a Danger,” The Round Table, 94 (379) (April 2005): 205, 203–15. 13 Jeff Haynes, Religion in Global Politics (London: Longman, 1998), Introduction. 14 Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965). 15 Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 211. 16 Jeffrey K. Hadden, “Toward Desacralizing Secularization Theory,” Social Forces, 65 (3) (1987): 587–611. 17 Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter Berger (Grand Rapids,

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18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 1, 1–18. It is important to note that Peter Berger, in the 1960s, was the most well-known proponent of the argument that religion will have very little, if any, role in public life. Emile Sahliyeh, “Religious Resurgence and Political Modernization,” in Religious Resurgence and Politics in the Contemporary World, ed. Emile Sahliyeh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 3. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World,” 2. Economist, “Obituary: God,” Economist, Millennium Issue, December 29, 1999, (accessed May 29, 2009). In 2007, the Economist argued that God is back; see Economist, “In the Name of God,” Economist, November 1, 2007. Anthony Giddens, Sociology, 3rd ed. (Oxford & Boston, MA: Polity Press, 1997, originally 1989). Kevin M. Schultz, “Secularization: A Bibliographic Essay,” The Hedgehog Review, 8 (1–2) (2006): 170, 170–7. Scott Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 39–40. DeVotta and Stone, “Jatikha Hela Urumaya,” 51: 31–52. Guilian Denoeux, “The Forgotten Swamp,” Middle East Policy, 9 (2) (June 2002), (accessed April 21, 2003). Aziz al-Azmeh, Reconstituting Islam (Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Occasional Papers Series, 1996). Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?, 58–9. The term is from Walpola Rahula, the ideologue of political Buddhism in Sri Lanka. His 1964 work Bhiksuvage Urumaya (later translated as The Heritage of the Bhikkhu) serves as the principal text for the activist monks. A. Pathak, Indian Modernity: Contradictions, Paradoxes, and Possibilities (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1998), 22. Rajeswari Sundar Rajan and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, “Introduction,” The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007), 35, fn. 7. Richard King, “The Association of Religion with Violence: Reflections on a Modern Trope,” in Religion and Violence in South Asia, eds. John Hinnells and Richard King (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), 234, 226–57. Peter van der Veer, “Religion in South Asia,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002): 173–87. Amalendu Misra, Identity and Religion: Foundations of Anti-Islamism in India (New Delhi & London: Sage Publications, 2004), 102. Hansen, The Saffron Wave, 45. Misra, Identity and Religion, 215. William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Dynasty 1857 (New York: Knopf, 2007). William Dalrymple, “Indian Mutiny was ‘War of Religion,’” BBC News, September 6, 2005, (accessed January 12, 2009). Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counterinsurgency,” Subaltern Studies, II (1983): 34–5. Taj Ul-Islam Hashmi, Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal 1920–1947 (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1994), 14. Partha Chatterjee, “Bengal Politics and Muslim Masses,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 20 (1) (1982): 32–3, quoted in Hashmi, Peasant Utopia, 13. K.M. de Silva, “Religion and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka: Christian Missionaries and Their Critics,” Ethnic Studies Report, XVI (1) (January 1998): 121, 103–39. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?, 5.

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43 Hashmi, Peasant Utopia, 13. 44 Sahliyeh, “Religious Resurgence,” 15. 45 Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 23. 46 William F.S. Miles, “Political Para-theology: Rethinking Religion, Politics and Democracy,” Third World Quarterly, 17 (1996): 525, 525–36. 47 Ali Riaz, God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994); Salwa Ismail, Rethinking Islamist Politics Culture, the State and Islamism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006); Francois Burgat, Face to Face with Political Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); Bobby S. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (London: Zed Books, 1997). 48 Hartwig Schafer, ‘Finishing the job of ending poverty in South Asia’, World Bank Blog, October 17, 2018; https://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/finishing-jobending-poverty-south-asia (accessed October 20, 2020). 49 Ashutosh Varshney, “Contested Meanings: India’s National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety,” Daedalus, 122 (Summer 1993): 242. 50 Ibid., 243. 51 The often-quoted example of this position is the statement of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, on August 11, 1947, as the presidential address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State.” 52 Ali Riaz, “Nations, Nation-State and Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 22 (1–2) (2002): 53–8. 53 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and the Society in the Late-Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 33. 54 Ibid., 243. 55 Ibid., 38. 56 Ibid., 47. 57 Ibid., 185. 58 Catarina Kinnvall, Globalization and Religious Nationalism in India: The Search for Ontological Security (London: Routledge, 2006). 59 Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security,” Political Psychology, 25 (5) (2004): 759, 741–67. 60 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 96. 61 Kinnvall, Globalization and Religious Nationalism, 763. 62 Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000). 63 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006), 51–9. 64 George Tarabishi, “Extremism Born of Politics Not Religion,” Al Jadid, 7 (37) (Fall 2001), (accessed July 10, 2008). 65 Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 51. 66 Ibid., 41. 67 Anand, “The Violence of Security,” 204. 68 Alvappillia Veluppillai, “Sinhala Fears of Tamil Demands,” in Buddhism, Conflict ed. Mahinda Deegalle, 91–113.

1 THE “GOD GAP?” PUBLIC PERCEPTION ON RELIGIONPOLITICS MIX IN SOUTH ASIA Md. Sohel Rana

The arguments that religion is increasingly being de-privatized and the world is becoming furiously religious, advanced by several authors in the 1990s,1 have received empirical validation in the past decade. The World Religion Project (WRP) data have indicated that there have been a roughly 25 percent increase of global religious adherents between 1945 and 2010,2 while Pew Research Center (PRC) has revealed that 84 percent of the world population today identify themselves with a religious group.3 However, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in 2011 have argued that while Western countries have witnessed a steady decline in religiosity among their populations, there is a surge of religiosity among people in the developing countries.4 Of the developing regions, South Asia bears special signifcance as it is the home of approximately world’s 97 percent Hindus, 30 percent Muslims, and 5 percent Buddhist populations.5 Previous studies have either recorded the rise of religious public spheres in South Asia or investigated the confation of religion and politics in public spheres from state and political perspectives. But studies on public perception of the relationship between religion and politics in South Asian context are sorely lacking. The rising religious public sphere is likely to have signifcant implications in the religion-politics relationship in these countries as religious citizens are more likely to support conservative governance and religious political parties. This is refected in the United States and Europe by the so-called “God Gap” or “Religion Gap” between religious and secular citizens.6 Whether South Asian populations prefer religiously conservative political leaders and parties in power is something which remained unexplored. This chapter meets this gap by analyzing public perception on the commingling of religion and politics in South Asian countries, namely, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, representing three major religions – Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. It analyzes theoretical and empirical claims of increasing religiosity in these countries, explores the extent of religiosity through a series of public perception

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survey fndings, and examines whether the growing religiosity has implications for politics, particularly elections. The chapter ofers two interrelated but divergent arguments. First, increasing religiosity leads to increasing tendency among the populations to support “political parties with religious beliefs.” Second, despite such tendency, the South Asian populations do not necessarily hail “religious political parties” with signifcant electoral support. It concludes that the people of South Asia tend to support religious values in public life and practice faith in personal life but avoid giving electoral support to religious parties. The chapter is divided into six parts. The second part discusses data sources and the measurement of increasing religiosity and public perception on the fusion of religion and politics. The third section presents empirical evidence of increasing religiosity among South Asian populations. The fourth section then elaborates public attitudes and perceptions toward the merger of religion and politics. The ffth part underscores that despite increasing religiosity and support for religious values in public life, the religious political parties meet very limited electoral success in competitive elections. The fnal part highlights the research fndings and their implications for South Asian politics.

Data sources and measurement Data have been gathered from two sources. First, for assessing the religious beliefs and practices and the perception of religion-politics nexus, I have used a series of surveys conducted by several organizations between 1995 and 2012. Second, the performance of religious parties is assessed based on the election results between 1991 and 2019, which is drawn from the respective election commissions. The survey data are derived from three sources: World Values Survey (WVS), Pew Research Center (PRC), and Asia Foundation (AF). As for WVS, four Waves have been used for extracting data for India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. These four Waves are: WVS Wave 3 (1995–1999), Wave 4 (2000–2004), Wave 5 (2005–2009), and Wave 6 (2010–2014). Multiple waves are used for the following reasons: to compare the level of religiosity over a period between at least two diferent waves; the unavailability of data for all three countries in the same two waves; and the incidents of missing and changed survey questions in the waves. Use of multiple waves of WVS helps to overcome the limitations. The data have been used to measure both rising religiosity and public perception on the religion-politics mix. The chapter uses data of PRC’s public opinion surveys on social and political views of Muslims around the world. The survey included 38,000 face-to-face interviews, which were conducted between 2008 and 2012 in 39 countries. I have used these surveys to measure the public opinion of Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh on the religion-politics mix. These data have been used in addition to the WVS data as they are more recent than the WVS Waves. Because of the absence of data on Sri Lanka in the WVS and the PRC, I have used the Asia Foundation’s data on National Value Survey Sri Lanka 2011. This survey was conducted in 2011 in nine

30 Md. Sohel Rana

provinces with 5,553 respondents through the face-to-face interview technique. The selection of the sample included the population above 18 years from four denominations: Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and Catholic. The survey data have been used to measure both religiosity and public perception on the religion-politics mix in Sri Lanka. Beyond these sources, data from other surveys, e.g., Gallup Poll, have been used where relevant. All these data are triangulated with the available analyses. The chapter also uses key insights from theoretical literature and relevant books, scholarly articles, journalistic accounts, policy papers, newspaper reports, and media analyses which have discussed the central arguments of this chapter. The chapter measures two aspects of the religion-politics nexus: extent of religiosity and public perception of the religion-politics mix. These two dimensions are measured by two indices – the religiosity index and the politics index (Table 1.1). The religiosity index has two dimensions – religious values and religious practices/participation. Three survey questions of WVS have been employed to measure religious values: How important is God in your life? How important is religion in your life? Independently of whether you go to Church or not, would you say you are a religious person? To estimate the participation/practice dimension, three survey questions of WVS have been applied: How often do you attend religious services? Could you tell whether you are a member of a religious organization? How much confdence do you have on religious organizations? The wordings of these questions, in both measurements, have been shortened to some extent without changing the meaning for the usefulness in the chapter. These six questions have been used to measure religiosity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In the case of Sri Lanka, data from Asia Foundation have been used. To measure religious beliefs, three questions have been used: Do you think people are more religious today than fve years ago? Which is your most often sought source of guidance? Is religious education more important today than it was fve years ago? Similarly, three questions have been used to measure religious practices: attendance to temple, church, or mosque; attendance to religious meetings; and preference to consult local religious leaders to validate religious teachings. For the politics index, which measures public perception on the religion-politics mix, four questions of WVS have been used for India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh: Are politicians who do not believe in God unft for public ofce? Is it better if more people with strong religious beliefs are in public ofce? Should religious leaders not infuence how people vote? Should religious leaders not infuence government? Additionally, four questions of Pew Research Center’s surveys on Muslims’ attitude and opinion about politics have been used to measure the politics index (especially for Pakistan and Bangladesh): Should sharia be the law of the land? Should religious leaders decide family and property disputes? Should religious leaders have political infuence? Are Islamic parties better compared to other parties? In the case of Sri Lanka, a set of six elements of Asia Foundation has been used to estimate public perception on the religion-politics nexus: respect for religious leaders; religious leaders should not be involved in politics; politicians will make mistakes if religious leaders are not consulted on local problems; religious statues and places of

The “God Gap?”

31

TABLE 1.1 Extent of religiosity and public perception on religion-politics mix

Cases

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh

Religiosity Index

Politics Index

Religious Values

Religious Practices

V9: importance of religion.

V181/V145/V185: attendance in religious services.

V190/V152/ V196: importance of God. V182/V147/ V186: religious person.

V28/V25: membership in religious organizations. V135/V108/V147: confdence in religious organizations.

V194/V200: politicians’ religious belief and eligibility. V196/V202: better if religious believers in public ofce. V195/V201: religious leaders and vote choice. V197/V203: religious leaders and government.

V184/V144: denomination. Source: WVS Wave 3 (1995–1999), 4 (2000–2004), 5 (2005–2009), and 6 (2010–2014). Q79a: sharia as law of the land. Q79a & Q92a: religious judges and property issues. Q15: religious leaders’ political infuence. Q13: Islamic and other political parties.

Sri Lanka

Q6: people are more religious today.

Q8(1)/Q9(1)/Q10(1): attendance in temple, mosque, and church.

Q7: source of guidance.

Q8(4)/Q9(2)/Q10(3)/ Q11(3): religious leaders and religious teachings.

Q19: religious education.

Q8(5)/Q9(3)/Q10(4): attendance in religious meetings.

Source: Pew Research Center’s Surveys, 2011–2012. Q13: respect for religious leaders. Q15: religious leaders in politics. Q17: need of religious leaders’ consultation on local problems. Q33: religious statues in public places. Q34: religious symbols and public ofces. Q36: religious organizations in politics.

Source: Asia Foundation, 2012. Source: See World Values Survey (WVS) Waves, 3, 4, 5, and 6, ; Pew Research Center, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society,” April 30, 2013, ; Asia Foundation, “National Value Survey of Sri Lanka 2011,” 2012, . The indices are compiled by the author.

32 Md. Sohel Rana

worship should not be allowed in public places; government organizations should not display any religious symbols; and organizations set up for religious purposes are becoming involved in politics. To measure the performance of religious political parties, data on election results are drawn from the respective election commissions of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, for at least three previous elections. For India, the electoral performance of national political parties in 2009, 2014, and 2019 general elections is extracted from the Election Commission of India. The Election Commission of Pakistan is used for the election results data of Islamist political parties in 2008, 2013, and 2018 national assembly elections. In the case of Bangladesh, the electoral performance data of Islamist parties is drawn from the Bangladesh Election Commission for 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2008 parliamentary elections. Similarly, the Election Commission of Sri Lanka is used to extract electoral performance data of religious political parties in 2004, 2010, and 2015 parliamentary elections.

Rise of religiosity in South Asia Understanding religiosity and the religion-politics relationship in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are complex on three counts: the vast number of people living in the region, the variety of religions practiced in these countries, and the infuence of demographic characteristics on religion. First, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka account for more than 95 percent of the total population of South Asia.7 Approximately one in fve people in the world is living in these four countries of South Asia.8 Second, as mentioned before, the region has a vast number of adherents of three major religions – Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism, as well as a substantial number of adherents of other religions such as Christianity and folklore religions. Finally, ethnicity, geography, and linguistic diferences contribute to religious practices. These have given a unique character to every religion in South Asia.9 Despite the uniqueness, South Asian public spheres have been witnessing a sharp increase of religiosity among the adherents of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. In India, a comparison of WVS Waves 3 and 6 reveals the increase of religiosity. Between the period 1995 and 2012, there had been an over 18 percent increase of those who reported that religion is “very important” in their life. Although there was a 10 percent decline in those who thought God is “very important” in their life, the percentage of the population who identifed themselves as “a religious person” had risen over 16 percent (Figure 1.1). In addition, between 1995 and 2012, in a diferent question on “believe in God,” the WVS waves found a 4 percent increase of Indians who believed in God. During the same period, the percentage of population who attended religious services “once a week” had grown over 6 percent. Although the percentage of Indians who reported “active” membership in a religious organization remained

The “God Gap?”

88.8

100 80 60

67.1 53.1 43.5

79.4

72.4

48.2

40

25.2 18.9

20 0

Importance of Importance of A religious God religion person 1995

FIGURE 1.1

33

Attending religious services

14.2 14

27.6

Membership Confidence in in religious religious organizations organizations

2012

Increasing religious beliefs and practices in India, 1995–2012

Source: World Value Survey (WVS) Wave 3 (1995–1999) and Wave 6 (2010–2014). The waves were conducted in India in 1995 and 2012 with 2,040 and 4,078 respondents, respectively.

roughly the same, there had been an over 51 percent increase of those who had “a great deal” of confdence in religious organizations. Moreover, according to a 2015 survey of PRC, eight in ten Indians insisted that religion is very important in their life.10 In another survey of PRC in 2018, more than half of Indians (54 percent) reported that religion plays a more important role in their nation today than it did 20 years ago.11 Therefore, there is no doubt that India’s public sphere is more religious today than it was before. In Pakistan, a comparative picture of WVS Waves 4 and 6 reveals a similar picture. In the 2001–2012 period, there had been a roughly 17 percent decrease among those who believed that God is “very important” in their life. However, in a diferent question on “believe in God,” a staggering 100 percent Pakistanis responded “yes” during the same period. Between 2001 and 2012, there had been a roughly 8 percent rise among the Pakistanis who thought religion is “very important” in their life, and around a 14 percent increase among those who described themselves as “a religion person” (Figure 1.2). During the same period, there had been about a 40 percent increase among those who identifed their denomination as Sunni. The percentage of those who attended religious services “once a week” had seen a slight decline. The reason behind this might be that an additional question “how often do you pray?” was asked in Wave 6, in which over 60 percent Pakistani respondents reported “several times a day.” On the question of confdence in religious organizations, there had been over 17 percent increase among those who responded, “a great deal” (Figure 1.2). As per a 2009 survey of PRC, around 80 percent Pakistanis support severe punishments, e.g., whipping or cutting hands for crimes like theft or robbery, while 78 percent support death penalty for those who renounce Islam.12

34 Md. Sohel Rana

120 100

100 83.3

89.5 81.8

99.7 85.8

93.5 53.3

60 40

24.119.6

20 0

88.2 71

80

Importance of Importance of God religion

A religious Denomination: person Sunni 2001

FIGURE 1.2

Attending religious services

Confidence in religious organizations

2012

Increasing religious beliefs and practices in Pakistan, 2001–2012

Source: World Value Survey (WVS) Wave 4 (2000–2004) and Wave 6 (2010–2014). The waves were conducted in Pakistan in 2001 and 2012 with 2,000 and 1,200 respondents, respectively. The question on “membership in religious organizations” was not asked in 2001 in Pakistan. Therefore, a diferent question on denomination has been added to understand people’s sense of belongingness in a religious group.

It refects that religion is attached to Pakistan’s public life and a vast majority of Pakistanis support core Islamic values and conservative practices in their public sphere. Likewise, a comparative picture of WVS Waves 3 and 4 refects increasing religious beliefs and practices in Bangladesh. Between 1996 and 2002, there had been over 9 percent increase in those who thought God is “very important” in their life, and over 5 percent increase in those who believed religion is “very important” in their life. Compared to 1996, an increasing 7 percent Bangladeshis in 2012 identifed themselves as “a religious person” (Figure 1.3). During the same period, the percentages of those who attended religious services “once a week” had seen roughly a 6 percent increase. The percentages of those who reported “active” membership in religious organizations had increased approximately 10 percent in the 1996–2002 period. On the question of confdence in religious organizations, there had been an over 5 percent increase among those who answered, “a great deal” (Figure 1.3). Moreover, the fndings from the Gallup International Polls between 2006 and 2009 revealed that personal religiosity has been on the rise in Bangladesh. In response to the question “Is religion an important part of your daily life?,” 96 percent responded positively in 2006, which had increased to 100 in 2009.13 It confrms that Bangladeshi society is increasingly becoming more religious. In Sri Lanka, the Asia Foundation’s data reveal religious beliefs and practices. In 2011, about 63 percent Sri Lankans reported that people are now “much more religious” than they were in 2006. Only 4 percent Sri Lankans thought that the

The “God Gap?”

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

93.3 84.2

87.5 82.2

35

89.7 84.3

88.7 81.3

43.3 33.6 19.1 13.2

Importance of Importance of A religious God religion person 1996

FIGURE 1.3

Attending religious services

Membership Confidence in in religious religious organizations organizations

2002

Increasing religious beliefs and practices in Bangladesh, 1996–2002

Source: World Value Survey (WVS) Wave 3 (1995–1999) and Wave 4 (2000–2004). The waves were conducted in Bangladesh in 1996 and 2002 with 1,525 and 1,500 respondents, respectively.

country has become less religious. When asked about the “most often sought source of guidance,” a staggering 99 percent indicated religious leaders, holy texts, religious scholars, and other religious literature. Among those, a total of 63 percent mentioned religious leaders as the most often sought-source of guidance. In response to the question “Is religious education more important today than fve years ago?”, about 89 percent confrmed that religious education is more important in 2011 than it was in 2006. A substantial percentage of Sri Lankans attends temple, mosque, or church as well as religious meetings “once a month.” At least one-third of the Buddhists shared this view. When asked about their preference to consult religious leaders, holy texts, and other religious sources to validate religious teachings, at least two-thirds of Sri Lankans pointed toward local religious leaders, e.g., monks, priests, father, and imams as their preference (Table 1.2). Additionally, in the survey fndings of the Gallup Poll 2012, Sri Lanka (along with Indonesia) was ranked as one of the top ten countries in terms of religiosity as 100 percent respondents reported that religion was an “important” part in their life.14 In the poll, in response to the question “how often do you attend religious services?,” about 78 percent said that they attended religious services regularly. Findings from these survey questions indicate that religion and religious leaders have a strong infuence in Sri Lankan public life. In summary, this section demonstrates that there has been an increasing trend in religious values and practices among South Asian populations. It shows that there exists a linear relationship between religious citizens and their increasing confdence on religious leaders and organizations.

36 Md. Sohel Rana TABLE 1.2 Religious beliefs and practices in Sri Lanka, 2011

Category

Survey Questions

All

Religious Perception

People are “much more religious” today than fve years ago Religious leaders, texts, and scholars are most often sought source of guidance Religious education is more important today than fve years ago Attendance to temple/ mosque/church “once a month” Attendance to religious meetings “once a month” Preference to consult monks/priests/imams to validate religious teachings

63

70

39

53

44

99

100

97

100

98

89

92

77

91

86



36

54



26



33

13



17



76

56

Religious Practices

Buddhists

Hindus

Muslims

26

Christians

67

Source: The Asia Foundation, “National Value Survey of Sri Lanka 2011,” 2012.

Public perception on religion-politics mix in South Asia Based on the increasing religiosity in South Asia in the previous section, one may hypothesize that it will shape public opinion about the role of religion in public life, particularly in politics. Existing literature ofers three theoretical insights in this regard. These three insights represent individual, societal, and cultural factors. First, as individuals, increasing engagement with religious rites may make people more inclined toward supporting religion’s involvement in politics.15 As religious persons fnd psychic benefts in religion,16 they tend to think their life and society in religious fashion, and are therefore likely to prefer religious leaders’ involvement in politics.17 Second, at a societal level, people’s attitudes toward religion are determined by what Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart called “existential security.” Based on this perspective, the societies that have lower levels of human development and growing insecurity have higher levels of religiosity.18 In such societies, people’s increasing religious participation enhances political participation and even less religious persons show higher preferences for religious leaders in politics.19 Third, historical and religious cultural traditions generate distinctive values in societies which transmit to the citizens even if they never set foot in a church, temple, or mosque.20 These distinctive values infuence individuals’ religiosity and their preferences for the engagement of religion and religious leaders into politics.21

The “God Gap?”

37

These theoretical insights suggest that increasing religious populations in South Asia are more likely to support religious political leaders and parties for public ofce. Norris and Inglehart noted that “regular religious participation, particularly collective acts of worship, will probably encourage political and social engagement and also electoral support for religious parties.”22 However, the public perception on the religion-politics mix in South Asia ofers interesting and signifcant fndings. In the WVS Wave 5 conducted in 2006 in India, more than one-third of Indians (almost 37 percent) insisted that politicians who do not believe in God are unft for public ofce (Figure 1.4). Only 4.1 percent strongly disagreed with this statement. However, when asked “better if more people with strong religious beliefs in public ofce,” the percentage has declined to 27 percent. In the survey, over 50 percent insisted that religious leaders should not infuence how people vote, while over 46 percent opined that religious leaders should not infuence government (Figure 1.4). Similarly, in Pakistan, as per the WVS Wave 4 conducted in 2001, an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis (95 percent) insisted that politicians who do not believe in God are unft for public ofce. But, when asked opinion on “better if more people with strong religious beliefs in public ofce,” only 16 percent supported the statement. Over 46 percent of Pakistanis rejected that more people with strong religious beliefs would be better in public ofce. A large majority of Pakistanis (over 70 percent) insisted that religious leaders should not infuence how people vote (Figure 1.5). In the survey of PRC on world’s Muslims’ attitude and opinion on the religion and politics relationship, conducted in Pakistan between 2011 and 2012, 84 percent of Pakistani Muslims said that they want sharia (Islamic law) as their ofcial law of the land. Among those, a staggering 87 percent insisted that religious judges should have the power to decide domestic and property issues. More than half of Pakistani Muslims (54 percent) believed that religious leaders should have some political infuence. A substantial percentage (29 percent) reported that Islamic parties are better compared to other political parties (Figure 1.6).

60

50.2

50

46.2

36.8

40

26.8

30 20 10 0

Politicians who don't believe in God are unfit for public office

FIGURE 1.4

Better if more people with strong religious beliefs in public office

Religious leaders should not Religious leaders should not influence how people vote influence government

Public perception on religion-politics mix in India, 2006

Source: World Value Survey (WVS) Wave 5 (2005–2009). The survey was conducted in India in 2006 with 2,001 respondents.

38 Md. Sohel Rana 95

100

70.9

80 60 40

16.4

20 0

Politicians who don't believe in God are unfit for public office

FIGURE 1.5

Better if more people with strong religious beliefs in public office

Religious leaders should not influence how people vote

Public perception on religion-politics mix in Pakistan, 2001

Source: World Value Survey (WVS) Wave (2000–2004). The survey was conducted in Pakistan in 2001 with 2,000 participants. During the wave, the question “religious leaders should not infuence government” was not asked.

100

84

87

80

54

60

29

40 20 0

Sharia as the official law of the land

FIGURE 1.6

Religious judges should decide domestic and property disputes

Religious leaders should have political influence

Islamic political parties are better compared to other parties

Pakistani Muslims’ attitude and opinion on religion-politics relationship,

2013 Source: Pew Research Center Surveys, 2011–2012. Total sample size in Pakistan was 1,512, including 1,450 Muslims.

In the case of Bangladesh, as per WVS Wave 4, over 67 percent of Bangladeshis in 2002 supported that politicians who do not believe in God are unft for public ofce. However, the percentage was at least three times smaller (about 22 percent) when asked whether it would be better if more people with strong religious belief are in public ofce (Figure 1.7). Although over 69 percent of Bangladeshis insisted that religious leaders should not infuence how people vote and over 65 percent opined that they should not infuence government in 2002, the share has increased substantially a decade later. In the PRC’s survey on world’s Muslims’ attitude and opinion on the religionpolitics relationship, conducted in Bangladesh between 2011 and 2012, a staggering 82 percent of Bangladeshis informed that they want sharia as the law of the land. Among those, an estimated 78 percent reported that religious judges should have the power to decide family law and property disputes. Similarly, a substantial 69 percent of Bangladeshis insisted that religious leaders should have some political infuence. When asked about their perception on Islamic political parties, a good

The “God Gap?” 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

69.1

67.2

39

65.1

21.9

Politicians who don't believe Better if more people with in God are unfit for public strong religious beliefs in office public office

FIGURE 1.7

Religious leaders should not Religious leaders should not influence how people vote influence government

Public perception on religion-politics mix in Bangladesh, 2002

Source: World Value Survey (WVS) Wave 4 (2000–2004). The survey was conducted in Bangladesh in 2002 with 2,002 respondents.

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

82

78

69 41

Sharia as the official law of the land

FIGURE 1.8

Religious judges should decide domestic and property disputes

Religious leaders should have political influence

Islamic political parties are better compared to other parties

Bangladeshi Muslims’ attitude and opinion on religion-politics relationship,

2013 Source: Pew Research Center Surveys, 2011–2012. Total sample size in Bangladesh was 2,196, including 1,918 Muslims.

number of Bangladeshis (41 percent) opined that Islamic parties are better compared to other political parties (Figure 1.8). In the case of Sri Lanka, in 2011, despite the fact that two-thirds (66 percent) insisted that religious leaders should not be involved in politics, an overwhelming 97 percent reported that they had high respect for religious leaders (Figure 1.9). However, a large majority of Sri Lankans want the presence of religious leaders in public life for providing guidance to politicians. A staggering 81 percent reported that political leaders will make mistakes if religious leaders are not consulted on local problems facing an area. In terms of the presence of religion in public sphere, a signifcant portion of Sri Lankans (43 percent) said that religious statues and places of worship should not be allowed in public places. More than half of Sri Lankans (51 percent) insisted that government organizations should not display any symbols that are religious in nature, while an estimated 57 percent

40 Md. Sohel Rana 120 97

100

81

80

66

60

43

51

57

40 20 0

Respect for religious leaders

FIGURE 1.9

Religious leaders Political leaders will Religious statues Government Organizations set up should not be make mistakes if and places of organizations for religious involved in politics religious leaders are worship should not should not display purposes are not consulted on be allowed in public any religious becoming involved local problems places symbols in politics

Public perception on religion-politics mix in Sri Lanka, 2011

Source: The Asia Foundation, “National Value Survey of Sri Lanka 2011.”

reported the increasing involvement in politics by the organizations that were being set up for religious purposes. In short, this section fnds mixed perceptions on the religion-politics mix in South Asia. Although a substantial number of populations in India and a large majority in Pakistan and Bangladesh insisted on the religious beliefs of politicians to be ft for public ofce, they did not support the infuence of religious leaders on people’s voting decisions and government. The percentage of populations who supported people with strong religious beliefs in public ofce was much smaller in all three countries. However, public opinion in Pakistan and Bangladesh in more recent surveys refected an overwhelming support for sharia law, religious leaders and their infuence in politics, and a considerable support for Islamic parties compared to other parties. In the case of Sri Lanka, almost all Sri Lankans held high respect for religious leaders and a large majority emphasized the need to consult religious leaders in local problem-solving, though a substantial majority did not support the involvement of religious leaders in politics. Therefore, it can be argued that majority of populations in these four countries support religion and religious leaders in public spheres, but they do not appreciate the infuence of religious leaders on people’s voting decision and government. They prefer political leaders with religious beliefs, but they do not extend their support to religious leaders who claim to represent religion in public sphere. A refection of these arguments on the electoral performance of religious parties in these four countries would give a clear picture of people’s perception on the amalgamation of religion with politics.

Mixing religion and politics: how do religious parties fare in elections? The aim of this section is to evaluate the electoral performance of religious political parties in South Asian politics. As Peter van der Veer (2002) noted, religion is one of defning elements in South Asian politics and many leading political parties

The “God Gap?”

41

in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have used religion for political purposes.23 Similarly, Upadhyay (2017) argued that “religion has always been a potent force in South Asian politics,” and “the continuous presence of religion and the use of religion by political parties are associated with the modes of governance in South Asia.”24 Therefore, the politicization of religion has become a constant feature in South Asian politics. However, in the presence of increased religious values and practices among South Asian populations as well as the rising demand for believer politicians and confdence on religious leaders and organizations, it is of crucial importance to examine the performance of mainstream religious political parties who claim to represent religion and are committed to deliver religious governance. In this backdrop, the chapter evaluates the performance of religious political parties in at least three previous national elections: India (2009, 2014, and 2019), Pakistan (2008, 2013, and 2018), Bangladesh (1991, 1996, 2001, and 2008), and Sri Lanka (2004, 2010, and 2015).

India The world’s largest democracy, India, is a multi-party system, and India’s election commission follows specifc rules to recognize national and state political parties. As per Article 6B of the “The Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order 1968,” a political party shall be recognized as a national political party if it meets one of its three conditions.25 One of the conditions is to win at least 6 percent of the total votes polled in each of four or more states and win at least four seats in any state(s) in the last general or legislative assembly election.26 As of today, only seven political parties in India are recognized as national political parties. No self-declared Hinduist religious political party, such as Shiv Sena (SS), Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), or Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), has yet been recognized as a national party as they failed to win at least 6 percent of the total votes polled in each of at least four states. Notwithstanding, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a party built on the ideology of Hindu nationalism, had been embarking on the theme of Hindutva in Indian politics since 1990s and headed the 1999–2004 coalition government for the frst time. Although founded on Hindutva ideology which insists on the role of Hindu religion in public life, BJP is pragmatic and even opportunistic as it has been utilizing religious symbols and ideas and personalities for political purposes whenever necessary.27 It has been blending politics with religious fervor in a manner which resonates with Mark Zuergensmeyer’s idea of religious nationalism.28 Although BJP could not win a majority of seats in the 2009 general election, the party maintained its position as the second-largest political party after the Indian National Congress (INC) (Table 1.3). In the 2014 election, BJP’s election campaign was not focused on the issues of Hindutva, but rather on the issues of development, anti-corruption, and good governance. It also did accuse INC of pseudo-secularism. BJP used Hindutva themes in a targeted manner in diferent contexts and geographies where BJP thought it could be benefcial.29 In the 2014 general election, BJP won 282 out of 543 seats in the lower house and came

42 Md. Sohel Rana TABLE 1.3 Performance of national political parties in India’s general elections, 2009–2014

Category

National Political Party

Party Name

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Indian National Congress (INC)

2009

2014

2019

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

116

18.80

282

31.34

303

37.76

206

28.55

44

19.52

52

19.7

Source: Election Commission of India, . The percentage of votes of the party is calculated based on the total number of votes polled in each of three elections.

to power as the frst-single majority party in India’s parliament in the last three decades. However, BJP’s victory was concentrated in a small number of states as 75 percent of its vote came from only eight states.30 In the 2019 general election, BJP has converted seats into votes as it secured 73.6 percent of its total winning seats (223 out of 303) from only 8 states out of 23 states and union territories it contested. BJP’s number of seats has increased nine times (2 to 18) in West Bengal, which represents 7.5 percent of the total population (2011 Census of India).31 However, it signifcantly declined in Utter Pradesh (UP) (71 to 62) and Bihar (22 to 17), which are the frst and the third largest states by population, respectively (together representing more than 25 percent of total population), even though UP chief minister Adityanath had been delivering speeches on “generous doses of Hindutva” (Hindu nationalism) across the Hindu majority states.32 BJP has failed to win any seat in Tamil Nadu, hosting around 6 percent of the total Indian population, whereas it won 21 seats from Jharkhand and Haryana, together representing 4.82 percent of India’s population. Therefore, the popular support for BJP in all large states have in fact declined, except West Bengal and Karnataka. Once BJP’s religious nationalist attitude started revealing itself across the country, Indian voters have taken a step back from BJP. BJP government’s decision to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the parliamentary approval of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have highlighted BJP’s Hindus nationalist attitude which caused nationwide protests and violence. The NRC requires documents such as a birth certifcate predating 1971 which would cause a signifcant number of people, particularly Muslims, to lose their citizenship. Under the CAA, India would ofer citizenship to religious minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, who have been in India before December 2014, except Muslims. This has induced a nationwide protest and Hindu-Muslim clashes in many states, which caused at least 31 deaths and thousands injured.33 These policies clearly indicate BJP’s religious nationalist position and BJP’s support bases have been declining in many states. In comparison to 2014 general election, BJP’s support in assembly

The “God Gap?”

43

elections across many states has signifcantly declined in recent times, though it won a majority of seats in the 2019 general election.34 By February 2020, BJP has been defeated in ten states, including the capital Delhi, which has reduced BJPdominated territories into half.35 In short, it can be stated that although traditional religious political parties have failed to reach to the national level politics in India, a religio-political party like BJP won the largest majority in the last two elections. However, once religious nationalist attitudes have been more apparent and aggressive, Indian voters have started reducing their support to BJP.

Pakistan Despite the increasing presence of religion in both private and public spheres of Pakistan, Islamist political parties have failed to secure popular votes in national elections. In 1990, 1993, and 1997, Islamist political parties won a negligible 1.76, 6.75, and 1.83 percentages of popular votes, respectively.36 In 2002, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance six Islamist parties (including Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) and Jamait Ulema-e Islam (JUI)), won 11.23 percent and came to central level of Pakistan’s politics.37 It emerged as the third largest political party after Pakistan Muslim League (PML)-Q and Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP). The later years saw further decline of popular vote for the MMA (Table 1.4). However, in 2008, the MMA alliance had fractured, mainly because of key diferences between the JI and the JUI – the former is considered the oldest

TABLE 1.4 Islamist parties’ share of votes in Pakistan’s national assembly elections, 2008–2018

Party Name

Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) Jamait Ulema-e Islam (JUI-F) Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), Pakistan Jamait Ulema-e Islam (JUI-N) Jamait Ulema-e Pakistan (JUP)

2008

2013

2018

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

6

2.1





13

4.85





13

3.22









4

2.12









0

0.23









0

0.15





Source: Election Commission of Pakistan, , and several media and journalistic accounts.

44 Md. Sohel Rana

and best-organized religious party, while the latter has a strong base in religious seminaries (madrasas). As soon as the JI boycotted the election, the MMA sufered as it won only 6 out of 272 seats (of total 342 seats, direct 272 and reserved 70) in the National Assembly with a 2.1 percent popular vote. By 2013, JI and JUI were unable to settle their diferences and the alliance broke, hence they participated separately in election. JUI-F won 13 seats with 3.22 percent vote, while JI secured 4 seats with 2.12 percent popular vote. As the alliance broke, many small Islamist political parties emerged and participated in 2013 election, but together all Islamist political parties won 17 seats with 6.74 percent of popular votes in 2013 elections.38 In 2018 election, both JI and JUI-F came together once again under MMA, but alliance secured only 4.85 percent of popular votes, with 13 seats in the National Assembly. In short, it is seen that Islamist political parties in Pakistan have not been able to win more than 6.74 percent popular vote since 2008.

Bangladesh Since their frst participation in the 1979 election, Islamist political parties continued to remain prevalent in Bangladesh politics and strengthen, mainly because of the crises of hegemony of the ruling bloc as well as the politics of expediency.39 However, Islamist political parties have not been able to secure considerable electoral support from the voters in previous elections in Bangladesh, as their electoral performance indicates. In the 1979 parliamentary election, an alliance of the Muslim League (ML) and the Islamic Democratic League (IDL) (a conglomerate of seven Islamist parties including Jamaat-e-Islami) secured 8 percent of popular votes and bagged 20 seats in the parliament.40 By 1986, Jamaat-eIslami Bangladesh (JIB) turned out to be the biggest Islamist political party in Bangladesh but secured only 10 seats with a 4.61 percent popular vote in 1986 election.41 In 1988, the military regime led by General H.M. Ershad added Islam as the state religion through the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution which rejuvenated Islamist political parties in Bangladesh politics.42 The later election years witnessed the participation of an increasing number of Islamist political parties in Bangladesh (17 in 1991, 18 in 1996, 11 in 2001, and 25 in 2008),43 though their electoral performance indicates insignifcant votes and electoral success (Table 1.5). As Table 1.5 indicates, JIB secured 12.13 percent of the popular votes and bagged 18 seats in the legislature in the 1991 parliamentary election. Except JIB, none of the Islamist political parties, e.g., Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ), Bangladesh Khelafat-e-Andolon, Zaker Party, and Bangladesh Muslim League, won signifcant percentage of popular votes. Altogether, these four Islamist parties secured 2.48 percent votes. Including these parties, a total of 17 Islamist political parties participated in the 1991 election, in which together they secured roughly 14.87 percent of the popular vote.44 In 1996 election, the popular support for JIB declined from 12.13 to 8.61 percent. Together, JIB and IOJ secured four seats in the parliament

The “God Gap?”

45

TABLE 1.5 Islamist parties’ share of votes in Bangladesh’s parliamentary elections, 1991–2008

Party Name

1991

1996

2001

2008

Seat(s) Votes Seat(s) Votes Seat(s) Votes Seat(s) Votes Won (%) Won (%) Won (%) Won (%) Jameet-e-Islami Bangladesh (JIB) Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) Bangladesh Khelafat-e-Andolon Zaker Party Islami Jatiya Oikya Front Bangladesh Muslim League Islami Shashantantra Andolon Islami Andolon Bangladesh (Bangladesh Islamic Movement) Jamaat-e-Ulama-e-Islami Bangladesh Bangladesh Islami Front Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish Bangladesh Tarikat Federation

18

12.13 3

8.61 17

4.28 2

4.7

1 0 0 – 0 – –

0.79 1 0.27 – 1.22 – – – 0.20 – – – – –

1.09 2 – 0 – 0 – 14 – 0 – 0 – –

0.68 0.02 0.00 7.25 0.00 0.01 –

0 0 0 – 0

0.15 0.02 0.19 – 0.00

0

0.94









0

0.03 0

0.25

– – –

– – –

– – –

– – –

0

0.06 0 – 0 – 0

0.05 0.04 0.03

– –

Source: Bangladesh Election Commission, . The data are compiled from the Statistical Reports of Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Parliamentary Elections of Bangladesh.

with less than 10 percent of popular votes. Except these two, no other Islamist political parties could secure mentionable percentage of votes. Similarly, in the 2001 election, percentages of votes for both JIB and IOJ further declined, and altogether Islamist political parties won less than 6 percent of popular votes. However, Islami Jatiya Oikya Front (IJOF), an alliance of a faction of Jatiya Party (JP) (led by former military ruler Ershad), Islami Shashontontro Andolon (ISA), and two other small political parties, secured 7.25 percent of popular votes, which was, in fact, the representation of the support of JP, not ISA.45 In the 2008 election, a large number of Islamist political parties participated, but altogether, they secured 6.7 percent of popular vote. The 2014 parliamentary election in Bangladesh had a voter turnout of 22 percent, as The New York Times indicates,46 while the 2018 election has been termed farcical by many international media.47 Islamist parties, mainly Bangladesh Tarikat Federation (BTF) participated in both elections but won only one seat in 201448 and one seat in 2018 election.49 In short, it can be stated that since 1996, Islamist parties could not win more than 10 percent popular vote. At the same time, their popular supports are on the decline; since 2001, Islamist parties could not win more than 6.7 percent of popular votes.

46 Md. Sohel Rana

Sri Lanka Until 2004, no Buddhist political party could manage to come to national politics in Sri Lanka as the country was ruled by either the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) or the United National Party (UNP) since its independence in 1948.50 The year 2004 was a breakaway from this tradition as for the very frst time a Buddhist political party called the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) or National Heritage Party, composed mainly of Buddhist monks and priests, appeared on the national level politics. Established in February 2004, JHU introduced a 12-point election manifesto with the central theme establishing a “righteous state” and governing as per the Buddhist principles.51 With such motto, it participated independently in the April 2004 parliamentary elections and competed with over 260 candidates. The JHU managed to win nine seats in the 225-member legislature, representing 5.97 percent of popular votes (Table 1.6). It subsequently aligned itself with the government led by Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)-dominated United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). Although the JHU played a signifcant role in promoting Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2005 presidential election, introducing anti-conversion bill to prevent evangelical Christian groups from converting rural people, and frst proposing the Nineteenth amendment of the Constitution in 2004 to establish Buddhism as ofcial state religion, its popular support signifcantly declined in the 2010 parliamentary election. JHU participated under the banner of UPFA alliance, but its popular votes declined as it was able to secure only three seats.52 By 2015, the JHU decided to withdraw its support for Rajapaksha and contest in election under the UNP-led United National Front for Good Governance

TABLE 1.6 Religious parties’share of votes in Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections, 2004–2015

Party Name

Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) Bodu Jana Peramuna Sri Lanka (BJP) Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) All Ceylon Makkal Congress (ACMC)

2004

2010

2015

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

Seat(s) Won

Votes (%)

9

5.97

3



3











0

0.18

5

2.02

8



7







3



4



Source: Election Commission of Sri Lanka, . Neil DeVotta, An Introduction to South Asian Politics, 2015, 96. Verite Research, “Mapping Sri Lanka’s Political Parties: Actors and Evolutions,”2017, 28. Andreas Johansson, Pragmatic Muslim Politics: The Case of Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, 2019, 20–22.

The “God Gap?”

47

(UNFGG) alliance. However, in 2015, a radical ofshoot of the JHU, Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), registered itself as a political party under the name the Bodu Jana Peramuna Sri Lanka (BJP) and contested in the parliamentary election. The BJP contested in 16 districts but received only 0.18 percent of the total popular votes.53 Although the 2015 parliamentary election attracted a voter turnout of 77.7 percent, an increase of 16 percent compared to 2010 election,54 JHU managed to secure only three seats, representing 1.3 percent of total legislative seats. While it is difcult to discern the corresponding percentage of popular votes that the JHU won behind three seats in 2010 and again in 2015 election as it ran under the UPFA and the UNP alliance, an estimated guess suggests that it would certainly not be more than 5.97 percent of the popular votes (as nine seats corresponded to the 5.97 percent vote in 2004). Therefore, it can be confrmed that Buddhist political parties in Sri Lanka could not manage to win more than 5.97 or 6 percent of the popular votes since 2004. Beside Buddhist nationalist political parties, some Muslim political parties are also part of Sri Lankan politics. The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) is most notable, which was established in 1981 by M.H. Ashraf, who was part of the da’wa movements of Jamaat-e-Islami in Sri Lanka in the 1970s.55 The SLMC contested independently in eastern districts and with the United National Front (UNF) alliance in other districts in the 2004 election but won fve seats with 2.02 percent of the popular vote. In 2010, the SLMC under the UNF won eight seats, while a breakaway of the SLMC, ACMC (established in 2005), contested under the UPFA umbrella and won only three seats.56 Altogether Muslim political parties won 11 out of 225 seats in 2010, representing 4.9 percent of total parliamentary seats. However, many political parties won seats in 2010 mainly because of the proportional representational system in Sri Lanka, which enables any political party to get representation if it receives 5 percent vote in an electoral district.57 In the next election in 2015, the SLMC won seven seats (six under the UNP banner and one independently), while the ACMC bagged four seats under the UNFGG alliance, but lost in Ampara district where it ran independently.58 Combining these two, Muslim political parties, contesting under national alliances, won 11 seats which represent 4.9 percent of total seats in the legislature. It is important to mention that Muslim political parties represent 11 seats in the current parliament, which is more than three times in comparison to the JHU as it represents only three seats. In short, this section fnds that religious political parties in South Asia have not been able to make signifcant electoral success. In India, although traditional religious political parties could never win 6 percent of popular votes polled in each of four states they participated, an opportunist religio-political party like BJP won largest majority in 2014 and 2019 elections. However, once BJP has started showing its Hindu nationalist attitudes, its popular support started declining. In Pakistan, Islamist political parties could not win more than 6.74 percent of the popular of votes since 2008. Similarly, in Bangladesh, Islamist parties were not able to win more than 6.7 percent of the popular votes since 2001. Likewise, in Sri Lanka, Buddhist political parties have not been able to win 6 percent of the popular votes

48 Md. Sohel Rana

since 2004. Therefore, it can be stated that religious political parties in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have not been able to win 7 percent of the popular votes since 2004.

Conclusion The chapter investigates public perception on the religion-politics mix in the presence of increasing religious values and practices among South Asian populations and its implications on the electoral performance of religious political parties. It has several fndings. First, there has been a sharp increase in religious values and practices among South Asian populations since the 1990s. Based on the evidence from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, the chapter fnds that increasing religious beliefs has a linear relationship with increasing confdence in religious organizations and leaders. Second, although religious citizens are likely to support the infuence and involvement of religious leaders and organizations in politics, South Asian populations have showed a deviation from this perception. The majority of populations in these four countries support religion and religious leaders in public spheres, but they do not appreciate the infuence of religious leaders on people’s voting decision and government. They prefer political leaders with religious beliefs, but they do not extend their support to religious leaders who claim to represent religion in public sphere. Third, people’s perceptions toward the involvement of religion and religious leaders are refected by their support to religious parties in elections. The chapter fnds that despite increasing importance on religion and religious leaders in public spheres, South Asian populations have not extended their electoral support to traditional religious political parties as manifested by their electoral performances. Though religio-political parties such as BJP in India can win the largest majority in parliament, their popular support starts declining once they reveal their religious nationalist attitudes. Therefore, the chapter concludes that even though there has been an increase of religiosity and religious citizens, that has not necessarily translated into electoral support for religious political parties. This is an aberration of the notion of God Gap in South Asia. South Asian populations tend to support religious leaders and organizations in public life, but they do not give vote to religious parties in elections for political ofce. This research has signifcant implications in South Asian politics. Faith and religion are central to the everyday life of the people of South Asia as they are blended with local, cultural, and historical factors. Although South Asian populations have continued to reject traditional religious political parties in elections, the mainstream parties, in a way, accept and legitimize those parties by political coalition-building to win elections and form government. This has been exemplifed in several occasions in South Asia: Pakistan Muslim League (PM)’s alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jatiya Party (JI)’s coalition building with Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh (JIB) and other Islamist parties, and the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP)’s

The “God Gap?”

49

coalition with the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU). Such coalitions give religious parties not only a legitimate cover in front of the public but also a way to survive in political life. Also, whether religious parties like JHU will learn to make targeted use of religion blending with nationhood as India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been doing remains an open question. Finally, in line with the global surge of religiosity, religion will continue to stay, religious political parties will continue to emerge in the public spheres, and their presence will continue to undermine the secular ethos of the nation-states in South Asia.

Suggested readings Pew Research Center, The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010, Pew Research Center Forum on Religion & Public Life (Washington, DC, 2012). Riaz, Ali, “Religion as a Political Ideology in South Asia,” in The Politics of Religion in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Ishtiaq Ahmed (London & New York: Routledge, 2011). Robinson, Rowena, “The Politics of Religion and Faith in South Asia,” Society and Culture in South Asia, 3 (2) (2017): 7–20. Upadhyay, Surya Prakash, “Secular Democracies, Governance and Politics of Religion in South Asia,” Society and Culture in South Asia, 3 (2) (2017): 244–61. van der Veer, Peter, “Religion in South Asia,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002): 173–87.

Notes 1 For details, see Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC: W.B. Eardmans Publishing Company, 1999), 2. 2 Zeev Moaz and Errol A. Henderson, Shrines, Scapegoats and World Politics: Religious Sources of Conflict and Cooperation in the Modern Era (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 122–9. The authors have used WRP data from 1945 to 2010 to show that the proportion of religious adherents has increased from 63.5 to 88.9 percent of the world population. They have also acknowledged that there are some statistical artifacts behind this estimation because of the increasing number of independent states and world population since 1945. They have noted that, even so, at least some of the increase in religiosity reflects an actual trend, rather than a combination of statistical artifacts. 3 Pew Research Center, The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010 (Washington, DC: Pew Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2012), 9. 4 For details, see Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The first edition of the book was published in 2004. 5 Pew Research Center, The Global Religious Landscape, 22–33. The percentages have been presented combining demographics of South Asian countries based on religion. The report shows that India, Nepal, and Bangladesh host 97.9 percent (94.3, 2.3, and 1.3 percent, respectively) of the world’s Hindu population. Similarly, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are home of 29.9 percent (11, 10.5, and 8.4 percent, respectively) of the world’s Muslim population. Likewise, Sri Lanka and India host 3 and 1.9 percent of the world’s Buddhist population, respectively, which total 4.9 percent.

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6 For details, see Laura R. Olson and John S. Green, “The Religion Gap,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 39 (3) (2006): 455–9; and Philip Habel and J. Tobin Grant, “The Demand for God and Government: The Dynamics of Religion and Public Opinion,” Politics and Religion, 6 (2013): 283. 7 Jacques Veron, “The Demography of South Asia from the 1950s to the 2000s,” Population, 63 (1) (2008): 9–89. 8 Meghna Sabharwal and Evan M. Berman, Public Administration in South Asia: India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (Cleveland, OH: CRC Press, 2016), 2. 9 Deepa M. Ollapolly, The Politics of Extremism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22–5. 10 Samirah Majumdar, “5 Facts about Religion in India,” Pew Research Center, June 29, 2018, (accessed June 18, 2020). 11 Jacob Poushter and Janell Fetterolf, “How People around the World View Religion’s Role in their Countries,” Pew Research Center, April 22, 2019, (accessed June 15, 2020). 12 Pew Research Center, “Pakistani Public Opinion,” August 13, 2009, (accessed June 19, 2020). 13 Ali Riaz, Lived Islam and Islamism in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Promotha Prokashan, 2017), 24. 14 Michael D. Driessen, Religion and Democratization: Framing Religious and Political Identities in Muslim and Catholic Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 214. 15 Kobe Dobbelaere, Secularization: An Analysis at Three Levels (Brussels: P.I.E. – Peter Lang, 2002), 169. 16 Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, “Religion and Preferences for Social Insurance,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 1 (2006): 262–3. 17 Tim Muller, “Religiosity and Attitudes towards the Involvement of Religious Leaders in Politics: A Multilevel-Analysis of 55 Societies,” World Values Research (WVR), 2 (1) (2009): 23. This analysis includes Bangladesh and Pakistan along with other states. 18 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 18–22. 19 See Ben Gaskins, Matt Golder, and David A. Siegel, “Religious Participation, Social Conservatism, and Human Development,” The Journal of Politics, 75 (4) (2013): 1125–41; also, see Muller, “Religiosity and Attitudes,” 18. 20 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 17. 21 Muller, “Religiosity and Attitudes,” 5. 22 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 22. 23 Peter van der Veer, “Religion in South Asia,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002): 173–87. 24 Surya Prakash Upadhyay, “Secular Democracies, Governance and Politics of Religion in South Asia,” Society and Culture in South Asia, 3 (2) (2017): 244–6. 25 Election Commission of India, “The Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order 1968,” . Two of the conditions are: win at least 2 percent of the total number of seats in the lower house (Lok Sabha) in the last general election and these seats must have won from at least three states; and the party is recognized as state party in at least four states. 26 Ibid. 27 Rekha Datta, “Hindu Nationalism or Pragmatic Party Politics: A Study of India’s Hindu Party,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 14 (4) (1999): 574. 28 Mark Zuergensmeyer, “The Global Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 64 (3): 262–73. 29 Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Modi-centric BJP 2014 Election Campaign: New Techniques and Old Tactics,” Contemporary South Asia, 23 (2) (2015): 151–66. 30 Milan Vaishnav, “Religious Nationalism and India’s Future,” in The BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism, ed. Milan Vaishnav (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2019), 12.

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31 Census 2011, ; also see India Today, “Indian States with Highest Population,” October 8, 2018, (accessed June 22, 2020). 32 Alyssa Ayres, “Why Narendra Modi’s Ruling Party No Longer Looks Invincible in 2019 Indian Elections,” Time, December 12, 2018, (accessed June 10, 2020). 33 Sumant Sen and Naresh Singaravelu, “How Many People Died during Anti-CAA Protests?” The Hindu, January 6, 2020, (accessed June 23, 2020). 34 Aditya Menon, “Why a ‘Modi Voter’ Isn’t Necessarily a ‘BJP Voter’?,”The Quint, October 30, 2019, (accessed June 24, 2020). 35 The Economic Times, “Far from Becoming an All-Powerful Juggernaut, BJP Now Looks Somewhat Lost,” February 11, 2020, (accessed June 22, 2020). 36 Farooq Tanwir, “Religious Parties and Politics in Pakistan,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 43 (2002): 252. 37 Ibid. 38 Riaz Hassan and Faiza Saleem, “The Performance of Religious Parties in Pakistan’s Elections,” ISAS Insights, 514 (2018): 1–7. 39 Ali Riaz, God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 41–5. 40 Ali Riaz, “Islamist Parties, Elections, and Democracy in Bangladesh,” in Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World, eds. Mechan Quinn and C. Hwang Julie (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2014), 158. 41 Frances Harrison, Political Islam, and Elections in Bangladesh (London: New Millennium, 2013), 50. 42 Ferdous Jahan and Asif M. Shahan, “Power and Influence of Islam-Based Political Parties in Bangladesh: Perception versus Reality,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, 49 (4) (2014): 429–30. 43 Ali Riaz and Kh. Ali Ar Raji, “Who Are the Islamists?” in Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh, eds. Ali Riaz and C. Christine Fair (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), 46. 44 Ibid., 64. 45 Ibid., 57. 46 Ellen Barry, “Low Turnout in Bangladesh Elections Amid Boycott and Violence,” The New York Times, January 5, 2014, (accessed June 26, 2020). 47 Editorial Board, “Bangladesh’s Farcical Vote,” The New York Times, January 14, 2019, (accessed June 24, 2020); Michael Safi, Oliver Holmes, and Redwan Ahmed, “Bangladesh PM Hasina Wins Thumbing Victory in Elections Opposition Reject as ‘Farcical,’” The Guardian, December 31, 2018, (accessed June 28, 2020). 48 Joyeeta Bhattacharjee, “Bangladesh: Election 2014 – An Assessment,” Observer Research Foundation (ORF), January 24, 2014, (accessed June 30, 2020). 49 Ali Riaz, Voting in a Hybrid Regime: Explaining the 2018 Bangladeshi Election (Singapore: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2019), 85. 50 Iselin Frydenlund, “Particularist Goals through Universalist Means: The Political Paradoxes of Buddhist Revivalism in Sri Lanka,” Buddhism and the Political Process, ed. Hiroko Kawanami (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016), 104.

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51 Neil DeVotta and Jason Stone, “Jathika Hela Urumaya and Ethno-Religious Politics in Sri Lanka,” Pacific Affairs, 81 (1) (2008): 38. 52 Neil DeVotta, An Introduction to South Asian Politics (London: Routledge, 2015), 96. 53 La Toya Waha, Religion and State Formation in Transitional Societies: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2018), 360. 54 Chandra R. De Silva, “Sri Lanka in 2015: A Year of Change,” Asian Survey, 56 (1) (2016): 201. 55 Andreas Johansson, Pragmatic Muslim Politics: The Case of Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (Cham: Springer, 2019), 18. 56 Verite Research (VR), “Mapping Sri Lanka’s Political Parties: Actors and Evolutions,” Westminster Foundation for Democracy, 2017, , 29. 57 Jayadeva Uyangoda, “Sri Lanka in 2010: Regime Consolidation in a Post-Civil War Era,” Asian Survey, 51 (1) (2011): 133. 58 Verite Research (VR), “Mapping Sri Lanka’s Political Parties,” 29.

2 ISLAM IN AFGHAN CONFLICTS AND POLITICS Abdulkader H. Sinno

The strategic use of religion plays an additive role in the ability of some Afghan political actors to legitimize their actions, mobilize support, undermine rivals, attract foreign aid, and control populations. Not all Afghan political actors can use religious language or sanction – only those who transcend divisions within a local, tribal, sectarian, ethnic, or national space and do not have a history of behavior considered “un-Islamic” can beneft from its advantages within that space, but not necessarily beyond it. These actors can aggressively leverage an Islamic agenda. Examples include several mujahideen organizations in the 1980s and the Taliban during their initial rise in 1994–2001 or during their insurgency against foreign occupation (2005–). Others, who do not have this kind of Islamic legitimacy, have to react to the strategic use of Islam by those who do. They may choose to adopt a strongly antiIslamic agenda (e.g., the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan before 1985), make symbolic gestures to counter the delegitimization process (PDPA between 1985 and 1992), or be pressed to accommodate religious demands (Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani from 2004 until the present). In all cases, such actors are at a strong disadvantage in a very conservative and religious Muslim country. The strategic use of religion may not be necessary for Afghan political actors to be successful and it is certainly not sufcient for them to outperform their rivals. Other factors such as foreign aid, organizational development, and strategic sophistication can be more important; but the strategic use of religious language and symbols brings additional advantages in this traditional society and may have tipped the balance in a number of the brutal and closely contested conficts that have plagued the country since 1979. In addition, the diferent types of Islamic rhetoric and symbols used by political actors in Afghanistan provide distinct advantages and liabilities. The strategic use of traditional Muslim language facilitates mobilization more efectively than do

54 Abdulkader H. Sinno

nationalist and other symbols. The adoption of Salaf Islamist language makes political actors more attractive to some motivated Muslim foreign sponsors but hinders mobilization. The use of a diluted, common-denominator Islamic language makes the political actor more attractive to Western donors but deprives it of the other advantages of the use of religious language and symbols. I test my argument by tracing the use of religious language and symbols by different Afghan organizations, including governments, and its efect on their ability to legitimize their actions, mobilize support, undermine rivals, attract foreign aid, and control populations in areas they controlled or contested. I begin the chapter with an introduction to politics and religion in Afghanistan, then discuss how diferent actors have used religion strategically for political legitimization, mobilization, and control in the country since the communist coup of April 1978. I conclude with a discussion of the signifcance of these fndings for Afghanistan’s current conficts.

Religion and politics in Afghan history Islam was introduced to Afghanistan very soon after Muslim armies left the Arabian Peninsula. Most Afghans probably became Muslims between the mid-seventh century, when Arab Muslims captured Herat, and the eleventh century, when the Ghaznavid dynasty conquered neighboring non-Muslim empires. With the Ghaznavids, Afghanistan became the center of a great Sunni Muslim empire, but this was not to last long. Between 1150, when Ghazni fell to the Ghorids, and the mid-eighteenth century, the populations that inhabited the boundaries of today’s Afghanistan were more or less autonomous subjects of regional empires. These included the destructive non-Muslim Mongols, the Timurids, the Mughals, and the Shiism-promoting Safavids. Afghans sometimes rebelled, with their always-restive tribes, such as the Hotaki Pushtuns, even threatening powerful neighbors. Still, the power, infuence and sectarian identity of the empires that controlled parts of Afghanistan helped to consolidate the region’s Muslim identity. Rivalry between Sunni and Shi’a empires also infuenced Afghanistan’s sectarian confguration.1 It is generally understood that modern Afghanistan was created in the mideighteenth century when Afghan leaders chose the powerful provincial potentate Ahmad Shah Abdali (who later changed his surname to Durrani) as their king. The dynasty was consolidated under the rule of his direct descendants until the Barakzai dynasty took hold with Dost Muhammad in the 1830s. Islam, like religions elsewhere in the world, was both a cementing and a divisive factor. For example, Afghan rulers used religious symbols, including artifacts purportedly connected to the Prophet Muhammad, to claim legitimacy and preempt resistance among tribes and ethnic minorities. Islam was used by the “Iron Amir,” Abdul-Rahman, to justify his conquest of Kafristan (land of infdels), which was renamed Nuristan (land of light) after its population converted to Islam. Resistance against invading powers was framed in religious terms and was led by men of religion and centered

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on Islamic motifs. The state justifed the persecution of the Shi’a Hazara on the basis of their sectarian identity. The lands that fall within Afghanistan’s current borders are unique in South and Central Asia because they were never colonized in a sustained way by Russia or Western powers. Since the founding of modern Afghanistan in the mid-eighteenth century, Afghans have fercely and successfully resisted attempts by foreign powers, particularly the British and Soviets, to occupy their land. Islam and its symbolic use played a major role in mobilizing support against the plans of neighboring superpowers to annex Afghanistan to their empires. Afghanistan’s lack of economic development, the presence of extensive networks of men of religion, the tribal structure, and lack of urbanization have all contributed to keeping Afghanistan a particularly conservative and religious country. In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was pressured by the expansionist policies of Tsarist Russia and the colonial British – an imperial rivalry that was dubbed the “Great Game.” The Russians captured some Afghan territories but did not invade Afghanistan, as the British feared, until much later. The British twice tried and failed to colonize the country (the Anglo-Afghan wars of 1839–42 and 1878–80). They were, however, successful in infuencing events in Afghanistan by allying with Afghan rulers such as Abdul-Rahman and in gaining concessions over Afghanistan’s foreign policy between 1879 and 1919, when they lost the third and last Anglo-Afghan war. The British also managed to demarcate the border between Afghanistan and British India in 1893 (the Durand Line) on advantageous terms, thus splitting Pushtun tribes between the two domains. The Durand Line would become a source of tension between Afghanistan and British India and, later, Pakistan. The state has always been weak relative to the social structure of the tribe and clan in Afghanistan. This is not particularly surprising in a country that is extremely mountainous, ethnically divided, and tribal. The state did, however, experience moments of strength under leaders who beneftted from outside support, particularly Abdul-Rahman, who received money and weapons from the British in return for giving up control over Afghanistan’s foreign policy. He used these resources to mobilize Pushtun tribes, put down revolts in minority areas, control new areas where the state had not reached before, move populations to pacify rebellious areas, and dispose of rivals. His rule was nonetheless exceptional and many Afghans value local independence and do not necessarily think that a strong state is desirable. The Barakzai dynasty ruled Afghanistan, with only short interruptions, until 1973 when King Zahir Shah (of its musahiban ofshoot) was overthrown by his cousin Muhammad Daoud and his allies from the Parshami faction of the Afghan communist party (PDPA). The Republic lasted until April 1978 when the other faction of the PDPA, the Khalqis, overthrew the regime and created the Marxist People’s Republic of Afghanistan in a coup dubbed the “Saur Revolution.”2 The communists had quite a few rivals in Kabul and some of the larger Afghan cities – particularly Islamists and even some Maoists. The Islamists fed to the countryside and to Pakistan to escape persecution and organize resistance. Those who survived

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would become part of the mujahideen movement that resisted the Soviet occupation that started in 1979. The rural areas where most of the Afghan population lived weren’t involved in any of these rivalries until the PDPA started sending its activists to the countryside to convince Afghans to become Marxists – with all the consequences this carries for economic relationships, faith, and social relations. This led to impromptu revolts that threatened the regime’s survival and began a series of events culminating in the Soviet invasion of the country.3 The Islamists who took refuge in the countryside and in Pakistan helped to organize some of the revolts and ultimately coalesced into seven Sunni mujahideen parties that received aid from the United States and other sponsors and distributed it to thousands of feld commanders to fght the Soviets. The Soviets established a client regime led by Parshamis, with armed forces numbering a total of some 250,000 fghters and committed 120,000 from among their best troops, 10,000 advisors and some of their most advanced weaponry to win this confict. Yet they withdrew in February 1989 after losing 35,000 soldiers and failing to achieve any gains.4 They continued to support their client regime with $5 billion a year until late 1991 when the Soviet Union ceased to be. Najibullah’s regime maintained itself within the larger cities, which it surrounded with its defensive positions, until April 1992. It fell apart when its client militias and many factions defected to make deals with mujahideen organizations led by Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or to strike out on their own. These factions, along with the Shi’a Hizbi Wadat, then competed to take control over Kabul in a bloody and destructive civil war. This war, and the predatory and violent practices that resulted from it, only ended when an organization emerged from the Pakistani religious schools (madrasas) to overwhelm the forces of most fghting organizations and warlords, except those of Ahmad Shah Massoud – the Taliban. The Taliban imposed a very strict version of shari’a (Islamic law) that required restrictive “Islamic” dress, limited entertainment, reduced women’s mobility and access to education and work, and severely punished transgressions. They were also able to reduce drug production at will and to provide law and order to Pushtun areas after a period of terrible chaos. The Taliban’s treatment of women and minorities, and their alliance with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda caused considerable hardship in some sectors of the Afghan population and hostility from the West. The September 2001 suicide attacks on the United States ushered in the direct involvement of the United States in Afghan conficts. Osama bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until well after the US invasion of Afghanistan, probably in an attempt to protect his hosts and difuse US energy in the pursuit of unknown attackers. There was little doubt, however, that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, and the United States invaded Afghanistan in October and November 2001 to defeat the organization and its Taliban hosts.5 The invasion was executed along an innovative model (later dubbed the “Afghan” model in military circles) that consisted of embedding special operations forces with Afghan allies on the ground to help direct massive air strikes to destroy Taliban defenses. The Afghan allies were expected to overrun the weakened Taliban defenses. This model

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reduced US military losses but provided very limited control over operations. This disadvantage became obvious in Tora Bora and Shah-i Kot, where less-motivated Afghan allies of the United States allowed Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaeda members to escape from the battlefeld. Still, the Taliban collapsed as a centralized government and military within two months of the beginning of the US attack. Its commanders fanned out across Pushtun areas of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan to partly reorganize as an insurgent organization. The US venture in Afghanistan has been grossly mismanaged. Security in Afghanistan has degenerated to the dismal levels that once facilitated the rise of the Taliban; economic growth is driven largely by drug production and the unsustainable spending of Westerners in Kabul; the state established by the US-led coalition is weak and very corrupt, and many regional leaders (including some particularly brutal and predatory ones such as Dustam and Shirzai before his death) have reestablished themselves, often with ofcial titles and seats in parliament. Afghans, particularly beyond Kabul, have seen little improvement in their lives, health, or education. Resistance to foreign occupation has increased dramatically since 2005. The Bush administration committed itself to providing better governance for Afghanistan at the time of the invasion. It therefore organized and managed several high-profle events, mobilized some international support, and engaged in limited institution building. The United States convened a November 2001 conference in Bonn, Germany, to appoint an interim administration under Hamid Karzai, a refned Pushtun local leader with long-standing ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States. It later (2002) convened two large, but not necessarily representative, gatherings of regional leaders (dubbed loya jirga or grand councils) to appoint Hamid Karzai as president of a transitional administration and to develop a constitution for the country.6 That bit of political and cultural theater was meant to give a veneer of legitimacy to the American-led process. The de facto political fragmentation of Afghanistan stands in stark contrast to the highly centralized Afghanistan described in a constitution that refects the wishes of Hamid Karzai and the Bush administration.7 The United States and the United Nations also helped to organize an October 2004 presidential election that Hamid Karzai won with 55 percent of the vote and a subsequent parliamentary election that produced a weak parliament. The failure of the American venture to fx the lawlessness, insecurity, and corruption it created helped the Taliban remobilize around 2004–5 to resist foreign occupation and the regime it backed. It would be joined by Hekmatyar’s rump Hizb which would later join the regime, and, in 2015, by a regional faction of the Islamic State (Khorasan Province).

Afghanistan today Afghanistan today has a constitution that vests strong powers in the presidency and an electoral system that discourages the formation of strong political parties in its parliament. The president, currently Dr. Ashraf Ghani, appoints the governors of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and is technically the commander-in-chief of the

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armed forces. The constitution and the powers it confers, however, are a fantasy. Ghani, like Karzai before him, has limited de facto infuence; the state apparatus is deeply corrupt and barely functional. Legal institutions and the police are feared by the population because of their corruption and abuses. The president only a few years ago gained real control over the Afghan National Army which depends on the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military presence for training, strategic planning, logistics, fnances, and operations. Local leaders have considerable autonomy, and the resistance to the US occupation and the regime it established has increased dramatically. The US-led coalition has all but acknowledged failure in Afghanistan after committing a trillion dollars and a peak 140,000 troops backed by another 100,000 contractors.8 Few people believe that the current government would last long if US forces were to leave the country. The economy of Afghanistan is in a shambles and relies in great part on the production of opium. Around one in ten Afghans relies directly on this crop and many others beneft indirectly from the money it puts in circulation. Opium production contributes about half of the country’s tiny gross domestic product (GDP), is a major driver of state corruption, and helps to fund the insurgency. About one million Afghans have become drug users.9 The other major source of economic activity is international aid, which is drying up as of 2020. Afghanistan today is one of the poorest countries in the world with a GDP per capita of some $600. Its 35,000,000 or so people have dismal literacy rates – 31 percent in 2018 with only 17 percent for women. Forty-fve percent of Afghans are under the age of 15. The total fertility rate is 4.6 children per woman (2016) and life expectancy is 63 years for both men and women. About one in two Afghans lives below the poverty line and one in three children sufers from malnutrition.10 Afghanistan doesn’t have an easy way to return to good economic health. The country has natural resources, mostly mineral deposits, but they are hard to extract under current circumstances. The agricultural sector has been sufering from deforestation, the destruction of irrigation systems, and poor agricultural practices. Afghans will need a period of sustained peace and will depend on foreign assistance for a long time before they can generate enough economic activity on their own to return to a normal economy that doesn’t rely on drugs and smuggling.

Overview of the major religions and religious composition of the population Afghans today are nearly all Muslims. Three of the four largest ethnic groups – the Pushtun (around 40 percent of population), the Tajiks (30 percent), and Uzbeks (7 percent) – are mostly Sunni Muslims. The Hazaras in the middle of the country and the larger cities (10–15 percent) and the urban Qizilbash are mostly Shi’a Muslims. About 1–2 percent of the population, mostly in the north, are Ismaili Muslim. The members of most of Afghanistan’s smaller ethnic groups (such as Baluch, Turkmen, Aimaks, and Nuristanis) are Sunni Muslims. Altogether, at least

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80 percent of Afghans are Hanaf Sunnis and the balance are mostly Twelver Shi’a. Afghanistan has tiny minorities of Hindus and Sikhs and a handful of Jews.

State and religion Islam is, and has been for centuries, the ofcial religion of Afghanistan, the moral basis and reference for its diverse cultures, the foundation of national unity, and a dominant presence in every Afghan’s life. Islam unifes Afghans because it emphasizes faith over ethnicity in a mostly Muslim country. Networks of highly infuential men of religion become particularly powerful in times of crises such as foreign invasions and perceived threats to culture and faith. In addition to Hanaf Sunni clerics, Suf orders (Naqshibandis and Qadiris) also played a strong mobilization role in the past. Madrasas in both Afghanistan and Pakistan play an important role in teaching Afghan youths, mostly Pushtun, the principles of the faith and, for some, an uncompromising version of it that requires the imposition of strict Islamic law.11 Networks of transnational Islamists have also helped to spread understandings of Islam (Salaf, Muslim Brotherhood, Iranian-style Shi’a Islamism, etc.) that difer from indigenously developed perspectives and lean toward the revolutionary and militant. New religious elites – more intransigent, better linked to transnational movements, more modern – replaced old religious elites during the horrifc wars of the 1980s and 1990s among both Sunnis and Shi’a.12 Their perspectives and ideologies have trickled down to a substantial portion of the population. In the Taliban era (1996–2001), the state and the organization, which defned itself as the protector of traditional Islamic mores as understood in the Pashtun hinterlands, were the same. The Taliban established a “morality police” (‘Amr bilma’rouf wa nahiy ‘an al-munkar) to punish public behavior that did not meet its leaders’ understanding of how Muslims should comport themselves. It harassed men and women for a wide range of perceived transgressions, limited the schooling of girls and restricted their access to jobs, and implemented legal punishment based on hudud, traditional Islamic rules for dealing with crimes. The Afghan state established by the United States and its coalition allies in 2002 is based on a mishmash of Western-inspired and Islamic principles. It is technically a democracy with a constitution and a reserved quota of parliamentary seats reserved for women. On the other hand, many of its leading fgures are ultra-conservatives and its vulnerable leadership often adopts and enforces conservative measures, as I discuss next, in the hope of wooing the Taliban insurgent into peace talks.

Religio-political parties and other groups Afghanistan has always had, and continues to have, a fragmented polity. Its diferent kings had to contend with rivals, strong independent tribes, and infuential local leaders. Afghanistan’s only non-communist president, Muhammad Daud, had to manage his communist Parshami allies, their communist Khalqi rivals, Maoist factions, Islamist groups, and the same tribal, clan, and other groups that made

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Afghanistan a challenging country to govern and conquer before him. The Islamist groups that escaped the communist takeover in Kabul ultimately coalesced into seven large Sunni mujahideen organizations during the jihad. These were mostly based on patronage and sufered internally from the fractiousness that afected the Afghan polity more broadly.13 In the Hazarajat, a number of Shi’a Islamist organizations formed during the jihad but then coalesced into the Hizbi Wahdat with Iranian encouragement in 1987.14 The end of foreign support to warring factions in Afghanistan led to the disintegration of the regime of the previously communist Najibullah and the organizations of most of his mujahideen rivals. Those that did survive by 1994 – Hekmatyar’s Hizbi Islami, Hizbi Wahdat, Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Shura Nazar, Dostum’s Jumbish, and Ismail Khan’s emirate – were soon ravaged by the Taliban during their meteoric rise. Only Massoud’s force still held some territory, about 10 percent of Afghanistan, in December 2001 when the United States intervened to end Taliban rule. Since US and NATO forces entered Afghanistan, the polity has been divided between its fractious government with its independent administrators and police commanders, powerful local leaders, Taliban, Hizbi Islami and Islamic State insurgents, al-Qaeda militants, US-organized militias, and drug trafckers. Many local leaders have a seat in parliament and maintain armed groups. Their beliefs vary from Taliban-like, such as the previous mujahideen leader Abd Rab-al-Rasul Sayyaf, modernist Islamist previous insurgent Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to the secular ethnocentric ones that pay lip service to Islam, such as Abdul-Rashid Dostum.

The strategic use of Islam in Afghan politics and conficts The strategic use of religion plays an important role in the ability of some Afghan political actors to legitimize their actions, mobilize support, undermine rivals, attract foreign aid, and control populations. Not all Afghan political actors can use religious language or sanction – only those who transcend divisions within a local, tribal, sectarian, ethnic, or national space and do not have a history of behavior considered “un-Islamic” can beneft from its advantages within that space, but not necessarily beyond it. Others, who do not have this kind of Islamic legitimacy, have to react to the use of Islam by those who do. They may choose to adopt a strongly anti-Islamic agenda, make symbolic gestures to counter the delegitimization process, or be forced to accommodate religious demands. In all cases, actors who are outmatched in their Islamic credentials are at a strong disadvantage in a very conservative and religious Muslim country. I argue elsewhere15 that organizational dynamics is the most important factor that shapes the outcome of complex social conficts. This is not to say that other factors do not matter or do not contribute an incremental or amplifying efect. I show in my statistical study, for example, that outside aid has an amplifying efect on an organization’s ability to defeat others. In this chapter, I focus on the particular efect of religious credentials in Afghanistan, not to argue that they are more important than others, but to trace the processes that allow them to sometimes

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provide an important advantage in closely contested conficts. Being credibly labeled as “non-Muslim” or un-Islamic (kafr) can be very damaging. One historical example of how this process works in Afghanistan is that of King Amanullah (ruler 1919–29). Amanullah was a popular king early in his tenure, particularly because he defeated the British in the Third British–Afghan War and regained control over Afghanistan’s foreign afairs. Later, however, he failed to resist opposition from the tribes and other societal factions. Confict between centralizing kings and independent-minded tribal leaders was nothing new in Afghanistan, but Amanullah was vulnerable to accusations that he was not a good Muslim because he discouraged the veiling and seclusion of women, introduced secular education, and promoted other measures inspired by the reforms of Turkey’s Ataturk. Some clerics declared him to be an infdel and a picture of him on an ofcial visit abroad with his unveiled wife was broadly circulated to make the point. The accusations deprived Amanullah of legitimacy, emboldened his rivals, and weakened the resolve of his supporters.16 Amanullah left for a European exile when he saw the end coming in 1929. This is not to say that an Afghan ruler cannot undermine the Islamic religious scholars (ulema) and other men of religion. The experience of Abdul Rahman in doing precisely this is enlightening when contrasted with that of Amanullah. Abdul Rahman “out-Islamed” the mullahs he sidelined by emphasizing the Muslim identity of the state and the importance of the “duty” of jihad, claiming that authority to rule was conferred upon him by God, that resisting the king’s will was unIslamic, and giving the state the right to regulate religious practice.17 This is exactly the point of this chapter: Amir Abdul Rahman’s successful attempt to centralize and strengthen the state could not be undermined by the use of the efective strategy leveled against Amanullah of questioning his Islamic credentials. The contest between the ruler and society’s dense solidarity groups is always a close one and this one factor can tip the balance against the monarch. The diferent types of Islamic rhetoric and symbols used by political actors in Afghanistan provide distinct advantages and liabilities. The strategic use of traditional Muslim language facilitates mobilization better than do nationalist and other symbols. The adoption of Salaf Islamist language makes political actors more attractive to some motivated Muslim foreign sponsors but hinders mobilization. The use of a diluted, common-denominator Islamic language makes the political actor more attractive to Western donors but deprives it from the other advantages of the use of religious language and symbols. In the following sections, I trace how the Afghan organizations and governments that had the credibility to use Islamic symbols and language beneftted from it to gain legitimacy for their actions, mobilize support, undermine rivals, attract foreign aid, and control populations.

Religion and confict during the Soviet occupation (1979–89) The PDPA was particularly aggressive in its anti-Muslim stance after it took over state institutions in 1978. The party sent activists to the villages to teach Marxism,

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imprisoned Muslim clerics, and changed family laws to refect the new ruling elites’ views of women’s rights.18 The intrusiveness of the PDPA activists, along with landownership and other laws that challenged established rural elites, encouraged revolt in the countryside. The Islamists who took refuge from the communist coup, whether modernists or Sufs, started to actively organize the revolt and liaising with Pakistani, Iranian, Gulf, and other potential sponsors. The Sunni mujahideen were consolidated into four modernist Islamist parties and three conservative pro-monarchy parties. Party leaders were generally widely respected fgures who derived charisma from religious scholarship (in the case of the Islamists) or lineage (the traditionalists).19 There were diferences in the language and methods used by the mujahideen parties, and these diferences afected their ability to mobilize support and attract aid. The traditionalists’ conservative views helped them to mobilize a broader swath of the population by using traditional, patronage-based arrangements and sparing them from having to promote a new ideology or ways of organizing. These same views made them less attractive than the modernist Islamists in the eyes of their Pakistani and Gulf Arab benefactors, who supported the modernists’ readiness to form “modern” fghting organizations infused with a coherent revolutionary ideology. One modern Islamist party in particular, Hekmatyar’s Hizbi Islami, struggled with mobilization because of its ideology, in spite of investing considerable resources in schooling and ideological training.20 But its universal Islamist ideology allowed it to mobilize across ethnic divides among Sunnis better than other parties. In general, by virtue of being Muslim and framing this as a Muslim jihad, the mujahideen as a whole found it easy to attract support in their fght against the regime and the “atheist” Soviet superpower that occupied their country. The regime tried to discredit the mujahideen through its media outlets by implying that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose Islamist ideology was the least attractive to Afghans, was the leader and symbol of the resistance. It also used the term “Wahhabi” to describe Hekmatyar and other mujahideen leaders. They were referring to Saudi Wahhabism, which many in Afghanistan viewed at the time as a particularly intransigent understanding of Islam that was intolerant of how they lived and practiced the religion. Some Afghans resented, for example, how some of the early volunteers (ansar) from the Gulf region used to criticize as sinful innovation cultural practices such as planting fags on tombs. This Soviet and regime strategy may have hurt Hekmatyar, but it had little impact on the resistance as a whole. When the communist regime realized the limitations it faced in its attempt to mobilize support and the risks involved in being framed as anti-Islamic, the PDPA tried to move, or to appear to move, to the political center and to escape its anti-Muslim reputation.21 Democratic Republic of Afghanistan President Babrak Karmal, for instance, made a November 1985 public speech in which he said that the PDPA should not monopolize power, private agriculture should be encouraged, tribal self-government should be allowed, Islam should be respected, and Afghanistan should be more neutral in its foreign relations.22 He also changed national insignia to include Islamic symbols once more (they were removed in

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1978) and began to express personal piety in public. He accused the mujahideen of destroying Islamic sites and of using Islam for political purposes. Other regime fgures, like the Shi’a Sultan Ali Kishtmand, tried to appeal to the Hazara population on the basis of both religion and ethnicity with similarly poor results.23 In 1987, President Najib, who succeeded Karmal in 1986, re-added “Allah” to his name, renamed the PDPA the Watan (Nation) Party, reversed unpopular reforms, proclaimed his respect for Islam and modifed the constitution to say that Afghanistan is a Muslim state, declared a ceasefre and amnesty, appointed some non-party fgures to the cabinet, and did away with communist symbols, with Moscow’s blessing.24 These attempts by PDPA leaders to burnish their Islamic credentials had little chance of success because of the party’s anti-Islamic history and past radical Marxist ideology. The PDPA regime was also defended by the presence of up to 120,000 Soviet troops and therefore could not be dissociated from Moscow’s ofcially atheistic ideology. The USSR, and Russia before it, are also widely understood in Afghan historical memory to have brutalized the Muslim populations they dominated in Central Asia and to have destroyed Islamic institutions there, and therefore were seen as being de facto anti-Muslim. And as William Maley in his excellent study of the PDPA regime’s legitimization strategies tells us: [The regime’s] attempt to use Islam as a rallying point has been preempted by the emergence of the Afghan mujahideen, who are able plausibly to present themselves as defenders of Islamic values in a way which the regime simply cannot. Islam has proved to be an ideology of resistance to, rather than support for, the regime, and there is virtually nothing that the regime can do to turn this situation around.25 Another way Islam afected the dynamics of the confict was through the Soviets’ fear of the spread of Islamist zeal to their own Muslim-majority republics. Substantial numbers of Turkmen, Uzbeks, and Tajiks (some estimate the number of their descendants at half a million in the 1990s) fed Soviet-occupied lands to Afghanistan in the wake of the “Basmachi” revolt.26 As resistance commanders in the north of Afghanistan gained confdence, assistance from Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), and military expertise, they and the descendants of the “Basmachi” performed incursions into Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, such as the March 1987 bombing of the Soviet Tajik town of Pyandzh. Armed with weapons and Korans, the Afghans had substantial infuence over their coreligionists across the border, as demonstrated by the immediate spread of Islamist activities after the Soviet collapse, particularly in Tajikistan.27 The links that the all-Union Islamic Renaissance Party (created in the former Soviet Union in 1990) developed with Afghan mujahideen a couple of years after its creation also attest to such infuence.28 A leading authority on Soviet Central Asia in the West described the efect of a then possible Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the following way:

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The effect of a complete Soviet withdrawal on Muslim society in Central Asia would be colossal. . . . It would be demonstrated [in that event] that Soviet might was not invincible and that resistance is possible. What are the Afghans for Central Asia? It is a small, wild and poor country. So then, if the Afghans could inflict (such) a military and political defeat, then that makes anything possible. And everyone in Central Asia knows that. I think that in Soviet Russia they know it too.29 And indeed, they did. Public declarations by a number of Soviet ofcials, including Gorbachev himself, indicated that they were worried about the spread of the Islamist creed to their Muslim-majority republics.30 Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze requested US assistance in stemming the spread of “Islamic fundamentalism” when he conveyed to US Secretary of State George Shultz the Soviet decision to withdraw on September 16, 1987, leaving Shultz with the belief that “he was clearly worried about the Islamic republics in the Soviet Union.”31 Lesser Soviet ofcials were given early retirement because they implied that the Islamic resurgence would have spread to the Soviet Union if it weren’t for intervention, and Russian intelligence agency (KGB) ofcials publicly stated that events in Afghanistan were linked to CIA eforts to exploit Islam in Muslim Soviet republics.32 Fiery statements by mujahideen leaders who declared their desire to free “the Muslim lands of Bukhara, Khiva and Khorezm” might well have fed this fear.33 Their threats were reinforced by statements from Pakistani President Zia-ul Haq, the leading supporter of the Afghan jihad, who told the seasoned journalist Selig Harrison that “we took risks as a frontline state, and we won’t permit it to be like it was before, with Indian and Soviet infuence there and claims on our territory. It will be a real Islamic state, part of a pan-Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims in the Soviet Union, you will see.”34 Zia-ul Haq was not a man who limited himself to empty threats, as Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf of the ISI informs us in his revealing account of ISI-supported mujahideen actions across the Amu Daria River: The cross-border strikes were at their peak during 1986. Scores of attacks were made across the Amu from Jozjan and Badaksan Provinces. Sometimes Soviet citizens joined in these operations, or came back into Afghanistan to join the mujahideen. .  .  . In at least one instance some Soviet soldiers deserted to us. That we were hitting a sore spot was confirmed by the ferocity of the Soviets’ reaction. Virtually every incursion provoked massive aerial bombing and gunship attacks on all villages south of the river in the vicinity of our strike.35 The earlier Soviet withdrawal of their Central Asian troops and their replacement with Slavic ones indicates that they were concerned with the potential for fraternization across the border.36 Add to that the Soviet leaders’ full awareness of the explosive growth of Central Asian populations – the Uzbek and Tajik populations

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trebled between 1959 and 1989 while that of the USSR as a whole increased by just 36.8 percent – and their fears become understandable. Those fears seemed well founded during 1992–93 when both Massoud and Hekmatyar trained and armed thousands of Islamist Tajiks and sent them back across the Amu Daria while providing shelter for tens of thousands of Tajik refugees.37 These Soviet fears of a spreading political Islam probably motivated Moscow to remain longer in Afghanistan than it would otherwise have done, and to continue supporting the regime in Kabul so long as it could do so.

Religion and politics during the Afghan civil war (1989–94) Islam played a very minor role in the Afghan civil war that succeeded the Soviet withdrawal of February 1989. The biggest change from the years of the antiSoviet jihad, and before the 1992 collapse of the Najibullah regime, was that this regime could have been slightly more credible when claiming that it was not anti-Islamic. After the regime collapsed, its diferent factions aligned themselves with diferent mujahideen parties. Some Khalqis joined Hekmatyar, some Parshamis joined Ahmad Shah Massoud or Dostum, and some Hazara units joined Hizbi Wahdat. The regime’s Uzbek and Ismaili militias (led by Dostum and Sayyid Mansur Nadiri, respectively), as well other smaller ones, defected and became independent forces. The larger mujahideen parties largely fragmented, and their feld commanders became independent local leaders, some of whom engaged in predatory activities. The larger fghting forces – Hekmatyar’s Hizb, Massoud’s forces, Dostum’s militia, and the Shi’a Hizbi Wahdat fought fercely over Kabul, causing much destruction and many casualties. The consequence of all this was to tarnish the reputation and Islamic credentials of most mujahideen leaders and parties, particularly among the Pushtun. Islamic ideology and sectarian identity also afected the patterns of foreign sponsorship of the diferent fghting factions: the Shi’a Hizbi Wahdat depended on support from co-sectarian Iran, the Salaf Abd-Rab al-Rassul Sayyaf who frequently clashed with Wahdat received considerable aid and volunteers from the Gulf, and Hekmatyar was backed by Arabs and Pakistanis. To be sure, however, there were other major drivers of foreign aid such as geopolitical interests and ethnic afnity.38

The rise of the Taliban (1994–2001) Islam obviously played a major part in the rise and fall of the Taliban: the organization framed itself as the most Islamic of all organizations in Afghanistan, defned its goal as bringing religious law to the land, used its Islamic image to undermine rivals in Pushtun areas, and used shari’a and Islamic symbols as tools of control after it spread its infuence. The Taliban grew from a small group of idealistic religious students with some military training into a sprawling organization that dominated more than nine-tenths

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of Afghanistan in less than fve years.39 They swept away all the warlords – petty and mighty alike, with the single exception of Massoud’s organization – that had partitioned and terrorized the country to impose a nearly unifed political order for the frst time since 1979. I explain elsewhere40 how the Taliban accomplished this, and I focus here only on how the strategic use of Islam helped them to achieve their goals. In Pushtun areas, the Taliban faced hundreds of armed groups and their particular brand of traditional “village” Islam facilitated their spread. The carefully calibrated image and message of the Taliban were essential components of their successful expansion across Pushtun areas, and were later tweaked, with lesser success, to win over other constituencies. The image and message of the Taliban both reduced the ability of rival commanders to rely on their followers’ support in case they wanted to resist the Taliban advance and prevented diferent local leaders from coalescing against them the way they would have were they Soviets, British, or Americans, the forces of a regime under the tutelage of a foreign power, or antitribal Islamists such as Hekmatyar. The identity of the Taliban leaders and rank and fle infuenced the way they were perceived and the credibility accorded to their message, but probably not the way most observers believe it did. Some argue that it is the Pushtun identity of the Taliban that mattered.41 Others suggest that the identity in question is Durrani as opposed to Ghilzai, but even this should probably be nuanced further because several Taliban leaders (including Mullah Omar) were of Ghilzai extraction.42 Edwards, who spent considerable time among the Pushtun, probably best isolates the specifc favor of agenda-linked identity that spared the Taliban from being unacceptable to most rural Pushtun: Another factor in explaining the Taliban’s success is that they consistently downplayed tribal or regional identities in favor of what might be called “village identity.” . . . In identifying purist culture and tradition with the Islam of the village, the Taliban were indirectly condemning the Islam of the parties since most of the party leaders were products of Kabul University or had worked for state-sponsored institutions. They were also putting themselves on a par with the people whose support they had to enlist if their movement was going to be successful.43 Identity mattered not because of who the Taliban were but because of who they were not. The Taliban were not hindered in their expansion within the Pushtun areas by having urban backgrounds, being modernist Islamists with anti-tribal dispositions, having a long record of ambitious expansion, or being non-Pushtun. Kabuli urbanites (e.g., PDPA leaders) were perceived as wanting to expand the power of a central government and of being culturally alien to rural Pushtun. Modernist Islamists (e.g., Hekmatyar) were perceived as planning to sacrifce local political and cultural autonomy in their efort to create a centralized and modernizing Islamic state. Established organizations that had attempted past expansion (e.g.,

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Hizb, Ismail Khan, Sayyaf) had clashed with many commanders and therefore lost their ability to claim neutrality. Non-Pushtuns would have been seen as alien and unacceptable by the historically dominant Pushtun, but Pushtuns were not necessarily unacceptable to minority groups if they did not impose a domineering and discriminatory regime. If the Taliban’s identity mattered because of who they were as opposed to who they were not, then Mullah Omar, a Ghilzai of unremarkable lineage, would not have mustered support among Durranis. In spite of his lineage, Mullah Omar was able to woo support across Pushtun areas because of the Islamic vision he and his organization articulated and their projected image as credible purveyors of this vision. The credibility of the Taliban’s message and image could not be undermined because of who they were, but what really mattered were the religious message and image, not the Taliban members’ ethnic, tribal, or qawm identities. A critical component of the Taliban’s image is the perception of them as neutral in the context of ongoing Afghan conficts. They also suggested at an earlier stage that they were not interested in wresting power for themselves. The Taliban’s perceived neutrality made them acceptable neighbors and intermediaries for many commanders. The way the Taliban approached commanders leveraged the neutral role of religious fgures in Pushtun tradition: Taliban sent religious envoys ahead to demand that local commanders disarm and dismantle roadblocks. Most duly did. Some even offered money, vehicles and weapons to help Taliban eliminate their rivals. But then Taliban pushed aside these collaborators too.44 These religious leaders also paved the way for the Taliban’s expansion by communicating their message in at least some areas not yet under their control. Many were trained in the same madrasas as Taliban members and their network represented the only remaining form of organization next to those of local leaders and the Hizb in Pushtun areas. The Taliban leveraged cultural knowledge and norms as well, to project an aura of invincibility. This reduced the commanders’ perception of their own ability to resist them and the willingness of their fghters to follow them into battle; it also provided assurances for those who would accept surrender or co-option. There is no stronger evidence of the importance the Taliban gave to the preservation of Pushtunwali (a Pushtun tribal code that Pushtuns believe is grounded in Islam) norms and Islamic solidarity than their willingness to shelter Osama bin Laden until the bitter (possible) end, the way a good Pushtun is expected to do for his guest. As one Taliban leader candidly acknowledged, Taliban leaders would have lost the respect of their followers and consequently endangered the organization’s cohesion if they had given up bin Laden. With Pushtunwali came cultural assets that reduced the cost of Taliban expansion. As they expanded, the Taliban brought back collective memories of Pushtun uprisings and symbols that were enshrined in oral culture. Reputation became a valuable asset to risk, thus committing those

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who declared their loyalty to maintaining it. And even a certain degree of susceptibility to rumor and superstition might have contributed to Taliban victories. Rumors circulated that those who fred on the advancing religious students were miraculously stricken with fear, incapacitated by unexplained bleeding, or fell into a coma. Although there is no evidence that such rumors were decisive, no other force in Afghanistan could have inspired religious and superstitious fear in those who were inclined to believe in it more than the Taliban.45 The Taliban also astutely used their knowledge of the Pushtun social landscape to decide whether to co-opt, discard, or assassinate diferent commanders. The Taliban co-opted local leaders who wouldn’t tarnish their fnely calibrated image as heralds of a better Islamic order and who could enhance their military potential. Jalaludin Haqqani, the master guerrilla leader and uncompromising learned Islamic scholar without independent ambitions, was the epitome of the co-optable commander. Commanders tarnished by a history of predation or loyalty to the Hizb or Jamiat were better discarded, and their followers recruited on an independent basis or disbanded. Of course, Taliban choices were not always fawless in this regard. They recruited well-trained members of the defunct communist Khalqi faction (some 1,600 of them, according to Hekmatyar claims) to enhance their military capabilities but discarded them by 1998 after realizing the damage they caused to their image and found alternative sources of military expertise. Once in power, the Taliban used an extreme version of shari’a to control the population and impose law and order. The strict dress code for men and women was a signal to all that their authority is absolute. It developed a specialized policing organization, the ‘Amr bil-Ma’rouf wal Nahi’ an al-Munkar (Promotion of Virtue and Discouragement of Vice), to impose and enforce a strict moral order. This later became the dreaded department whose enforcement of extreme edicts made news in the Western press. While the zeal of ‘Amr bil-Ma’rouf led to excesses that damaged the Taliban’s reputation at home and abroad, it helped to keep the rest of the Taliban in check and prevented others from committing crimes in its name.46 It also became the most infuential, autonomous, and powerful ministry and received independent funding from the Arab Gulf. The Taliban further enforced discipline by creating a three-tiered judicial system to enforce shari’a.47 The Taliban used symbols of Islam to gain legitimacy. Taliban leader Mullah Omar took the title of Amir al Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful), called the country “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” and appeared in front of 1,200 Pushtun religious leaders wearing the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, a symbol of Islamic authority.48 The Islamic ideology of the Taliban attracted fnancial and military aid from like-minded Muslims in Pakistan and the Gulf. Non-Afghan troops that were valued for their advanced tactical training and tenacity, including some followers of Osama bin Laden, were organized as the crack 055 Brigade that allowed the Taliban to win decisive battles and enforce discipline at the front.49 The particular Muslim identity of the Taliban provided them with access to a network of madrasas across the border in Pakistan. These madrasas provided the

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Taliban with highly committed recruits who helped their war efort.50 The training and brotherhood of the madrasas also reduced the cost of keeping the Taliban cohesive.51 The madrasa education ensured that new organizational members had very similar worldviews, were ready to obey the leadership fanatically, and provided a thorough background check on the pupils. The Dar al-’Ulum Haqqania madrasa near Peshawar provided the elite training ground and produced much of the cohesive Taliban leadership. It was easy for the Taliban to “out-Muslim” its Pushtun rivals in 1994–96, including Hekmatyar’s Hizb whose fghters simply abandoned the front when the Taliban approached, because they had all been tarnished by un-Islamic behavior such as predation, the killing of civilians or naked political ambition. This factor played a much smaller role when the Taliban faced minority organizations, such as the Shi’a Hizbi Wahdat, Ismail Khan’s emirate, Dostum’ Jumbish, and Massoud’s Shura Nazar.

The American occupation (2002–19) The Taliban and al-Qaeda did not quite disappear after the US invasion of Afghanistan and the standof in Tora Bora. The Taliban reorganized as an insurgent force around 2004 and al-Qaeda focused on providing it with tactical, media, and fnancial support. A third but smaller group, the rump Hizb-i Islami, also initiated insurgent activities after the 2002 return of Hekmatyar from exile in Iran. Later in 2017, Hekmatyar would join the regime after striking a peace agreement with it. In 2014, small Taliban and TTP (Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan – the Pakistani Taliban) groups, along with a small Uzbek contingent, declared fealty to the Islamic State, thus constituting its “Khorasan Province,” because they felt, among other reasons, that the Taliban was not aggressive enough in its campaign against foreign occupiers and the Kabul regime. Over time, the Khorasan Province was considerably weakened by Taliban, TTP, and US operations. The insurgency’s intensity has been increasing steadily since the spring of 2005. As of 2020, The US-led coalition spent a trillion dollars and committed a peak of 140,000 troops and 100,000 contractors, of which more than 5,000 were killed, in its unsuccessful attempt to defeat the Taliban. As of early 2020, a US force of 14,000 troops and massive US Airforce assets are helping maintain a corrupt Afghan government’s defensive positions. The Taliban are making territorial gains and killing regime troops in large numbers daily and feel that they are on the cusp of victory. The Trump administration, like the Obama one before it, is pleading for a face-saving agreement with the Taliban that would get them to promise not to shelter al-Qaeda anymore in return for an American withdrawal.52 Minority militias have rearmed in anticipation of a coming civil war after the collapse of the Kabul regime. As of 2020, Afghanistan is nearing an endgame. I explain elsewhere the complex factors that allowed the Taliban, a small insurgent group with one-thousandth of the operating budget of the US-led coalition, to fght the world’s strongest military power to a stalemate.53 These strategic, policy,

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and organizational factors are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the Taliban’s use of religious symbolism, discourse, and messaging certainly gave them an advantage over their opponents. They began their resurgence by spreading their message of jihad against what they framed to be an anti-Muslim occupier and its puppet regime by distributing leafets (night letters) and through broadcasts of Radio Sharia. The United States and the coalition have been at a considerable disadvantage in winning the Afghans’ support for their operations and for the Karzai regime by being non-Muslim forces. Their non-Muslim identities and a history of highly publicized anti-Muslim and negligent behavior make it very easy for their enemies to present them as anti-Afghan, anti-Muslim, and as being similar to Afghanistan’s brutal erstwhile Soviet occupiers. The US military and government also assisted Taliban messaging by engaging in a brutal counterinsurgency that caused many civilian deaths, the mistreatment and murder of prisoners, arbitrary arrests, and the abuse of civilians by US troops and their Afghan allies. News of the desecration of the Koran (purported or real) and of the abuse of Afghan prisoners by US troops in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, and Guantanamo caused riots in protest in diferent parts of Afghanistan. The Americans’ reputation also sufered from the desecration of the bodies of Taliban fghters in October 2006, the invasion of the privacy and killing of Afghans during search and seizure operations in their own homes, the destruction of Afghan vehicles and property by armored American vehicles in Kabul, and the use of massive frepower that indiscriminately kills civilians and destroys homes. While Afghans, for a number of reasons, as I explain elsewhere,54 tolerated the US military presence for several years, goodwill evaporated in Pushtun areas since the Taliban insurgency started in 2004. After so much mismanagement and so many mistakes, it became easier for the Taliban to convince Afghans in general, and the Pushtun in particular, that the US and NATO forces are not much diferent from the hated Soviet and British armies of the past. The Taliban also have the advantage of using idioms and symbols that resonate well with Afghans (Islamic law, jihad, etc.), while US agencies use concepts that are imported and have much less meaning for a population that is sufering from poverty and insecurity – concepts such as the “rule of law” and “democracy.” Even the media the Taliban use carry particular meaning for Afghan Pushtuns: Radio Sharia evokes a period of law and order in the south and the use of “night letters” evokes the jihad against the Soviets. The Taliban’s Islamic ideology connects them to a network of Islamist organizations and state agencies in Pakistan that ofer safe havens, fnancing, expertise, and recruits. Inside of Afghanistan, today’s Taliban is a more moderate and broadly encompassing movement than the Taliban of the past. This religious fexibility allows them to mobilize more support in their attempt to expel foreign forces and overthrow the Karzai regime. The Taliban’s religious capital also garnered them unexpected support in times of duress. As soon as the United States invaded Afghanistan, for example, a Pakistani Pashtun cleric from the Swat Valley northwest of Islamabad named Suf

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Muhammad declared jihad on the Americans and led thousands of Pakistani tribal volunteers across the Durand line to defend the embattled Taliban.55 The Afghan regime is not in a position to counter the clear, pointed, and efective Taliban messaging. Not only is the Afghan government one of the most corrupt on earth and utterly dependent for its survival on US backing,56 but it is also in the awkward position of having to respond to the Taliban challenge and the requests of conservative elements within the regime by supporting restrictive legislation and practices, all while trying to appease Western backers who are concerned about women rights and religious freedom. Indeed, some infuential regime fgures such as Abd-Rab al-Rassul Sayyaf and the now late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Fazal Hadi Shinwari held views on gender roles, religious minority rights, and other matters that do not difer much from those of the Taliban. This tension forced both Presidents Karzai then Ghani to fip-fop or fnd backdoor solutions to crises that emerged when shari’a-based laws were passed or implemented. As a consequence, they both received little credit from conservative Afghans and much criticism from liberal Western governments that need to answer to domestic pressure groups. To illustrate, the Afghan regime has on and of adopted tight restrictions on women’s rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. These include laws that allow for marital rape and restricting a woman’s access to education and mobility outside the home among the Shi’a, strict blasphemy laws, and harsh punishment for conversion. In 2012, President Hamid Karzai endorsed a “code of conduct” issued by the Ulema Council that stated that women must not travel without a male guardian and should not mingle with strange men in places such as schools, markets, and ofces.57 The code also states that beating one’s wife is prohibited only if there is no “sharia-compliant reason,” in a reference to Islamic law. Of course, these may be reversed, but the pressure is strong from infuential fgures to make the law even more restrictive, and laws that do protect women are generally contravened or ignored.58 The Taliban’s particular favor of Islamic credentials facilitated their ability to mobilize Pushtun support across the Durand Line as well as transnational Islamist support from non-Pushtuns. The government simply could not compete on this level, but two other Islamist insurgent organizations tried to do so: the Hizb-i Islami between 2002 and 2017 when it was in the resistance and the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province (IS-KP) branch starting in 2014. They both fell short. The Hizb was much less successful than the Taliban for the same reasons it couldn’t resist them in 1994-96. Hekmatyar is widely seen by rural Pushtuns, the main pool of insurgents, as an opportunist, modernist ideologue, and opponent of local autonomy. Among Kabulis and minorities, he is still remembered as the “butcher of Kabul” who showered Kabul with devastating volleys of inaccurate missiles during the 1992–94 battle over the capital. He simply had little to ofer when it comes to religious credentials, legitimacy, and messaging over the more proven Taliban. The IS-KP had much more potential to out-Islam the Taliban and they came close to creating a real schism within the organization when it was led by Akhtar

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Mohammad Mansour. Mansour, the successor of the Taliban’s founding leader Mullah Omar, had enemies within the organization who painted him, whether correctly or not, as being more interested in proft from the drug trade, less keen on jihad, and more conciliatory toward the Kabul regime than he ought to be. Some of these opponents split from the Taliban to join the IS-KP. The US assassination of Mansour on May 21, 2016, through a drone attack and his replacement by the more widely accepted Hibatullah Akhundzada helped stem the defections. Massive military operations by both the Taliban, TTP in Pakistan, and US forces against IS-KP held areas weakened the organization as of 2020, but it is certainly not defunct. IS-KP has the potential to out-Islam the Taliban if it regains its footing, but only if Taliban leaders weaken in their resolve to resist foreign occupation and the Afghan regime it supports. Under Akhundzada, this seems less likely to be the case. Afghan conficts are not solely won based on strategic advantages bestowed by religious credentials and messaging, but these can make a diference. In the current confict, the Taliban enjoy several advantages in Pushtun areas: they are suitably organized, time is on their side, they know the Pushtun social landscape much better than their opponents, and their fnances are secure. In addition, they have outmatched the Afghan government, the coalition, and other insurgent groups in the area of Islamic credentials and messaging. As of 2020, the US-led coalition has all but acknowledged defeat, and the factions that form the Afghan government are fghting each other over election results and resources and have rearmed in anticipation of an endgame in which the regime would unravel. If history is any indication, the odds are not on the US-led coalition and President Ghani’s side in this confict.

Suggested readings Barfeld, Thomas, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Crews, Robert and Amin Tarzi (eds.), Decade of the Taliban (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Maley, William, Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst and Company, 2006). Sinno, Abdulkader, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Sinno, Abdulkader, “Partisan Intervention and the Transformation of Afghanistan’s Civil War,” American Historical Review 120 (5) (December 2015): 1811–28.

Notes 1 Nazif Shahrani, “State Building and Social Fragmentation in Afghanistan: A Historical Perspective,” in The State, Religion and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, eds. Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 26–9. 2 See Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), Chapter 5, for an excellent account.

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3 See Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chapters 5–6, for a more detailed account. 4 The Soviets underreported their losses, with later evidence suggesting that they lost around 35,000 troops. The official number of Soviet casualties was contested by several analysts during and immediately after the war. Anthony Arnold, The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan’s Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993), 190; and Larry Preston Goodson, “Refugee-Based Insurgency: The Afghan Case” (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1990), 27, for example, argue that Soviet deaths could have been as high as 50,000. See V. Izgarshev, “Afganskaia bol” (Afghan Pain), Pravda, August 17, 1989, 6, as reported in Sarah E. Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 26. 5 For a Taliban perspective on the US-Taliban dynamics leading to the invasion, see Abdul Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 6 For an account of the rubber-stamp quality of the loya jirga, see “The Afghan Transitional Administration: Prospects and Perils,” International Crisis Group Afghanistan Briefing, July 30, 2002. For a historically grounded scathing critique, see Jamil M. Hanifi, “Editing the Past: Colonial Production of Hegemony through the ‘Loya Jerga’ in Afghanistan,” Iranian Studies, 37 (2) (2004): 295–322. 7 For more details on the constitution, see “Afghanistan: The Constitutional Loya Jirga,” Afghan Briefing, International Crisis Group, December 12, 2003. 8 Abdulkader Sinno, “Partisan Intervention and the Transformation of Afghanistan’s Civil War,” American Historical Review, 120 (5) (December 2015): 1811–28. 9 UNODC 2018 Afghanistan Opium Survey 2018 (November 2018), (accessed December 19, 2019). 10 Data compiled from UNICEF, the World Bank, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Afghanistan Country Report. 11 Masooda Bano, The Rational Believer: Choices and Decisions in the Madrasas of Pakistan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 12 See Kristian Harpviken, Political Mobilization among the Hazara of Afghanistan (Oslo: Department of Sociology, University of Oslo, 1996), for a study of shifting elites among the Shi’a Hazara; and David Edwards, Before the Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), for a study of leadership change among Sunnis. 13 Abdulkader Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 14 Harpviken, “Political Mobilization.” 15 Sinno, Organizations at War. 16 See Leon B. Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919–1929: King Amanullah’s Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), for a thorough account. 17 Shahrani, “State Building and Social Fragmentation.” 18 Eden Naby, “Islam within the Afghan Resistance,” Third World Quarterly, 10 (2) (April 1988): 787–805; Nancy Dupree, “Revolutionary Rhetoric and Afghan Women,” in Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Perspectives, eds. M. Nazif Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1984), 306–40. 19 Even the followers of “Engineer” Hekmatyar liked to point out that he wrote some 40 booklets on religious matters. This number might have been an exaggeration. Some of the traditionalist leaders lost popularity when it became known that they lived a life of luxury while their commanders suffered at the front. 20 Farshad Rastegar, “Education and Revolutionary Political Mobilization” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991).

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21 See Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978–1992 (London: Hurst, 2000), Chapter 3, on the PDPA’s growth problems. 22 Ibid., 56. 23 Naby, “Islam within the Afghan Resistance.” 24 Ralph Magnus and Eden Naby, Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx and Mujahid (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 133. 25 William Maley, “Political Legitimation in Contemporary Afghanistan,” Asian Survey, 27 (6) (June 1987): 705–25. 26 “Basmachi” is a derogatory term meaning “bandit,” which the Russians used to designate the Muslim rebels in territories they conquered in the first 40 years of the 1990s. Regrettably, this term became the standard one in reference to these groups. See Pinar Akcali, “Islam as a ‘Common Bond’ in Central Asia: Islamic Renaissance Party and the Afghan Mujahidin,” Central Asian Survey, 17 (2) (1998): 274, for the figure. 27 Afghan Tajik commanders supported the Islamists who temporarily seized power in Tajikistan, for example. Islamist parties have formed in all the newly independent exSoviet republics that border Afghanistan. Afghan influence even reached Chechnya, as manifest in the declarations of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first overall leader of Chechen insurgents. See TASS, April 19, 1987, reporting about mujahideen incursions into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. See also United States Information Agency, “Afghanistan Chronology,” April 8, 1987. 28 See Akcali, “Islam as a ‘Common Bond,’” for a study of the links between the IRP and the Afghan mujahideen. 29 The quote is by Alexander Bennigsen, Radio Liberty Research, RS 58/88, July 5, 1988, 6. 30 Bennigsen in Rosanne Klass, The Great Game Revisited (New York: Freedom House, 1990), Chapter 2, chronicles such declarations and indications of Islamic resurgence in Soviet republics after the start of the Afghan invasion. 31 George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993), 987. 32 Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American – Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1994), 1032; and Henry Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 157. 33 Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 10, quotes Hekmatyar as saying, “If the mujahideen persistently continue to fight, the day will soon come when the occupied lands of Soviet Central Asia will be liberated.” Such statements were frequent. See also Akcali, “Islam as a ‘Common Bond,’” 276, for more such statements by Hekmatyar and Berhanuddin Rabbani. See, inter alia, Tom Rogers, The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Pub Group, 1992), chronology, for many instances of such declarations. See Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Afghan and Falklands Conflicts (1990), 70–1, for examples of mujahideen attacks on USSR territory. See Mohammed Yousaf, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (Lahore: Jang Publishers, 1992), Chapter 12, for a thorough account of ISI-supported operations in Soviet Central Asia. He interestingly reports that demand for Korans was stronger than for ethnically based motivational propaganda prepared by the CIA. Some sources mention that the CIA was motivating Hekmatyar’s operations across Soviet borders Barnett Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan (1995), 81. 34 Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92. Quoted on June 29, 1988, in Islamabad. 35 Yousaf, The Bear Trap, 200. The Pakistani-sponsored attacks were halted in May 1987 after the Soviets transmitted thinly veiled threats to the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, Yousaf, The Bear Trap, 205. 36 Central Asian troops were mostly withdrawn in early 1980 after widespread refusal to fight, fraternization, trafficking in Korans, and other acts of sabotage of Soviet military

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40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

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efforts. Some Central Asian soldiers even defected to the mujahideen. See Akcali, “Islam as a ‘Common Bond,’” 275, for one brief account. See Akcali, “Islam as a ‘Common Bond’,” 278–82, for a more detailed account of Afghan military support to Tajik Islamists. Sinno, Organizations at War, Chapter 7. Taliban joins the Arabic noun talib (seeker, as in seeker of truth or knowledge) with the plural Dari and Pashto suffix “an.” I refer to the Taliban in both the singular and plural to reflect current practice. It is more accurate to use the singular, however, because the Taliban is an organization with a structure and not an amorphous group of students as the name would indicate and the organization’s mythology would imply. Sinno, Organizations at War, Chapter 8. Larry Preston Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001). A list compiled by Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), Appendix 2, reveals that there were more Ghilzai than Durranis among top-tier Taliban leaders. David Edwards, Before the Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 294. Emily MacFarquhar, “A New Force of Muslim Fighters Is Determined to Rule Afghanistan,” US News and World Report, March 6, 1995, 64–6. See also Nasreen Ghufran, “The Taliban and the Civil War Entanglement in Afghanistan,” Asian Affairs, 41 (3) (May–June 2001): 468, 462–87. Ahmad Mansur, Mustaqbal Afghanistan (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 1995), 54. M.J. Gohari, The Taliban Ascent to Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55–6. For an example of the use of the morality police to enforce frontline discipline, see William Vollman, “Across the Divide,” New Yorker, May 15, 2000. See also Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, 106–7. Gilles Dorronsoro, La révolution Afghane: Des communistes aux Tâlebân (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 307–8. William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 223; Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, 42. Brian Glyn Williams, “On the Trail of the ‘Lions of Islam’: Foreign Fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 1980–2010,” Orbis 55 (2) (2011): 216–39. Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam. Dorronsoro, La révolution Afghane, 302. Abdulkader Sinno, “What Will Come after a US Withdrawal from Afghanistan?,” The Conversation, March 5, 2019. Abdulkader Sinno, “Partisan Intervention and the Transformation of Afghanistan’s Civil War,” American Historical Review 120 (5) (December 2015): 1811–28. Sinno, Organizations of War, Chapter 9. Williams, “On the Trail of the ‘Lions of Islam,’” 227–8. As of 2020, Transparency International ranks Afghanistan 172nd out of 180 countries in its Corruption Perceptions Index, . One example of Afghan state corruption is that its judges decide based on the relative size of the plaintiff ’s bribes. The Taliban took advantage of their opponents’ corruption by establishing their own very popular courts based, of course, on Shari’a law. On the Taliban court system, see David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47. Associated Press, “Hamid Karzai Backs Clerics’ Move to Limit Afghan Women’s Rights,” Tuesday, March 6, 2012. See, for example, “Afghan Clerics Warn Karzai against Missionaries,” Reuters, January 6, 2008; “Worse Than the Taliban – New Law Rolls Back Rights for Afghan Women,” The Guardian, March 31, 2009, (accessed December 15, 2019).

3 BANGLADESH The return of religion to the political center stage Ali Riaz

On March 23, 2014, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina declared that the country would be governed as per the Medina Charter, a 622 CE document which lays out the Islamic principles of governance1 and last sermons of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH); she also said that there would be no law contrary to the Quran and Sunnah.2 Hasina’s declaration to a group of Islamic scholars marks a milestone in the transformation of the country’s journey from the promise of banishment of religion in the public sphere to bringing religion into the heart of the state’s ideology. Not only was it an indicator of the transformation of the ruling Awami League, ostensibly a secularist party, but most importantly the transformation of a state which on November 4, 1972, adopted secularism as the state principle in its constitution, proscribed religion-based parties, and forbade use of religion in politics. These two points in time provide us the pathway of the interplay of religion and politics in Bangladesh since its independence. The 2014 declaration testify to the resurgence of religion in Bangladeshi politics, and the emergence of religio-political parties, especially Islamists, as formidable forces in the political landscape. Between these two points in time, the country witnessed the removal and reinstatement of secularism in the constitution as a state principle, and the inclusion of Islam as a state religion. This chapter traces this transformation, explores the cause of and conditions for these dramatic changes, and examines their impact on the society and politics of Bangladesh. Comprehending these changes requires a broad understanding of Bangladesh’s political history, the religious composition of the population, and various strands of Islamist parties, and contextualizing them within the political development since its independence in 1971.

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Contextualizing Bangladesh Bangladesh, with a population of 164.51 million,3 is the third-largest Muslim majority country in the world. Bangladesh formed part of India under British rule from 1757 until colonial rule ended in 1947. After 24 years of being a part of Pakistan, the country emerged as an independent nation in 1971 through a devastating war which cost millions of lives and caused the violation of hundreds and thousands of women, the widespread destruction of homes, and the sufering of millions of people who were either displaced internally or took refuge in India. The nationalist movement which led to its secession from Pakistan grew over decades from opposition to the Pakistani rulers’ use of religion in politics. The Pakistani military junta attempted to justify the genocidal war it unleashed against the Bengali population on March 25, 1971 by claiming that it was saving the Islamic ideals of the country. The emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state was, therefore, seen by the protagonists as a victory over the abominable use of religion.

Overview of history and politics The political history of Bangladesh since its independence can be broadly divided into six eras: populist authoritarianism (1972–75), military dominated rule (1975– 90), electoral democracy (1991–2006), unsuccessful reform of military-dominated interim government (2007–08), the era of democracy redux (2009–13), and the era of democratic backsliding (2014–to date). Soon after independence in 1971, the Awami League (AL), which led the ethnolinguistic Bengali nationalist movement and the war of independence, formed a government. It was a continuation of the government-in-exile established in April 1971 when the country was still at war. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Mujib), the founder of the nation and a charismatic leader, returned from jail in Pakistan in early 1972. A constitution, pledging an inclusive democracy and a just society, was framed and the government laid out a populist agenda.4 The constitution encapsulated the four fundamental principles of the state: democracy, secularism, nationalism, and socialism. The salient features of the constitution included the introduction of a Westminster-type parliamentary system, providing the parliament with supreme authority on important issues like declaration of, or participation in, war and imposition and collection of taxes. Additionally, the constitution made provisions which appeared to amount to “guaranteeing” the fundamental rights of the people and “ensured” the separation of the judiciary from the executive organ of the state.5 The agenda of the ruling party included nationalization, pledges of land reform, and egalitarianism. But soon the government began to falter on many fronts. Problems such as the failure to deliver economic success, to check the deterioration of law and order, to address rampant corruption, and to deal with the excesses of party members decreased the popular appeal of the regime within a very short time.

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The frst general election – held in March 1973 – was marred by intimidation of political opponents, and abuse of government power to sway the votes in favor of the AL. However, the opposition parties were disunited and failed to present any pragmatic alternative program to that of the AL, and therefore could not secure substantial victory. However, in the face of growth of opposition to the government and the ruling party, the regime drifted toward coercive measures. Manipulation of the constitution and the electoral process, the passing of repressive laws, the establishment of a paramilitary force named the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini (JRB, the National Defense Force) which held enormous power,6 and recourse to the military to solve law and order problems were the early and concrete indications of this shift toward authoritarianism. By late 1974, the regime ofcially resorted to emergency rule. The proclamation of the Emergency, on December 28, 1974, essentially brought an end to parliamentary rule and the constitutional state. This was followed up with the fourth amendment of the constitution, passed by the parliament on January 25, 1975. The Constitution (Fourth Amendment) Act made sweeping changes. The country entered into a new constitutional arrangement where only one political party could exist and the executive branch with the president at its apex assumed supremacy over the legislative and judicial organs of the state. Additionally, by the amendment itself, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was elected by the parliament as president for fve years, with an opportunity to hold the ofce for an unlimited term. The era of populist authoritarianism came to an end in August 1975, with a high price, however. On the morning of August 15, 1975, Mujib, most of the members of his family,7 and his close associates were brutally murdered in a military coup, and a prolonged era of military-dominated regimes began in Bangladesh. Until December 1990, the country was ruled either as a military regime or by a military-dominated government under two strongmen – General Ziaur (Zia) Rahman (1975–81) and General Hossain Muhammad Ershad (1982–90). The nature and course of politics under their rule was virtually identical. These regimes faced similar crises and adopted similar policies to earn legitimacy and sustain themselves in power. While there were attempts to civilianize the regimes, and one brief interregnum (June 1981–March 1982), both were characterized by repression, curtailment of democratic rights, and the manipulation of constitutional processes. Furthermore, both were instrumental in bringing religion into the political arena. It became evident in the very early days of the rule of Ziaur Rahman that he did not subscribe to the secularist principles of the Mujib regime. The Zia regime faced more than three well-organized coup attempts and many sporadic rebellions between 1975 and 1980. These coup attempts and the rebellions were organized by political forces – both from the left and the right. In the face of violent opposition from within the military, Zia eventually sought both political and constitutional legitimacy to his rule. To gain political legitimacy, he amended the fundamental principles of the constitution and charted a new course for the country. These amendments, proclaimed

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through an executive order (Second Proclamation Order No. 1, April 23, 1977), included redefning the state principles and identifying the citizens as “Bangladeshi” as opposed to Bangalee (Bengali). Secularism as a state principle was substituted with “absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah” and the words “Bismillah-arRahman-ar-Rahim” (In the name of Allah, the Benefcent, the Merciful) were inserted above the preamble. The regime also attempted to gain constitutional legitimacy through a series of political actions. These include a referendum on his presidency in 1977, a presidential election in 1978. The Zia regime reintroduced the multi-party system and founded a new political party in 1978 – the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in 1978. But as these elections were blatantly rigged, they failed to bolster the image of the regime. The executive orders issued between 1976 and 1979 removed the ban on forming political parties based on religious ideology and allowed those individuals who collaborated with the Pakistani army in 1971 to participate in politics.8 The BNP brought together an array of anti-AL political forces, ranging from radical leftists and defectors from other parties to those who opposed the war of liberation and others who had close connections with religious organizations. The Fifth Amendment to the constitution, passed by the 1979 parliament brought in through a highly rigged election, provided constitutional legitimacy to the regime. Zia was assassinated in May 1981 in an abortive military coup. Within ten months, the then army chief General Hussain Muhammad Ershad usurped power through a coup and faced a legitimacy crisis similar to that of the Zia regime of 1975. Ershad diligently tried to tread Zia’s path – forming a party (1984, Jatiya Party) and holding a referendum (1985), parliamentary elections (1986, 1986), and a presidential election (1986) in quick succession. But unlike Zia, he faced intense challenges from the political parties, who formed two alliances – one centered on the AL and the other on the BNP. The Islamists, particularly the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), distanced themselves from the military ruler in a bid to gain public acceptance by participating in the pro-democracy movement, in spite of Ershad’s making another amendment to the constitution in mid-1988 – to prove his Islamist credentials – which declared Islam the state religion. In a move similar to Zia’s, Ershad manipulated the vote in 1986 to elect a parliament, which passed the Sixth Amendment of the constitution approving the actions of the regime since its takeover. This amendment provided the regime with legal authority from the constitutional point of view, but the regime’s public approval remained very low. The repressive measures of the regime further alienated the ruling party. Yet the regime’s shrewd move to divide the opposition worked on several occasions9 and thus breathed new life into it. But as the elections, boycotted by the opposition parties, failed to garner enough public support for the ruling Jatiya Party, the regime collapsed in December 1990 in the face of a popular upsurge. One of the defning features of these two regimes is their belief in the role of Islam in public life and politics. These regimes succeeded in bringing Islam into the

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political discourse and facilitated the gaining of legitimacy for the Islamists – both constitutionally and politically. Between 1991 and 2006, the country was ruled by elected representatives. The reintroduction of the parliamentary system,10 and the holding of elections at regular intervals were the most notable positive developments. However, the era was also marked with incessant squabbling between the two major political parties (AL and BNP), with ever-increasing belligerent posturing on both sides, and the rise of Islamist militancy as a serious threat to the peace, order, and democratic future of the country. Among political developments, the institutionalization of the caretaker government has had the most far-reaching impact. Five elections were held between 1991 and 2008. Of these, three were held on time and were remarkably fair, while one was entirely the opposite. The 1991 election brought the BNP to power with the tacit support of the Jamaati-Islami (JI). By 1994, the JI had shifted their allegiance to the opposition AL and participated in street agitation. The opposition demanded an amendment to the constitution to make permanent the role of an interim government to oversee the election.11 The government fnally caved to the demand. The sixth parliament – brought in via an election boycotted by the opposition and blatantly manipulated in favor of the BNP – amended the constitution and made the caretaker government (CTG) a part of the constitution.12 The Thirteenth Amendment stipulated that upon dissolution of the parliament at the end of its fve-year term, an 11-member non-party CTG headed by the chief advisor would function as an interim government for 90 days. The amendment provided that the immediate past chief justice would be the head of the CTG,13 which would be dissolved on the date that a new prime minister assumed ofce. The constitution also stipulated that during the term of the interim government, the Defense ministry would be under the president’s control, who otherwise is the titular head of state. In June 1996, fresh elections were held under the CTG, headed by the immediate past chief justice. The AL emerged as the largest single party in the seventh parliament, although it was short of the majority required to form the government. The unconditional support of the Jatiya Party (JP) of General Ershad ensured the return of the AL to power after 21 years. Sheikh Hasina became the prime minister. The bitter rivalry continued throughout the fve years of AL rule. Nevertheless, the Hasina regime completed its term in 2001, the frst government in the history of Bangladesh to do so. Power was handed over to the CTG on July 15 and the election to the eighth parliament was held on October 1, 2001. A center-right four-party coalition, formed in late 1998, with the BNP, a faction of the JP and the Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ), a conglomeration of seven conservative Islamist parties, secured a landslide victory with a two-thirds majority. The acrimonious relationship worsened over the following years.14 The relentless wrangling between the AL and the BNP made the parliament dysfunctional and vitiated politics; opposition political parties resorted to street agitation and frequently enforced hartals (general strikes).

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The situation took a turn for the worse in late October 2006 when the BNPled coalition government completed its tenure and was about to hand power to the CTG. The opposition alleged that the potential head of the CTG is loyal to the BNP and that the BNP had already put in place an elaborate plan to rig the election. By the time Justice K. M. Hassan declined the position, the situation was out of control. The president assumed the role of head of the CTG in addition to his regular duties. This brought no respite to the ongoing violence, on account of the president’s partisan stance. After weeks of violence, general strikes, and blockades, the army stepped in to force the president to declare a state of emergency; a military-backed interim technocratic government headed by the former chief of the central bank was appointed. On January 12, 2007, a new CTG took over and promised sweeping reforms to the political system and the building of institutions necessary for sustainable democracy. Despite initial overwhelming support from a large section of the citizens, the CTG began to falter and both Bangladeshis and the international community began to push for the return to elected governance. Thus, a new election was held on December 29, 2008. The December 2008 election delivered a landslide victory (four-ffths of parliament seats) to the Awami League. The BNP and its allies recorded its worst ever electoral defeat, the Jatiya Party (JP) headed by General H.M. Ershad regained its position as a key player in Bangladeshi politics, and the Islamists, particularly the Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), experienced a setback. In June 2011, the parliament passed the Fifteenth amendment of the constitution which disposed of the caretaker government provision. The incumbent insisted that it was acting pursuant to a verdict of the Supreme Court of May 2011 that annulled the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution. Although the court also observed that the next two elections could be held under the extant system and members of the civil society supported the Supreme Court’s observation, the ruling AL party did not heed these calls. This led to the BNP threatening to boycott the next election if it was superintended by a partisan political regime. The political situation took a violent turn by March 2013 after the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT), which was a Bangladeshi entity despite being branded “international,” began delivering verdicts on those charged with crimes against humanity committed in 1971. The ICT was established in 2010 by the government. Several leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami were tried. The BNP and the JI describe the ICT as fawed and an instrument of political vendetta. Both lenient and harsh sentences meted out by the ICT led to violent protests by diferent groups and caused numerous deaths. One of the verdicts delivered in February 2013 engendered a protest called “Shahbag Movement” (named after the city square where they held a sit-in for more than a month) by young activists which was followed by a counterprotest of the Islamists under the leadership of a conservative Islamist group named “Hefazat-e-Islam” (Protector of Islam, HI). Although the AL initially took a hard stance against the HI, it later shifted the position and befriended the Islamists. By late 2013 in the wake of the election, violence engulfed the nation; on the one hand, the JI activists launched protests against the ICT verdicts and execution

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of its leaders, while on the other hand, the BNP continued street agitations demanding the restoration of the caretaker government. International initiatives, including a UN delegation team’s mission to Dhaka, failed to bring any solution to the impasse. Although the JP wavered between joining the election and boycotting it, the party was fnally coerced into participating. Despite all eforts by local and international mediators to have an inclusive election, the ruling party went ahead with a one-sided election on January 5, 2014. The AL won 233 seats out of 300; the JP, led by the former military ruler Ershad, took 34. Only 12 parties out of the 40 registered with the Election Commission participated in the election. There were 153 candidates elected without facing any opposition, thereby practically disenfranchising a whole segment of voters. International press reported massive rigging and very low turnout. According to the New York Times, the actual voter turnout was 20 percent.15 On January 12, 2014, a new government headed by Sheikh Hasina was sworn in, with three members of the JP, which was ofcially declared the Parliamentary Opposition Party, included in the cabinet. General Ershad was named special envoy of the PM. The inclusion of the JP in the cabinet essentially turned the tenth parliament into a one-party parliament. Immediately before the election, Prime Minister Hasina promised that a new election will be held soon, but she later reneged. Soon after the election, the BNP called of its agitation campaigns. Throughout 2014, the country enjoyed relative peace and stability notwithstanding opposition leaders being persecuted, with frivolous charges often fled against them. This included cases against the BNP leader Khaleda Zia. On the eve of the frst anniversary of the controversial election when the government denied the BNP-led alliance the right to hold a rally demanding a new election and confned Khaleda Zia to her party ofce, violence erupted again. The BNP launched violent general strikes and imposed a countrywide blockade. For over 90 days, the country was rocked by confrontations between the BNP and the JI activists on the one hand, while police and members of the law enforcing agencies on the other. The scale and nature of the violence was unprecedented, even by Bangladeshi standards. The government met the agitations with heavy-handed measures and after the violence subsided, both legal and extralegal measures were adopted to neuter the opposition. Hundreds of cases were fled against the BNP leaders and activists. Other opposition parties, on the other hand, failed to confront the growing attenuation of democratic practices: the number of extrajudicial killings increased, and incidences of enforced disappearances grew exponentially. The media was muzzled using the Information and Communication Technology Act (as amended in 2013), particularly Article 57. The incumbent tried establishing its complete control over the judiciary, through passing of the Sixteenth Amendment of the constitution in September 2014, which empowered the parliament to impeach Supreme Court judges. The High Court scrapped the amendment in May 2016, and the Supreme Court rejected the appeal of the government in June 2016. The government frantically tried to convince Chief Justice S K Sinha to review and cancel the verdict. Chief Justice Sinha, in his memoir published in

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2018, alleges that he was forced to resign and exiled when he did not relent to the government pressure.16 It is in this background that 2018 election approached. In February 2018, Khaleda Zia was sentenced to fve years of jail on a graft charge, which was increased to ten years, and she was convicted for seven years on another case in October. The BNP joined a newly formed alliance called the Jatiyo Oikyo Front (National Unity Front), and the alliance and all other opposition parties joined the election. But arrests of thousands of people, attacks on BNP activists, implementation of a new draconian law called the Digital Security Act (DSA) stifing social media and cyberspace, and canceling opposition candidates’ nominations created a fearful environment. The international election observer groups decided not to send any monitoring teams. The election, held on December 30, delivered an unprecedented victory to the incumbent. The Awami League and its allies won 289 out of 300 seats. Of the 289 seats, 22 are from Jatiya Party (JP) led by H M Ershad, which was later once again designated as the ofcial parliamentary opposition. The opposition BNP won six seats while its ally Gono Forum secured two seats; three independent candidates also won. Because of the extent of manipulation, international media described the election as “farcical.”17 Independent observers reported massive irregularities, booth capture by the government activists, the administration and law enforcement agencies’ connivance to fake voting, assault of opposition polling agents, and threatening voters.18 A BBC report showed a stufed ballot box even before voting started.19 Following the election, Hasina was sworn in as the prime minister for the third consecutive term and has become the longest serving head of the government in the history of the country; many analysts have concluded that Bangladesh has become a de facto “one party state.”20

Religions and religious composition of the population Bangladesh is the third-largest Muslim majority country in the world. Almost 90 percent of the population adheres to Islam. Muslims in Bangladesh are predominantly of Sunni denomination, but a small number of Muslims follow the Shi’a tradition. The largest religious minority of the country is Hindu, comprising 9 percent in 2011. Christianity and Buddhism are also followed by a very small segment of the population. Adherents of minority religions are not concentrated in any geographical areas, except the southeastern hill districts where Buddhism is the dominant religion. Among the Christian population, Catholicism is the main denomination (Table 3.1).

State and religion The Bangladesh constitution, as framed in 1972, declared secularism to be one of the fundamental principles of the state, but it also protected the religious freedom of all communities. The rights of minorities have been protected under Article 41 on freedom of religion and the freedom of every religious community or

42,062 50,804 71,478 87,120 106,315 123,151 144,043 156,800 158,900

1951 1961 1974 1981 1991 2001 2011 2014 2015

32,227 40,890 61,039 75,487 93,881 110,406 130,204

Muslims (numbers)

76.9 80.4 85.4 86.7 88.3 89.7 90.39

Muslims % 9,239 9,380 9,673 10,570 11,179 11,329 12,299 15,000 17,000

Hindus (numbers) 22.0 18.5 13.5 12.1 10.5 9.2 8.54 9.9 10.7

Hindus % 319 374 439 538 623 862 889

Buddhists (numbers) 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.7 0.62

Buddhists % 107 149 216 275 346 369 447

Christians (numbers) 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.31

Christians %

0.1 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.14

Others %

Sources: Census Data for 1974 through 2011: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Population and Housing 2011, National Report, Volume -1. Analytical Report, Table 3.7.2 and Table 3.7.4, pp. 86 and 88. 2014 and 2015 data are from Prothom Alo (2016), “Hindu Population Increased; BBS,” June 23, 2016, and BBC (2016), “Hindu Population in Bangladesh Increased,” BBC Bangla, June 23, 2016,

Total Population

Census Years

TABLE 3.1 Composition of Bangladesh population (in thousands)

84 Ali Riaz

Bangladesh

85

denomination to establish, manage, and maintain its religious institutions (subject to law, public order, and morality). Proselytizing, however, is discouraged. An amendment to the constitution under President Ziaur Rahman in 1977 removed the principle of secularism, replacing it with “absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah.” The amendment also removed Article 38(2) which forbade formation of political parties on the basis of religion. The Eighth Amendment of 1988 declared Islam to be the state religion: “[t]he state religion of the Republic is Islam, but other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony in the republic.” The Fifteenth Amendment of the constitution passed by the parliament in 2011 restored secularism as a state principle, while the state religion and the declaration of faith before the preamble ([BISMILLAH-AR-RAHMAN-AR-RAHIM (In the name of Allah, the Benefcent, the Merciful), as inserted by the Zia regime) remained. The amendment, however, didn’t restore Article 38(2), thus allowing religionbased parties to operate. Resolution of issues related to family matters – including marriage, succession, inheritance, and maintenance – is determined by religious law. The Muslim Personal Law Ordinance 1961 governs the application of Muslim laws to the Muslim community. Separate family laws are on the books for Hindus and Christians, based on their respective traditions with few signifcant diferences. Marriage rituals and proceedings [are] governed by the family law of the religion of the parties concerned; however, marriages were also registered with the state. Under the Muslim Family Ordinance, female heirs inherit less than male relatives, and wives have fewer divorce rights than husbands. The state provides support to religious communities, although the Muslim community receives the lion’s share. The Ministry of Religious Afairs administers four funds for religious and cultural activities: the Islamic Foundation, the Hindu Welfare Trust, the Buddhist Welfare Trust, and the Christian Welfare Trust. The Hindu Welfare Trust and the Buddhist Welfare Trust were established in 1983, and both were reorganized under a new law in 2018. The Christian Welfare Trust came into being 2009.

The political landscape Despite the existence of a plethora of political parties,21 Bangladeshi politics is dominated by just two – the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The AL, founded in 1948, is one of the oldest political parties and insisted on its secularist credential. The BNP established in 1978, is a right-ofcenter party in its orientation and strongly advocates the presence of Islam in public life. Other political parties, especially the leftists, enjoy some grassroots support, but failed to translate this into electoral success. Fifteen years of military rule engendered not only the BNP but also the Jatiya Party (JP, established in 1984) on the one hand and allowed the Islamist parties, for example, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) to

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reemerge, on the other. During the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s, three poles emerged: one led by the AL, another by the BNP, and the third composed of smaller left parties; the JI maintained relationships with both the AL- and the BNP-led alliances without joining either. The electorate, through the 1991 election, in large measure endorsed the twoparty system in Bangladesh. Almost 60 percent of the popular vote was secured by them. Two subsequent elections, in 1996 and 2001, cemented this trend; in 2008, these two parties commanded the support of more than 80 percent of voters of the country (Table 3.2 and Table 3.3). Between 1991 and 2006, the JI emerged as the kingmaker by switching sides at opportune moments; in 1991, it lent support to the BNP to form the government; in 1994, it joined the opposition to unseat the BNP; in 1998, it joined the BNP-led alliance and fnally became a partner of the BNP-led fourparty coalition which came to power through the 2001 election. The JI faced a setback in the election of 2008 as their seats were reduced to two; a huge drop compared to 2001 when it secured 17 seats. In 2014, no opposition parties participated in the election. TABLE 3.2 Bangladesh election results, 1991–2001

Party

1991

 

1996

 

2001

 

 

Seats

% of Votes

Seats

% of Votes

Seats

% of Votes

Bangladesh Awami League (AL) AL’s alliance partners Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), Bangladesh Jatiya Party (N-F) Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) BNP-led 4-party alliance Jatiya Party (E) Jatiya Party (M) KSJL Independents Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) Other parties Total

88

30.08

146

37.46

62

40.13

12 140

3.59 30.81

n/a 116

n/a 33.61

n/a 193

n/a 40.97

18

12.13

3

8.60

17

4.28

n/a 1

n/a 0.79 n/a

n/a 1

n/a 1.09 n/a

4 2 216

1.12 0.68 47.04

35 n/a n/a 3 1

11.92 n/a n/a 4.39 .33

32 n/a n/a 1 1

16.40 n/a n/a 1.06 0.33

14 1 1 6 0

7.25 0.33 n/a 4.06 0

2 300

6.29 100.00

0 300

1.79 100.00

0 300

1.52 100.00

Source: Bangladesh Election Commission.

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TABLE 3.3 Bangladesh election results, 2008

Alliance

Party

Grand Alliance

Bangladesh Awami League (AL) Jatiya Party (JP) Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) Workers’ Party of Bangladesh Four-Party Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Alliance Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) Bangladesh Jatiya Party (BJP) Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) Liberal Democratic Party Independents and others Total

Seats

% of Popular Votes

230 27 3 2 30 2 1 0 1 4 300

49.0 7.0 0.6 0.3 33.2 4.6 0.1 0.16 0.2 4.3

Note: The results of 2008 election are presented separately to refect the new political alliances and their performances. For example, the JP led by General Ershad, the JSD, and the Workers’ Party joined the Grand Alliance led by the AL.

Religio-political parties and groups Since around 1990, Bangladesh has seen a phenomenal rise of political parties and organizations with an Islamist agenda. According to one account, in 1970 Islamist parties (i.e., those which utilize religion as a political ideology and, in some forms, “instrumentalize religion to pursue political objectives”)22 numbered 11.23 Islamist parties participating in the elections show a steady growth since 1979. In that year, only two of them contested the election, and the number stayed the same in the 1986 election, but it increased to 17 in 1991 and to 18 in 1996. The number declined slightly in 2001, to 11.24 Election Commission (EC) records show that at least 35 political parties bearing names suggestive of an Islamist agenda participated in elections between 1979 and 2001.25 Of the 41 parties registered with the Bangladesh Election Commission in April 2020, at least ten of them explicitly profess an Islamist agenda. Not all Islamist parties are registered with the EC. During the 2018 election, altogether 66 Islamist parties, including the registered, were active. Many of them were parties with little or no organizational strengths. Among the Islamist parties, the most prominent is the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). As mentioned before, the party was proscribed in 1972 because of its opposition to the war of independence. However, the party remerged when the Political Parties Regulation of 1976 allowed organizations with an Islamist ideology to register with the government. The members of the party frst appeared on the political scene under a newly formed organization called the Islamic Democratic League (IDL). The IDL became the fountainhead of a new Islamist movement in Bangladesh. The JI emerged under its own name in 1979. The party was deregistered

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in October 2018, after a court in 2013 found the party’s constitution inconsistent with the nation’s constitution.26 Islamist parties can be broadly divided into fve categories (Table 3.4). Of the fve categories of Islamist parties, those which fall within the frst three operate within mainstream politics, while those in the ffth category are clandestine and some have been proscribed since 2005. The precise number of clandestine Islamist groups operating within Bangladesh is unknown. The estimated number varies between 29 and 53. Islamist militant groups began to emerge in Bangladesh in the early 1990s, although very little attention was paid to this menace. A group of Bangladeshi Islamists who volunteered in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet TABLE 3.4 Taxonomy of Islamist political parties in Bangladesh

Distinguishable Traits

Names of the Islamist Political Parties

Pragmatist/opportunist

Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami (JI).

Want to establish Islamic social order in society through the state, believe in “Islamic revolution,” participate in elections; support base is wide ranging. Idealist and orthodox Want a pure Islamic state; support base is largely within qwami madrassahs.

Pir- (preacher of Islam) centric and mazar- (shrine) based Aim to establish a state based on traditional Islam and shari’a; party organized around individuals; weak support base. Urban elite-centric

Jamiyat-e-Ulama-e-Islam, Khelafat Andolon, Ahle Hadith, Islami Morcha, Khelafat Mojlish, Nejam-e-Islam (some of the previously mentioned political parties founded a seven-party combine called the Islami Oikya Jote – IOJ, the United Islamic Alliance.), and Hefazate Islam. Zaker Party, Islami Shashontantra Andolon (Islamic Constitution Movement, renamed Islami Andolon Bangladesh) Bangladesh Tariqat Federation.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Bangladesh.

Want to establish Khelafat; internationally connected, highly educated middle-class leadership, yet to take part in elections. Jihadists Militant Islamists who aim to establish an Islamic state in Bangladesh through jihad. Source: Compiled by the author.

Harkatul-Jiahd al Islami Bangladesh (HuJi-B), Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB), Hijbut Tawheed, Shahadat-e-Al Hikma, Allahr Dal, Anasr-al Islam.

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forces returned and founded the Bangladesh chapter of the Pakistan-based Harkatul-Jihad al Islam (HUJI) in 1992. Between 1999 and 2006, militant groups were behind 25 bomb attacks through the country. Most spectacular were the attacks in August 2004 and in August 2005. In the former instance, a proscribed militant organization attempted to assassinate then-opposition leader Sheikh Hasina hurling grenades at a public rally in Dhaka. The attack killed 24 people. In 2005, 450 homemade bombs exploded all over the country in the span of one hour. Four suicide attacks followed over the next several months, killing at least 30 people and wounding 150 more. Security measures against these groups launched in late 2006 after initial denial of their existence by then incumbent BNP continued under the CTG (2007–08) and the AL government after 2009. Despite successes, these groups remerged in the background of contentious politics in 2013. There were several attacks on bloggers and secular social activists in 2013. Within two years, the situation signifcantly deteriorated, and it became evident that afliates of both the Islamic State (ISIS) and the Al-Qaeda have established their footprints in the country. There were incidents of targeted killings of foreigners, and members of minority Muslim sects by ISIS, and bloggers, online activists, publishers, journalists, Suf monks, Hindu priests, academics, and gay rights activists by the Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh, also known as Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), the self-proclaimed Bangladesh chapter of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). Between January 2015 and early June 2016, at least 49 people were killed in 48 attacks for which the Islamic State or Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh claimed responsibility. Militant groups afliated with Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) claimed responsibilities for 12 of those attacks, while ISIS claimed responsibilities for 21. The most audacious attack was by ISIS on a café in Dhaka killing 22 civilians including 17 foreigners, followed by small-scale attacks including suicide attacks. The government continue to deny the existence of the transnational terrorist groups although ISIS posted photographs online in real-time giving credence to its claim. Since July 1, 2016, more than 70 alleged militants have been killed in various security operations. These have demonstrated the coercive capacity of the state and disregard for due process. Some of the militants were apprehended; they were tried and sentenced to death in 2019. However, there have been small-scale attacks on police by these groups in 2019. Between 2003 and May 2020, the government proscribed eight Islamist militant organizations: Shahadat-e-al Hikma, Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB), Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HUJI) Bangladesh, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Ansarullah Bangla Team, Ansar al Islam, and Allah Dal. Ansar al Islam, formerly known as Ansarullah Bangla Team, claims to be the Bangladeshi chapter of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). The Islamic State (or Daesh) claims to have a presence in Bangladesh. The government insists that the JMB was decimated by 2008, and it has now reemerged as the Neo-JMB, a euphemism it appears to be using for ISIS.

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Analyzing the interplay of religion and politics The growing Islamization of Bangladesh, as narrated in the preceding section, is a result of both top-down and bottom-up processes. Notwithstanding the impacts of global upsurge of religiosity, weakening of secularist principles, proliferation of religion-based politics, and globalization, three domestic factors can be attributed as the proximate causes for the transformation – the ubiquity of Islam in Bangladeshi society and transformation of social institutions, the crisis of moral legitimacy of the ruling parties, and the politics of expediency of self-proclaimed secularist parties. For centuries, Islam has been an important part of the social milieu of eastern Bengal, which later constituted Bangladesh. One of the key features of this tradition is that a syncretistic form of Islam27 has emerged over time and Islam remained connected to personal lives and to social space but was not a political ideology. Even during the movement for Pakistan, emphasizing a Muslim identity did not mean that Bengalis were favoring a heightened role of religion in politics.28 The rise of Bengali nationalism, not too long after the establishment of Pakistan, was a testimony to the fact that Bengalis were uncomfortable with the linkage between national identity and religion on the one hand, while it was not a complete rejection of their Muslim identity. Neither in 1947 nor in 1971 was there a choice made between one or the other. Discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization in the name of Islam by the Pakistani rulers strengthened the resolve of much of the Bengali population that a separation between religion and politics was necessary. But the inclusion of secularism in the country’s 1972 constitution, understood by its protagonists as the complete banishment of religion from the public sphere, was not a result of a robust discussion in society. The meaning of “secularism” remained vague to both the ruling elites and the common masses. The government soon began undercutting the spirit of secularism through an array of activities including broadcasting religious programs on the state-controlled media. Many socio-religious organizations in the country continued propagating religious messages and events tied to religion were celebrated. Not only did the traditional Islamic festivals continue, the government also allowed the madrasas (Islamic seminaries), particularly of Deobandi persuasion, to impart Islamic education despite the nationalization of education. Other Islamic organizations, for example Tabligh Jamaat, a global pietistic organization, continued with its dawa, or missionary, movement. A latent tension between the idea of secularism and the role of religion thus remained within Bangladeshi society. But what was clear was that religion, particularly Islam, remained strongly present in the social and personal lives of the citizens. However, the role of religion has changed from exclusively personal piety to a source of social activism. Various Islamic organizations played pivotal roles in this regard. These organizations continue to work with a goal to change the religious practices and adopt a more conservative interpretation of Islam. Traditional social practices, such as the waz mahfls (public performances of scriptural commentaries),

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underwent a dramatic change throughout the past decades, especially in the 1990s. Waz Mahfls, organized in both urban and rural areas as a means of preaching Islam among the believers, traditionally was an expression of piety in eastern Bengal, particularly in the rural areas. Since the 1980s, these gatherings have become a forum for commentary on current afairs and thus more centered on ideology rather than on theology. The transformation came to the attention of many in the early 1990s, when the Islamists began a campaign against the non-governmental development organizations (NGOs) on the grounds that they were spreading Christianity, and engaging women in un-Islamic acts. During this campaign, waz became the most convenient means to assault the secularists and vilify the schools established by the NGOs. These waz mahfls not only condoned violence but also, in many instances, provoked the attendees. There are numerous incidents where NGO ofces and schools have come under attack after speakers at waz mahfls called upon the villagers to resist the local NGOs. Waz and other traditional social institutions have been recast as guardians of orthodoxy and propagators of a certain version of Islam akin to the Wahabbism of Saudi Arabia. These have contributed to the social Islamization of Bangladesh. The resurgence of Islam in the political arena is intrinsically tied to the crisis of moral legitimacy of the ruling elites since the beginning of the independent Bangladesh. Although the government headed by Mujibur Rahman (1972–75) adopted a constitution with secularism as the state principle, it began to veer away from its proclaimed position by 1974. The regime began losing support because of its failure to address issues related to daily lives (e.g., law and order) and its growing reliance on force to quell public discontent. Packaging the state principles – secularism, nationalism, democracy, and socialism – as Mujibism (named after Mujib) and the authoritarian tendency of the regime caused serious damage to its appeal. The rigged election of 1973 severely weakened the moral legitimacy of the incumbent AL despite the personal popularity of its leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In the face of challenges from the leftist political parties, the regime attempted to court the support of the rightist elements of society. These helped the Islamist elements of society to regroup. Some of these also found a home within opposition political parties as they were trying to rally support against the Mujib regime. The moral legitimacy crisis of the military regime headed by Ziaur Rahman, which came to power through a series of coups and counter coups between August and November 1975, was clearly discernable and more acute than the Mujib regime. The regime was neither constitutionally nor morally legitimate. Faced with these crises, the Zia regime (1975–81) made changes in the constitution, removed secularism as a state principle, and underscored religious identity. The goal was to make a clear ideological distinction from the previous regime, and by doing so the regime made Islam a central element of the public sphere, including politics. Besides, several people with close ties to religious organizations became members of Zia’s cabinet and his close confdants. The Zia regime allowed the religion-based parties to operate. When Zia founded his party in 1978, it was clearly stated in the party constitution that Islam had a pivotal role to play in public life, thus implying

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that it had a role in politics and public policy as well. This trend gained momentum under the Ershad regime (1982–90). The declaration of Islam as the state religion was one aspect of it, and frequent visits by Ershad to mosques, mazars (shrines), and pirs was another. Many important government decisions were announced at gatherings of religious scholars and supporters of socio-religious organizations. In the face of the pro-democracy movement launched by the political parties, Ershad frequently resorted to religious rhetoric to boost his Islamic credentials. In post-1991, despite poor governance and fragile democracy, both the BNP and the AL had relatively fair elections as the sources of their legitimacy to govern. But the situation took a dramatic turn for the worst in 2013 as the 2014 election approached. With the threat of opposition of boycotting the election because of the removal of the CTG system in 2011, the AL was increasingly becoming weary on the one hand, while relying on coercion, on the other. This led it to fnd an alternative source of legitimacy; religion was the readily available for it. By then, religious idioms and icons were used not only in political discourse but also in the social milieu. The AL’s shift was a result of a gradual transformation of the AL since 1990 and the meteoric rise of the Hefazate Islam (HI) in 2013. The AL, popularly known as a secularist party, frst began to use Islamic jargon and religious verbiage after its unexpected defeat in the election of 1991. The BNP’s victory was viewed by the AL as the result of BNP’s astute use of religious sentiment. At the beginning, especially in the early 1990s, the use of religious discourse was described as a tactical move, but soon it graduated into a strategy, and by the end of the decade, it apparently became the ideological position of the party. The spectacular rise of the HI, which emerged in 2010 but did not draw much attention until 2013, took place in opposition to a youth-led movement, referred to as Shahbag movement demanding capital punishment of those who were convicted for crimes against humanity in 1971. The government moved quickly to co-opt the Shahbag movement and steered it to its beneft. Islamists condemned the uprising and its organizers as anti-Islamic and branded the government as atheist due to its support for the movement. With JI marginalized – thanks to the government’s heavy-handed measures and the JI’s wanton violence – a space for the Islamists opened. Smaller Islamist parties and organizations resuscitated the Hefazate-Islam (HI). HI, an organization of Islamic scholars associated with privately operated traditional qwami madrassahs (Islamic seminaries), gradually gained strength and held a long march to the capital in April 2013 and issued 13 point demands including the introduction of an anti-blasphemy law carrying the death penalty for anyone who “insults” Islam and the Prophet. Other demands were for an end to the prowomen development policy; a ban on men and women mixing in public; an end to “shameless behaviour and dresses”; and a call for the Ahmadi sect to be declared non-Muslim. On May 5, 2013, the organization rallied almost half a million activists in the downtown. After daylong demonstrations, when it declined to leave the city, they were forcibly removed in the middle of night by the law-enforcing agencies. The relationship between the government and the HI, however, changed in the following months, as the government began to befriend the HI. By early 2014,

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the government sent clear signals that it will rather move away from the secularists to prove its credential as the guardian of Islam. Hasina’s unequivocal statement regarding Medina Charter was intended to do so. After the noninclusive election of 2014, as the incumbent’s legitimacy became questionable, the government begun to appease the HI. In early 2017, textbooks for schools were revised and non-Muslim authors’ works were removed as demanded by the HI; in April, the government formally recognized the certifcate of Daura-e-Hadith of the qwami madrassahs as equivalent to a master’s in Islamic Studies and Arabic and in May, a statue of Lady Justice was removed from the Supreme Court premises which was deemed as un-Islamic by the Islamists. Economist noted in June 2017, “having undermined Bangladesh’s democracy, and thus deprived itself of the legitimacy that free elections might have brought, the government is trying to win support by courting the devout.”29 In the following year, the government decided to construct 560 mosques around the country. In November 2018, a month ahead of the election, HI accorded Hasina a public reception and backed her reelection.30 Befriending the Islamists by the secularist parties began during the pro-democracy movement (1982–90). The opposition alliances, led by the AL and the BNP, maintained close contacts with the JI. These alliances often declared identical political programs and claimed to be participating in a “simultaneous” movement. Evidently, the BNP-led alliance was closer to the JI, but the AL-led alliance was not that far away. In the name of broadening the opposition camp against the military regime, these two alliances accorded the JI the political legitimacy which it had lacked until then. Thus, within a decade of its reemergence as an organized political force, the Islamists made their way into mainstream politics. It became evident after the downfall of the Ershad regime that befriending the Islamist political parties was not a tactical move on the part of the secularist parties for the purpose of the democracy movement. Instead, it heralded a new era where Islam became a political ideology and Islamic rhetoric an integral part of the political discourse. As for the Islamist parties, this marked a new beginning for them whereby they could play the two major parties one against another and reap the beneft. Driven by political expediency, the AL and the BNP, especially the latter, each began relying on the JI to challenge the other. The 2001 election manifestos of major parties demonstrate the shift in the political discourse regarding the role of religion in politics. The BNP’s election manifesto proclaimed that the party, if voted to power, “will not enact any law contrary to Islam.” The JI, for understandable reasons, announced in unambiguous terms that the party, if voted to power, “will convert the People’s Republic of Bangladesh into an Islamic Republic.” The AL, in an apparent race with the others, declared in its manifesto, “no law will be enacted, which will be inconsistent with the dictates of the Qur’an and Hadith.”31 The JP election manifesto stated that if the party was voted to power, existing laws would be brought in line with the principles of the Quran and Sunnah, . . . laws contrary [to the] Quran and Sunnah shall be amended. . . . Shariah laws would be followed as far as possible . . . special laws would be

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made for punishing those making derogatory remarks against the Prophet [pbuh] and the Shariah . . . religious education would be made compulsory at all levels. In late 2006, leading up to the scheduled election in January 2007, these parties went beyond their manifestos and brought Islamists to their platform to achieve the immediate goal of securing victory. The AL created “the Grand Alliance” composed of General Ershad’s JP, various breakaway factions of the BNP, and its usual allies such as the JSD. Islamists, particularly the conservative Islamists, were embraced with open arms. The AL signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish (BKM) on December 23, 2006. BKM was well known for its radical views and the involvement of its leaders with militant groups such as the JMB. The fve-point MOU stipulated that if the “Grand Alliance” came to power, the government would allow the certifed ulama (Islamic clerics) the right to issue fatwas (religious edicts), impose a bar on enacting any law that went against Koranic values, initiate steps for proper implementation of the initiative for government recognition of the degrees awarded by qwami madrassahs, and ban criticism of the Prophet Muhammad (i.e., introduce a blasphemy law).32 As part of the deal the AL, on behalf of the Grand Alliance, nominated six Islamists, including two veterans of the Afghan war, in the election.33 The BNP, on the other hand, insisted that the only way to save Islam was to vote for the four-party alliance.34 Pointing to this rat race among the two alliances to cajole the Islamists, Fazlul Huq Aminee, the leader of the IOJ, gleefully declared that “no one can go to power without the support of the Islamic forces.”35 The extent of cajoling the Islamists was on display ahead of the 2018 election. Of the 66 Islamist parties, a staggering 61 Islamist parties were within the fold of the AL-led alliance. The BNP had fve within its fold.

Electoral politics? The growing number of Islamist parties in the past decades, their increased importance on the political scene, the competition among rival secularist parties to entice them, the emergence of the JI as the Kingmaker between 1991 and 2001, and the rising infuence of various Islamist parties may provide an impression that Islamists command a large following among the electorate and that support is growing in Bangladeshi society and politics as the country has undergone Islamization. However, available statistics of votes secured by the Islamists in the four elections held between 1991 and 2008 suggest the contrary. Take, for example, the share of popular votes of the largest Islamist party, the JI. In 1991, Jamaat fled 35 candidates under the party’s banner and won 18 seats with 12.13 percent of popular votes; in 1996, the party fled the full slate of 300 candidates and won only three seats with 8.61 percent of votes. In 2001, the JI participated as a member of the four-party alliance led by the BNP and contested in 31 seats. It won 17 seats with 4.29 percent of popular votes. In 2008, the JI continued its alliance with the BNP and 40 seats were allocated to them to contest, of which the party won only two seats and

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Bangladesh

secured 4.70 percent of votes. This is not to say that the total number of votes of the JI has not increased, but the increase has been negligible and that the increase proportionally was smaller than the increase of total voters, which means that the party is failing to keep pace with new voters. Despite an increase of about 15 percent in total cast votes in 2008 compared to 2001, the JI’s vote remained almost static, growing by only 0.2 percent (Table 3.5). But discussion of the Islamists’ performance should not be limited to JI’s electoral results; instead, we should consider how Islamist parties generally performed in the election. Their performance shows that after a gradual decline of the share in popular votes between 1991 and 2001, it increased slightly to 6.27 percent in 2008 (Table 3.6). TABLE 3.5 Islamists’ electoral support, 1991–2001

Party

Jamaat

1991

 

 

1996

 

 

2001

 

 

Seats Won

No. of Votes

%

Seats Won

No. of Votes

%

Seats Won

No. of Votes

%

18

12.13

3

8.61

17

1

1.09

2

0.27





2.38 million 0.37 million –

4.29

0.79

3.64 million 0.46 million –

1.22









IOJ

1

Khelafat Andolon Zaker Party

0

4.13 million 0.26 million 93,049

0

4,17,737

0.68

Source: Bangladesh Election Commission. Parliament Election Reports. TABLE 3.6 Islamists’ performance in 2008 election

Party

No. of Candidates

Votes Secured

% of Votes Cast

Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami Islami Andolon Bangladesh Jamiate Ulamaye Islam Bangladesh Zaker Party Islami Oikyo Jote Bangladesh Islami Front Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish Bangladesh Tarikat Federation Bangladesh Khelafat Andolon Total

40 166 6 36 4 17 9 31 30

3,160,000 733,969 173,633 129,289 108,415 31,450 28,546 19,750 13,759

4.48 1.05 0.25 0.19 0.16 0.05 0.04 0.03 0.02 6.27

Source: “25 Small Parties Get 2pc Votes in Total,” Daily Star, January 2, 2009, 1.

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The number is very important in understanding the political landscape of the country. This is equal to the number of respondents who chose the Islamic form of government in a preelection survey conducted by the Daily Star and Nielsen in November 2008.36 In response to a question as to which form of the government he or she likes, 7 percent of respondents favored Islamic as opposed to 81 percent who chose (parliamentary) democratic. Six percent chose a caretaker form of government, 3 percent chose the presidential form, and 3 percent chose martial law. The concurrence of these two numbers reveals that the Islamists have an unwavering base of 7 percent within the population of Bangladesh. Since 2010, as the JI faced the wrath of the government and its leadership has been decimated, whether the party has lost its support among the electorate is difcult to determine, but in 2018, the BNP-led alliance nominated 21 JI candidates under its symbol and three participated as independent candidates, none of them won. On the other hand, Islamic Movement of Bangladesh has participated in local and national elections. In 2018, the party fled 299 candidates and secured 1.53 percent of popular votes. The overall picture of popular vote share of Islamists does not show that they have a large support among Bangladeshi voters.

Beyond Bangladesh These domestic developments should also be juxtaposed with changes in global politics and the global economy. Among these, two deserve highlighting: the emergence of political Islam on the global scene and Bangladesh’s connection with Middle Eastern and Gulf countries. Throughout the 1980s, Islamists not only gained global prominence but also acquired power and achieved legitimacy, thanks to two events in 1979 – the Iranian Revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan followed by the emergence of the mujahideen (holy warriors). The Iranian Revolution demonstrated that Islam can be seen as a political ideology rather than merely a religious or theological construct. This line of argument had earlier been advanced by Hasan al-Banna (1906–49) and Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79) and debated within activist circles. Nevertheless, the Iranian Revolution proved that it could be translated into a reality. The Afghan example was even more compelling, especially because of the involvement of the United States. Mahmood Mamdani noted that the Afghan War was important on two counts: frst, the ideologization of the war as a “religious war” instead of a national liberation war, and second, the privatization of the war (i.e., allowing the recruitment, training, and organizing of a global network of fghters through Islamic charities, and their training through militarized madrassahs). Mamdani insists, “Before the Afghan jihad, right-wing political Islam was an ideological tendency with little organization and muscle on the ground. The Afghan jihad gave it numbers, organization, skills, reach, confdence and a coherent objective.”37 Bangladesh’s interaction with countries in the Persian Gulf region and the Middle East has been mediated through its migrant workers. Since 1976, exporting

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unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled labor to these countries has become one of the main sources of Bangladesh’s foreign revenue. Labor migration has a positive impact on the nation’s economy in at least two ways: frst, it has kept the unemployment rate low, and second, it has brought in a fow of remittances, often in the face of dwindling exports.38 The social cost, however, has been quite high. Migrant workers have been exposed to a set of retrogressive social values and to a less tolerant version of “Islam” in the host countries. This has nurtured the idea that Islam practiced in its birthplace is more authentic than that practiced anywhere else. Thus, upon returning home, the migrants try to emulate the lifestyle and values that they have been exposed to and to share them with their communities. In poorer rural communities, the returnees also assume a social status that allows them to become authority fgures. This has contributed to the deepening of social conservatism in the name of Islam and has played a crucial role in the Islamization process. To maintain the newly earned social status of the returnee migrants, these values and norms needed to be reproduced in the society.

Conclusion The foregoing discussion on the interplay of religion and politics in Bangladesh demonstrates that the rise of Islam as a political ideology and Islamists as prominent political actors began modestly after independence but gained pace since 1975. Fragile democracy, and incessant squabbling between two major parties – the AL and the BNP – facilitated the rise of the Islamists in the political arena and helped them to thrive. However, the Islamization of political discourse, public display of religiosity, and adherence to religious ethos were not exclusively a top-down process. Instead, Islamic organizations and movements have played a signifcant role in Islamization of the society and thus a bottom-up process also contributed to the transformation of the relationship between the state and religion. A combination of three domestic factors – ubiquity of Islam in society, crisis of legitimacy of the ruling elites, and the politics of expediency of the ostensibly secularists have brought religion to the forefront of politics at a time when the global environment was conducive to the rise of political Islam. Although the crisis of legitimacy of the ruling elites began in the early days of independence and thus a gradual shift to religion was in the making, military rulers’ penchant for Islam as a political ideology and a marker of national identity expedited it. The constitutional legitimacy of the Islamists was achieved during military rule. Their political legitimacy, on the other hand, was won during the pro-democracy movement, thanks to the two major parties of the country, the BNP and the AL. Economic imperatives and globalization necessitate Bangladesh’s interactions with Muslim countries in the Middle East and the Gulf; but there seem to be social and political costs to this relationship. A conservative notion of Islam, contrary to the traditional syncretic Islam, has become strong. It is worth noting that there has been a considerable change in the nature of Islamists who have ascended in the decade beginning in 2010. Conservative

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Islamists, such as the Hefazate Islam, have gained ground. The incumbent AL has not only cajoled them but also increasingly embraced their ideological underpinnings. The AL’s authoritarian turn, especially since the noninclusive election in 2014, impelled the party to rely on Islamic rhetoric and befriending conservative Islamists for legitimacy. Concurrent to the rise of conservative and radical Islamists within mainstream politics was the proliferation of violent extremist Islamist groups within the country and the presence of transnational terrorist groups such as the AQIS and the ISIL. Despite recent success in taming these terrorist groups through kinetic measures, the likelihood of their resurgence is strong because of the changes in social ethos and religion’s heightened role in politics.

Suggested readings Ahmed, Rafuddin (ed.), Understanding the Bengal Muslims: Interpretative Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). Banu, U.A.B. Razia Akter, Islam in Bangladesh (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). Lewis, David. Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Riaz, Ali, Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence (London: I B Tauris, 2016). Shehabuddin, Elora, Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Uddin, Sufa M., Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). van Schendel, Willem, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Notes 1 The Medina Charter, also known as the constitution of Medina, is a document produced in 622 on behalf of Prophet Muhammad shortly after his arrival at Medina from Mecca and provided the guidelines of relations between various Arab tribes and administration of a society under Islamic laws. 2 The Daily Star, “Country to follow Medina Charter,” March 23, 2014, (accessed May 6, 2020). 3 World Population Review, “Bangladesh Population 2020,” (accessed March 5, 2020). 4 A 34-member Constitution Committee was appointed by the Constituent Assembly (CA) to draft the constitution on April 10, 1972, and the first draft was presented to the CA on October 18, 1972. After three weeks of discussion, the Assembly adopted the constitution on November 4, 1972. The constitution came into effect on December 16, 1972. 5 The democratic spirit of the constitution, however, received a serious blow on September 22, 1973, as the ruling party introduced the Constitution (Second Amendment) Bill, which incorporated provisions relating to preventive detention and proclamation of a state of emergency (Part IXA). One of the significant features of this amendment was that the government could now detain anyone for an initial period of six months to prevent that person from engaging in any action which, in the opinion of the government, constituted a threat to public safety and the sovereignty of the state. With the incorporation of Part IXA in the constitution, provisions were made that the president could

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9

10

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14 15 16 17 18

19 20

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issue a proclamation of emergency, make laws inconsistent with the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution, and suspend the court’s authority to enforce fundamental rights during the period of emergency. In early 1972, the government announced the formation of a paramilitary force named the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini (JRB, the National Defense Force). The Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini Order 1972 (President’s Order No. 21 of 1972) was promulgated on March 7, 1972, with a retroactive effect from February 1, 1972. Two of Mujib’s daughters, Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana, survived as they were on a trip to Europe at the time of the coup. Islamist political parties, particularly the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), opposed the Bengali nationalist movement and collaborated with the Pakistani military after it unleashed a reign of terror on March 25, 1971. The JI was instrumental in founding paramilitary groups in support of the Pakistani army. For example, the 1986 parliamentary election was boycotted by the BNP and an alliance of left parties while the AL and JI participated. The members of AL and JI resigned from the parliament within a year and joined the street agitation. Similarly, in 1987, street agitation reached its peak and hundreds died under police fire, but this failed to unseat the regime because of divisions within the opposition alliances. The presidential system, introduced through the Fourth Amendment of the constitution in 1975, remained effective during military rule, though many other provisions of the amendment were repealed over time. The fifth parliament, elected in 1991, brought in the Twelfth Amendment, which was ratified through a referendum. The demand for a caretaker government grew out of the experience of the transitional arrangement devised in late 1990 as a constitutional way out from the military regime of General Ershad. In December 1990, the opposition alliances agreed to a formula that Ershad would hand over power to an interim government headed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Stanley Kochanek, “Bangladesh in 1996: The 25th Year of Independence,” Asian Survey, 37 (1997): 136–42. The constitution stipulates four other options for appointing the chief advisor if the immediate past chief justice is unavailable or unwilling to take up the position. If all other options prove unworkable, the president will head the caretaker government in addition to his presidential duties. Ali Riaz, “Bangladesh in 2004: The Politics of Vengeance and Erosion of Democracy,” Asian Survey, 45 (2005): 112–18; and Ali Riaz, “Bangladesh in 2005: Standing at a Crossroads,” Asian Survey 46 (1) (January–February, 2006): 107–13. Ellen Berry, “Low Turnout in Bangladesh Elections Amid Boycott and Violence,” New York Times, January 5, 2014, (accessed April 3, 2020). David Bergman, “Bangladesh: Ex-Chief Justice Alleges He was ‘Forced’ to Resign,’” September 28, 2018, (accessed April 3, 2020). Editorial Board, “Bangladesh’s Farcical Vote,” New York Times, January 14, 2019, (accessed April 3, 2020). Dhaka Tribune, “11th General Election: TIB Finds Irregularities in 47 Constituencies; EC Rejects,” January 15, 2019, (accessed April 4, 2020). New Age, “Ballot Box Stuffed with Votes Found in CTG: BBC,” December 30, 2018,

Gwynne Dyer, “Bangladesh Returns to 1-Party State,” Bangkok Post, January 3, 2019, (accessed April 3, 2020).

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21 Election Commission records show that in 1991, the commission allotted symbols to 75 parties participating in the election; in 1996, the number was 119; and in 2001, the number was 95. In May 2020, 41 parties were registered with the Election Commission. But there are scores of parties which are not registered. Earlier figures are drawn from Dalem Ch. Barman, M. Golam Rahman, and Tasneem Siddiqui, “Democracy Report for Bangladesh,” International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) (2001). 22 Guilain Denoeux, “The Forgotten Swamp: Navigating Political Islam,” The Journal of Middle East Policy, IX (2002). 23 Shakhawat Liton, “Islamic Parties Boom after 1976 Ban Lifting,” Daily Star, August 29, 2006, 1. 24 Ibid. 25 See Ali Riaz, Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh: A Complex Web (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 26 The Daily Star, “EC Scraps Jamaat’s Registration,” October 30, 2018, (accessed April 6, 2020). 27 For the advent and expansion of Islam in Bengal, see Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). On the syncretistic tradition of Islam in Bengal, see Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 28 The role of the religious identity of Bengalis in the Pakistan movement is examined in Taj ul-Islam Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920–1947 (Nashville, TN: Westview Press, 1992). 29 Economist, “Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Uses Piety to Mask Misrule,” June 1, 2017, (accessed May 6, 2020). 30 Ashif Islam Shaon, “Qawmi Leaders Back Sheikh Hasina for Another Term,” Dhaka Tribune, November 4, 2018, (accessed May 6, 2020). 31 The only exception was the 11-party alliance, a conglomeration of the left and liberal democratic parties and groups. They pledged that if voted to power, they would work toward restoration of secular ideals. 32 “Khelafat Majilisher Shathe Panchdofa Chukti, Awami League Khomotai gele Alemder Fatwar Odhikar Debe” (Five Point Agreement with Khelafat Majlish: If Elected to Power, Awami League Will Allow Alims to Issue Fatwa, in Bengali), Prothom Alo, December 24, 2006, 1. 33 Hasan Jahid Tushar, “2 ‘Militants’ Get AL Tickets,” Daily Star, December 27, 2006, 1. 34 “Chardoleyo Jote ke vote na diley Islam rakshya hobe na” (Islam Won’t Be Saved Without the Four-Party Alliance Voted to Power, in Bengali), Shamokal, December 26, 2006, 1. 35 “Islami Shaktir Shohayota Chara Keu Khomotai Jete Parbe na: Aminee” (No One Can Attain Power Without the Support of the Islamic Forces: Aminee, in Bengali), Ittefaq, December 26, 2006, 1. 36 For details, see Daily Star, November 21, 2008, (accessed January 17, 2009). 37 Mahmood Mamdani, “Inventing Political Violence,” Global Agenda, (accessed June 5, 2020). 38 Studies have shown that the contribution of migrant worker remittances to Bangladesh’s GDP rose from 1.09 percent in 1979 to 3.64 percent in 1983 to 10.58 percent in 2020. Although Bangladesh also exports migrant workers to some Southeast Asian countries, seven Middle Eastern and North African countries have been the main destinations. They account for more than 75 percent of migrant workers from Bangladesh. These countries are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Libya, Bahrain, and Oman.

4 INDIA From secular to sickular Anirban Acharya

One can characterize politics as a systematic study of ways in which interest groups compete over the power to shape state policy. In this sense, politics is concerned with the incessant competition to gain power to govern as well as the mechanisms through which a plurality of conficting interests are managed. Politics also has an entrenched normative tradition that prescribes “good” ways to organize society, or in other words, tries to diferentiate between what is socially just or unjust. Here politics is the domain of formulating ethics and norms – of what ought to be and why it should be that way. It is in this second formulation that politics and religion share the same fundamental concerns – an evaluation of what is “good” and “just.” In fact, when it was understood in terms of divinely ordained right to rule personifed in the body of the sovereign, all politics, by defnition, was religious. To expand on Quentin Skinner’s idea if political modernity is defned by the moment where political power is not understood in personal terms, it is also when religion as the raison d’etre of sovereign power is called into question. Transcendental source of worldly rule is replaced by the temporal rule of “the people.”1 To the extent “the people” are sovereign in democracies, it becomes impossible for power to be legitimate in any absolute sense. This fundamental indeterminacy of power underlies the foundation of democracies. Following Claude Lefort’s assertion that universal popular franchise renders the locus of power empty and unrepresentable, Thomas Blom Hansen claims this “gap between legitimacy and power” in democracies leads to an ever-increasing imperative to create and enact “new strategies of legitimization of power.”2 To put it simply, with the dissolution of top-down sovereign (divinely justifed/imperial/colonial dominance) power, all exercise of political power has to be constantly legitimized by conceptualizing and articulating the collective good. This may take the form of discourses concerning economy, national security, nationalism, patriotism, freedom, justice, community, identity, equality, etc. In this contested feld of legitimizing discourses,

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religious justifcations must compete with other forms of mobilization. All claims to state power must be subject to the discipline of the constitution and the “vote market.” In capitalism, competition for votes is also a competition for resources (money, muscle, management) geared toward winning seats.3 In this theoretical context, I examine the relation between religion and politics in post-independence India along three avenues of inquiry. First, I show ways in which collective religious identities have formed and congealed since the independence of India in 1947. Second, I analyze the conditions under which and modes through which religious identities are mobilized for electoral salience. Third, I evaluate how and when these social forces couched in religious identities are able to transmit their articulated preferences efectively so as to shape public policy at the federal level. A takeaway from this study is that although a communal vein of politics, soaked in an incendiary mixture of jingoism and xenophobia, has gained purchase among a broad base of voters at the national level, I argue that a closer look might reveal a more complicated picture of “split ticketing.”

The lay of the land If Europe is seen as a continent, then India must not be seen as just a country. Even in its present incarnation, which came into being in 1947 as an independent country after 190 years of British colonial rule, the landmass that is known as India is better represented as a multinational/multiethnic/multireligious/multilingual/ multicultural/(sub)continent operating as a federal union (with a single common market and currency as well as freedom of movement within its borders) that is administratively divided along ethno-linguistic lines into 28 states and 8 union territories. India does not have a national religion or language. There are 22 ofcial languages. For the purposes of federal administration, Hindi and English is used. It is a vibrant, and sometimes violent, but a fercely competitive electoral democracy, with eight national parties and around ffty state parties contesting the 2019 elections. There are also hundreds more registered (“un- recognized”) political parties. India should be comprehended more like the European Union, as many of its states are more populous than member states of the European Union. For example, as of 2019, about 200 million people live in Uttar Pradesh (UP) which is roughly the area of the UK (66 million). India is the also the only country that is home to all major world religions (Table 4.1).

Partition and independence The trauma of the 1947 partitioning of undivided British India into Muslim majority (East and West) Pakistan and Hindu majority India, remains as central to South Asians as the Holocaust is to the Jews.4 Between 12 and 15 million people, adherents of all religions, were uprooted, and faced death and mayhem. The death toll was more than two million, and thousands simply vanished.5 Given this catastrophe on the basis of religious animosity that marked the birth of modern India, religion is

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TABLE 4.1 Composition of Indian population by religion

Religion

Total (in million)

% of Population

All Religions Hindu Muslim Christian Sikh Buddhist Jain Other Religions Not stated

1,210 965.58 172.18 27.83 20.81 8.47 4.47 7.98

100 79.80 14.23 2.30 1.72 0.79 0.37 0.66

2.90

0.24

Source: Compiled from Indian Census Data of 2011 (Ofce of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, Ministry of Home Afairs, Government of India).

undoubtedly, as historian Ramachandra Guha puts it, “one of India’s foundational fault lines.”6 Why did religious considerations “win out” and take the form of sectarian violence among communities that have lived together (with reasonable, dispersed, localized discord beftting any diverse culture) for centuries? This question has been discussed extensively in available literature on partition. One of the explanations underscore the British policy of fomenting division along religious lines, described as “divide and rule.” Other explanations put more emphasis on the agency of the colonized masses, persuaded and/or coerced as they were by the political elite, in carving out their destiny as well as clashes between political leaders such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (the most popular Gandhi in the West), Jawaharlal Nehru (the frst Prime Minister of India), and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the frst governor general of Pakistan).7 A global perspective on the matter asserts that communal hatred did not just crop up in the Indian subcontinent in isolation. The incendiary nexus of religion and politics is also a product of the globally circulating discourses of scientifc racial theories gaining prominence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Drawing upon orientalist discourses, the Hindu nationalists continue to claim racial uniqueness and superiority of Hindus. Against all evidence, these discourses of Hindu supremacy claim that India remained tarnished by Muslim rule, and hence the urgent need to return to the untarnished Aryan and Vedic golden age.8

Dalits Caste, a social form of stratifcation, is an integral part of Indian society. The question of untouchables and the lower castes have loomed large throughout the independence movement and added another layer of complexity to the question

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of religion and politics. The “outcastes” of the Hindu system (ofcially recognized as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes or SC/ST) are historically marginalized communities that have faced centuries of violence meted out by members of the upper castes. According to the 2012 Census, SC/ST formed 24.2 percent of the Indian population amounting to about 250 million people. By the 1930s, selfproclaimed Dalits (The Oppressed) were led by Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who refused to remain within the fold of the Hindu franchise and argued for a separate electorate for the Dalits. This meant that lower castes could vote leaders from their communities in seats reserved only for them, and their votes will not be diluted along with other Hindu constituencies. For a Hindu politician like Gandhi, this was unacceptable. Even though in principle and practice he was against caste oppression, he was not against the institution itself, often falling into orientalist tropes of understanding India as an unchanging society insulated from and hence ignorant of centralizing state power. His understanding of caste as “calling,” led him to construct a functionalist argument of interdependent occupational groups that apparently acted as a glue to an unifed, local, and harmonious nature of (Hindu) society.9 There were Hindu groups that infuenced political life with religious overtones. By the 1920s and 1930s, Hinduist groups like the Hindu Mahasabha (Pan Hindu Association) and Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, translated as National Volunteer Organization) have started to publicize the paranoia of a dying Hindu community, thus conjuring an urgent need for Dalits to be converted back from Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. These anxieties will surface as these groups and their ideas will gain political purchase during the 1990s.

Secularism and the Indian constitution Shortly after independence, many observers predicted that India, a country of many nations, will eventually disintegrate. “No one can make a nation out of a continent, as one prominent British ofcer put it.10 Yet, here we were, in a world of contradictions. Dr. Ambedkar’s last speech to the Indian constituent assembly is still relevant to contemporary Indian politics. On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. In politics, we will be recognizing the principle of one [person] one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one [person] one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?11 The relation between the constitutional state and the organized religion in this new India is codifed in the constitution. The philosophy and principled purpose of the Indian Constitution (the preamble) notes that “the people of India” have “solemnly resolved to constitute India” to be a “Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic.”12 The objectives for such a solemn constitution of the union by

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its people is “to secure for its citizens” social, economic, and political justice, “liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship,” “equality of status and opportunity,” “and to promote among them all fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.” But what does it mean to be secular? A simple defnition could be “state neutrality with regards to religion.”13 Neutrality means that the state cannot ofcially associate with any religion or any religious terminology for that matter, and should, under certain reasonable restrictions, allow the free practice of all religious faith. Moreover, it should act impartially toward all religious groups. In modern democracies, this doctrine of the “separation of church and state” might vary in manifestations. For example, unlike France, religious accouterments can be worn openly by pupils in Indian public schools. India, unlike the USA, does not host any National Prayer Breakfast, and unlike the USA, there is no ban on silent meditations in public schools. In India, secularism takes the form of majoritarian tolerance, where the state, while presiding over a Hindu majority society, practices neutrality toward all religions. For example, all major religions are represented in the list of “compulsory holidays” for central government employees.

Religion and the constitution Specifc articles of the Indian constitution delineate the relation between the state and religion. Article 14 establishes “equality before the law or equal protection of the law” within Indian territories. Article 15(1) prohibits the State from discriminating “on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.” Article 15(2) prohibits discriminatory public access.14 Article 16(1) establishes “equality of opportunity for all citizens in matters relating to employment or appointment to any ofce under state.” Article 16(2) prohibits discrimination in “any employment or ofce under the State” “on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, descent, place of birth, residence or any of them.” Article 17 forbids the practice of “untouchability.” In the section explicitly dedicated to “Right to Freedom of Religion,” Article 25(1) states that “Subject to public order, morality and health,” “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.” However, Article 25(2a) maintains that the State can regulate and restrict “any economic, fnancial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice.” Article 26 ensures that “Subject to public order, morality and health, every religious denomination or any section thereof ” has the right (a) “to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes’’; (b) “to manage its own afairs in matters of religion”; (c) “to own and acquire movable and immovable property”7; and (d) “to administer such property in accordance with law.” Article 27 prohibits taxation “specifcally appropriated” for the “promotion or maintenance of any particular religion or religious denomination.” Article 28(1) prohibits religious instruction “in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State fund.” These articles together demonstrate the fundamentally secular nature of the Indian constitution.

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However, there are some interesting peculiarities that make this secular arrangement unique and fraught with tension. Although India legally banned discriminatory segregation a decade before the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 (that banned racial segregation in public spaces in the US), it is still legal for a property owner in India to discriminate in the case of rental arrangements. India also does not have a uniform civil code, which means diferent religious groups can have authority over dispensing verdicts (regarding inheritance and marriage) based on religious laws. The Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV of the Indian constitution, which lays out principles “not enforceable by any court,” yet “nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country,” clearly states in Article 44: “the State shall endeavor to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” Shortly after independence, much of Hindu Personal Law was incorporated into the national civil code; however, Muslim Personal Law was not. Even though Muslim Personal Law is handled by secular courts, this has created, as we will see, much tension in national politics and has evoked anxieties among conservative Hindus and Muslims.15

Problem with speech The cornerstone of substantive democracy is freedom of speech and expression, which must include freedom of the press. Religious rituals are forms of expression. In a democracy, can one use religious fgures in a light or even pejorative way? If a form of free and creative expression hurts the sensibility of a group of people, should that expression be banned? India has a very tenuous relation with freedom of speech. Article 19(1)(a) states, “All citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression”; Article 19(1)(b) confers to all citizens the right “to assemble peaceably and without arms.” Article 19(2), however, subjects the exercise of these rights to “reasonable restrictions” in the interests of “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency, or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an ofence.” Although freedom of the press is not mentioned explicitly, it is derived from Article 19(1)(a) but is subject to the same “reasonable restriction.” These “reasonable restrictions” (with other provisions in the Indian Penal Code that can restrict expression) provide a wide latitude for state power to curb speech. More importantly, it is the constitutional basis for groups to protest against artists, authors, and flmmakers and their work. Governments have has acted under pressures from religious groups. For example, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was banned in 1988 by the Rajiv Gandhi government because of protests by Muslim groups.16 In 2014, an activist forced Penguin publishers to rescind Dr. Wendy Doniger’s book “The Hindus: An Alternative History.”17 Increasingly, the Hindu right, with impunity, have attacked Muslims and Dalits for eating beef or for approving/posting content in social media – all because their sentiments (read “sense of decency and morality”) were hurt.18 In that sense, India can be described as a lumpen democracy because

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the state, overtaken by claims of religious fanatics, can restrict, and has restricted expression by arresting individuals. Politically afliated supporters or mobs of religious fanatics have ransacked ofces of newspapers with impunity.

The Congress system The frst two decades of the Indian republic can be characterized by the electoral domination of the Congress party at the national and state level, governing under what scholars have called a Nehruvian Consensus based on principles of democratic socialism, secularism, and nonalignment.19 Rajni Kothari has famously called this “the Congress system” – a system of one-party dominance but (due to regular turnover of competitive elections and opposition parties) not a one-party system. In this view, Congress was a party of consensus as it won overwhelmingly in the national and state legislatures riding on a legitimacy that translated to “only Congress could be trusted.” The Congress Party was also able to build up economic resources and enduring patron-client structures that created barriers to entry. The opposition often erupted and dissolved as eventually everyone wanted the Congress umbrella lest they are left out in the political wilderness without the money, information, resource, and contacts that the party institutions provide.20 As Table 4.2 shows, Congress’s grip on national politics was paramount in the beginning decades. During this time, although the Nehruvian consensus has kept a

TABLE 4.2 Electoral performance of major Indian parties between 1952 and 1977

Party

1952–1957 (Seats: 494) (% Votes)

1957–1962 1962–67 (494) (494)

Indian National Congress (INC)

364 (44.9)

371 (47.8)

Communist Party of 16 (3.3) India (CPI) Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS later BJP) Socialist Party (SP) 12 (10.6) Praja Socialist Party – (PSP) Swatantra Party (SWP) Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M)

27 (8.9)

1967–71 (520)

1971–1977 (545)

361 (44.7) 283 (40.8) 352 (43.7) Indira Faction 29 (9.9) 23 (4.4) 35 (9.3)

19 (10.4) 18 (7.9)

44 (8.7) 25 (5.1)

Source: Compiled from The Election Commission of India and IndiaVotes,

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check on political strife based on religion, there were signifcant issues in the state of Kashmir, which require some attention here.

The case of Kashmir When the British left, India was composed of 560 or so recognized vassal princely states that, although indirectly under British rule, were not formally annexed into British India. The British maintained shifting alliances with rulers of these so called “native states.” During independence, it was understood that these native states will not be automatically added to Indian or Pakistani territories. The ruler of these states, keeping in mind the wishes of the people they ruled, will join India or Pakistan, or remain independent. This was a moment where the territories of India could become “Balkanized” into many small states. This fragmentation was unacceptable to Congress’s leadership. Most of these accessions to India moved smoothly, spearheaded by the coercive and persuasive measures of Sardar Vallabbhai Patel (India’s frst deputy prime minister and the minister of home afairs) and Rao Bahadur Vappala Pangunni Menon (popularly known as V.P. Menon, Indian Civil servant and constitutional advisor) who dangled the lure of privy purses for joining India. Religious issues became paramount in some border states. For example, in the case of Junagadh, although the Muslim ruler wanted to join Pakistan, his majority Hindu subjects did not. When Pakistan refused to have a plebiscite, the Indian army went in and settled the equation in its favor by holding a plebiscite that overwhelmingly supported joining with India. By the beginning of 1948, Junagadh was in India, and many Muslims were forced to leave for Pakistan. The northern border state of Jammu and Kashmir was the obverse of Junagadh as it was ruled by (a notoriously inept greedy Hindu ruler) Hari Singh who presided over a Muslim majority population.21 What would have been the result of a plebiscite continues to remain an open question to this day. Sheikh Abdullah who emerged as a natural leader of Kashmiris, was a committed secular and like Nehru, also a native of Kashmir. In 1944 before the war started, his party, the National Conference, had proposed a constitution of Independent Kashmir, stating that, We the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and the Frontier regions, including Poonch and Chenani districts, commonly known as Jammu and Kashmir State, in order to perfect our union in the fullest equality and selfdetermination, to raise ourselves and our children forever from the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and superstition, from medieval darkness and ignorance, into the sunlit valleys of plenty, ruled by freedom, science and honest toil, in worthy participation of the historic resurgence of the peoples of the East, and the working masses of the world, and in determination to make this our country a dazzling gem on the snowy bosom of Asia, do propose and propound the following constitution of our state.22

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Furthermore, Tariq Ali points out, [Abdullah] regarded the Muslim League as a reactionary organization and rightly feared that if Kashmir became part of Pakistan, the Punjabi landlords who dominated the Muslim League would stand in the way of any social or political reforms. He decided to back the Indian military presence, provided the Kashmiris were allowed to determine their own future. At a mass rally in Srinagar, Nehru, with Abdullah at his side, publicly promised as much.23 During October 1947, armed Pathan tribes from the newly formed Pakistan’s North Western Frontier Province moved into Kashmir to join an internal revolt in the Poonch region and in the process committed grave atrocities on the population raping and pillaging Hindus and Muslims alike.24 Defunct Hari Singh needed urgent help from India and unilaterally signed an accession. Late October 1947, the Indian army was airdropped on Srinagar (capital of Kashmir) triggering the frst Indo-Pak war. On January 1, 1948, India approached the UN Security Council for a resolution to the dispute. In the beginning of February 1948, the UN brokered a ceasefre with Line of Control (LOC) portioning Kashmir which left two-thirds of the territory of Kashmir under Indian control. The next year, the new constitution of India, through Article 370, accorded some autonomy to the new state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) while maintaining power over communication, defense, and foreign policy. Sheikh Abdullah of the National Conference Party, in what was observed as an election fraught with irregularities, won all seats in the frst state election.25 In 1952, Sheikh Abdullah joined J&K to the Indian union with partial autonomy under Article 370. This was in continuation with National Conference’s 1948 position of “provisional accession” to India given its “status as an autonomous republic.”26 But dissent brewed among the conservative elements among Kashmiri Hindus (many of them from the previous nobility that “ruled” the land) who abhorred this special status of Kashmir and demanded complete Indian control. In the Hindu majority India, they found allies among the political right. Notably, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee who had left Nehru’s cabinet to establish the BJS that scored a paltry three seats in the 1952 elections. The Kashmir issue was a worthy rallying point for a party with abysmal results. In the spirit of secularism, Sheikh Abdullah had stafed state administrative positions with non-Muslims and Muslims. Riled by sustained protests and disruption from right-wing Hindu nationalists, on April 10, 1952, Abdullah publicly talked about his fears: Many Kashmiris are apprehensive as to what will happen to them and their position if, for instance, something happens to Pandit Nehru. We do not know. As realists, we Kashmiris have to provide for all eventualities. . . . If there is a resurgence of communalism in India, how are we to convince the Muslims of Kashmir that India does not intend to swallow up Kashmir?27

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Abdullah looked up to Nehru for support, hedging that Nehru, in spite of being a Kashmiri Hindu himself, will maintain his secular credentials and force the hands of those Congress party members who are ideologically aligned with the Hindu right’s jingoist impulses. Nehru appeared to stave of pressure from right-wing Hindus like S.P. Mookerjee, who questioned the Congress government’s willingness to wrest the third of Kashmir now under Pakistani control. Nehru replied, It is not the property of either India or Pakistan. It belongs to the Kashmiri people. When Kashmir acceded to India, we made it clear to the leaders of the Kashmiri people that we would ultimately abide by the verdict of their plebiscite. If they tell us to walk out, I will have no hesitation in quitting. We have taken the issue to the United Nations and given our word of honour for a peaceful solution. As a great nation, we cannot go back on it. We have left the question for final solution to the people of Kashmir and we are determined to abide by their decision.28 Yet, the opposite happened. Under Nehru’s watch, a coup saw Abdullah deposed from power and imprisoned on charges of communicating with the Pakistani intelligence. Indian troops used violent and heavy-handed measures to quell these mass protests. After years of incarceration and frequent unrests in Kashmir, Abdullah was released in 1963 under Nehru’s initiative. With encouragement from Nehru, Abdullah went to Pakistan to work out a solution with General Ayub Khan and made some progress. But then on May 27, 1964, when Abdullah was in Pakistan, Nehru died of a heart attack and Abdullah immediately arrived at his friend’s funeral. But the damage had already been done. Kashmir will remain unresolved to this day and will infame the communal animosity on both sides of the border.29 Again and again, religion and politics will be entangled in a toxic mix which will ultimately stife the Kashmiris. Opinions about the future course of Kashmir among people living inside (and outside) J&K are of three types – founding an independent state, work within the framework of Article 370 of India, and join Pakistan. The more militant adherents of these three groups, aided by Indian and Pakistani armies have been killed and tortured and they have killed each other. The repression of protests described earlier is a part of Kashmir’s history that will be repeated time and again with uncanny similarities irrespective of the parties that were in power. In 2019, when Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power with overwhelming majorities, the Modi government scrapped Article 370 status of Kashmir and clamped down on Kashmiris who continue to live under extrajudicial killing, often terrorized by Indian army personnel, and cut of from internet or social media access.

The era of Indira After the death of Nehru (and the sudden departure of his interim successor Lal Bhadur Shastri in 1966), his daughter Indira Gandhi, became the prime minister. In the 1967 Indian General Elections, the Congress Party won a comfortable

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majority. As a sign of vibrant democracy, Congress was also facing electoral competition from other parties. Its seats declined in the face of challenges from the right by Hindu dominated Jana Sangh, and the libertarian Swatantra Party (founded by C Rajagopalachari in protest of the Nehru dominated Congress in 1959 and dissolved by 1974). On the left, the CPI and other socialist parties also posed somewhat of a challenge to Congress’s rule. Local parties like Sikh infuenced Akali Dal in the Northern state of Punjab and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in the Southern state of Madras (Now Chennai) came onto the scene as worthy competitors at the state level. Overall Congress saw its seats drop from 361 to 283 (see Table 4.2). Congress’s performance in state-level elections was also dismal. Subsequently, the Indian Congress faced a split which not only diminished its standing as a cohesive force but also led to the “old guard” Congress leadership to be efectively neutralized by the Indira faction of Congress – a political move that made it easy for Indira-led Congress to play with communal divisiveness a decade or so later. In the elections of 1971, the opposition congealed against the Indira faction Congress (R) with SWP, BJS, and Congress (O) being the prime movers of dissent. A clarion call of Indira Hatao (remove Indira) was matched by Indira’s own slogan of Garibi Hatao (remove poverty). This secular and progressive platform led to spectacular results with Congress (R) emerging overwhelmingly victorious.30 Her government gained legitimacy as the privy purses of the erstwhile native state royals were abolished by the Twenty-sixth Amendment of 1971. India was pulled into civil war in the Eastern part of Pakistan when the Pakistan Army unleashed a genocide against the people of then East Pakistan on March 25, 1971. More than ten million took refuge in India in the following months. India extended both moral and material support to the Bangladeshi freedom fghters who declared independence and established an exile government in India. India played a key role in assisting the Bengali liberation movement. After almost nine months of civil war between the Bengali freedom fghters and Pakistani Army, it became a war between India and Pakistan leading to the emergence of independent Bangladesh on December 16, 1971, when Pakistani soldiers surrendered. What is important to note here is that although religious considerations in political maneuvering partitioned undivided India, ultimately linguistic and cultural afnities superseded religion. Both West and East Pakistan were majority Muslims, but it could not throttle the emergence of an imagined (Bengali) community based on ethno-linguistic identities.

Emergency period By 1972, dissent was brewing in the states where the Congress was being perceived as being bloated with corruption and nepotism.31 Student movements in various states erupted under leaderships of student chapters of the Communist Party of India – Marxists (CPI-M) and rightwing Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) in 1974. At the request of the students of Bihar, social activists, and followers of Mohandas Gandhi, Jayprakash Naryan (JP) agreed to lead the anti-government movement,

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on the condition of nonviolence. It is one of the rare moments in Indian politics where communal divisiveness was overcome, in JP’s own words, “to fght corruption and misgovernment and black marketing, profteering and hoarding, to fght for the overhaul of the educational system, and for a real people’s democracy.”32 People from various walks of life, including women who usually remain outside the public space, participated in the movement. Indira, to consolidate power, trumped up patriotism and diverted attention from the problems in Bihar and elsewhere and tested India’s frst nuclear bomb. This strategy failed to quell the discontent in the long term. Meetings between JP and Indira failed, while the government began to adopt harsh measures. Yet, the movement spread and various parties including the old guard of Congress (O), Jayprakash Narayan and Moraaji Desai, Jana Sangh, and the socialists, continued agitations to make matters worse for Indira Gandhi. There were legal challenges to her electoral win. A veteran freedom activist and socialist Raj Narain who had lost to her in the Raebareli constituency lodged a case of electoral malpractice. In 1975, the Supreme Court nullifed the election, and Ms. Gandhi was no longer a Member of Parliament (MP). The very next day following the verdict, Ms. Gandhi via the president declared a state of national emergency. Invoking Article 352, she launched a massive crackdown on civil and political liberties. Anyone criticizing the government was detained or jailed. President’s rule was imposed, and state legislative elections were suspended. After two years of what can be described as dictatorship, suddenly and mysteriously, Indira Gandhi dissolved the parliament, ended the emergency, and called for fresh elections. In the 1977 elections, Congress (Indira) lost spectacularly to a coalition of parties called the Janata coalition headed by the Janata Party. Morarji Desai was the new PM for two years followed by Charan Singh as the PM for less than six months. The 1980 elections saw Congress (Indira) win an overwhelming majority of 353 seats, with the next three parties getting a total of 108. It is important to underscore here the long-term efect of this split in the Congress leadership. As the old guard of Congress was marginalized and ultimately ushered out of policy-making circles by the Indira faction, the voices of tolerance and communal harmony went with them, replaced by a more Machiavellian nature of politics, where provoking religious divisiveness to gain electoral ground became fair play. It is not a coincidence that Ms. Gandhi’s new Congress faced two important issues that signifcantly afected the relation between religion and politics in India – Khalistan and Shah Bano case.

Khalistan and Blue Star In the 1980s, political machination of the Indira regime to undermine her opponent in Punjab using the Sikh religious community resulted in an insurgency based on religious identity and cost her life. The founder of the Sikh religion Guru Nanak had sought to synthesize the elements of Hinduism and Islam.33 During the independence movement, Sikh nationalism took shape

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among the clamor for separate nation-states for Hindus and Muslims.34 More importantly, the land of Punjab where many Sikhs have stayed and constructed Gurudwaras were sliced into Pakistani and Indian counterparts. Mass migration to India during partition resulted in a Sikh majority state. Although Sikhs make up less than 2 percent of the Indian population, they form about 60 percent of Punjab’s population. In addition, the Sikh diaspora is around 15 million. During independence, the Sikh group Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) emerged as an anticolonial force in Punjab. SAD initially aligned with the Congress, but along with Sikh citizens, became increasingly alienated within the context of Punjabi politics. The Hindu-dominated Punjab government led by the Congress and the central government’s intransigence in creating a state of Punjab along linguistic lines made things worse.35 In the 1977 elections, SAD routed the Congress and emerged with a majority of seats in the Punjab assembly and sent nine MPs to the Indian Parliament. The Anandpur Resolution, on which SAD fought the elections, claimed autonomy of Punjab in terms of more states’ rights within the federal system of government. Indira Gandhi wanted to overcome the Akali opposition in Punjab by employing the techniques of divide and rule.36 The idea was to manufacture a political force against SAD by stoking communalism and disharmony. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale became the radical and militant front man against SAD. But, in turn, Bhindranwale became a force that Congress (Indira) could not control. By 1982, he had moved into the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar and started agitating for a Khalistan homeland, separated from India. His followers joined with weapons and adopted hijacking and other violent actions. In June 1984, PM Gandhi ordered the Indian military to evacuate the premises of the Golden Temple. In what was called Operation Blue Star, hundreds of Sikhs perished in this direct assault on the holy shrine. Sant Bhindranwale died with them. Massacres against Sikhs ensued, the number of deaths was in the thousands, and many were forced to seek a diferent homeland in Canada, the US, or the UK.37 In Kashmir, Gandhi also played communal games. As Kanchan Chandra points out, in 1983, Indira aligned with the Hindu minority of Kashmir for electoral purposes and Congress lost the state elections.38 Within a year, Farooq Abdullah’s democratically elected government was dismissed. Within four months of Blue Star, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh. In Delhi, more than two thousand Sikhs were killed by lynch mobs, many of them were Congress party members. By all accounts, this was a pogrom and has been recorded as such by survivors and scholars.39 The late PM’s son (now sworn in as the new PM) Rajiv Gandhi, condoned the mass killings as he infamously quipped “when a tree falls, the earth shakes.”40 Congress swept the 1984 elections based on what Indians often call “sympathy vote,” and PM Rajiv Gandhi was at the helm. One of the landmark incidents of Rajiv Gandhi’s time that showcases the complicated nature of religion and politics is the Shah Bano case.

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Shah Bano case In a 1985 landmark case, the Supreme Court of India ruled that a Muslim woman Shah Bano was entitled to alimony from her ex-husband under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code that requires husbands with sufcient means to provide monetary support for their wives and ex-wives who are unable to support themselves. Zoya Hasan underscores how the issue of women’s right to dignifed existence quickly got lost in the bickering about minority rights or the lack thereof.41 The Court observed that even though Muslim Personal Law does not require such settlements, it also does not consider the economic condition of the woman. Many Muslims considered this verdict as an afront to the system of Muslim Personal Law. Further, the Court’s reference to Article 44 (the states shall endeavor to secure for citizens a Uniform Civil Code) made things worse. Critics suggested such allusions expanded the scope of the judgment to question the validity of Muslim Personal Law in India or the Shariat. The maintenance of Shariat for many Muslims had become a sacred symbol of identity within India, in the same way the cow became holy to many Hindus. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board led the protests along with Muslim politicians from Congress and Janata Dal. Feminist activists have advocated for the reform of religion personal laws for secular universal principles, but the Shah Bano verdict also activated the Hindu right that hijacked this secular commitment and yielded it as “a powerful weapon” to gain electoral advantage.42 As Zoya Hasan explains, “singling out Muslim women as the group oppressed by religion contributed to the construction of the Muslim as backward and fed readily into the discourses of minority appeasement.”43 In spite of protests from Muslim women’s groups who supported the verdict, in 1986, the Congress majority parliament under PM Rajiv Gandhi overturned the Apex Court’s verdict by legislating an act that did nullify the requirement of alimony beyond a certain religiously mandated period called iddat.44 The implication of this case for religion and politics was twofold. First, it solidifed the conservative Hindu majoritarian discourse of Muslim appeasement and backwardness, a communally divisive discourse that will be capitalized somewhat efectively by the Hindu right. Second, it neglected the issue of women’s rights and failed to hear the voices of Muslim women, thus tarnishing Congress’s democratic, progressive credentials, or whatever was left of it.

Hindutva redux The same year that Congress overturned the Shah Bano verdict through legislation, it allowed Hindu activists to enter and worship in a mosque in Ayodhya, UP (where Congress was also in power). The Hindu right has long claimed that Babur, the frst Mughal Emperor destroyed a temple to build what is now called Babri Mosque. The town of Ayodhya is mentioned in Epic Ramayana as the birth place of Hindu mythological king Rama and hence the Hindutva crowd with

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unprecedented archaeological accuracy claimed that the very site of the mosque was where Rama was born.45 These networks of organizations are invested in creating an explicitly Hindu state. They insist that a Hindu-ness, commonly referred to as Hindutva, is necessarily in antagonism with Islam, communists, and liberals. Collectively, they are referred to as the Sangh Parivar or the Sangh ecosystem composed of BJP, RSS, Shiv Sena, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), Hindu Sena, and myriad other smaller organizations. A mixture of Hindu religiosity, jingoism, Aryan/Hindu supremacy, and righteous violence animates the discourses of Hindutva ideology. Among its overwhelmingly male adherents, there is a sense of being held hostage by the Muslims and the political left, who are now simply called “anti-national” or “terrorist.” In 1989, for example the Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thakerey was claiming that injecting militancy into Hindu blood would make for an appropriate leader.46 As early as 1984, the Sangh Parivar, most notably the VHP and RSS, had attempted to liberate Ayodhya for the purpose of Hindu worship.47 By the 1989 election campaign season, it was clear that Congress was leaving behind the secular posturing of its frst four decades. Rajiv Gandhi promised to establish a Ram Rajya (Kingdom of Ram) if he won the election.48 Congress lost the 1989 election to a united opposition led by V.P. Singh. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991 because of the fallout from Tamil liberation in Sri Lanka. In 1992, a riotous crowd of Hindu activists stormed the mosque and demolished it. As Kanchan Chandra explains succinctly, the postemergency Congress’s “sustained move toward Hindu majoritarianism over several decades created a fertile ground for a more extreme ideology of the BJP.”49

Hindutva 101 At its core, Hindutva aims to unify disparate cultural formations, traditions, sects, and thoughts under the common label of being a Hindu, a single unifed community to which, it asserts, India belongs. V.R. Savarkar, of the early twentieth century Hindu Mahasabha who coined this term Hindutva, aimed at constructing a “Hindu-ness shared by all Hindus.”50 During the Babri Mosque agitations of the 1990s, one Daljit Singh from RSS wrote, “Well, Muslims did beat Hindus time and again, not because Hindus lacked bravery and sacrifce, but just for one reason- Disunity.”51 The Hindutva-based nationalism symbolizes the nation as the mother which needs to be protected from what Thomas Blom Hansen has called “a masculinized Hindu culture created in partial imitation of the features of Islam and Christianity.”52 Hindutva seeks to destroy religious pluralism and against all evidence – imagine India as a religiously homogeneous Hindu nation. One RSS member Srikanth Joshi summed it up for the New York Times: “Muslims are converted Hindus, but they have forgotten their Hindu-ness. So, we will awake them to their Hindu-ness, and in time, they will realize their mistake.”53 This India has to be economically and militarily strong and secured from people, who are in disagreement.

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An anti-Western, anti-Muslim, and anti-Pakistani rhetoric colors this discourse. Hostile to historical facts, the interlocutors of Hindutva profess a narrative of a golden, Vedic, and Hindu nation-state that was pillaged and defled by Muslim and British rulers. The idea is to recover India from “sickulars” – a pejorative term that is used by the Hindu right to refer to anyone, specifcally from the left, who does not subscribe to their communal politics. This discourse of Hindu-ness constructs itself primarily in opposition to Islam in general and Indian Muslim citizens, in particular (but also the Dalits). In the more rabid end of the spectrum, this rhetoric calls for violent bullying of academics, journalists, or anyone who challenges the premises of this Hindutva nationalism, including spiritual fgures who profess harmony among religious groups.54

Coming of the saffron system The secular nature of the constitution does not hinder Indian politicians from regularly invoking religious symbology and metaphors for electoral purposes. Politicians from parties like the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, BJP, and Hindu social organizations like the RSS, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Sena regularly use divisive, incendiary, and intolerant rhetoric, especially during election time. In 1999, Bajrang Dal activists burned Australian Christian missionary Graham Stuart Steins alive, along with his two sons, aged ten and six, all based on the false allegation that he was converting Hindus under the guise of social work. Since 2016, there is rampant, nationwide, unpunished, mob lynching of Muslims suspected of eating beef, or simply living their lives. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court condemned this killing spree.55 The Indians electorate, in 2014, delivered a historic victory to the BJP, the standard-bearer of the Hindutva ideology with long-running association and support among groups that imagine and forcefully advocate an India reconfgured primarily as a Hindu supremacist state. The victory of 2014, securing 282 of 543 seats of the national parliament, was increased in 2019 to 303 seats. In the past years, the activists and supporters of the Bharatiya Navshaki Party (BNP) and its afliate organizations have used social media to reproduce and amplify the globally circulating xenophobic discourses that paranoidly perceive Islam, and by extension all Muslims to be a threat to national integrity and global peace.

The BJP The BJP was founded in 1951 as Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), a political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). But connection between BJS and RSS was problematic since the latter was perceived as extremist and militant. After all, Nathuram Godse who shot Mohandas Gandhi for “favoring Muslims” was a member of the RSS. RSS was banned after M.K. Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. BJS was opposed to secularism and collectivism, but as B.D. Graham argues, it was unable to efectively articulate its economic liberalism and anti-secularism to voters

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who were against Congress.56 S.P. Mookerjee tried to steer away BJS from this stigma of intolerance and militancy that its association with RSS evoked but after his death in 1953, the chances of BJS to mount an efective political challenge to Congress faded. But the leaders of BJS, under the reign of D.N. Upadhyaya, used the formidable RSS network of volunteers called pracharaks to reshape BJS in the latter’s image.57 In the 1977 post-emergency election cycle, BJS joined the Janata Party as unifed opposition that defeated Congress, but by 1980, it has morphed into BJP with a more centrist platform. Kanchan Chandra accurately observes that after years of poor electoral performance and lack of popular legitimacy, BJP “had given up on Hindu nationalism” as a lost cause that would “never attract popular following in India.”58 In the 1984 elections, BJP was less aligned with Hindu forces than Congress. For example, BJP’s party Manifesto from 1984 talked about “unity in diversity” being a “hallmark of Indian culture, which is a unique multicultural synthesis of cultural contributions made over the centuries by diferent peoples and religions”.59 It positioned itself as a viable alternative to the Congress on a platform that stressed the erosion of Indian cultural values due to Congress-led westernized development. It accused Congress of anti-democratic elitism, corruption, and minority appeasement.60 After its loss in the 1984 election and observing Congress’s successful pivot toward Hindu majoritarianism, the BJP regrouped and by 1989, Hindutva and Ayodhya were back on its agenda. Congress under Indira had slowly but surely lost its grassroots credibility as she squeezed out the old guard, and by the 1990s, it was considered the party of the elite ridden with internal disputes. BJP, on the other hand, inculcated party discipline and top-down authoritarian coherence in its political messages, with an osmotic relation with RSS whose hierarchy it emulates.61 As Achin Vanaik notes, the RSS has cultivated, created, and safronized mass support at the grassroots level with associations like Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (Center for Tribal Welfare) that has worked closely with the tribal and Dalits.62 This, in turn, helped BJP in gaining electoral success. Here, the Sangh ecosystem has tried to co-opt Dalit politics by bringing it into an expansive “Hindu community,” a more inclusive nationalism against both non-Hindu minorities and liberal left “anti-national” critics. Congress’s power and ambition to remain as a “party of consensus” structured the way it orchestrated inter-identity and intra-identity rivalry to gain broad legitimacy. But the BJP conglomerate was far more well prepared and competent in molding Hindu majoritarianism and now has more economic resources than anyone.63 The slow yet spectacular ascent of the BJP in the Indian national electoral map is easily discernable in Table 4.3. It is telling that in 2014 and 2019, the BJP was the only winning party to not have a single Muslim MP in the history of India. It is more telling that although Muslims make up 14 percent of the population, only 5 percent of MPs in a 543 strong assembly were Muslims.64 In 2019, the BJP government led by PM Narendra Modi was able to realize some of these visions of Hindutva. Legislative activism has lowered the standard for designating

118 Anirban Acharya TABLE 4.3 BJP and Congress seats in 543-member Lok Sabha (1984–2019)

Elections

1984

1989

1991

1996

1998

1999

2004

2009

2014

2019

BJP Congress

2 404

85 197

120 244

161 140

182 141

182 114

145 138

206 116

282 44

303 52

Source: Compiled from The Election Commission of India and IndiaVotes.

individuals as terrorists, thus making any one with a diference in opinion, and especially Muslims, prone to incarceration. It has criminalized portions of Muslim Personal Law. With broad support, it revoked the Article 370 status of Kashmir and as noted escalated the repression by cutting of civilians from basic communication utilities. It also wants to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC) that seeks to sort Indians into legal and illegal categories. Many rightfully fear that it will be weaponized against Muslims and Bengalis as it is evidenced from incidents in Assam since 2019. Moreover, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019) gives a path to citizenship to non-Muslims coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (because of religious persecution or otherwise). These two-pronged actions – NRC and CAA – though seemingly unrelated, efectively allow all illegal Indians a path to citizenship except Muslim Indians and thus intends to efectively disenfranchise Muslim Indians.65 Protests against the CAA erupted after it was approved by the parliament on December 12, 2019. In addition to the members of the police and law-enforcing agencies, the BJP called upon its supporters to confront the demonstrators tacitly suggesting that the demonstrators are “traitors.” For example, on January 27, 2020, a BJP parliament member and union minister urged his audience to “shoot the traitors of the country.”66 Three days later, a Hindu nationalist obliged him by shooting an unarmed and nonviolent protester in Delhi.67 These incidents have accentuated the tensions between the religious communities, but most importantly showed how religion is used by the incumbent to fan the fame of hatred. The rhetoric of the BJP and ilk have already caused a serious damage to the social fabric of the country, whether irreparable or not is something to be seen in the future.

Religion and liberation Circling back to where we started, all religions interpret ideas of social justice and collective good and hence can germinate progressive political activism. In the case of India, religion can and has been deployed for the purposes of liberation – promoting social equality and communal harmony. For example, Gandhi, who as a Hindu politician often invoked Hindu icons and sensibilities, served as an unrelenting leader of anti-colonial struggle through nonviolent civil disobedience and advocated communal harmony. These strategies of tolerance and nonviolence were

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pragmatic and realistic ways to upend the British Raj.68 B.R. Ambedkar interpreted and applied Buddhist principles for articulating the struggle for social and economic equality of Dalits. The system of afrmative action in India that reserves government jobs and educational institutions for Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC), is an excellent example of the progressive and liberating aspects of religious principles that inspire political action. Islam and Christianity have a rich tradition of liberation theology that is too voluminous and complex to note here. One of the pillars of Sikhism is the struggle for social justice. Recently, Anantanand Rambachan has constructed a liberation theology of Hinduism through scriptural interpretation that emphasizes the worldliness of social struggles. This view socializes the idea of reincarnation where the rebirth of the soul is the continuation of generation of struggles for justice and truth that connect the past to the present.69 The syncretic cultures of India, which stand at the confuence of all religions, allow religions to create a space for interfaith harmony and celebration.

Conclusion Since its independence, India has moved from a more secular, tolerant state to an expressly intolerant and xenophobic one. In pre-Hindutva India, Muslims and Dalits were marginalized, but now Hindutva-inspired politicians are regularly using violent and derogatory language in election rallies against Muslims and the political left. Cow vigilantism targeted toward Muslims have led to indiscriminate lynching. In a fascist move, dissent toward the policies of the ruling BJP government is framed by its supporters as anti-national, and worse, terrorism if the dissenter is Muslim. Since the age of information is also the age of misinformation, the ruling class can and has used social media to manufacture alternative realities and histories to disastrous efect. Whatever may be the case, there is also enough evidence that a strong, tolerant, and resilient civil society constantly challenges the racism and repression of the Hindu right, taking to the streets and enduring the brutality of the police. It is this India that brings hope of steering away from the regressive forces that try to deny “unity in diversity.” The monochrome politics of hate might be powerfully seductive to some religious fundamentalists, but the multicolored and multicultural India will defeat these fascist forces resoundingly.

Suggested readings Bayly, Christopher A., “The Pre-history of Communalism? Religious Confict in India, 1700–1860,” Modern Asian Studies, 19 (2) (1985): 177–203. Brass, Paul R., The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011). Chandra, Kanchan (ed.), Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Deol, Harnik, Religion and Nationalism in India: The Case of the Punjab (London & New York: Routledge, 2003).

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Doniger, Wendy, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). Hinnells, John and Richard King. Religion and Violence in South Asia: Theory and Practice (London & New York: Routledge, 2007). Jafrelot, Christophe (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Nanda, Meera, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Rambachan, Anantanand, A Hindu Theology of Liberation: Not-Two Is Not One (New York: SUNY Press, 2014). Shani, Ornit, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Sikand, Yoginder, Muslims in India since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter-faith Relations (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). Thapar, Romila, “Communalism and the Historical Legacy: Some Facets,” Social Scientist, (1990): 4–20. Varshney, Ashutosh, Ethnic Confict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

Notes 1 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume II: Renaissance Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 368. 2 Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 21. 3 In the 2019 Indian federal election, the major parties reportedly spent about $7 billion and 53 percent of funds received by the major political parties was from unknown sources. For details, see Jeanette Rodrigues, Archana Chaudhary, and Hannah Dormido, “A Murky Flood of Money Pours into the World’s Largest Election,” Bloomberg, March 16, 2019, (accessed March 3, 2020). Also, the projected party expenditure in 2019 comes with a 40 percent increase from the 2014 election within a legal environment of “zero transparency.” For details, see Milan Vaishnava, “Political Finance in India: Déjà vu All Over Again,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 31, 2019, (accessed March 3, 2020). 4 Ayesha Jalal, for example, understands partition as “a defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.” See William Dalrymple, “The Great Divide: The Violent Legacy of Indian Partition,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2015. 5 It is important to keep in mind that the Bengal Famine of 1943 that was caused by deliberate colonial policies of diverting food for war efforts, had already claimed three million lives in Bengal. 6 Ramchandra Guha, “India Was a Miracle Democracy. But it’s Time to Downgrade Its Credentials,” The Washington Post, August 14, 2019. 7 Alex Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (London: Macmillan, 2008); Neil Stewart, “Divide and Rule: British Policy in Indian History,” Science & Society (1951): 49–57; Amar Farooqui, “Divide and Rule? Race, Military Recruitment and Society in the Late Nineteenth Century Colonial India,” Social Scientist, 5 (3/4) (2015): 49–59. Abhinav Chandrachud, Republic of Religion: The Rise and Fall of Colonial Secularism in India (New Delhi: Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 2020); Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Bernard S. Cohn,

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9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essay (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Peter van der Veer, “Hindu: A Superior Race,” Nations and Nationalism, 5 (3) (1999): 419–30; Romila Thapar, “The Theory of Aryan Race in India: History and Politics,” Social Scientist (1996): 3–29; Romila Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity,” Modern Asian Studies, 23 (2) (1989), 209–31; Ishan Ashutosh, “Mapping Race and Environment: Geography’s Entanglements with Aryanism,” Journal of Historical Geography, 62 (2018): 15–23; and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu Aryan Myth, and NeoNazism (New York: New York University Press, 2000). It is not a surprise that, as late as 1973, the Dalit Panthers of Maharashtra who have drawn inspiration from the Black Panthers of the US marked Gandhi as “cunning,” “deceitful,” and “an orthodox caste-ist” who for the sake of Indian and more so Hindu unity scuttled the Dalit cause by his patronizing and paternalistic rhetoric that kept the structure of oppression somewhat unchanged. See David Arnold, Gandhi: Profiles in Power (New York: Routledge, 2014), 180. Guha, India was a Miracle Democracy. Ramachandra Guha, “The Four Fault Lines of Our Republic,” The Hindustan Times, January 27, 2019. The words socialist and secular were added through the Forty-second Amendment in 1976. Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism (London: Verso Books, 2017), 48. “No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to (a) access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment; or (b) the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State funds or dedicated to the use of the general public.” Granville Austin, “Religion, Personal Law, and Identity in India,” in Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgement, ed. G.L. Larson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 15. Alison Flood, “Banning Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was ‘Wrong’ says Indian Minister,” The Guardian, December 1, 2015. Mira Kamdar, “Do Indians Have Freedom of Speech?” Pacific Council on International Policy, April 23, 2018. In 2017, the Supreme Court ordered state governments to take requisite action to stop cow vigilantism. See Meenakshi Ganguly, “Mob Attack in India Highlights Broader Violence,” Human Rights Watch, July 20, 2018. See Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism; and Rajni Kothari, “Political Consensus in India: Decline and Reconstruction,” Economic and Political Weekly (1969): 1635–44. See Rajni Kothari, “The Congress System in India,” Asian Survey (1964): 1161–73. The Hindus generally live around the Jammu area. Tariq Ali, “The Story of Kashmir,” in Kashmir: The Case of Freedom, eds. Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji, Habbah Khatun, Pankaj Misra, and Arundhati Roy (London & New York: Verso, 2011), 40–2. Ibid., 42–4. Ali, “The Story of Kashmir,” 40–1. The UN security council in 1951 resolved that elections cannot replace a statewide plebiscite. Ali, “The Story of Kashmir,” 42–3. Ibid., 43–4. Arundhati Roy, “Seditious Nehru,” in Kashmir: The Case of Freedom, eds. Tariq Ali et al., 123. Ali, “The Story of Kashmir,” 45–7. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of World’s Largest Democracy (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 469.

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31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 477. 33 See Anil Sooklal and P.R. Pillay, “Guru Nanak, Sikhism, and the Clamour of Khalistan,” Journal for the Study of Religion (1991): 45–63. 34 Christine C. Fair, “Diaspora Involvement in Insurgencies: Insights from Khalistan and Tamil Eelam Movements,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 11 (1) (2005): 126–56. 35 Punjab formally became a Punjabi language state of India in 1966. 36 Sooklal and Pillay, “Guru Nanak, Sikhism, and the Clamour of Khalistan.” 37 See Apurba Kundu, “Indian Armed Forces’ Sikh and Non-Sikh Officers’ Opinions of Operation Bluestar,” Pacific Affairs (1994): 46–69. 38 Kanchan Chandra, “The Roots of Hindu Nationalism’s Triumph in India,” Foreign Affairs, September 11, 2019. 39 Pramod K. Nayar, “Writing Survival: Narratives from the Anti-Sikh Pogrom, India 1984,” in The Other India: Narratives of Terror, Communalism and Violence, ed. Om Prakash Dwivedi (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 14–26. 40 Chandra, “The Roots of Hindu Nationalism’s Triumph in India.” 41 Zoya Hasan, “Minority Identity, State Policy and the Political Process,” in Writing the Women’s Movement: A Reader, ed. M. Khullar (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2005). 42 Soibhan Mullally, “Feminism and Multicultural Dilemmas in India: Revisiting the Shah Bano Case,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 24 (4) (2004): 671–92. 43 Hasan, “Minority Identity, State Policy and the Political Process,” 210. 44 In 2001, this act was challenged in Daniel Lati vs. Union of India, but the Court upheld the legislature’s decision. 45 For centuries, Hindus and Muslims have prayed in the same site. But during the midnineteenth century, guardrails were put in by the British but both religions used the same premises. In 1949, an idol of Rama appeared in the Mosque and for the first time set off a riot. 46 Mary F. Katzenstein, Uday Singh Mehta, and Usha Thakkar, “The Rebirth of Shiv Sena: The Symbiosis of Discursive and Organizational Power,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 56 (3) (1997): 371–90. 47 Tummala, “Religion and Politics in India,” 65. 48 Chandra, “The Roots of Hindu Nationalism’s Triumph.” 49 Ibid. 50 Hansen, The Saffron Wave, 77. 51 Ibid., 174. 52 Ibid., 112. 53 Shaila Seshia, “Divide and Rule in Indian Party Politics: The Rise of Bhartiya Janata Party,” Asian Survey, 38 (11) (1998): 1041. 54 Rana Ayyub, “Mobs are Killing Muslims in India: Why Is No One Stopping Them?,” The Guardian, July 20, 2018. 55 Ibid. 56 Bruce D. Graham, “The Leadership and Organization of the Jana Sangh 1951–1967,” in Parties and Politics in India, ed. Zoya Hasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 155. 57 See Christophe Jaffrelot, “A Specific Party Building Strategy: The Jana Sangh and RSS Network,” in Parties and Politics in India, ed. Zoya Hasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 58 Chandra, “The Roots of Hindu Nationalism’s Triumph.” 59 Jaffrelot, “A Specific Party Building Strategy,” 218. 60 Seshia, “Divide and Rule in Indian Party Politics,” 1039–40. 61 See Jaffrelot, “A Specific Party Building Strategy”; and Hansen, The Saffron Wave. 62 Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism, 68–70. 63 Ibid., 86–7. This section provides several points behind the decline of the Congress, which might be helpful for the reader.

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64 India had three Muslim presidents out of 14. The president is not directly elected by voters but are chosen in indirect elections. 65 Jhalak M. Kakkar, “India’s New Citizenship Law and Its Anti-Secular Implications,” Lawfare, January 16, 2020, (accessed April 5, 2020). 66 Hindustan Times, “Inflammatory Slogan at Union Minister Anurag Thakur’s Election Meeting in Delhi,” January 28, 2020. 67 Alasdair Pal and Danish Siddiqui, “Gunman Fires at Delhi Protesters after Threatening ‘Final Journey’ Live on Facebook,” Reuters, January 30, 2020. 68 Karuna Mantena, “Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence,” American Political Science Review, 106 (3) (2012): 455–70. 69 Anantanand Rambachan, A Hindu Theology of Liberation: Not Two Is Not One (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014). Also see, S. Gupta Barnes, “Articulating a Hindu Theology of Liberation,” KAIROS, The Center for Religion, Rights, and Social Justice, (accessed May 29, 2020).

5 DEMOCRACY AND SALAFISM IN THE MALDIVES A battle for the future Azra Naseem

The Maldives is the only “100 percent Muslim country” in South Asia; one of only two in the world, the other being Mauritania. The people of Maldives, Dhivehin, are of one ethnicity, speak one language, Dhivehi, and worship one God. Things have been thus since 1153 AD – just as the Buddhist king then ordered all his subjects to embrace Islam, the Maldivian Constitution (2008) demands that all citizens be Muslim.1 Defending and enforcing this homogeneity – most importantly, the “100 Percent Muslim Status” – plays a central role in ordering contemporary Maldivian politics and society. Although Islam has remained the only religion in the Maldives for the better part of 800 years, the type of Islam practiced over time has been open to change, with long-isolated Dhivehin perennially eager to welcome Islamic knowledge and infuences as they arrived on Maldivian shores. Thus, what began as a strongly Suf-infuenced Islam, which over the years evolved into a syncretic Maldivian Islam, has today become an overwhelmingly Salaf Islam. Maldives adopted a multiparty democratic system of governance in 2008 and has since been attempting to position itself as an Islamic, modern, and progressive state. The Salaf belief in “progression through regression,” however, is often in confict with the aspirations and ideals of the democratic system of governance, making the interplay between religion and politics both tense and intense. This chapter provides an overview of current political and religious environments in the Maldives and identifes the ongoing clash between Salafsm and democracy as a defning characteristic of both political and religious practices in the country at present. It explores the characteristics and conficts of the interplay between Salaf and democratic actors in the Maldives by examining their interactions during key contemporary sociopolitical and religious events. Additionally, it identifes various categories of Salaf actors working to realize their vision of an “authentic” Islamic state in the Maldives and explores how political considerations

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create an environment conducive to the spread of Salafsm – and Salaf-Jihadism – in the Maldives.

The Maldives: an overview The Maldives is among the most geographically dispersed sovereign states in the world, with people living on only 189 of the 1,125 islands dotted across almost 300 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean. The beauty of the islands, for which it is world renowned, is fragile as the environment is devastatingly vulnerable to the efects of sea-level rise. The 26 natural atolls in the archipelago are administratively divided into 18 atolls and three island cities. Most islands are smaller than one square kilometer, and most inhabited ones are home to communities of less than 1,000 people each. Years of centralized Malé-based governance, however, has concentrated almost all developmental gains – better education, health, employment, infrastructure – on the capital island. Consequently, immigration to Malé has stretched the island-city’s services and infrastructure to capacity. Around 41.9 percent of the population lives on the two square kilometer island; no other island has more than a 6 percent share of the population.2 Adding to the thousands who have focked to the capital city from various parts of the archipelago is a largely undocumented expatriate population of about 100,000 workers from other South Asian countries.3 Consequently, Malé, at the start of 2020, is one of the world’s most congested cities with a population density of 23,000 people to every square kilometer. Over 70 percent of the Maldivian economy is based on tourism. In 2019, a record of 1.7 million tourists visited the country, generating over US$3 billion. The Maldives GDP per capita reached $11,890 in 2018 according to the World Bank,4 the highest by far in South Asia.5 The average monthly income of Maldivians, however, remains low with over 50 percent of employees earning on average around US$1200 or less a month.6 The income inequality between urban and rural populations, and between the small number of rich and the large number of poor is vast. The UN Human Development Report (2019) shows that between 1995 and 2018, the Human Development Index value given to the Maldives increased by over 30 percent, propelling it in 2019 to the High Human Development group of countries.7 But, as experts have highlighted, once the Maldives’ HDI value is adjusted for inequality based on variances in life expectancy, education, and per capita income, it decreases by 21 percent. This reduction is several points higher than the overall average of 17.9 percent, and far worse than the 12.1 percent reduction scored by neighboring Sri Lanka.8 Vast corruption connected to all tiers of government and some leading private businesses have added to the country’s socio-economic and environmental woes, and to this increasing inequality. During the term of President Abdulla Yameen (2013–2018), the Maldives lost about a billion US dollars in the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the country involving ofcials at the helm of the government and the tourism industry.9 President Yameen and his deputy Vice President

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Ahmed Adeeb have since been jailed for their roles in the embezzlement, but the stolen money remains unrecovered, as do islands, lagoons, and other national resources leased or sold in the deals.10 While crime rates, in general, and violent murder rates, in particular, have come down since President Solih’s coalition government came to power, they soared during the previous fve years. Gang violence in which individuals were brutally murdered on crowded streets of the capital, extremist violence in which suspected nonbelievers, apostates, and members of other nonconforming minorities were brutally slayed, and random drug-related robberies made life in the crowded capital as well as in isolated island communities tense and fearful for citizens. It is in this environment of political chaos, corruption, greed, inequality, and social disafection that ultra-religious conservatism in the form of Salafsm, and its violent subcategory of Salaf-Jihadism, has taken hold in the Maldives.

Political landscape The current government, led by Ibrahim Mohamed Solih of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), is a fragile coalition of four disparate and rival parties that came together to defeat incumbent President Abdulla Yameen in the September 2018 elections. The other three members of the coalition are Jumhooree Party (JP), former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s Maldives Reform Movement (MRM), and the Islamist Adhaalath Party. Leaders of all four parties – Mohamed Nasheed of MDP, Qasim Ibrahim of JP, Gayoom (formerly of PPM – Progressive Party of Maldives) and Sheikh Imran Abdulla of Adhaalath – had been imprisoned on trumped up, politically motivated charges during Yameen’s presidency.11 In January 2016, under immense pressure from the international community, Yameen allowed Nasheed to travel abroad to the United Kingdom for medical treatment, where he promptly acquired refugee status. In exile, Nasheed was involved in several attempts to form an opposition coalition to challenge Yameen. When in May 2018 the Elections Commission nullifed the candidacy of anyone convicted of a crime in the previous years, it ended the possibility of any of the four party leaders contesting in the election.12 After months of bickering, the coalition agreed on Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, a veteran lawmaker and close confdante of Nasheed, as the common candidate. While MDP has had to share executive power, it won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections which followed in April 2019, securing 65 of the 87 seats in the unicameral People’s Majlis.13 One of the new MPs was former President Mohamed Nasheed who, in May 2019, was elected Speaker of the Majlis. The absolute majority in Majlis, combined with Nasheed’s occupation of the speaker seat, allowed the party to push through some promised reforms such as an overhaul of the judiciary,14 and amendments to the Counter-Terrorism Act of 2015 which gave law enforcement more powers to address the issue of violent extremists.15

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Islam in contemporary Maldives In the last decade, Salafsm, “a philosophical outlook which seeks to revive the practices of the frst three generations of Islam,”16 has rapidly replaced the syncretic Maldivian Islam that had evolved over centuries. The redemptive philosophy of Salafsm found a receptive audience in the politically chaotic and economically unequal Maldives of the early millennium, particularly in the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami. Given the lack of studies identifying or categorizing the religious beliefs of Maldivians – research considered unnecessary given the insistence on absolute homogeneity – exact fgures are unavailable on what percentage of the population have embraced Salafsm as a philosophy that governs their conduct as Muslims. A lazy measurement would be to highlight the astonishingly large numbers of Maldivians who have adopted the “aesthetic conformity” of Salafs – unkempt beards and hemlines that stop short of the ankle for men and the niqab for women. Aesthetics alone, however, explains neither Salafsm itself nor its infuence or complexity.17 The Salaf community is broad, and major diferences exist among its adherents on the method or manhaj by which to realize the Salaf vision of reviving the Islam practiced in its frst three centuries.18 Existing literature has divided Salafsm into varying numbers of categories.19 Quintan Wiktorowicz’s popular typology published in 2006 sorts Salaf actors into “purists” who avoid politics, “politicos” who get involved in politics, and “jihadis” who advocate armed struggle to realize the Salaf vision.20 Shiraz Maher criticized the Wiktorowicz model for being “too broad to capture the relationship between how these actors view their relationship with power, and the manner in which they engage with, or change it.”21 Maher’s more comprehensive typology is composed of (a) quietist-advisors who eschew public dissent in favor of private counsel; (b) activist-challengers who publicly disagree with the government and call on it to reform; (c) violent-challengers who, while having taken up arms, are yet to reject the entire domestic or international order; and (d) violent-rejectionists who regard the nation-state itself as “a heterodox afront to Islam whereby temporal legislation usurps God’s sovereignty.”22 The last category are the Salaf-Jihadists. While not every Salaf is a Jihadi, Salafsm is the intellectual and ideological bedrock from which Salaf-Jihadism springs. The Salaf goal of reviving the ways of Islam’s frst three generations – al-salaf al-salihin – poses fundamental difculties to democratic governance.23 For instance, Salaf actors in the Maldives have fundamentally challenged equality between men and women; between Muslims and others; have vehemently (and violently) rejected secular democracy; drawn clear boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims; applied the principle of Al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ in dealing with non-Muslims, and demanded its application in Maldivian foreign policy. They have also called repeatedly to reinstate the death penalty and establish Shari’a punishments for all hudud crimes. Given the fundamental conficts between the goals of Salafsm and of democracy, it is essential to understand the power relations between them in a Maldivian context.

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Neither quantitative nor qualitative research exists that show any deviance from or variance within the crucial “100 percent Muslim” status of Maldives. An examination of contemporary events of signifcance in recent times can, however, reveal the presence and infuence of various categories of Salaf actors. Additionally, an examination of the interplay between politics and various categories of Salaf actors during and around these events – combined with a historical overview of how Salafsm interacted with authoritarian and democratic forces in the last decade to arrive at its current position of infuence – can contribute to a deeper understanding of politics and religion in the Maldives today. That is the task to which this chapter now turns.

Salafsm and democracy: forward or back to the future? At the end of 2019, a signifcant number of top-level government ofcials were associated with either the Islamist Adhaalath Party, the Islamic Ministry, or infuential Salaf non-governmental organizations such as Jamiyyath Salaf. The current Home Minister Sheikh Imran Abdulla, leader of Adhaalath Party, was one of the most vociferous Salaf activist-challengers against the MDP government led by Mohamed Nasheed. As president of the Adhaalath Party, he campaigned for implementation of Shari’a punishments by ending the long-standing moratorium on the death penalty and accused Mohamed Nasheed of governing with the intent to “wipe Islam from the Maldives.”24 These accusations of anti-Islamic activities by Nasheed and MDP, given religious credulity by Salaf clerics, played a key role in inciting anti-Nasheed sentiment and protests, which culminated in his controversial resignation on February 7, 2012. In March 2015, however, the Adhaalath Party aligned with MDP, turning against the Yameen government citing its brutality and corruption.25 On May 1, 2015, Sheikh Imran, jointly with MDP, led a 20,000 strong anti-government protest and made a speech for which he was convicted of terrorism in February 2016. The protest ended with a violent police crackdown and over 200 arrests. The Supreme Court suspended Sheikh Imran’s conviction in November 2018, and in December 2018 he was appointed to President Solih’s cabinet as Minister of Home Afairs. The Adhaalath Party, which has less than 7,000 members and has no seats in parliament, holds two cabinet posts in the current government – Home Ministry and the Ministry of Islamic Afairs. The Ministry of Islamic Afairs works closely with the Adhaalath Party and with Jamiyyath Salaf and solicits their advice in decision-making processes.26 It also has a track record of inviting controversial Salaf speakers such as Zakir Naik27 and Bilal Philips28 to give public lectures and works closely with Salaf NGOs in organizing their numerous Da’wa camps and other missionary activities. The Ministry is also keen to look for transgressions by believers and has placed itself in charge of identifying apostates, and of monitoring media and other public spaces for instances of kufr, shirk, and other issues of priority for Salaf actors. In April 2018, the Ministry published the “Procedures to Deal With People Who

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Participate in Activities Related to Religious Freedom, Mocking Religion, Going to War, Violence in the Name of Religion, and Assisting War Eforts.”29 The document, written in Dhivehi, identifes citizens “leaving Islam (even if few in number)” as one of the key threats the Maldives is facing at present. Leaving Islam, it notes, is not a crime defned in Maldivian law. Asserting that “the 100 percent Muslim status” of Maldives must be maintained, the Ministry outlined the measures to be taken when confronted with a Maldivian apostate. This includes counselling, and if necessary, a court verdict to confrm their apostate status followed by isolation from the rest of society for a set period of time. While the Ministry is quick to take action against any activity perceived to be antiIslamic, it has been more reluctant to condemn or take action against human rights abuses arising from behaviors justifed by the intention to practice “pure” or “authentic Islam.” In November 2019, for instance, it emerged that a group of Maldivians on the island of Maduvvari in Raa Atoll had been living as a separate community for about a decade. In a population of just 2,400, on an island of 0.2 square kilometer, the group separated itself from others on the basis of diferences in their religious practices which, investigative reports later revealed, included “marrying” girls at puberty, refusing them an education, and endangering their health by refusing vaccines. While the separatist community’s existence was news to the general public, government and law enforcement authorities—including the Home Ministry, Islamic Ministry and Gender Ministry (the Minister of which was, at the time, an Adhaalath Party member) knew not just of their existence but also the religious views held by the community and its human rights abuses in the name of religion, yet failed to take any action. A similar case had come to light in February 2013, when a Maldives court sentenced a 15-year-old victim of child sex abuse to fogging for fornication. Forced into action by pressure from the international community, the government took the child into state care and appealed her sentence. The government also formed a special committee represented by the Ministry of Gender, Family and Human Rights; the Ministry of Foreign Afairs; Ministry of Home Afairs; the Ministry of Islamic Afairs; the Attorney General Ofce; and the Family Protection Unit of the Maldives Police to discuss ways and means to prevent such an event from occurring again. Salaf activist-challengers are also robust actors in the non-governmental arena. Many prominent Salaf actors are registered as NGOs, while non-registered groups also operate news and educational websites online, extending Da’wa and spreading the teachings of whichever Salaf manhaj the actors follow. Salaf groups also run nurseries and preschools, hold Da’wa camps on islands across the country, organize public lectures and informal workshops in mosques, disseminate Salaf teachings to the general public via all major mainstream and social media communications platforms, and monitor the conduct of citizens both on and ofine for digressing from the righteous path of the al-salaf al-sālihin. . . The most infuential non-governmental Salaf actor is Jamiyyath Salaf (JS). Registered in 2006, JS in 2020 had close to 60,000 (roughly 15 percent of the population) followers on Facebook and heavily subscribed accounts on Viber, Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube, among other platforms. The Maldives have a high

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Internet penetration rate of over 80 percent, the number of Internet users rising from just 6,000 at the start of the millennium to over 300,000 at the end of 2019. The population also enjoys a 100 percent literacy rate, and a majority of Maldivians today possess smartphones even in the remotest of islands. Over 80 percent of the population are also on Facebook, and the use of mobile communications apps is widespread. While the Internet is not a cause of “radicalisation” (sic), it is “a facilitator and catalyser (sic) of an individual’s trajectory toward violent political acts.”30 JS takes full advantage of all online resources available in the Maldives. The NGO produces a vast amount of mainstream media material on Salaf teachings, and popular members appear daily on dedicated religious television and radio channels or as guests on private and public broadcasting stations. Several members of JS activist-challengers hold infuential posts in society as university lecturers, teachers, island councilors, community leaders, preachers, and “reformed” celebrities who use their positions to disseminate Salaf teachings, and to publicly challenge any government or public action seen as against the aqīdah. Maldivian Salaf activistchallengers regularly reiterate the importance of aqīdah – maintaining doctrinal purity. In fact, the defning characteristics of contemporary Salafsm: tawhid, bid’a, takfr, and Jihad – are fully integrated into contemporary Maldivian sociopolitical discourse. Several customary religious practices have been banned, for instance, as bid’a, music is actively discouraged by all and has been banned as haram by many, and the same can be said of dancing. Infuential Salaf actors also identify particular people as murthad or apostate, making them targets for the destructive hatred of violent Salaf actors. The practice of accusing others of apostasy, alien in preSalafsm Maldives, is common today. JS’s approach to power, and the degree of infuence it possesses can also be observed in its recent successful campaign to abolish the Maldivian Democracy Network (MDN), a local NGO working toward protection of human rights and democratic values. MDN published a Preliminary Assessment on Radicalisation in the Maldives in 2015, a report which analyses the country’s changing religious beliefs and practices by examining Salaf discourses online, in school textbooks, and in sermons approved by the Islamic Ministry for Friday prayers.31 In September 2019, JS condemned the “MDN Report” as “obvious proof of continuing eforts to wipe Islam from Maldivian territory and to establish on these lands a secular government,”32 and demanded that the NGO be shut down.33 “If the Maldivian Islamic identity is to be maintained, it is absolutely essential that every single Maldivian fully appreciate the extreme danger that this report poses,” the statement said. To create awareness of its contents, therefore, JS thus translated extracts of the English language report into Dhivehi and provided the public with a summary of what the report was truly about: setting up a secular system of governance in the Maldives. Furthermore, some of the most active of Salaf clerics hastily formed a group named the Association of the Most Learned and campaigned with JS online and of-line to ban MDN. Represented by “all religious establishments in the country,” the association included members of the Adhaalath Party and JS among other Salaf actors. Their demands echo those of JS: (a) uphold and protect Islamic values;

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(b) take any steps necessary to immediately stop any and all crimes against religion; (c) show no hesitation in punishing such crimes; (d) cooperate in any activity conducted to uphold Islamic values; (e) resolve public unease; and (f) ban MDN to prove willingness to swiftly stop any and all crimes against religion. Within days, Salaf activist-challengers were able to not just incite public outrage against the report but also to translate the outrage into street protests calling to ban MDN and impose Shari’a punishments on the authors for mocking Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. A social and mainstream media campaign to ban MDN (#BanMDN) was launched on Twitter and Facebook, garnering nationwide support. Protests were held on several islands, and over a 100 Island Councils issued statements condemning “the MDN Report.” Under pressure, the government acceded to the demands, at frst suspending MDN in October 2019, then altogether dissolving it in November 2019.

Salaf-Jihadism: rejecting democratic government The policy of successive governments from 2008 to 2018 had been to turn a blind eye to society’s changing religious practices and to deny the radicalization which had accompanied the sea change toward religious conservatism. In December 2019, however, Commissioner of Police Mohamed Hameed stated that 1,400 Maldivians existed within society who were “prepared to kill another” for their beliefs. He also revealed that 400 Maldivians attempted to travel to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS and the Nusra Front. Close to 200 Maldivian men, women and children did make it to the war zones, and 59 remained in the area at the end of 2019, “not in a position to return home.” In September 2019, authorities also revealed that local terror cells connected to Al Qaeda were responsible for at least three high-profle killings in the Maldives between 2012 and 2017. These included the murder of MP and religious scholar Dr. Afrasheem Ali in October 2012 after disagreements with JS; the forced disappearance and killing in August 2014 of Ahmed Rilwan, a journalist whose reporting included Maldivian Jihadi activities in Syria and Iraq; and the murder in April 2017 of Yameen Rasheed who published a blog, The Daily Panic,34 which often satirized Salafsm and its followers. After years of neglect and obfuscation by government, the three murders were investigated by a special commission set up by President Solih. Findings published by the President’s Commission, for the frst time, provided details of individuals and groups who recruit Maldivians to fght in foreign wars. The report also revealed some of the murderers had fown to Syria for Jihad after committing the crimes; their departure had been deliberately enabled by politicians at the top level, and by law enforcement and immigration fgures who themselves subscribed to some variant of Salafsm. In December 2019, the Maldives Police Service (MPS) raided Maduvvari island to uproot a separatist religious community and revealed that a plan to carry out a terrorist attack at the Velana International Airport had been foiled in 2017 and that a Maldivian afliated with Islamic State Khorasan Province had received a 21-year jail sentence for terrorism in Afghanistan.

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Mapping Maldives road to Salafsm It has taken centuries of belief in Islam for the Maldives to arrive at its current relationship with Salafsm,35 for while Islam has remained the state religion for close to nine centuries, signifcant changes have occurred over time in how Islam is practiced by Dhivehin during particular epochs under various political leaders. These changes across time have occurred parallel to and in connection with changes to systems of governance, political expediency, and infuential international developments. In the twelfth century, when Buddhist King Dhovemi Kalaminja ordered the population to convert to Islam, the geographically isolated Maldives was just being discovered by traders and explorers on the Silk Route, one of the main routes along which Islam spread to Asia and beyond.36 Maldives adopted Islam, its founding myth narrates, after a Berber from the Maghreb, Abu Barakat Al Barbari, rescued the population from a sea monster that demanded monthly virgin sacrifces. Although generally suspicious of outsiders, travelers with Islamic knowledge to impart were awaited with eagerness and welcomed with generous hospitality. It was the norm for such travelers to be invited into the inner sanctum of the ruling monarchy and be given infuential positions within.37 At the same time, Maldivian scholars – invariably members of the ruling elite – travelled to “Islamic lands” in Arabia and North Africa, where they immersed themselves in Islamic teachings for years (sometimes decades) before returning to the Maldives to shape and rule Maldivian society according to their newly acquired knowledge. Throughout history, Maldivians who acquire Islamic knowledge, especially from countries in the Arab region, have received high esteem in society, seen as possessing a form of knowledge superior to that acquired in non-Islamic countries. This prevalent traditional conviction is an advantage to the modern Salaf clerics educated in Middle Eastern countries, who travel to the islands to extend D’awa, or to recruit new fghters. In more modern times, the 30-year government of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom brought about considerable changes to religious practices in the Maldives. Gayoom, a graduate of Al-Azhar University, exerted tight control over the population’s religious conduct. Through articles in a weekly newsletter, Dheenuge Magu (Path of Religion) published by the President’s Ofce, Gayoom dispensed religious opinion and advice on all manner of subjects from personal hygiene to good manners. Gayoom, who frst became a student in Egypt at the age of 12, had formed religious views in line with the society where he grew up. Much in the tradition of other Maldivian scholars who journeyed to the Middle East for their studies, he returned to instruct Maldivians on the best way to practice Islam. As a dictator with complete control, Gayoom quelled all religious debate and demanded absolute conformity, much as Salaf actors do now, except for diferences in the forms of Islam so enforced. New legislation, the Religious Unity Act 1994, was introduced to address the presence of religious diferences in society after decades of conformity.38 It demanded the president’s personal preapproval, or permission from an entity personally approved by the president for all public lectures or teaching of religion. It

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also made permission from the Education Ministry necessary to teach religion as a subject. Only graduates from government-approved universities, educated “to a level the government deems necessary,” were eligible to teach religion. It also criminalized any and all speech and action that threatened “the religious unity of Maldivian citizens.” With legislation in hand, Gayoom jailed several key Salaf activists, driving the movement underground. The movement, which at the time was identifed as Wahhabism, strengthened clandestinely, forming communities that prayed at separate congregations, and segregated themselves from the mainstream. Jihadists among them joined training camps in other parts of South Asia, such as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. At the time, the public reaction to the tiny minority’s decision to embrace Salafsm was greeted with astonishment, and such practices remained well outside the mainstream. The choice of an exceptional few. This began to change signifcantly, however, with the War on Terror. As the war’s efects were felt across the world, and the sense of persecution felt by Muslims increased, Maldivian Salafs began to receive generous funding from foreign and local sources to increase their activities to invite Maldivians to Salafsm. Along with funding for ultra-conservative teachings also came support and funding for the more violent characteristics of the philosophy. In 2002, Ibrahim Fauzee, a Maldivian, was arrested from an Al-Qaeda safe house in Pakistan and held in extrajudicial detention at the Guantanamo Bay prison camps. Although Fauzee was released in 2004 and was returned to the Maldives, he remained silent until October 2008, when Gayoom was defeated in the new democratic elections. Speaking to a Pakistani newspaper, he accused Gayoom of letting him remain in jail for his own political and religious agendas. Following the democratic transition, he set up the Islamic Foundation, now one of the most active Salaf civil society organizations in the country. In October 2006, police closed down and demolished a private mosque and arrested 25 people on Himandhoo island for breach of the Religious Unity Act. Most islanders had left traditional Islam for Salafsm and were rejecting earlier places and methods of worship as “un-Islamic.” Also, the same month, the government put a young man, Ali Jaleel, under two-year house arrest for teaching Islam without permission. Three years later, in May 2009, Jaleel was a suicide bomber in the attack on Pakistani intelligence headquarters in Lahore. On September 29, 2007, a homemade bomb was set of in central Malé, injuring a dozen tourists. Pursuit of the attackers led police and military back to the island of Himandhoo, where a group of masked men with swords and iron rods confronted the police. Around 50 people were arrested and jailed. Meanwhile, agitation for democracy had been gathering momentum. On September 19, 2003, the Maldives National Security Services (NSS) killed a prisoner, 19-year-old Evan Naseem, in a Maafushi jail. At the time, Maldivian prisons were full of young men addicted to heroin; substance abuse is regarded not simply as a crime but also as a religious transgression deserving severe punishment. Human rights conditions in the jails were poor, and rumors of torture – later proven – were rife.39 The killing of Evan Naseem, which was followed by the fatal shooting of

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another two prisoners in the same prison the following day, led to spontaneous street protests expressing public anger with the inhumanity. As the anti-government sentiments merged with the democracy movement, Gayoom’s government was besieged by public unrest. In August 2004, Gayoom’s security forces cracked down on protesters with teargas, pepper spray, and batons. Over 200 were arrested, adding democracy activists, anti-government agitators, and scores more disafected young men to the already crowded prison population, which included the Salaf actors jailed by Gayoom for various violations of the Religious Unity Act 1994. Salaf Jihadists, arrested from the battle in Himandhoo, joined them in October 2007. Criminals and political activists alike, as well as law enforcement ofcers, came under the infuence of the imprisoned Salaf actors, a trend which continues to this day. Later, most of the prison population – sinner, preacher, politician, and criminal alike – joined the democracy movement, which took to the streets of Malé from 2004 onwards to call for a change of government. The December 2004 tsunami had a strong impact on both religion and politics in the Maldives. The vast Indian Ocean swelling and rising over the low-lying islands was a terrifying sight to behold. Waves did not crash onto the islands; rather, the sea swelled, “as if the islands were sinking,” then receded, taking everything with it. A total of 82 people died, 13 islands were completely devastated, and 12,000 people became homeless.40 The national shock, fear, and trauma from the experience was unprecedented. Gayoom declared an amnesty for political prisoners, calling for national unity. Salaf actors related the event to Islam and the failure to practice it in the manner of al-salaf al-salihin. Achieving redemption through revival of “authentic Islam” was a message that especially resonated with Maldivians at the time. Democracy ushered in an era in which the ultra-conservative movement fnally took wings, free from state controls. The coalition agreement, with which the new democratic government came to power, collapsed within a short period of time, motivating President Nasheed to form an alliance with the religious Adhaalath Party to ensure his and the MDP government’s survival. Nasheed’s government replaced Gayoom’s Supreme Council for Islamic Afairs with an Islamic Ministry, appointing a leader of the Islamist Adhaalath Party as the minister. The Islamic Ministry was in charge of all religious speech and action from authorizing Imams, sermons, and mosques to approving school curricula. According to reports, the ministry favored the Adhaalath Party’s recommendations in all its decisions, closing the space for other Islamic teachings and voices within society. Furthermore, despite increasing evidence of internationally targeted radicalization among Islamic communities, the new government also refused to impose any form of control on the quantity or quality of the ultra-religious movement’s proselytizing or preaching in various parts of the Maldives. The media saturation of Salaf religious content was such during this period that it was difcult to occupy any public space on land or sea without listening to Salaf teachings on radio, television, or other platforms.

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Concerns raised by civil society organizations alarmed by the rapidly increasing conservatism were dismissed by the new government which saw no reason to muzzle the democratic right to free expression. With control over religion resting with the Islamic Ministry, which was itself conducting its afairs in close association with the Adhaalath Party, power struggles between political and religious actors became frequent. In 2010, the government freed people taken prisoner by Gayoom in connection with the bombing in Malé. This period also saw several occasions in which the government backed down to demands made by the conservative religious establishment, allowing Salaf interpretations of Islam to dictate government policy. To “defend Islam,” Salaf actors demanded amendments41 to the Religious Unity Act 1994 and successfully took to the streets to challenge the government’s plan to allow alcohol at hotels and guest houses on inhabited islands and, also successfully, to demand the closure of spas and massage parlors, including those on resorts. In November 2011, United Nations High Commissioner Navi Pillay, in an address to the Maldivian Parliament, criticized the Maldives’ practice of fogging as a punishment for fornication and adultery.42 The Salaf establishment reacted with alacrity, quickly staging protests outside the UN ofce in Malé, demanding the High Commissioner’s immediate deportation. The Islamic Ministry issued a statement criticizing Majlis members for allowing Pillay to speak “against a tenet of Islam.” “The Maldives is an Islamic state,” the statement insisted. “No international institution, association, individual or state has the right to prevent or stop Dhivehin from following the principles of Islam which they have been following for so many years.”43 On December 23, Salaf activists and the political opposition came together in a “Coalition to Defend Islam,” the biggest Islamist gathering in the country’s history. Thousands had travelled by boat for long hours to express their anger. In the opposition discourse of the time, defending Islam in the Maldives and removing Nasheed from the presidency came to mean the same thing. The allegation that he was “irreligious” or “La-Dheenee” not just maligned his reputation but also afected his credibility as a leader. La-Dheenee is a pejorative neologism, which has come to mean irreligious or anti-Islamic which, when attached to an individual or organization, has the power to bring about their social and political destruction. The allegation that President Nasheed planned to “bring other religions to the Maldives,” was repeated daily through opposition-owned television and other media. In January 2012, the opposition Dhivehi Qaumee Party (since abolished), published “President Nasheed’s Cunning Plans to Destroy the Islamic Faith of Maldivians” which envisaged that by completion of Nasheed’s presidential term: (a) Maldives will not be a 100 percent Muslim country; (b) faith of Maldivians will be weak; (c) sin will be common; (d) the noble path of Islam would be made shameful; (e) there will be places of worship for other religions; and, internationally, (f) Muslim allies will become foes, and infdels friends. It was the responsibility of every Maldivian to defend and protect Islam.

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The politico-religious protests continued almost daily, fueled by the La Dheenee label and clerical discourse. On February 7, as violence among protestors increased, and with a police mutiny on hand, Nasheed resigned. Nasheed’s alleged irreligiosity or anti-Islamic beliefs and actions, and the credibility these accusations gained from the support of infuential Salaf sheikhs, was crucial to bringing an end to the frst democratically elected government of the Maldives. The rhetoric of “defending Islam” also played an important role in the 2013 presidential election. The frst round, on September 7 was contested by fellow candidate JP’s Qasim Ibrahim, who accused the Elections Commission of rigging it in favor of the MDP. With the intervention of the Supreme Court, the frst round was nullifed and held again on November 9. Rivalry between the candidates – Nasheed, Qasim, PPM’s Abdulla Yameen, and incumbent President Mohamed Waheed – was intense. Denouncing Nasheed’s irreligiosity in comparison with the piety of rivals was an important characteristic of the election. Then Minister of Islamic Afairs Dr. Mohamed Shaheem Ali Saeed (Adhaalath Party), speaking at an election rally, encouraged fellow scholars and clerics to escalate their condemnation of Nasheed: We want all other scholars to step up to the frontline with us. This is not about a particular party. This is a call to the Maldivian Ummah. I am speaking also in my capacity as the Minister of Islamic Affairs. I call on the entire Maldivian Ummah to unite to defend this nation from this Laa Dheenee [Godless/irreligious] philosophy.44 After a long drawn-out and controversial election, Abdulla Yameen won by 51 percent against Nasheed’s 49 percent on November 16, 2018. Yameen kept the rhetoric of “defending Islam” running throughout his presidency, regularly using it to shore up public support or criticize the opposition. He also cultivated close ties with the Saudi regime, making state visits to Riyadh, opening a Saudi Embassy in Malé, securing $1.7 million in free aid for building “world class” mosques and a pledge of $100,000 from Saudi scholars to promote Islamic education. The government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with its Saudi counterpart to “maintain religious unity” in the Maldives.45 In December 2015, Yameen announced that Maldives was part of Saudi Arabia’s Islamic antiterrorism coalition and also in May 2016 cut diplomatic ties with Iran, and later Qatar in 2017. Having come under criticism for failing to address the issue of radicalization efectively, Yameen ratifed a new Prevention of Terrorism Act 2015, established the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) in 2016 and in 2017, published the National Strategy on Preventing and Countering Extremism. Yet, Maldivians continued to travel to Syria for war, and separatist religious communities living on small islands, such as the one on Maduvvari, continued to exist with no action from the government, and reports persisted of radicalization within the Maldivian security establishment itself.

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Conclusion Islam has been the state religion of the Maldives for nine centuries. Maintaining religious homogeneity has been an important part of political and social order for the same length of time. As Salafsm gained infuence in society, helped by the interplay between religion and politics, this homogeneity has come to be an advantage to Salaf actors. Their belief in Salafsm as the right Islam, and the acceptance of this view (to varying degrees) by large swaths of the population, is allowing the Maldives constitution’s requirement that all citizens be Muslims to be interpreted increasingly to mean that citizens can only be Salaf Muslims. This interpretation, and the various Salaf actors’ eforts to realize this vision, can be seen in the ongoing battles between the Salaf establishment and the government over both policy and the hearts and minds of the people. Which direction the country takes in the near future will depend on a combination of political and religious factors: how much more infuence Salaf actors manage to exert on policy and polity, formally and informally, and how much the government is able to reduce economic and social inequality, along with its ability and will to strengthen democratic processes in such an environment.

Suggested readings Bell, H.C.P., The Maldive Islands: Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1940). Heyerdahl, Thor, The Maldive Mystery (New York: Random House, 1987). Maloney, Clarence C., People of the Maldive Islands (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1980). Robinson, J.J., The Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy (London: Hurst, 2015). Romero-Frias, Xavier, The Maldive Islanders: A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom (Barcelona: Nova Ethnographia Indica, 2003). Zahir, Azim, “Religious and Political Transformations in the Maldives: The Macro-Level Contexts of Radicalization,” in Radicalization in South Asia: Context, Trajectories and Implications, eds. Mubashar Hasan, Kenji Isezaki and Sameer Yasir (London: Sage, 2019).

Notes 1 President’s Office, Republic of Maldives, Constitution of the Republic of Maldives 2008, (accessed June 6, 2020). 2 The World Bank, “Poverty and Inequality in the Maldives,” 2018, (accessed June 5, 2020). 3 Human Rights Watch, “Migrant Workers in Maldives at Added Risk from COVID-19,” New York: HRW, March 27, 2020, (accessed June 6, 2020). 4 The World Bank, “The World Bank in Maldives: Overview,” (accessed April 10, 2020). 5 The World Bank, “GDP Per Capita (Current US$) – South Asia,” (accessed May 6, 2020). 6 Salary Explorer, “Average Salary in Maldives 2020: The Complete Guide,” (accessed May 6, 2020).

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7 UNDP, “Inequalities in Human Development in the 21st Century: Briefing Note for Countries on the 2019 Human Development Report – Maldives,” The Human Development Report 2019, (accessed March 6, 2020). 8 Akiko Fujii, “Let’s Talk about Inequality,” The Edition, December 10, 2019, (accessed December 15, 2019). 9 “Stealing Paradise,” Al-Jazeera, September 7, 2016, (accessed November 14, 2019). 10 In June 2016, after falling out of favor with Yameen, the former vice president was found guilty of attempting to assassinate the president, and of embezzling from the Maldives Marketing and Public Relations Corporation (MMPRC). He received a combined sentence of 33 years. A long-awaited report by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) revealed details tracing US$ 1 million into a private account of the president. Convicted of money laundering, Yameen was jailed for five years in November 2019. 11 Former President Nasheed was found guilty of terrorism and jailed for 13 years in March 2015. See “Maldives ex-President Jailed for 13 Years on Terrorism Charges,” The Guardian, March 13, 2015, (accessed November 15, 2019) . Sheikh Imran Abdulla was jailed in February 2016. See “Maldives Court Jails Opposition Figure for 12 Years,” The Guardian, February 17, 2016, (accessed November 15, 2019). Qasim Ibrahim was jailed in August 2017, convicted of attempting to bribe the Speaker of Parliament. See “Maldives Jails Its Last Oppn. Leader,” The Hindu, August 25, 2017, (accessed October 7, 2019). 12 Human Rights Watch, “Maldives: Opposition Candidates Barred From Election,” May 29, 2018, (accessed December 17, 2019). 13 “Maldives Ruling Party Wins Parliamentary Polls: Elections Commission,” Xinhua, April 12, 2019. 14 “Maldives Overcomes Islamic Opposition and Appoints Two Women as Supreme Court Judges,” News In Asia, September 13, 2019, (accessed December 17, 2019). 15 “Parliament Approves Changes to Anti-Terror Law,” Maldives Independent, September 30, 2019, (accessed November 10, 2019). 16 Shiraz Maher, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea (London: Hurst, 2016), 7. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 Jarret M. Brachman, Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Anatomy of the Salafi Movement,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 29 (3) (August 2006): 207–39. 20 Wiktorowicz, “Anatomy of the Salafi Movement.” 21 Maher, Salafi-Jihadism, 9. 22 Ibid., 9–10. 23 Magnus Ranstorp, Filip Ahlin, Peder Hyllengren, and Magnus Normark, “Between Salafism and Salafi-Jihadism: Influence and Challenges for Swedish Society (Executive Summary),” Swedish Defense University, June 2018, (accessed December 27, 2019). 24 “Maldives Elections Unlikely to Improve Religious Freedom,” World Watch Monitor, September 6, 2013, (accessed December 28, 2019).

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25 “Former Bitter Rivals Unite against ‘Brutality’ of President Yameen’s Government,” Minivan News, 20 March 2015, (accessed December 20, 2019). 26 In December 2009, for example, the Islamic Ministry reassured Jamiyyath Salaf in a press statement, that it was indeed considering Salaf ’s suggestions in amending the Religious Unity Act 1994. See Ahmed Naish, “New Regulations Will Defend Islam in the Maldives, says Islamic Ministry,” Minivan News, December 22, 2009, (accessed November 8, 2019). 27 “Why Zakir Naik is a Wanted Man,” India Today, August 20, 2019, (accessed November 10, 2019). 28 Adis Duderija and Ghulam Rasool, “Bilal Philips as a Proponent of Neo-Traditional Salafism and His Significance for Understanding Salafism in the West,” Religions, 10 (6) (2019). 29 Ministry of Islamic Affairs, “Procedures to Deal With People Who Participate in Activities Related to Religious Freedom, Mocking Religion, Going to War, Violence in the Name of Religion, and Assisting War Efforts,” Maldivian Government Gazette, 47 (55) (2018). 30 Alex Meleagrou-Hitchens and Nick Kaderbhai, “Research Perspectives on Online Radicalization: A literature Review 2006–2017,” VOX-Pol, 2017, (accessed November 25, 2019). 31 Maldivian Democracy Network, “Preliminary Assessment of Radicalization in the Maldives,” 2015, (accessed November 19, 2019). 32 Jamiyyath Salaf, “Press Release Issued because the Real Truth and Motive of the ‘Preliminary Assessment of Radicalization in the Maldives’ Report,” October 7, 2019, (accessed November 13, 2019) Translation to English in this chapter is the author’s own. 33 Ibid. 34 Yameen Rasheed, “Title,” The Daily Panic, . 35 Azim Zahir, “Religious and Political Transformations in the Maldives,” in Radicalization in South Asia: Context, Trajectories and Implications, eds. Mubashar Hasan, Kenji Isezaki and Sameer Yasir (London: Sage, 2019). 36 Richard C. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 37 M.M. Defremery and Sanguinetti, “Ibn Batuta in the Maldives and Ceylon,” trans. Albert Gray, Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Colombo: James Duncan Campbell, 1882). 38 Attorney General’s Office, Republic of Maldives, “Religious Unity Act (Act No.6/94),” (accessed October 22, 2019). 39 See Uncuffed: Torture Victims of Maldives, “Title of the Report or News,” (accessed October 18, 2019). 40 Facts and Details, “Great Tsunami of 2004 in the Maldives,” (accessed October 11, 2019). 41 Naish, “New Regulations will Defend Islam in the Maldives,” 2009, (accessed October 12, 2019).

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42 UNHRC, “Opening Remarks by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay at a Press Conference during Her Mission to the Maldives,” November 24, 2011, (accessed October 11, 2019). 43 Ministry of Islamic Affairs, “Applying Hudud for Fornication,” Press Release, November 28, 2011, (accessed October 22, 2019). 44 Shaheem Ali Saeed, “Rigged Vote, Rigged Vote,” Dhivehi Sitee, September 17, 2013, (accessed September 29, 2019). 45 “Saudi Arabia to Maintain Maldives Religious Unity,”Minivan News, November 15, 2015, (accessed November 17, 2019).

6 NEPAL From Hindu monarchy to secular democracy Subho Basu

“King Dipendra, who died early today at age 29, knew all about privilege. He was revered as a god by many adoring Nepalese. . . .” Thus, wrote the New York Times on June 5, 2001. The highly prestigious British Broadcasting Corporation was slightly more cautious when it concluded its report of the assassination of the king on June 2, 2001 by stating that “[s]ome people in Nepal, which is 90% Hindu, believe that the king is the reincarnation of the god Vishnu.” Nepal, which generally remains outside the attention of global media, worked its way into the headlines when a tragic drama engulfed its royal family.1 According to news reports, the king was assassinated in rather mysterious circumstances by his drugged son over a dispute concerning his marriage proposal to a girl of “inferior social status.” This incident was rendered more dramatic as Nepal was engulfed in a Maoist insurgency at the time of this assassination. The global media highlighted a curious and interesting fact that the king in Nepal was viewed as the incarnation of Lord Vishnu by his Hindu subjects. This statement is itself highly revealing of popular Western understandings of the relationship between politics and religion in Nepal. The very representation of monarchy as the embodiment of Hindu divinity obviously authenticates a rather superfcial orientalist notion of Nepali political culture widely prevalent in the global media. Yet such casual references deny the complex relationship between religion and polity in Nepal. This chapter submits that religion occupies a central place in Nepal’s polity not because of a theologically sanctioned mystical bond between monarch and his subjects but for secular reasons. The relationship between religion and politics involves a wide range of issues: the quest for legitimacy by an authoritarian regime, the construction of national identity, and preserving a social stratifcation process through an emphasis on the homogeneity of national religio-cultural traditions. More importantly, in the nineteenth century, religion was the means through which various Nepali communities imagined their existence. With the rapid rise and fall of ideologies

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of governance in the context of globalization in the late twentieth century, the very means of imagining community was transformed in Nepal, which fundamentally altered the relationship between religion and polity. A crucial fall out of this ideological reconfguration was the declaration of Nepal as a secular republic in 2015 by a constituent assembly elected after the fall of the Nepali monarchy as part of the people’s movement in 2006. Yet the insertion of the term “secular” in the constitution led toward a signifcant degree of contestation within the Nepali polity. Capitalizing on the perceived fear of conversion to Christianity in Nepal among Hindus, Hindu nationalists from India and their allies’ pro-monarchical forces within Nepal were trying to challenge the formal constitutional declaration of Nepal as a secular republic. Meanwhile, religious “minorities,” drawing on global liberal discourses of human rights, claimed that Nepal did not fulfll its secular promises. This contestation centered around the notion of conversion defned the new fault line in the Nepali polity with Hindu right on the one hand and Communist left on the other. To understand such epochal transformations, we need to place the relationship between religion and polity in social and economic contexts. This chapter delineates the previous arguments through an analysis of geography, economy, demography, the constitution, and the changing dynamics of the political landscape in Nepal.

Framing Nepal: an overview Located in the lap of the Himalayas, Nepal’s society and economy in numerous ways are defned by this snow-capped mountain range. Geographers divide Nepal into three ecological zones: the Terai Plain in the south, the hill region in the middle, and the mountain areas of the north. This complex topography provides Nepal with diverse climatic zones ranging from tropical humidity in the Terai Plain, to a temperate climate in the hills and Arctic tundra in the mountains. The Himalayan range also limits Nepal’s connections with the Tibetan Plateau and integrates its cultural mores deeply with Indic cultures of the south. Geography has afected Nepal’s internal social organizations, too. Isolated river valleys and gorges produced a complex mosaic of ethnicities and linguistic communities living in different corners of Nepal. Indeed, the 2001 census recorded 100 ethnic groups and castes in Nepal2 and 92 linguistic communities.3 Though Nepali is undoubtedly the most important language of communication in the country, it is recorded as the frst language by less than half of the population.4 Geopolitically, as a Himalayan country, Nepal is a crucial bufer state between India and China. The tense relationship between these Asian giants and their attempts to infuence local afairs in Nepal often adversely afected the politics and economy of Nepal. Though Nepal entered into a trade treaty with India in 1950, the treaty was often used as a political weapon by both Nepal and India, particularly as it is reviewed and revised every ten years. The Sino–Indian relationship often fgured in the reviewing of this treaty. In 1989, when Nepal sought to buy arms

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from China, ignoring Indian warnings, India closed all but two transit points and allowed the treaty to expire. This embargo reduced Nepal’s projected economic growth from 5 percent to 1.5 percent in 1989–90.5 Again in 2015, it is alleged that the Indian envoy requested Nepal not to enact a clause that would transform Nepal into a secular state.6 Yet the passage of the constitution led to agitations in the border region over the rival claims of diferent ethnic groups in terms of territorial organization of diferent provinces. This led to blockade in the Indo-Nepal border that disrupted the fow of fuels and even international relief materials that were intended for earthquake victims in Nepal. Many newspapers within Nepal speculated that the Hindu nationalist government in India had also engaged in such an act to reverse the insertion of the locution “secular” in the constitution.7 Between September 23, 2015, and February 4, 2016, Nepal faced a disruption of fow of goods across the border for which Nepali political elites blamed India. The blockade mysteriously disappeared from February 5, 2016.8

Administrative structure Apart from international geopolitical rivalries, traditionally, Nepal’s administrative divisions were also infuenced by geography. Administrative districts were organized earlier in accordance with geographic divisions. From the 1950s onwards, the Nepali state devoted attention to diversifying economic resources to overcome natural disadvantages. From 1961, the country was divided into 75 districts. Each district was further divided into village development committees and municipalities. In the democracy era, political demand for self-government among diverse ethnic communities has led to the reconsideration of these administrative divisions. In 2015, the government introduced new federal restructuring of Nepali territories based upon a three-tier governmental structure incorporating the center, federal provinces, and local governments. The government created seven diferent provinces and all old municipalities were restructured into 753 new municipalities. The former 75 district development committees (DDC) were also replaced by 77 new district coordination committees (DCC). Currently, there are six metropolitan cities, 11 sub-metropolitan cities, 276 municipalities, and 460 rural municipalities.9

The economy of Nepal Economically, the Himalayan topography of Nepal – marked by mountains, hills, rivers, and gorges – created insurmountable barriers to human communications and thus produced fragmented economic enclaves. The most critical economic challenge for Nepal lies in integrating these fragmented economies into a national whole and providing a sustainable basis for economic growth. More importantly, in a predominantly agrarian economy, where nearly 75 percent of the population still depends on agriculture for its livelihood, the topography has reduced the availability of land for extended cultivation. For example, in Nepal, agricultural cultivated land accounts for 2,598,970 hectares, uncultivated agricultural land totals 986,898

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square kilometers, forest including shrub covers 6,306,460 square kilometers, and pasture land covers 1,757,345 square kilometers.10 Indeed, today only about 19 percent of the total area is cultivable and another 33 percent is forested.11 The problem of scarcity of agricultural land is also complicated by the skewed pattern of landholding in Nepal. Ruled for centuries by a quasi-feudal agrarian bureaucracy extracting surplus from tenant farmers, Nepal developed a highly adverse situation of landholding. According to a report in 2004, one million families out of 4.2 million did not own any land at all. In Terai, nearly 18 percent had no access to land. The enactment of a series of land reforms between 1959 and 2001 failed to rectify the situation. Many landless families in Terai are reduced to a situation of debt bondage.12 Though in July 2000 the government enacted legislation for the cancellation of debt bondage, very little progress has been achieved in the interior of fve western Terai districts. The distribution of poverty had deeper gender, caste, and regional dimensions. Dalits (former untouchables) and in some instances the Adivasi-Janajati population (primarily Tibeto-Burman groups placed at the middle level of caste hierarchy) are poorer than the high caste Hindu male population from hill areas. Similarly, high caste hill Hindus were far better represented in the state bureaucracy. More importantly, historically, Nepali rulers siphoned resources from rural areas to the Kathmandu Valley and thus strengthened the afuence of the royal court at the expense of the countryside. This trend persisted in modern Nepal, whereby the Kathmandu Valley received the lion’s share of developmental funds. In a society where the rural population constituted an overwhelming majority and nearly 75 percent depend on agriculture, such an urban bias signifcantly contributes to the growing poverty of the region. Nepal’s difcult topography, quasi-feudal agrarian bureaucracy and urban bias in development were not alone responsible for its rather spasmodic economic growth. Nepal’s development is crucially contingent upon the fow of foreign aid. Aid constituted 78 percent of the total outlay of Nepal’s second fve-year plan and nearly 56 percent of the third fve-year plan (1965–70). This foreign aid is not without cost to Nepal. Indeed, as of 2005, Nepal had a $1.7 billion debt out of the $5.5 billion budget.13 In recent years, an important lifeline for Nepal’s economy has been provided by the remittances of workers working outside the country. Many Nepali migrants are undocumented workers, and they remit money through informal networks. A recent research article estimates that the scale of remittances in the Nepali economy may be equal to 13 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and quite possibly might amount to as much as 25 percent of GDP.14 Thus with an average annual per capita income of $322 and 31 percent of people living at or below the poverty line, Nepal is currently regarded as one of the poorest Asian countries.15 These desperate economic conditions obviously contributed to the growing popular distrust of the state’s ability to improve the people’s living standard. Ironically, since 1950, “development” has been the raison d’être of the monarchical and subsequent quasi-democratic regimes. Thus, the developmental failure, as

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evident in the persistence of poverty, undermined the legitimacy of the former monarchical regime among popular social classes. From 1996 onwards, this crisis of legitimacy enabled a group of Maoist insurgents to register a powerful presence in the countryside. After nearly ten years of insurgency and violent counterinsurgency measures, 12,000 people had died in Nepal.

Population growth and the transformation in Nepali society This situation of arrested development is further complicated by rapid population growth from 1951 onwards (see Table 6.1). The imbalance between population growth and agricultural growth became markedly visible during the 1970s and 1980s. For example, between 1974 and 1989, agricultural production grew at an average annual rate of 2.4 percent, but the population increased at an average annual rate of 2.6 percent. Further, the annual average growth rate of food grain production was only 1.2 percent during the same period. According to a Nepal Statistical Handbook, the population growth rate stood at 2.25 percent per annum in 2006 and again the gain achieved by development activities was overshadowed by a growing population. Only a little over half (58.2 percent) of the population of working age was reported as being usually economically active in 2001. The census of 2001 records that 53.1 percent of the population of age ten years and over is employed. An overwhelming majority of Nepali people belong to the younger active working age group. According to Central Bureau Statistics, in Nepal men belonging to the active working age group (15–54 years) constitute 50.4 percent of the total male population of all age groups and women of the active age group (15–54 years) constitute 52.5 of the total women of all age groups. With male life expectancy at

TABLE 6.1 Decennial rate of population growth in Nepal

Census Year

Total Population

Annual Growth Rate (exponential)

1920 1930 1941 1952–54 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001

5,573,788 5,532,574 6,283,649 8,256,625 9,412,996 11,555,983 15,022,839 18,491,097 23,151,423

−0.13 −0.07 1.16 2.27 1.64 2.05 2.62 2.08 2.25

Source: Ritu Pantha and Bharat Raj Sharma, “Population Size Growth and Distribution,” Population Monograph, 1 (2003): 38 (Kathmandu: Central Bureau of Statistics, Government of Nepal, National Planning Commission Secretariat). 20/02/08

146 Subho Basu TABLE 6.2 Nepal’s changing population distribution in various ecological zones

Census

Mountain and Hill Combined

Terai

Year

Mountain

1952 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001

5,349,988 (64.8) 5,991,297 (63.6) 7,210,017 (62.4) 8,466,011 (56.4) 9,863,019 (53.3) 11,938,970 (51.6)

2,906,637 (35.2) 3,421,699 (36.4) 4,345,966 (37.6) 6,556,828 (43.6) 8,628,078 (46.7) 11,212,453 (48.4)

1,138,610 (9.9) 1,302,896 (8.7) 1,443,130 (7.8) 1,687,859 (7.3)

Hill

6,071,407 (52.5) 7,163,115 (47.7) 8,419,889 (45.5) 10,251,111 (44.3)

Source: Ritu Pantha and Bharat Raj Sharma, “Population Size Growth and Distribution,” Population Monograph, 1 (2003): 38, 41 (Kathmandu: Central Bureau of Statistics, Government of Nepal, National Planning Commission Secretariat). 20/02/08

birth being 62.9 years and female expectancy at 63.7 years in 2006, this is indeed a high fgure.16 The mean age of population in 2006 was 20.1 years.17 Nepal is thus a young nation. This obviously contributed to political instability as a large number of young people tended to be concentrated in urban centers. The state sought to mitigate the situation by opening up the thickly forested regions of the alluvial plain of Terai and thus altered population distribution between mountains, hills, and Terai, with substantial demographic and economic implications (see Table 6.2). Indeed, Terai became the hub of industrial and agricultural activities in Nepal. This small stretch of land – extending over 500 kilometers from east to west but only 45 kilometers from south to north – was originally covered with forests and was known for its humid and hot climate and malarial fever. The crucial fallout of such rapid transfer of population to Terai was a radical denudation of forests and soil erosion. This obviously undermined Nepal’s long-term economic viability.

History and politics: the making and unmaking of the monarchical regime The monarchy played a crucial role in establishing the Nepali state in its current form. Historians trace the origin of the modern Nepali state to the conquest of the Kathmandu Valley by Gorkha ruler Prithvi Narayan Shah, who defeated local rulers and established an infrastructure of state control over the Himalayan regions of the valley and fnally extended his control far beyond the Kathmandu Valley. Nepal experienced a political convulsion with the rise of Jang Bahadur Rana, a military general who massacred members of the royal court in 1846 and appointed himself and members of his clan as hereditary prime ministers of Nepal. The Rana polity was primarily clan-based and operated through a system of distribution of

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patronage to loyal retainers and military coercion against the opposition. In many ways this polity was a classical patrimonial one, whereby members of the ruling clan controlled political and economic power. The Ranas remained in the good books of British Indian rulers by supplying them with troops at times of crisis and through their contribution to British war eforts during the First World War, which prompted the British Indian government to recognize Nepal as an independent kingdom in 1923. The Rana rulers thus operated within two diferent frameworks. Within the country, they appropriated the agrarian surplus produced by the peasantry and in terms of foreign policy, they accepted British colonial suzerainty and thus opted for indirect colonization. In 1950 in the wake of the decolonization of South Asia, the Rana rulers faced serious rebellion geared toward ending the clan-based polity. The rebellion was spearheaded by cadres of the Nepali Congress Party, which came into existence in Calcutta in 1947. Inspired by the socialist ideals of Indian leader Rammanohar Lohia, the Nepali Congress Party emerged as a modernizing force aiming to establish a democratic polity in Nepal. While the Nepali Congress organized an armed insurgency against the Rana regime, King Tribhuvan, the traditional titular head of the Nepali state, added to the political discontent by escaping from Rana control and taking shelter in Delhi. The Delhi Accord, as the deal came to be known, forestalled the political revolution sought by the Nepali Congress and allowed the restoration of the crown to power. The Delhi Accord started a tug-of-war between the monarchy and the rather faction-ridden and brittle forces of democracy represented by the Nepali Congress, which led to the holding of elections in 1959. However, the monarchy soon suppressed the elected Congress government formed under the able leadership of B.P. Koirala and imposed a Panchayati system that actually vested all power in the hands of the monarchy. Though student movements in 1978 and 1979 confronted the monarch and compelled him to hold a referendum on the Panchayati system, indirect coercion undermined the new system. In 1990, the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the economic shock delivered by the Indian blockade led to a massive popular movement against the monarchy. This movement was spearheaded by the Nepali Congress and a combination of communist groups known as the United Left Front. The communist groups later clustered into a new party called the Communist Party of Nepal (Unifed Marxist-Leninist) (CPN-UML). The leaders of both these parties compromised with the king to prevent further radicalization of politics and presided over the introduction of a quasi-democratic era, whereby the king would remain commander of the forces, but the government would be elected by the people through a frst-past-the-post system. The parliamentary model soon became unworkable, because of constant political bickering among politicians who all coveted the position of prime minister. Indeed, despite having three general elections whereby the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML emerged as the two largest political entities, Nepal witnessed the appointment of 14 prime ministers in 14

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years between 1990 and 2004. This obviously created a situation of popular alienation from the political regime. Two opposite political actors sought to obtain beneft from such a situation. First, Maoist communists who were marginalized in the two-party electoral system organized an open rebellion from February 13, 1996 onwards against the government. They were successful in compelling the government to withdraw from policing a vast tract of rural Nepal. Second, the monarchy also started gaining ground, particularly as King Birendra refused to sanction a military operation against Maoists as requested by the elected civilian government. This move obviously undermined the authority of the civilian government, as they remained dependent on the monarchy for military operations under the constitutional arrangement of 1990. In these circumstances, in a rather mysterious set of events, on Friday, June 1, 2001, according to the ofcial version, crown Prince Dipendra, in a drunken condition killed his parents and then committed suicide. The new King Gyanendra came to the throne on June 4, 2001. Many suspected that he was the mastermind behind the royal massacre and thus he lacked political legitimacy. He was also keen on playing a direct role in politics and appointed and dismissed prime ministers at will. Finally, on February 1, 2005, he assumed direct control of the government through a royal coup. This act led to a bitter, civil war-like situation in Nepal. Eventually, an alliance was concluded among seven major political parties, including two factions of the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML. These political parties then negotiated a 12-point understanding with the Maoists and spearheaded a people’s movement against the king. The people’s movement compelled the king to restore power to the political parties on June 24, 2006. The seven-party alliance and Maoists agreed on a constituent assembly election in Nepal and even included Maoists in the government, though the peace process and truce proved to be a rather difficult and delicate process. Nepal was characterized by an institutional brittleness of the party’s political apparatus and a political culture of clientelism. In April 2008, there took place historic constituent assembly elections in which Maoists emerged as the largest political party. Soon after their election on May 28, 2008, the constituent assembly abolished the monarchy to make Nepal a republic. Yet the constituent assembly failed to agree on a constitution and Nepal witnessed for three years changes of government between CPN(UML) and Maoists. In 2013, Nepal went into election again, but the election produced a political stalemate. In 2015, the constituent assembly enacted a constitution declaring Nepal a secular state. In October 2017, the CPN-MC and the Communist Party of Nepal Unified Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML), which had previously been bitter opponents, formed an alliance to contest the national legislative elections together and they secured massive victory. Later, on May 17, 2018 they unified as the Nepal Communist Party, and together they constituted the largest Communist Party in South Asia and is the only ruling communist party in the region.

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Religion, monarchical state, and society in Nepal: the royal regime’s quest for legitimacy Nepal is often perceived to be a Hindu majority nation as the monarchical state from 1962 onwards declared Hinduism the state religion of Nepal. Yet in reality, Nepal is a multireligious pluralistic society. Hinduism, Shamanism, various forms of Buddhist practices, and Islam are the major religions there. There also exists a small but fastexpanding Christian community in Nepal. Borders between diferent religions are permeable, and most people practice a popular religion without consciously following a particular denomination. In 1951, a popular upsurge restored the rule of the Shah dynasty but introduced a new contender for power: a party political apparatus. From then on, Nepal witnessed continuing power struggles between political parties committed to the introduction of constitutional democracy and the monarchical authority which preferred the status quo. It was against this background, advocates of monarchical rule claimed, that the Hindu religion constituted the foundational premise of the national identity of the Nepali people. They presented the monarchy as the custodian of religion and the symbol of a Hindu nation. At a more humdrum level, royalists tacitly encouraged ordinary Nepalis to view the monarch as the incarnation of Lord Vishnu. In the context of wider regional politics, the Nepali monarch – through the preservation of Hinduism as the state religion – sought to distinguish Nepal as a nation from its larger neighbor and a Hindu majority country, namely, India, precisely because the Indian constitution is democratic and supposedly “secular.” This emphasis on Hinduism as a national culture in Nepal by the monarchical state obviously refects the crown’s attempt to legitimize its role as the custodian of Nepali culture. The very moment of the declaration of Hinduism as the state religion of Nepal refects this anxiety for legitimacy. Indeed, soon after the royal coup against the elected Nepali Congress government, the new constitution of 1962 drafted by King Mahendra defned the “nation” of Nepal as “[h]aving common aspirations and united by the common bond of allegiance to the Crown, the Nepalese irrespective of religion, race, caste or tribe collectively constitute the nation.”18 This emphasis on the loyalty toward monarchy as the foundational premise of the nation is complemented by the assertion in clause 3 in the same constitution: “Nepal is an independent, indivisible, and sovereign, monarchical Hindu state.”19 The 1962 (one needs to distinguish this constitution from republican constitution) constitution further states under the clause entitled “Right to Religion”: “Every person, having regard to the traditions, may profess and practise his own religion as handed down from ancient times. Provided that no person shall be entitled to convert another person from one religion to another.”20 This clause is clearly a legal warning to non-Hindus, primarily Buddhists and Christians, that the monarchical state would not tolerate any contravention of Hindu religious customs which constitute the authentic cultural identity of the Nepali people. Ironically, even after the establishment of quasi-democratic constitutional monarchy, the constitution which was drafted as a compromise continued to state that “Nepal is a multiethnic[a1], multilingual, democratic, independent,

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indivisible, sovereign, Hindu and Constitutional Monarchical Kingdom.”21 Interestingly, though the constitution of Nepal refecting the spirit of the people’s movement recognized Nepal as a multiethnic and multilingual state, it did not emphasize its multireligious societal structure. Indeed, the constitution continued to state that under clause 19, “Right to Religion”: (1) Every person shall have the freedom to profess and practise his own religion as handed down to him from ancient times having due regard to traditional practices; provided that no person shall be entitled to convert another person from one religion to another (2) Every religious denomination shall have the right to maintain its independent existence and for this purpose to manage and protect its religious places and trusts.22 Though the clause was slightly modifed from the royal constitution of 1962, the Nepali constitution still retained the language of monarchical Hindu nationalism. Indeed, during the quasi-democracy era in 2001, four cases related to proselytizing were fled, with one case resulting in a guilty verdict and a three-month sentence for the four Christian defendants, including one Norwegian national. The government zealously investigated charges of conversion and, under law, non-governmental groups or individuals were free to fle charges of proselytizing against individuals or organizations. In December 1999, a private attorney fled a case against the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) and the United Missions to Nepal (UMN), an umbrella Protestant group. In April 2001, Pashupati Sena Nepal, a Hindu fundamentalist group, lodged a case against the UMN with the Supreme Court. More importantly, in 1999 Christian groups in Kathmandu were not allowed to observe Good Friday in a public park, ostensibly because of their failure to obtain a proper permit. Similarly, in December 2000 police stopped a procession of Tibetan school children, monks, and others on their way to Swayambunath Temple in Kathmandu, and in February 2001 the local government halted the performance of a traditional Tibetan Buddhist dance scheduled to be performed on February 26, the occasion of the Tibetan New Year. Further, local ofcials put pressure on Tibetan community leaders to refrain from public celebration of festivals, to mark the anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s winning the Nobel Prize, at the Boudhanath Stupa on December 10, 2001. Muslim communities, as well, were placed under indirect surveillance when on January 31, 2002 the cabinet decided that Muslim religious schools, or madrassahs, must register with local District Administration Ofces (part of the Home Ministry) and supply information about their funding sources to continue operations. Many Muslim leaders described the move as discriminatory.23 Thus, though Nepal remained tolerant of religious plurality, the constitution and the nature of laws in the Hindu kingdom, even during the quasidemocracy era, had an implicit bias against minorities. The waning of royal absolutism and the celebration of multiculturalism under the quasi-democratic era opened up a new dimension in Nepali society. From

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TABLE 6.3 Distribution of population in Nepal by religion, 1952/54–2001 censuses

Name of Religious Afliation

1952–54 % of Population

1961

1971

1981

1991

2001

Hindu Buddhist Muslim Kirat Jain Christian Sikh Other Unstated

88.87 8.59 2.54 –

87.69 9.25 2.98 – .01 –

89.39 7.50 3.04 – .05 0.02

89.50 5.32 2.66 – .06 0.03

86.51 7.78 3.53 1.72 .04 0.17



– –

2.43 –

0.14 0.10

80.62 10.74 4.20 3.6 .02 0.45 0.02 0.34 –

– 0.01 –

0.06

Sources: Department of Survey, Nepal 1958 Population Census 1952/54, Part II, Table 5. Central Bureau of Statistics, Nepal (CBS), 1968 Population Census 1961, Vol. II, Table 7. CBS, 1975 Population Census 1971, Vol. II, Table 13. CBS, 1984 Population Census 1981, Vol. I, Part III, 13. CBS, 1993 Population Census 1991. CBS, 2002 Population Census 2001 (National Report), Table 18, 80.

the 1990s onwards, when the quasi-democratic regime allowed people to practice their faiths without state intervention, many groups with fexible religious practices declared their indigenous religious system as being outside of the fold of Hinduism. This is evident from the decline in the number of Hindus nationally (see Table 6.3). To understand the complex changes in the recorded identity of the Nepalis, we need to understand the relationship between state-sanctioned Hindu caste social stratifcation processes in the late nineteenth century and the ascription of identities to diferent ethnic communities outside the fold of Indic religious practices. The main purpose of the monarchical interventions since the nineteenth century was to subsume diferent ethnicities under the rubric of caste identity. Borrowing on Vedic prescriptions of social order, the Rana regime introduced a Civil Code (Muluki Ain) in 1854 and sought to direct the complex process of localized social stratifcations toward a rigid centralized structure of the Hindu caste system to consolidate the monarchical regime and to impose a patina of unity on the complex mosaic of ethnicities in Nepal. Though its prescriptions were complex, Muluki Ain stipulated a threefold caste system: at the apex were Tagadhari (twice born), in the middle were Matwali (liquor drinkers), and at the bottom were the occupational caste Pani Nachalne, who were declared as untouchables. The so-called Tagadharis included Brahmins, Thakuris, and Chetris. Thakuris were theoretically a subsection of Chetris but were actually elevated in terms of their social status because of their ties with the royal household. The mid-ranking Matwalis included most of Nepal’s

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Tibeto-Burman forest ethnicities. Among the latter were those people who had arrived in Nepal relatively earlier than the high caste Indo-Nepali population. The Pani Nachalne, declared untouchables, were associated with specifc, traditional specialized artisanal occupations. These castes were ranked on the principle of purity and pollution. Obviously, Nepalis did not live in hermetically sealed caste-based communities following the royal prescription of caste status. Indeed, empirical studies reveal stories of resistance to this imposition of a Hindu identity. Not all of the provisions of Muluki Ain were implemented in practice, and in 1962 the Nepali state ofcially prohibited the practice of caste distinctions in public life. Yet it would be far more inaccurate to assert that this edict did not have an impact on Nepali life. Rather, the broader outline of caste distinctions, as stipulated in Muluki Ain which undoubtedly drew upon Brahamanical readings of various local practices, undoubtedly formed the premise of Hindu social practices in Nepal. Within the context of Nepal, the imposition of a Hindu social order was justifed through the political rhetoric of Hindu identity of the state and the territory under its control. The Rana rulers unambiguously maintained that their kingdom was a Hindu polity. In the preface to the edict on religious endowment, Rana Jang Bahadur declared that: We have our own country, a Hindu Kingdom, where the law prescribes that “cows shall not be slaughtered” nor women and Brahamans sentenced to capital punishment; a holyland where the Himalayas, the Bashuhi Ksetra, the Ayra Tirtha, and the refulgent Sri Pasupati Linga and Sri Guhyesvari Pitha are located. In this Kali Age this is the only country in which Hindus rule.24 Rana rulers claimed the purity of their land in Hindu religious terms to legitimize their authority in the perception of their Hindu subjects. Thus, monarchical authority, whether of the Shah dynasty or Rana clans, used religion to consolidate its control through subtle manipulation of symbols, rituals, and social stratifcation processes. As the quasi-democratic era opened up the polity in Nepal, minority groups transformed their hitherto quasi-clandestine resistance into an open defance by claiming a distinct local religion diferent from that of Hindus. With the growing strength of the democratic movement, many perceived the continued existence of a state religion as symptomatic of high caste Hindu elite domination over ethno-religious minorities who were assigned lower ritual status within the constructed caste hierarchy of Hinduism. Maoists on some occasions indulged in counterviolence against Hindu worshippers and thus mirrored the royal violence against subjugated ethnic minorities. Yet the Hindu identity of the state remained so deeply identifed with the monarchical regime that almost all constituents of the popular democratic movement in 2006 agreed to rescind the “ofcial religion” status bestowed upon Hinduism and actualized this into practice on May 17, 2006, soon after the restoration of parliamentary rule.

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The political landscape: royal absolutism and democratic movements Popular movements for “democracy” and the palace establishment’s reluctance to change the political power structure have dominated politics in Nepal since the restoration to power of the Shah dynasty in 1950. The Nepali monarchy could remain in power by skillfully manipulating factionalism and the culture of clientelism that pervaded every sector of politics, whereby each political actor fercely competed for patronage of the powerful and rich and thus tended to view their fellow political actors as rivals even if they shared similar ideological dispositions. This factionalism was institutionalized in the Panchayati system of government introduced by King Mahendra in 1962. The Panchayati system faced the periodic outbursts of popular movements for democracy until such movements reached their height in the 1990 people’s movement. This movement resulted in compromises between the monarchy and political leaders as the latter aimed at securing power at the expense of their party’s political rivals. Nepal now experimented with a quasi-democratic structure. Under the new constitutional arrangement, a House of Representatives (Pratinidhi Sabha) comprising 205 members was elected for a fve-year term through plurality votes in single-seat constituencies. A prime ministerial style of government was responsible to the House of Representatives. Besides the House, the National Assembly (Rashtriya Sabha) comprised 60 members of whom 35 were elected by the Pratinidhi Sabha, 15 were representatives of regional development areas and ten were appointed members. In the absence of a proportional system of governance, this system marginalized smaller political parties and enabled two large political formations – the Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML to beneft from the situation. Yet in 1994, after the election of a parliament where the CPN-UML became the largest political party but without a majority, Nepal was plunged into political paralysis. Governments were formed every nine to ten months and were thrown out by a counter-alliance. Meanwhile, marginalized by the two larger political formations, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) embraced a radical strategy of guerrilla movement. Though Congress was returned to power in 1999, the party remained internally divided between diferent warring factions. This situation enabled the royal court to assert its presence again by refusing to sanction military action against Maoists, but soon King Birendra was assassinated in mysterious circumstances. The real benefciary of the regicide was the king’s brother, Gyanendra. Gyanendra again played politicians against one another and consolidated his own regime. On February 1, 2005 he staged a royal coup and unleashed the army against his political opponents. But once more in 2006, a massive popular movement against royal absolutism – headed by a seven-party alliance and backed by Maoists – toppled the king from power. All parties agreed to hold a constituent assembly election in the future. Since then, a precarious peace has held although the situation is fraught – with the ever-present danger of the country’s plunging back to civil war.

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Thus, the most critical feature of the Nepali political landscape is the institutional brittleness of governance. This was the legacy of royal absolutism. The fragmentation and suppression of political parties under the monarchical regime throttled the democratic aspirations of a politically active segment of population. This produced radicalization of politically conscious agents in the society and their propensity to resort to violence increased over time. Yet when opportunity came for these party political activists to access power in a limited degree, the intensity of power struggle among them due to the political culture of clientelism undermined the stability of the political system and paved the way for more radical actors to question the political legitimacy of the state because of its brittle, fraction-ridden ungovernable nature. Nepal in the past could never institutionalize democratic practices and the dynamic dance between autocracy, coups, and popular movements always remained a possibility.

Tamed Hindu nationalism: religio-political parties, and groups in Nepal Hindu political forces remained active in Nepal even after the declaration of Nepal as a secular state. All monarchs in Nepal assiduously cultivated a relationship with rising Hindu nationalist forces in India. They attended rallies organized by the Rashtriya Swaymsveak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) combine, and they remained in close touch with the Hindu organizations. The chief aide to King Gyanendra, Bharat Keshari Singh, was also the head of the World Hindu Federation. In 1990, soon after the people’s movement, in response to the call for the establishment of a secular state, Arun Subedi, a Hindu activist, established a political party called the Shiv Sena Party of Nepal to preserve Hinduism as the state religion of the country. Though the party’s name is close to that of its radical counterpart in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Subedi denies any link between these organizations. However, the Nepal Shiva Sena, founded in 1999, headed by Kiran Singh Budhathoki, claims ties with its Indian counterpart. While these political organizations are of recent origin and seek to bask in the refected glory of their Indian counterparts, the Nepal Sanatan Dharma Sewa Samiti is the oldest traditionalist Hindu political organization. These organizations tried to register their protests against the declaration of Nepal as a secular state, but they still lack substantial political presence and are too closely tied with the discredited monarchy.

Nepal as a “secular democratic nation” The demand for secularization of the polity was part of the original charter presented by Maoists in 1996 on the eve of their self-declared people’s war. Even before that, in 1990 Buddhist religious groups, drawing upon international human rights discourses, demanded that Nepal should be declared a secular state. In Nepal, secularism is viewed as a method of recognition of religious pluralism. It emphasized the state’s role in preventing religious discrimination. But Hindu nationalists

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insisted that Nepal’s Hindu tradition, as embodied in the Hindu state, enabled Nepal to function as a harmonious society that integrated diverse Hindu, Buddhist, and other shramanic traditions. Like Indian Hindu nationalists, they tended to view Hindu identity as an indigenous way of living and the constituted core of national identity. They also maintained that secularism was a western imperialist way of undermining Hindu identity in Nepal to proselytize the country into Christianity. This distinction between Hindu identity as indigenous and semetic religious groups as outsiders were clear refections of Indian Hindu nationalist discourses on Nepali Hindu nationalism. They obviously refused to recognize the marginalization of lower caste people through the imposition of Hindu identity. The primary target of Hindu nationalists was to present the growing number of Christians in Nepali society as evidence of large-scale conversion of lower caste social groups to Christianity through material inducements. Though the Hindu nationalist movement was composed of primarily the older royalist pro-Panchayat party, many within the Nepali Congress and other non-leftist forces were sympathetic to the idea of removing the nomenclature secular from the constitution. The battle started on the very day Nepal’s secular constitution was promulgated by the constituent assembly. On September 20, 2015 pro-Hindu state activists organized a protest outside the CA building in Kathmandu and attacked a passing UN vehicle, smashing a rear window. Soon police arrived and a battle between police and protestors took place. In the same evening, two Christian churches in Jhapa, a southeastern district bordering India, faced bomb attacks. The next day, three police personnel got injured by a bomb that exploded in police custody. Hindu Morcha Nepal, an unknown organization, claimed responsibility through two pamphlets. In the pamphlets, the Morcha declared its commitment to make Nepal Christian free.25 They had diferent antics to popularize their causes. On April 8, 2018, Acharya Srinivas, a self-proclaimed Hindu guru, reputedly close to King Gyanendra and an ardent advocate of the Hindu state, sustained a bullet injury to his chest in Biratnagar when he was there to attend a religious ceremony. His supporters raised a hue and cry for the lack of safety to their spiritual preceptor. Interestingly, when police investigated the case they found that “venerable” Acharya hired two assailants to fre upon himself to publicize his cause against the secular state and instigate sectarian violence.26 The same Acharya, in 2014, in a leafet in August 2014, claimed that “[Nepal has] more than 94% Vedic religion followers, but in 2006 some leaders of this nation, under the infuence of foreign dollars, declared Nepal a secular state and disturbed the religious harmony.”27 In an open letter, on the occasion of international human right day on December 10, 2014, Andrew Sparkes, the British Ambassador to Nepal, requested the constituent assembly members to observe inalienable right of humans to convert their religion. This obviously created a political storm in Nepal. Facing the agitation among Hindu nationalists, the Nepali government demanded clarifcation from the British embassy.28 The fear of proselytizing Christians was so great that police arrested seven on June 8 for handing out Christian religious material to children at a school in Dolakha, a district in northern Nepal. Local pastors said that they gave

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copies of the bible to Christian children at school.29 According to Wagner, the visible presence of Christians in public space after the introduction of democracy and secularism attracted the ire of Hindu nationalists. Yet there existed very little introspection about why low-caste Hindus would feel attracted to a “foreign religion.” Despite the anger of Hindu nationalists, the constitution did not ofer radical protection to minorities. It still retained the cow as a national animal to assuage the feelings of Hindus and cow slaughter is prohibited in Nepal. Anti-conversion laws were very stringent under the current constitution. For example, according to a report published on March 25, 2018, four persons including Hum Bahadur Rana (70), Kumari Gharti, Ram Kumari Gharti, and Kunti Thapa, all local residents, were arrested in the Kapilavastu district for killing a cow.30 The stringent clause against conversion stated in an article led toward far more restrictions on religious freedom. According to Suman Paudel, a scholar of religion and politics in Nepal, Christians feel seriously handicapped by the clause against religious conversion. In Nepal, there exists a small but numerically larger Muslim population. Few Imams appreciated the introduction of secularism as an imam said to Paudel, “it is good at least the country is secular now. It is good to be a Muslim of a secular country than the Muslim of a Hindu kingdom, where we used to feel like second-class citizens.” They claimed that the situation in the present is better than the past. Imam further said, “We can go to court if anything wrong happens because now, we are in the secular state. I think it is better than the previous Hindu kingdom. It is better but not the best.”31 Paudel found that many Imams desired state patronage for furthering their culture and some even wanted Muslims allowed to live under shariah law. However, many Muslims categorically told Paudel that they did not have direct confrontation with Hindus of the hill origins but hardline Hindus from India posed a threat to peace for them.32 Yet Nepal is not entirely free from religio-ethnic tensions in which these organizations fourish. Indeed, on September 1, 2004, when 12 Nepali workers were murdered by radical Islamic groups in Iraq, an irate mob attacked the main mosque in Kathmandu. Though isolated and extremely rare, such incidents could strengthen Hindu nationalist organizations. Nonetheless, Nepal remains a society that is opening up to the idea of diversity and moving toward a great degree of tolerance of diversity in religious practices, despite occasional misgivings.

Interpreting religion and politics in Nepal The relationship between religion and politics, as the Nepali case demonstrates, is not premised upon primordial ties or even debates and confrontations over scriptural interpretations. Indeed, quotidian religio-spiritual practices in Nepal are fexible and permeable, whereby members of normatively diferent religious groups participate in each other’s rituals.33 Rather, relationships between religion and politics are fundamentally inscribed on the Nepali psyche through the process of state formation. Ruling regimes drew upon religious idioms to legitimize their rule and sought to foster a culturally hegemonic religious identity which would

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enable the monarch to gather spontaneous consent of the subject population to his rule. Monarchical regimes thus developed myths and legends about royal families, assumed god-like postures and tried to overcome subaltern resistance to the state formation processes through royal diktat. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the relative isolation of Nepal from the cross-currents of global politics possibly muted reactions from subjects and the royal edicts, such as Muluki Ain of 1854 that laid down the rules of social stratifcation in Nepal along caste lines, acted as templates through which the state could organize subjects. The resistance to the ascription of lower-caste status did not assume the form of identity politics in the patrimonial state under Rana familial control. This Rana polity was a product of indirect colonization by the British colonial masters of the South Asian subcontinent. Following the Treaty of Saugali in 1816, a resident was placed in the royal court and the fractional wrangling in court politics was observed rather intently by the resident. The bloody rise of Jang Bahdur Rana and polity that he helped create actually ftted into the British imagination of oriental despotism in a precolonial polity. The claim of a Hindu state in Nepal fostered a situation of internal colonization of diverse ethnicities by the ruling entities, which themselves nervously sought colonial toleration of their activities and recognition of the Nepali polity in the international comity of nations. The moment of decolonization in South Asia in the late 1940s thus unsurprisingly unleashed political movements against the Rana polity, which led to the demise of patrimonial despotism in Nepal. The ensuing political contestation between democratic forces and the monarchy obviously defned the role of religion in politics. The role of religion in the Nepali polity had been defned by paradoxes. “Development and democracy” became the slogan of the new regime. Yet the monarchical regime survived by denying openly functioning constitutional democracy. Though the Panchayati regime supposedly ofered scope for the decentralization of the power structure, in reality, power was concentrated in the hands of a palace bureaucracy. The regime also suspended structural reforms to transform the Nepali economy. The monarchical state made minimum eforts to provide economic entitlements through the redistribution of land or any reduction in rent to a marginalized segment of the population. Ofcial eforts toward land reform remained rather superfcial and spasmodic. The reality of a resource-poor economy driven by foreign aid and the glacial pace of economic improvement eroded the legitimacy of the ruling regime. The quasi-feudal monarchical regime used religion to establish its hegemonic ideological presence in the political landscape. It would be obviously wrong to suggest that the royal elites and conservative forces had an instrumentalist understanding of the role of religion in quotidian life. The projection of Hinduism as the state religion was fundamentally diferent from the individual belief system of the Nepali population or members of the royal household. Indeed, the royal promotion of Hinduism as a state religion brought to the fore monarchical absolutism more than a Hindu religious belief system. This is refected in the ingenuous attempt to present the monarch as the incarnation

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of Lord Vishnu and thus as a symbol of a Hindu nation. Such attempts obviously created in Nepal what a prominent anthropologist in a diferent context called “counterfeit public culture.”34 The Nepali monarchial establishment borrowed on the eighteenth-century rhetoric of state formation and sought to present it in a modern context with the faint hope of gaining legitimacy. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to imagine that the opposition to this rhetoric of state building was automatic and instantaneous on the part of marginalized segments of the population. Rather, the decoding of such royal claims took place against the background of steady economic decline and the globalization of the Nepali workforce. Nepali workers working abroad were exposed to diverse crosscurrents of political and social change associated with globalization. In north Indian cities, as members of an informal sector workforce, they were more clearly exposed to the new rise of dalit assertion and a diverse range of afrmative action programs that challenged the hierarchical nature of the caste structure of Hindu society in general and more importantly familiarized them with the possibilities of negotiation in the democratic polity. It is thus no accident that even the high caste leaders of the Nepali Congress were deeply impressed by the Indian leader Rammanohar Lohia, the architect of modern afrmative action politics, euphemistically christened as the social justice movement. In the 1990s, this situation took another turn through the presence of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Nepal. In an aid-dependent economy, the delivery of social goods to the population, in the wake of neo-liberal globalization, took place through international NGOs. In modern Nepal, crucial social struggles for the liberation of bonded workers were organized by these NGOs. In the 1980s and 1990s, NGOs also transplanted in the Nepali context the language of human rights. These notions afected the popular classes and marginal ethnicities far more directly. The idea of community changed radically. Nation was no longer viewed through the prism of overarching Hindu community identity. Rather, the very meaning of being Hindu routed through caste distinctions raised critical questions about the nature of social hierarchy in Nepal. As royal absolutism waned during the quasi-democratic era of the 1990s, ethnicity became a critical component of Nepali politics. The critiques of the Hindu caste system among ethnic groups recycled colonial anthropological constructions to demand attention to their social marginalization. As Susan Hangen, an anthropologist studying racial politics, notes, the Nepal Mongol Organization, a rather tiny political grouping that sought to unify the Gurung, Magar, Limbu, Rai, and Sherpa populations in Nepal, used the template “Mongol” to highlight racial features of these population groups. The Mongol National Organization claimed that “Mongols” were “indigenous” inhabitants of Nepal and were discriminated against by the “Aryan” Indo-European outsiders.35 The purpose behind the promotion of this language of racial discrimination is an attempt by certain ethno-political entrepreneurs to present the Hindu caste structure as a racist institution, whereby those who were placed at the bottom were discriminated against by high caste Bahun (Brahamin) and Chetris (Ksatryas) on racial grounds.36 This political use

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of race as the language of resistance by ethno-political entrepreneurs is a crucial refection of the circulation of the international human rights discourse among Nepali intellectuals, who articulated new demands for the empowerment of the indigenous population. As the international discourse of human rights highlights the racial marginalization of indigenous populations in settler societies and asks for afrmative action in favor of indigenous groups to acquire land and resources under democratic regimes, Nepali ethno-political entrepreneurs employed similar terminologies to gain support from the United Nations for their movements. Resistance to the Hindu state and the related process of social stratifcation based on caste led to the formulation of a political language employing race, caste, and religion. The Mongol National Organization could not register a powerful presence in Nepali politics. In the 1990s, Nepal experienced a brief moment of mobilization of ethnic identities in politics as a celebration of the demise of the ideology of a homogenous, monolithic notion of nation. In such circumstances, the government sought to prohibit exclusively ethnic organizations from playing a critical role in Nepali politics. But that did not end the challenge to Hindu political culture from ethnic groups assigned subordinate social status under the Hindu process of social stratifcation. Soon drawing upon more acceptable international political idiom of multinational states and pluralism, Nepali indigenous right activists used the idea of nationality in the place of ethnicity. For example, in the 1990s the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN), an organization of nearly 54 ethnicities, emerged as the largest NGO in the country. This organization challenged the idea of Hindu caste hierarchy and the depiction of non-high caste groups as ethnic minorities. Led by Om Gurung, a Cornell-trained anthropologist, the organization claims on its website: NEFIN was formed with the goal of documenting, preserving and promoting cultures, languages, religion, customs, traditions of the Indigenous Nationalities of Nepal and to assist them in developing and obtaining equal rights.37 The key term here is “religion.” Though most indigenous nationalities were earlier included within the Hindu pantheon in Nepal, this organization makes a bold assertion that their religious customs could not be subsumed under a monolithic, homogenous Hindu cultural tradition. Rather, the idea is to celebrate a more plebian form of multiple religious practices that characterizes quotidian life in Nepal. Nepali social activists deployed a complex strategy of celebrating pluralism and the secularization of national identity by resisting the idea of a homogenous Hindu culture. The celebration of pluralism is a form of expression of the arrival of political modernity in Nepal. This is not simply limited to those who negotiated their identity from the margins of Hindu society. Many among high-caste landholding elites, who were situated at the apex of the social structure, now negotiated for a subtle shift from an overtly state-sponsored Hindu identity associated with

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absolutist monarchy to a rather nuanced notion of secular ceremonial royalty. Many old aristocratic families became involved in establishing media networks and schools and engaged in the process of internalization and dissemination of the idea of political modernity. The demand for a reformed constitutional monarchy had a wider currency among these urban, aristocratic intelligentsia who increasingly transformed their wealth into cultural capital and projected a new professional identity. It became apparent to many that the Hindu monarchy could not be the vehicle of political modernity and national identity in Nepal. In many ways, such transformations indicate that the relationship between religion and politics is crucially contingent upon a dialectical interplay among forces along principal social contradictions based on religio-demographic fault lines that separate communities. In Nepal, the principal political contradiction centers on the relationship between the monarch and the forces of conservative autocracy, on the one hand, and diverse sorts of democratic and republican forces, on the other. In societal terms, this involved questioning the recycling of Hindu idioms of national identity that in the past had sanctioned the ritual and material marginalization of janajatis or ethno-religious minorities. As the monarchy claimed legitimacy through a version of Hinduised culture and a Brahamanical notion of caste hierarchy, opposition to royal absolutism tended toward formal political secularism. More importantly, historically there existed no signifcant religious other to Hinduism in Nepali society. All religious rituals among major population groups ranging from Bahun and Chetris to Rai, Tamangs, Limbus, and Sherpas were similar. They share complex ritual practices involving Bahuns, Lamas, Shamans, and other religious specialists within a wider framework of High Himalayan and Indic religious traditions. The impact of Semitic religions such as Islam and Christianity on Nepali society is marginal. Secularization of the polity is often perceived as the symbolic step toward the eradication of caste hierarchy and the recognition of pluralism within national identity. This actually blunted the appeal of Hindu nationalist forces in Nepal. Indeed, their alignment with the royal household critically limits their appeal to wider social confgurations. The issue of the relationship between religion and politics in the Nepali context cannot be limited to a superfcial depiction of quaint religious practices alone. Rather, the very process of state formation – the contestation between absolutism and democracy, the framing of national culture and the recognition of plurality, and fnally the process of social stratifcation and ethnic marginalization – constituted the terrain in which the relationship between religion and politics was played out. The way in which community is being imagined following the twin impact of political modernity and the global circulation of human rights discourse is central. Rather than subscribing to an overarching, unifed ecumenical national community, Nepali society now imagines their community identity through ethnic prisms. This implies that, contrary to many assertions, the world is experiencing a religious revival and indeed confessional movements now dot the political landscape outside the secular West – something which requires substantial revision in favor of local complexities. With the revival of ethnicity as a plank of mobilization, Nepal is

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faced with new possibilities of being divided along deeper geographical fault lines between hill and plains. The emphasis on ethnicity did not mean that this is a stable category in Nepali society. Ethnic identities are imagined and reimagined in diferent ways in modern contexts of politicization of the very process of imagining identities. In Nepal, social ties based on ethnicities actually cut across the very boundaries they tend to represent. The idea of NEFIN or the alliance among janajati and adivasi groups is a crucial example of the wider reimagining of ethno-communal identities. Neither are such identities necessarily primordial. Rather, they had acquired diferent dimensions in diferent contexts, and in many instances, self-imagination of community identity is related to the issue of garnering resources for social mobility. The current demand for a federalization of the Nepali polity refected that. Religion as an issue is now pushed to the backburner. Indeed, there exists little political investment in transforming a complex pluralism of religious practices into a monolithic national movement. More importantly, in Nepal, because of the particular history of the relationship between state and society, such a resurgence is not currently possible.

Conclusion This chapter explores and explains the changing dynamics between religion and polity in Nepal. It demonstrates that in Nepal, religion played a crucial role in the process of state formation. Nepali monarchs openly promoted Brahamanical Hinduism to unify their kingdom, consolidate their regime, and impose a process of social stratifcation based upon legal principles to organize the society. As Nepal entered the modern era, the monarchs made the assertion of religious identity into a national culture to continue to justify their political presence. No doubt these assertions had gradually lost their legitimacy as democratic and republican forces within Nepal contested the basic premise of the monarchy as a sociopolitical institution. More importantly, the very process of imagining community boundaries in Nepal underwent radical transformations in an era of globalization. This chapter demonstrates that the relationship between religion and polity could not be equated with religion as a social practice in quotidian life in Nepal. Indeed, in everyday life, diverse forms of religious practices of Hinduism, Buddhism and Shamanism interact with each other and constitute a complex integrated social pattern where the very application of denominational separation would make little sense. It is in this context that the attempt to present Nepal as a monolithic, homogenous indivisible Hindu kingdom is being contested and a secular polity is being established. This chapter thus seeks to confront several wider generalizations about global politics that tend to view religion as an expression of primordial spirituality in nonWestern contexts and also, when on the rise, as a means of articulating boundaries of communities and civilizations. Such notions obviously impose a strictly Westcentric political prescription at a rather superfcial level. This is particularly evident

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in Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations. In the Nepali context, such views are obviously authenticated through the media articulation of Hindu rituals of shaving heads during the funeral ritual of King Birendra and Prince Dipendra. This chapter demonstrates that these rituals would make more sense if we placed them in a dialectical mapping of the evolution of Nepali political culture, where fault lines were determined through a process of social stratifcation based on the Hindu caste system. By examining the story of the evolution of and resistance to the Hindu caste system in Nepal, we have identifed a nineteenth-century idiom and means of social stratifcation and culture of governance. We have also demonstrated why, with the crisis of economic development, a quasi-feudal, aid-driven political structure with a nineteenth-century Hindu idiom of state formation has entered a crisis of existence. Globalization exposed the Nepali workers to the complex mechanism of democracy, political practices of afrmative action, and the dynamics of social movement aiming to provide the working poor with a sense of dignity. The new importation of the language of political rights through NGOs and social movement organizations opened up critical avenues of reimagining boundaries of communities. Nepali ethno-political entrepreneurs experimented with diferent templates of social categories to resist claims of Hindu monarchy. This language of resistance could embrace colonial racial discourses, borrow upon United Nations’ discourses of rights of indigenous populations in settler societies and claim entitlements within Nepali contexts for marginalized and minoritized ethnicities. These complex encounters with political modernity in a seemingly isolated hill community in an era of globalization demonstrate the dynamism of the relationship between religion and society. Communities could not be imagined to exist in a timeless mystical Hindu–Buddhist cultural wrap. Indeed, Nepali society is caught in the crosscurrents of globalization and is experiencing diverse forms of societal changes that impinge on the relationship between polity and religion. In a society characterized by clientelism in political culture, developmental retardation, and the presence of large aid agencies, such changes indicate new ways of invention and the articulation of newly imagined communities. Secularization of the Nepali polity is an expression of this process.

Suggested readings Brown, Louise T., The Challenge to Democracy in Nepal: A Political History (London: Routledge, 1996). Lawoti, Mahendra, Towards a Democratic Nepal: Inclusive Institutions for Multicultural Society (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005). Riaz, Ali and Subho Basu, Paradise Lost: State Failure in Nepal (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2007). Rose, L.E. and M.W. Fisher, The Politics of Nepal: Persistence and Change in an Asian Monarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970). Whelpton, John, A History of Nepal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Notes 1 “Nepal Royal Assassin Named King,” BBC New World Service South Asia, June 2, 2001, (accessed January 26, 2008). 2 Dilli Ram Dahal, “Social Composition of the Population, Caste/Ethnicity and Religion in Nepal,” Population Monograph, 1 (2003): 93, (accessed January 26, 2008). 3 Yogendra P. Yadava, “Language,” Population Monograph, 1 (2003): 137, (accessed January 26, 2008). 4 Nepal in Figures 2006 (Kathmandu: Government of Nepal, National Planning Commission Secretariat Central Bureau of Statistics, 2006), 6. 5 Niranjan Koirala, “Nepal in 1989: A Very Difficult Year,” Asian Survey, 30 (2) (February 1990): 136–43. 6 “Re-delcare [sic] Nepal a ‘Hindu State’, Modi told Oli: Reports,” Southasia, February 12, 2016, (accessed February 29, 2020). 7 Ibid. 8 Promode Jaiswal, “Significance of Prime Minister KP Oli’s New Delhi Visit,” IPCS, February 19, 2016, (February 26, 2020). 9 “New Local Level Structure Comes Into Effect from Today,” The Himalayan Times, March 10, 2017. 10 Sarita Neupane, “Women’s Land Rights and Globalization in Nepal,” Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development, (accessed February 26, 2008). 11 Ali Riaz and Subho Basu, Paradise Lost: State Failure in Nepal (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 98. 12 Ibid., 102. 13 Ibid., 108. 14 D. Seddon, et al., “Foreign Labor Migration and the Remittance Economy of Nepal,” Critical Asian Studies, 34 (1) March 2002): 19–40, 22. 15 Nepal in Figures 2006 (Kathmandu: Government of Nepal), 2. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Ibid. 18 The Constitution of Nepal (English translation) (1963), 2. 19 Ibid., 2. 20 Ibid., 7. 21 “Constitution of the Kingdom of Nepal (1990),” Himalayan Research Bulletin, XI (1–3) (1991), (accessed February 26, 2008). 22 Ibid. 23 State Department of the United States, International Religious Freedom Report, 2003, (accessed February 26, 2008). 24 Richard Burghart, “The Formation of the Concept of Nation-State in Nepal,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 44 (1) (November 1984): 101–25, 116. 25 Luke Wagner, “A Rumour of Empire: The Discourse of Contemporary Hindu Nationalism in Nepal,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 18 (2) (2018): 147–66. 26 “Acharya Staged Own Assassination Bid to Restore Hindu State,” myRepublica, May 7, 2018, (accessed February 28, 2018). 27 Wagner, “A Rumour of Empire: The Discourse of Contemporary Hindu Nationalism in Nepal,” 147–66. 28 Anil Giri, “Diplomat Summoned Over Envoy’s Conversion Note,” Kathmandu Post, December 16, 2014, (accessed February 28, 2020).

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29 Christopher Sharma, “Nepali Christian Arrested for Proselytising Charges for Handing Out Bibles to Quake Victims,” Asia News, November 7, 2016, (accessed February 28, 2020). 30 “Four Held for Cow Slaughter in Kapilavastu,” Himalayan Times, March 25, 2018,

31 Suman Paudel, “Contested Secularism and Religious Conflict in Nepal” (Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Helsinki Faculty of Theology, March 2019),  39, (accessed February 28, 2020). 32 Ibid., 50. 33 For a detailed and interesting explanation of the interaction of different religious practices, see David Holmberg, “Ritual Paradoxes in Nepal: Comparative Perspectives on Tamang Religion,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 43 (4) (August 1984): 697–722. 34 Richard Burghart, “The Political Culture of Panchayat Democracy,” in Nepal in the Nineties: Version of the Past, Visions of the Future, ed. Michael Hutt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–13. 35 Susan Hangen, “The Emergence of a Mongol Race,” (accessed August 31, 2006). 36 Ibid. 37 “About Us,” Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN), 2008, (accessed February 26, 2008).

7 PAKISTAN A state for the Muslims or an Islamic state? Farhat Haq

In 2011, the governor of the largest province of Pakistan was assassinated for defending a poor Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, against charges of blasphemy and criticizing blasphemy statutes as black law. Several prominent religious leaders argued that the assassin had committed a justifable homicide, because calling the blasphemy statutes black law meant that the governor had blasphemed against the honor of the Prophet Muhammad and consequently the integrity of Pakistan as an Islamic state. His assassin was turned into a saint by many as huge crowds gathered for his funeral after he was hanged by the state. Out of that gathering, several new groups emerged ostensibly to protect the honor of the Prophet by ensuring that no changes are made to the blasphemy laws. One of those groups, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), garnered 4 percent of the votes in the 2018 elections but almost 50 percent of the votes were given to religiously leaning parties. Aasia Bibi was eventually released from prison after the Pakistani supreme court threw out her conviction but had to fee to Canada because of the fear that the government could not guarantee her safety in Pakistan. Since the early 1990s, four Pakistani governments have attempted and failed to reform blasphemy statutes. The violent and toxic politics surrounding the blasphemy ordinance or Jihadi politics dominate international news about Pakistan making religion seem like the central political issue. But the view from within Pakistan presents a more complex picture. Pakistan, a country approximately twice the size of California with over 212 million people and currently the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons, is also the only modern state created specifcally for Muslims, but the role of Islam in defning the boundaries of the community remains unresolved. The role of Islam in Pakistan is paradoxical; it is both central and marginal to Pakistani politics. Pakistani society is experiencing signifcant transformations in social norms such as increasing the number of women working outside of the home. Unlike the extremists who insist that there is only one right version

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of religion, the lived Islam in Pakistan is experienced through constant debates, discussions, questions and stories.1 What, then, explains the frightening politics around blasphemy laws and Jihadi groups that seems so central to Pakistan when we observe it from abroad yet seems marginal when one views it from within Pakistan? We will answer that question by focusing on three dynamics: (a) What does Islamic stand for in the Islamic republic of Pakistan? Does Islam stand for an ethical framework enabling a progressive and democratic polity, or does it mean implementation of specifc laws that treat women and minorities diferently based on premodern Islamic jurisprudence? (b) How does the diverse and plural Islamic religious landscape in South Asia infuence who speaks authoritatively on issues of the role of Islam in contemporary politics; (c) How did functionalizing Islam to legitimize military coups and foreign policy objectives shape the role of Islam in contemporary Pakistani politics? The turmoil in Pakistani politics has many sources – the most important being the dominance of the military and an arrogant but woefully incompetent federal government that has been unable to address the grievances of most of the non-Punjabi ethnic groups – but to the outside world, the most important source of turmoil appears to be the role of Islam in politics.

Pakistan: an overview Pakistan is a complex mosaic of languages, cultures, and nationalities. Language is one of the important markers of ethnic identity. On the eve of its creation, Pakistan had fve major ethnic groups: Bengali, Punjabi, Baluchi, Sindhi, and Pushtun. In 1971, Bengalis fought and won independence and created a separate homeland in Bangladesh which resulted in more compact boundaries for Pakistan. Pakistan now borders India in the east, China in the north, Afghanistan in the northwest, Iran in the west and the Arabian Sea in the south. From its very inception, Pakistan had to face boundary disputes. Both Punjab and Bengal were partitioned by the Radclif Commission, creating deep-seated resentments among Pakistanis who were convinced that the commission had unfairly given strategic advantage to India. The territory of Jammu and Kashmir continues to be disputed between India and Pakistan. Afghanistan has disputed the legitimacy of its border with Pakistan, at times with the Afghan government arguing that all Pushtun (also spelt Pakhtun) territory in Afghanistan and Pakistan should be under Afghan control. Pakistan has four provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan; it also had two federal territories: Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) which was incorporated into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) in 2018. Urdu, the mother tongue of about 8 percent of Pakistanis, is the national language of Pakistan. The majority of the Urdu-speaking Pakistanis migrated from India to Pakistan after partition. Until the 1970s, the Urdu-speaking immigrants tended to identify strongly with the idea of Pakistan as a single nation united around the Urdu language and a common religion. But in the 1970s, as other ethnic groups demanded greater autonomy, a fair share in much-coveted civil service jobs, and admission to

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universities and colleges, the Urdu-speaking muhajirs (immigrants) also began to organize themselves as an ethnic minority. In the 1980s, the Muhajir Quami (National) Movement emerged in Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh demanding recognition as the ffth nationality in Pakistan. Close to 44 percent of Pakistanis speak Punjabi as their mother tongue, about 14 percent speak Sindhi, around 15 percent Pushto, 10 percent Siraiki, and 3 percent Balochi; the rest speak over a dozen regional languages.2 To some extent, Urdu has played the role of lingua franca for Pakistan; the Punjabi middle class has embraced Urdu more enthusiastically, but the middle classes of other nationalities learn Urdu more reluctantly and continue to resent the hegemony of Urdu. Approximately 96 percent of Pakistanis are Muslims, and the remainder are Hindus, Christians, or Sikhs. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunni, and between 12 and 20 percent are estimated to be Shi’a. Since the 1980s, there have been signifcant clashes between Shi’a and Sunni, leading to hundreds of casualties. The small Christian community has also sufered greater religious discrimination since the late 1970s when Islamization became an ofcial policy. The Ahmadiyya (also known as Qadiyani) became another oppressed religious minority in 1974 when they were declared “non-Muslims” because allegedly they did not recognize the Prophet Muhammad as the last prophet. As I will discuss in greater detail next, economic conditions are often viewed as central to the growth of Islamist movements. Unemployment, infation, rural-tourban migration, lack of access to education, and healthcare are all central concerns of the majority of Pakistanis. Pakistan continues to be a predominantly agricultural economy because the majority of people still rely for their livelihood on agriculture, though only 30 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) derives from agricultural output. Since the 1980s, there has been a rapid growth in the service and industrial sectors, though much of the industrial sector is based on agricultural products like cotton and sugar. While there have been periods of impressive economic growth, such as in the 1960s when the annual growth rate often topped 8 percent, the overall average growth rate has been around 4 percent.3 Economic growth in Pakistan is shaped by erratic and often inept government policies, the ability of the military to claim a major proportion of the country’s resources, and the enterprising spirit of the people of Pakistan that makes them seek out employment opportunities in all parts of the world. Since the 1980s, Pakistan has launched several liberalization policies, deregulation of industries, privatization of state-owned industries, and facilitation of capital fows and easing of regulations on banking industries, which started a consumer credit boom. As in many other developing countries, one sees both extreme poverty and tremendous wealth in Pakistan. The greater availability of credit since 2005 has meant that middle-class Pakistanis are able to buy cars, but the lack of investment in infrastructure leads to typical scenes of trafc jams in big cities and even small towns. The privatization of industries and services has often not produced the desired results of efciency, mostly because of infuence peddling and the lack of government oversight. The rich and well-connected families borrow millions of rupees from banks

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and routinely default on them, while the micro-credit sector that gives very modest loans to poor people claims a rate of return of over 95 percent. The remittances from close to eight million Pakistanis working overseas are the second most important source of foreign exchange earnings for Pakistan. For many Pakistani families and communities, remittances from their relatives working abroad has made a diference between abject poverty and having enough resources to eke out a lower middle-class existence. The outfow of Pakistani workers to the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries started from the mid-1970s and continues to be a major destination for Pakistanis working abroad. Some of these workers return from places like Saudi Arabia with a religious sensibility informed by Wahabbi Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government’s infuence over Pakistani politics stems from both its foreign aid to the country and the Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia. The ability of the Saudi government to negotiate former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ’s exile in 1999 and then again his return to the country in 2007 is one of the indications of the close connections between the Saudi royal family and the Pakistani political elite.4 Since the attacks on the twin towers of New York on September 11, 2001, the Western media has talked about the dangers of madrasas (Islamic seminaries). The lack of investment in the educational sector is one of the reasons for the explosion of madrasas in Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis would prefer to provide their children with what is termed an “English-medium” education because that is seen as the ticket to better economic opportunities. But the investment in both education and healthcare in Pakistan has often seriously lagged behind. The overall literacy rate in Pakistan is 59 percent, but there are wide variations. In the capital city of Islamabad, the percentage is as high as 95 percent, but in many rural areas of KPK, Sindh, and Baluchistan, the percentage can be as low as 9 percent.5

Political landscape Pakistan inherited Westminster parliamentary structure with a single-member winner-take-all electoral system. The number and role of political parties in Pakistani politics is complicated. In 2018, there were 120 political parties registered with the Election Commission of Pakistan, but only 12 of those won at least one seat in the parliament.6 Three diferent types of political parties exist. The frst type operates on a national level, such as the three parties in the 2018 elections namely, Pakistan People’s Party, Muslim League (N), and Pakistan Therik-e-Insaf (PTI). The second type is regional and represents a particular ethnic group; MQM in Urban Sindh and the Awami National Party (ANP) in KPK are two examples of such a party. A third type is often termed “Islam-pasand” (loving) parties; the three most important examples are Jammat-e-Islami, Jamiyat-e-Ulama Pakistan (JUP), and Jamiat-e-Ulama Islam. Even before the partition of the Indian subcontinent, there were several political parties claiming to represent Muslims. The Muslim League was largest of these parties, but soon after the partition, diferent politicians and later military rulers put

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their claim on the party, splitting it into various factions. For example, currently the Muslim League (N) is the largest faction. N stands for Nawaz Sharif, a politician who became the prime minister three times. A smaller faction of the Muslim League (Q) represents a group of politicians who have cooperated with military rulers in the past. Jammatt-e-Islami is another signifcant party that was formed before the partition of the Indian subcontinent. JI has presence in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Though it initially opposed the creation of Pakistan, after partition it became the most forceful proponent of the idea that Pakistan is an Islamic state. Two political parties, Jamiat-e-Ulama-Islam and Jamiat-e-Ulama Pakistan, represent the ulama of two maslaks, Deobandi and Barelvis. During the elections, the Islam-pasand parties have created an electoral alliance under the umbrella of MMA. In 2018, several smaller parties emerged out of the confict over blasphemy laws and the assassination of the governor of Punjab. Therik-e-Labiyyak-Pakistan (TLP) emerged as the leader of the pack and received almost half of the “religious vote.” Overall, the religious vote in Pakistan has not broken the 20 percent barrier, and generally it has hovered around 10 percent. There is no signifcant political party in Pakistan that stands for secularism in the sense of separation of state and religion. PPP comes close to this idea though its founding leader, Z.A. Bhutto spoke of Islamic socialism and presided over declaration of Ahmadis as non-Muslim. The party is considered liberal because of its defense of religious minorities and women. The Muslim League claimed to be the party representing the interests of Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. During the military rule of Ayub Khan (1958–69) and Pervaz Musharraf (1999–2007), the faction of the Muslim League that supported the generals also supported their attempt to constrain religious forces and reform Islamic laws. During Zia-Ul Haq’s (1979–88) military rule, the faction of ML supporting his regime facilitated his Islamization program. The Muslim League under Nawaz Sharif ’s leadership used Islamic rhetoric as a campaign strategy against its chief rival, the PPP, but has softened that rhetoric and has projected a more inclusive image since 2013. The PTI is the youngest national party based on the charisma of its founding leader Imran Khan who speaks of Medina, the city of Prophet Muhammad, as a model welfare state.

Who speaks for Islam? It is often observed that Islam constitutes the language of politics in the Muslim world.7 That may be so, but it is a language with many dialects. The cacophony of voices results in disagreement on who speaks for Islam.

The Sufs Historically, Sufs and the ulama have been the most important religious actors in South Asia. The Sufs are generally seen as the representatives of popular or folk Islam. The charisma of the original founder of the Suf order is transferred to the living representatives of the order, often – though not always – through family

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lineage. Historically, the distinction between Sufs and the ulama was not as clear cut; there were ulama who belonged to or were infuenced by a Suf order and there were diferent types of Sufs, including those who conducted military campaigns, others who insisted on orthodox practices, and yet others who challenged what they saw as the rigid orthodoxies of the ulama.8 Maintaining shrines is the most important way in which the hereditary Suf saints (pirs) have accumulated infuence and resources. In contemporary Pakistan, the Sufs or pirs have not collectively organized to represent their interests in the political arena but many of the infuential politicians have come from Suf lineages. Starting from the early 1960s under Ayub Khan, the government started to exert control over major shrines by bringing their administration under the control of the Department of Religious Endowments (Auqaf).The secular political elite and the government in Pakistan have viewed the Suf tradition as a powerful antidote against Islamic militants. On June 7, 2009, the Pakistani government announced the formation of a seven-member Suf Advisory Council (SAC) to combat extremism and spread a more tolerant and open Suf Islam. The rise of Barelvi militancy since 2011 raises serious questions about the simplistic notion that Suf Islam is open and tolerant.

The ulama The modernist Muslims and Islamists have often accused the ulama of blindly following tradition (taqlid) and thus failing to maintain a vibrant Islamic tradition that could cope with the changing times, but the ulama’s approach to Islamic texts and traditions has shown considerable fexibility and adaptability. The fexibility arose out of the continued practice of independent induction (ijtihad): Their continuous search for and articulation of new rulings on sundry legal issues, the discourses of even late medieval jurists bear ample testimony to continuous legal adaptation and even innovation – that is, in effect to the continuous practice of ijtihad.9 Unlike the Sufs, the ulama have organized themselves into political parties and have attempted to play an active role in politics. They have both made alliances with the Islamists and at times competed fercely with them over the question of who has the authority to interpret Islamic injunctions and in the electoral arena for votes.

The Islamists I use the term “Islamists” to describe a style of Islamic politics that insists on taking over the state to create a righteous Islamic society. In Pakistan, the Jamaat-i-Islami is the most important example of Islamist politics. Islamists are intensely politicized since they believe that regeneration of Muslim societies is not possible without the assumption of political power. They aim to accomplish this mission by turning faith into ideology and assigning a vanguard of pious Muslims the task of building a

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strong Islamic welfare state. In scholarly discussion of contemporary political Islam, Abu Ala Maududi (1903–79) and Syed Qutb (1906–66) are acknowledged as the founding fathers of modern Islamism. Given that Maududi is often credited with infuencing Qutb’s ideas, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Maududi is the George Washington of contemporary Islamism.

Maslak as political identity Sufs, ulama, and the Islamists are important political actors, but coming to terms with maslaks is crucial for understanding why politics of religion has been so tumultuous in Pakistan. From the middle of the nineteenth century, as Muslims lost power and infuence in the Indian subcontinent, intense discussion ensued on how the Muslim past can guide its present. The result was emergence of several maslaks competing with each other over the questions of “what sources of tradition must inform one’s engagement with key legal, ethical and theological problems?”10 What made maslaks an enduring organizing category was the materialization of debates about authoritative sources of knowledge from the Muslim past into “patterns of ritual and everyday life,”11 hardening maslaks into social and eventually political identities. Maslak as political identity added to the tumult of sectarian divides in Pakistan as the Deobandis, Barelvis, and Ahl-e-Hadith have engaged in intense competition over mosques, madrassas, and shares of the increasingly religious public sphere.12 Muslims of the Indian subcontinent responded in multiple ways to loss of political power and the rise of British colonial control. None of these responses rejected the role of religion as an important element in the revival of the Muslim community. There were intense debates on what led to the decline of Muslims and how to respond to challenges posed by the British colonialism. To the question of what went wrong that allowed European colonial powers to dominate Muslim societies in the frst place, there were, broadly speaking, three diferent answers. For the ulama, it was the corruption of Muslim rulers and the corrosion of Islamic norms because of too much mixing with local cultures and customs that led to the decline. The solution, ulama argued, was renewed commitment to Islamic education and the revival of Islamic norms and practices under their guidance. One of the bestknown of such reformist attempts by the ulama was the madrassah founded in Deoband, India in 1867. A second response came from those who put the blame for the decline of Islamic civilization on the “blind imitation” of the traditional authority of the Ulama. For the modernist, the Quran, and to lesser extent Hadith and Prophet’s life, ofered general ethical principles that could guide Muslims toward embracing modernity without giving up the faith. Rashid Rida, one of the best-known and most infuential modernists, summed it up thus: If Muslims had stood firm in reflecting on the Qur’an and in being guided by it in every age, their morals and manners would not have been ruined,

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their rulers would not have been unjust and despotic, their authority would not have declined, and they would not have become dependent on others for their livelihood.13 In the Indian subcontinent, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan became the proponent of embracing English education as a means to uplift the Muslim community. He founded the frst modern Muslim university at Aligarh to equip Muslims with knowledge of modern subjects, as well as a renewed understanding of Islam, so that they would be “capable of defending Islam and civilization.”14 For the third group, neither the modernists like Rida, too sycophantic toward Western modernity, nor the ulama, too mired in their medieval mindset, were up to the task of renewing Muslim societies. That task had to be taken up by vanguard political parties who could take over political powers and create Islamic states. The Islamists – the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world and Jamaat-e-Islami in the Indian subcontinent – argued for focusing energy on creating an Islamic state which would in turn create the wherewithal for a strong Islamic society. The Islamists, although critical of the ulama, were willing to forge alliances of convenience and grant the ulama their traditional role as interpreters of sharia. In the nineteenth and the frst half of the twentieth century, wider availability of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and books disseminated ideas of ulama, modernists, and Islamists to the literate Muslim public. The rise of electronic media further facilitated the spread of religious knowledge to those unable to read or write. What has been termed an Islamic resurgence, starting from the late 1970s, was often led by a “new class of teachers and preachers, with target audiences diferent from those of the classically trained Ulama.”15 This pluralization and democratization of religious knowledge is perhaps most evident in the entry of many women preachers and teachers who lead Quranic study. Al-Huda, a study circle founded by a woman preacher in 1994 in Pakistan, now boasts hundreds of branches and millions of members in Europe, North America, and South Asia. This diversity of lived Islam sits in tension with the need many Muslims feel to proclaim that Islam ofers clear guidelines for life, and therefore, there could only be one right way of doing things Islamic. Thus, the question of the role of Islam in contemporary public life is a signifcant quandary for almost all Muslim societies. Although when given a chance, the majority of the Muslim electorate may not vote for Islamist parties, the fact remains that the language of opposition toward most Muslim autocratic governments is Islamic. The fragmentation of authority signifcantly shapes religion and politics in Pakistan in two ways: frst, the contest over who speaks for Islam leads to the fragmentation of religious authority. Whereas in premodern Muslim societies, the ulama claimed the mantle of leadership, in the contemporary Muslim world, the ulama competes for a share of the Islamic public sphere with popular teachers and preachers, Islamist groups, Suf movements, and intellectuals claiming that direct access to the scripture rather than the intermediation of ulama is the need of the time. Second, this fragmentation of authority has made it more difcult for

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modern Muslim states to control religious forces and to use religion for enhancing legitimacy without in turn expanding the space that allows ulama and Islamists to compete with the state. The fact that modern nation-states have the power to proclaim what should count as religion does not mean that they can determine and control the outcome of such decisions. Take the example of public schooling, a process that many social scientists viewed as a central pillar of modernization, and which Muslim states embraced as a means of producing patriotic and compliant citizens. Teaching Islam is often folded into the “secular” educational system in most Muslim countries like Egypt and Pakistan, where the state is interested in both using Islam as a way to enhance its legitimacy and to contain the infuence of Islamist parties. What Gregory Starrett concludes about Egypt is also applicable to Pakistan: that far from counteracting the appeal of private-sector religious forces like the Muslim Brotherhood and the smaller Islamic splinter groups that call for revolt against the state, the religious studies curriculum in schools (and other programs for children and youth) both lays the government open to radical criticism and increases the hunger for religious resources that cannot be met solely by the public sector.16 The Pakistani public sphere is saturated with Islamic themes. The grafti on the walls of public buildings by a variety of Islamic groups jostling to frm up their brands is only one of the many ways the Islamists have claimed the public space. But this highly visible public presence should not be mistaken for centrality of Islam in Pakistani politics. When it comes to mobilizing voters, for instance, ethnicity and regional afliations are more important than religion. Multiplicity of Muslim responses to modernity is often obscured by the social science frameworks used to analyze the interaction between religion and modernity. Secularism has accumulated too much baggage over the years, making it problematic as an analytical category. For example, the often-unspoken assumption by many scholars is that secularism is the only path toward a tolerant and democratic society. The normative value attached to secularism without always clarifying what one means by this concept has made it a highly problematic framework for analyzing interaction between religion and politics. Islamists are actively hostile to secularism, which they defne not as separation of religion and politics, but rather “la-deeneet” (without religion) or an anti-religious system. The tendency to attach positive or negative meaning to secularism further obstructs empirical study of the relationship between religion and politics. The linkage of modernity with secularity is more ideological than empirical. One of the most astute scholars of religion, Jose Casanova, reminds us that “there can be modern societies like the U.S., which are secular while deeply religious, and there can be pre-modern societies like China, which from our Euro-centric religious perspective look deeply secular and irreligious.”17 Secularism in the Muslim world does not signify a state’s indiference or neutrality toward Islam. Joseph Sassoon, in his study of eight authoritarian Arab

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regimes, observes that “the battle against Islamists in most of these countries was not just against an organization; it was against the idea of Islam – a powerful rival ideology – entering politics and its ability to attract the youth.”18 The secular Syrian regime, at the height of its repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, executed a prisoner if he was caught praying, and Tunisian and Syrian regimes banned the Quran in prisons.

Debate on the role of Islam The question of what the role of Islam would be in the public life of the new country arose even before the Pakistani state was created. The movement for a separate state for Muslims of the Indian subcontinent was led by the Muslim League, a political party with a generally secular outlook. It was opposed by Islamists like the Jamaat-i-Islami and many of the prominent ulama (also spelled ulema, religious scholars) who were either skeptical of the ability of the secular leadership of the Muslim League to create an Islamic state or else felt that Muslims would be better of in an independent and united India led by the Congress Party. Once a separate state for Muslims of the subcontinent became a reality, the question of the nature of this state became controversial. Creating a territorial state for Muslims of the Indian subcontinent proved to be an immensely formidable task. The distribution of the Muslim population in the Indian subcontinent was such that it was impossible to create a geographically contiguous state for all Muslims. There were Muslim majority areas but not all of them were geographically contiguous and thus the new country had a thousand miles of Indian territory between its two wings. It was not just the physical distance that separated East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) from West Pakistan. The Bengalis, the largest ethnic group in the newly created Pakistan, felt that they were being treated as second-class citizens, told to adopt Urdu as their national language and to forgo the benefts of being the largest group in the union by accepting the parity formula which would make the East and West wings of the country equal in number in the parliament. The partition of the Indian subcontinent also unleashed a largely unanticipated refugee crisis that uprooted close to 14 million people. “Pakistan lost its bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and clerks – the wheels came of the machinery of the state.”19 It did not help that the Quaid-i-Azam, “the great leader” of the Pakistan movement, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, died a year after the birth of Pakistan. The process of building a democratic foundation for the new country was further hampered by the fact that the Muslim League, the party which led to the movement to create a separate state for Muslims in the subcontinent, had very shallow roots in the areas that became Pakistan. Two recent books on the history of partition of India provide diferent accounts of the role of Islam in the creation of Pakistan. Faisal Devji20 and Venkat Dhulipala21 agree that those seeking a new nation-state for Muslims in the subcontinent had a clear vision for the kind of polity they wanted to create. They disagree on what that vision was. Devji contends that Pakistan, like Israel, was willed into

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existence by appealing to the idea of a Muslim or Jewish nation that did not owe its existence to connections with “blood or soil” or history but to an abstract idea of a Muslim or Jewish state. For the leadership of the Muslim League, “religion was an abstract and even empty idea because they had no intention of defning Islamic practice for Pakistan citizens.”22 Dhulipala, on the other hand, points to political collaboration between the Muslim League, the party leading the movement for Pakistan, and the ulama who founded the Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam (JUI). The charter of JUI made it clear that its role was to help the Muslim League in “matters pertaining to religion and the Shariah and to work for the regeneration of the Muslim nation on Islamic lines.”23 Faisal Devji is right that many of the leaders of the Muslim League viewed Islamic identity of Pakistan as a forward-looking and even progressive movement toward the true spirit of Islam for the modern era. Creation of a modern Muslim nationstate was a novel project for the ulama of the Indian subcontinent. For the ulama (JUI) supporting the Muslim League, creation of an Islamic state of Pakistan meant revival of the traditional role of the ulama as the keeper of Sharia (Islamic jurisprudence). A signifcant number of ulama were suspicious of the Muslim League and opted for a composite nation of Hindus and Muslims where Muslims will be free to live and practice their faith in a democratic India. These diferences were evident during the frst decade of Pakistan’s existence. The process of writing the frst constitution provided the Islamists with an opportunity to fex their political muscle by insisting on an “Islamic Constitution.” This led to the passage of the “Objectives Resolution” in 1948, which laid out the basic framework for the constitution. The Objectives Resolution proclaimed that sovereignty belonged to God; the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance, and social justice, as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed and Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings of Islam as set out in the Qur’an (or Koran) and Sunnah. Objectives Resolution as a preamble was general enough that both the secular political elite and the Islamists and ulama could see it as a victory for their side. Objectives Resolution continued to be a tabula rasa on which modernists, Islamists, and the ulama projected their particular versions of the role of Islam in public life. The Objectives Resolution has become a vassal for many agendas and aspirations in Pakistan. All three constitutions (1956, 1961, 1973) included the Resolution as a guiding statement and by 1985, Zia-ul-Haq’s regime had incorporated the Resolution into the constitution in Article 2-A. “Our own grundnorm is enshrined in our own doctrine that the legal sovereignty over the entire universe belong to Almighty Allah alone, and the authority exercisable by the people within the limits prescribe by Him is a sacred trust,”24 declared Chief Justice Hamoodur Rahman. The judiciary’s appeal to the Objectives Resolution was limited to what it saw as the progressive and democratic potential of the OR, but the majority of the judges continue to maintain that it was up to the Parliament to decide how to enable the people to live life according to the Qur’an and Sunnah. Even those justices most enthusiastic about incorporating Islamic jurisprudence into their decisions were

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concerned with reaching more “ethical” or “just” results rather than rigid adherence to Islamic injunctions. More often than not when the judiciary invoked Islam, it did so to either provide a justifcation for decisions it was making on secular grounds or to argue for the expansion of basic rights of the people. The most ambitious attempt at using the Objectives Resolution to deliver speedy justice to the people came in the early 1990s in the so-called “Quetta Declaration,” when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the four High Courts as well as the Federal Shariat Court afrmed the need for genuine efforts for reconstruction of the Islamic concepts . . . for guiding and motivating the citizens and the State for asserting, promoting and enforcing the legal rights of citizens guaranteed and provided by Islam, the Constitution and Law.25 The judges used the Islamic social justice argument to take on bonded labor problems, the dowry murders, misuse of public land by corrupt politicians, the need for greater care in capital punishment cases, and abolition of court fees which were declared repugnant to Islam. “The overall impression conveyed by these cases is that Islamic law constituted an important additional source of law, which could be referred to and relied upon by judges to expand the scope of fundamental rights and to fll gaps present in the existing framework of statutory laws.”26 The Federal Shariat Court (FSC), created in 1980 to “examine and decide whether or not any law or provision of law is repugnant to the injunctions of Islam,” has considered dozens of cases, such as scope and manner of hudud punishment, requirement of photos for national identity cards and the general role of fne arts in Islamic societies, permissibility of paying interest on housing loans, hereditary transfer of village leadership (lamberdar), and the right to appeal court-martial. The justices have used “Islam to expand the scope of fundamental rights and even to add rights like a fundamental right to justice to those human rights expressly protected by the 1973 Constitution.”27 Though the question of the role of Islam in Pakistan was often debated vociferously in the frst two decades of the country’s existence, it was the issues of fair representation of various ethnic groups and economic development that shaped the contours of Pakistani politics. Starting from the early 1970s, a variety of factors led to an increase in the political power of the Islamists. First, the emergence of Bangladesh led to a renewed debate regarding the sources of Pakistan’s national identity. Second, the emergence of Arab oil economic power and Pakistan’s attempt at close alignment with the Arab world also resulted in greater emphasis on the Islamic identity of Pakistan. Besides the separation of Bangladesh, the rise of the Baluchi separatist movement, the language controversy in Sindh, and the demand for a greater “Pakhtunistan”28 led to the resurfacing of the unresolved question: “Why Pakistan?” – a question particularly suited to Islamists’ penchant for ideological debates. The Jamaat, for

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example, forcefully argued that the example of Bangladesh demonstrated that the only force which could keep Pakistan together was the Islamic identity of its people. The Jamaat’s imprint was once again refected in the 1973 constitution, which promised anew to bring existing laws into conformity with the Qu’ran and Sunnah and to ensure that no laws would be enacted which were repugnant to Islam. Another major victory for the Jamaat was the passage of a law in 1974 declaring the Ahmadiyya a minority – a demand for which the Jamaat had been agitating since the early 1950s.

The Islamization of Pakistani politics: 1977–88 In the 1970 election, the Islam Pasand parties – such as the Jamaat, Jamiat-i-Ulama-iPakistan, and Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Islam – competed with each other, but in the 1977 election, these parties along with the Muslim League formed an electoral alliance against Bhutto. The Pakistan National Alliance made the implementation of Nazim-i-Muhammadi (the Prophet’s system) its central goal. Under the PNA [Pakistan National Alliance] umbrella gathered a number of important social and economic groups that had sufered in one way or another from the various actions of the PPP [Pakistan People’s Party]29 government. These groups, taken together, constituted the Pakistani middle class, and they had been adversely afected by a number of economic and social and administrative reforms instituted by the PPP. During the hard-fought election campaign, the Alliance was able to mobilize large crowds in urban areas but, when the results were announced, the People’s Party had won comfortably in three of the four provinces. Stunned by its defeat at the polls, the Alliance accused the Bhutto regime of rigging the natural elections and boycotted the provincial elections. The Alliance took its demands to the streets and carried out a sustained protest movement against Bhutto’s regime until Zia-ul Haq took over the government, put Bhutto under house arrest, and promised to bring stability back to the country. In late 1970s, several factors came together and further enhanced the infuence of Islamists in Pakistani politics. In 1977, the military once again overthrew a civilian government and the regime of Zia-ul Haq made Islamization the main justifcation for staying in power. General Zia-ul Haq added to the traditional twin justifcations of military rule in Pakistan – political instability and the threat to the nation’s survival – a third element: a promise of implementing an Islamic system. Thus, Zia became the frst ruler in Pakistan’s history to unequivocally assert that “the introduction of an Islamic system is an essential prerequisite for this country.” To purify public morality, the censorship of television and flm increased. For example, women were now required to wear a headdress and “decent” clothes before they could appear on the state-controlled television. All government departments were required to make arrangements for prayers during working hours. Senior ofcers were advised to lead or at least to attend these prayers. Much government fanfare surrounds the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Zia-ul Haq became

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the “pious-in-chief ” by making a public display of his religiosity. Islam was put to work by a military regime to justify the overthrow of the frst democratically elected government. Zia-ul Haq’s (1977–86) Islamization campaign was responsible for expanding the blasphemy law and introducing the Hudud ordinance; both laws created signifcant administrative problems for rule of law in Pakistan and made it impossible for democratically elected governments to address these problems by reforming the laws. Zia’s Islamization contributed to the already robust religious marketplace where various Islamists, sectarian, and extremist groups vigorously competed with each other to claim a market share of the Islamized public sphere. Challenging the “writ” of the state and particularly the ability of elected governments to legislate in the areas of Hudud laws, blasphemy ordinance and women’s rights became an important weapon in the arsenal of these groups. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the use of Islam as a strategic asset by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) brought both resources and prestige to the Pakistani religious parties, because they were the main conduit for getting money, weapons, and training to the Afghan resistance against the Soviets. Though by the 1990s, civilian governments and electoral politics came back to Pakistan, the infuence of the military in politics continued, as did the tussle between the prime minister and the president. During the 1990s, Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party and Nawaz Sharif ’s Muslim League competed fercely with each other. The Benazir government was dismissed twice by the president, and Sharif ’s government was dismissed also, thus revealing the limits to the powers of democratically elected governments. The frequent military intervention in politics had led to weak parliamentary institutions and political parties and to an interventionist military and bureaucracy. Over the years, the Muslim League had often split into various factions, but it continued to survive as a party that gave a civilian facade to the military rule. By the 1990s, the Muslim League led by Nawaz Sharif and the People’s Party led by Benazir Bhutto became the two main national parties, in which the former represented the centerright position and the latter a center-left position. In 1999, Pakistan experienced yet another military coup by a military general with an ambitious agenda. Branding himself as an “enlightened moderate,” General Pervez Musharraf sought to make economic, political, and social changes that echoed Ayub Khan’s goals but his project to moderate the Islamists was often frustrated by the remnants of Zia-ul Haq’s regime. The ghost of Zia’s Islamization policies has haunted Pakistani governments since his demise in the airplane crash in 1988. The hudud ordinances made a frail criminal justice system even more dysfunctional. The Islamic taxation system (Zakat and Ushr) yielded little in revenues – the majority of the taxpayers took advantage of loopholes because they did not see the government as a faithful purveyor of Islamic charitable funds. Zia’s government expanded and modifed a set of colonial era blasphemy statutes meant to punish “Ofenses Relating to Religion,” in ways that made it easier to use these statutes against religious minorities or as an arsenal in sectarian confict between various Muslim groups. Directives, policies, laws,

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and institutions created by Zia-ul Haq to Islamize the Pakistani state and society emboldened various groups to challenge the authority of the state and compete with each other to claim a greater share of this Islamic public sphere. Freedom of religion and equality of citizens are two areas where one sees signifcant diferences between democratic norms and practices introduced by Zia’s Islamization policies. Though it took Western democracies some time to get there, it is now assumed that any polity claiming a status of democracy must grant equality to all its citizens, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or religious afliation. The obstacles Muslim countries face in implementing these norms of equality of all citizens stem not only from medieval Islamic texts but also from a highly contentious politics resulting from the so-called clash of civilization between the West and the Muslim world. When liberal democratic values are associated with Western Civilization and the Islamic world is framed as highly religious, rigid, and intolerant, extremist groups thrive by keeping issues of blasphemy and gender norms on the front burner in Pakistan.

The global jihad comes to Pakistan: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the emergence of Islamic extremism In 1948, Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79), one of the most important Islamists of the twentieth century and founder of the Jammat-e-Islami in Pakistan, refused to use the word jihad to describe the incursions into Indian-held Kashmir by irregular forces of Pashtuns encouraged by the Pakistani government. He argued that there had been no declaration of war against India and the Pakistani state was not an Islamic state yet; therefore, what was going on in Kashmir could not be called jihad. This juristically careful attitude toward declaring jihad stands in stark contrast to JI’s enthusiastic embrace of “privatized” jihad, frst against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then against India in Kashmir. Zia-ul Haq was the greatest benefciary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979) and in retrospect, Pakistan was to sufer greatly from the forces unleashed as the result of the invasion. The invasion made Pakistan a frontline state which could now control millions of dollars as well as arms to train mujahideen and manage the insurgency against the Soviet-supported government in Afghanistan. Since US involvement was covert, managed by the CIA, the millions of dollars sent to Pakistan both by the United States and Saudi Arabia were handed out to the ISI. “Congress secretly allocated about $470 millions in US funding for Afghan covert action in fscal year 1986, and then upped that to about $630 million in fscal year 1987, not counting the matching funds from Saudi Arabia.”30 The fght against Soviet invasion was to be no ordinary insurgency. Instead it was cast as a jihad and fought by mujahedeen, and this provided the Islamists and ulama in Pakistan with a key role. The Jamaat-i-Islami had maintained a close working relationship with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar since the early 1970s and, after the invasion, the relationship between Hekmatyar’s Hezb-eIslami (Islamic Party) and the Jamaat-i-Islami became even closer.

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For the Pakistani military, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a golden opportunity to rearrange strategic dynamics of the region. Afghanistan had been unfriendly to Pakistan and friendly toward India from the beginning, refusing to accept the Durand Line (the British-created border between Afghanistan and Pakistan) and laying claims to the North-West Frontier Province. The possibility of creating a friendly government in Afghanistan was highly attractive to the Pakistani military. From 1979 to 1989, the Pakistani government received billions of dollars, arms and ammunitions, and the ability to cultivate a relationship with the insurgents in Afghanistan. Once the Soviets withdrew and the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, Pakistan became even more determined not to lose infuence in Afghanistan. The rise of the Taliban in 1994 gave Pakistan the chance to fnally install what it hoped would be a pliant client regime. The Jamiat-i-Ulamai-Islam (JUI), a party of Deobandi Ulama, that had been able to win several seats in the National Assembly from the North-West Frontier Province and in 1993 allied itself with Benazir Bhutto’s government, was another benefciary of the rise of the Taliban. The JUI had been running madrasas along the Pushtun belt in NorthWest Frontier Province and Baluchistan during the 1980s. Many of the Taliban (students) were from the JUI-run madrasas. The JUI were to benefit immensely from their Taliban protégés. For the first time, the JUI developed international prestige and influence as a major patron of Islamic radicalism. Camps inside Afghanistan which were used by military training and refuge for non-Afghan Mujaheddin, and which had earlier been run by Hekmatyar, were taken over by the Taliban and handed over to JUI groups such as the SSP [Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan].31 The 1990s witnessed a proliferation of Islamist groups. The JUI, for instance, split into fve factions, of which SSP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi are two extremist anti-Shi’a organizations that have contributed to the growing sectarian violence in Pakistan. Along with the splintering of ulama-based parties, another breed of Islamists emerged as the jihadi active in Indian-held Kashmir. By the late 1990s then, the landscape in Pakistan had shifted from a few Islam Pasand parties to dozens of smaller groups that tended to be organized around a particular political entrepreneur running its operation from madrasas, cultivating relations with various intelligence agencies, publishing a variety of newspapers and magazines to propagate a militarist agenda, and training young men to engage in terror activities. Though General Musharraf attempted to roll back some of the Islamization policies of Zia-ul Haq, such as the Hudud Ordinance, when it came to patronizing the extremist jihadi groups, Musharraf ’s policy was no diferent than that of the earlier government – that is, until September 11, 2001. The primacy of jihadi talk we witness in contemporary Islamic politics is tied to both the Cold War politics of the late 1970s and the burgeoning number of extremist wings breaking of from mainstream Islamist groups to declare holy war against infdels as well as the enemy within. There is no doubt that contemporary

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jihadists are primarily non-state actors, but it is also the case that the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and to a lesser extent Egypt, China, and Great Britain pioneered the privatization of jihad as the strategy to fght the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Rather than looking for roots of contemporary jihadi violence in the Quranic verses or a facile discussion of “Dar-ul-Harb” and “Dar-ul-Islam,” it bears repeating that it was state-led geopolitical dynamics, not cultural or theological factors, that have made jihad part of the global lexicon. The siege of the Red Mosque in the heart of Islamabad in 2007 and the 2009 takeover of the Swat region by the Movement for the Implementation of Muhammad’s Sharia (TNSM) illustrate the deadly nature of state-sponsored politics of jihad to the integrity of the state in Pakistan. The jihadi challenge continued with the rise of TTP (Therik-e-Taliban Pakistan) which engaged in ongoing insurgency against the Pakistani state by launching suicide attacks on shrines, military and police, schools, hotels, markets, and mosques. From 2008 to 2019, close to 65,000 Pakistani citizens were killed in terrorist-related bombing.32 In 2011, two events weakened Pakistani state’s legitimacy both at home and abroad. A CIA operative, Raymond Davis, was released after he had killed two Pakistanis in a crowded market and after the capture of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. For Pakistanis, it raised questions about the government’s complicity in granting U.S. permission to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty. For the international community, the presence of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil raised the specter of the Pakistani government’s duplicity in the “War against Terror.” It was also in 2011 when Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab, was gunned down by Mumtaz Qadri, opening political space for Barelvi militancy.33 On December 16, 2014, in a terror attack that is labeled by the media as Pakistan’s 9/11, militants gunned down more than 150 people, most of them children, at Peshawar’s Army Public School. They claimed this a retaliation of the army’s operation called “Zarb-e-Azb” (Sharp Strike) to root out TTP. The ground operation launched in FATA (Federally administered tribal areas), in June, did yield a reduction in “incidence and lethality of terrorist attacks,” albeit at a great cost with 700,000 civilians displaced due to these military operations.34 In 2020, as the United States winds down its military presence in Afghanistan it is clear that in the last four decades, Pakistan has paid a steep price for its nurturing of jihadi elements that turned from fghting against the Soviets and the U.S. to fghting against the Pakistani state. Pakistan provides a seven-decade-long look at the tangled relationship between Islam, nationalism, law, and democracy. Islamist and the ulama adopted a fexible posture for the frst decade of Pakistan’s existence as they bargained with political elites over the role of Islam in the constitution. They became strong proponents of parliamentary democracy in the second decade to counter the authoritarian secularist regime of Ayub Khan. Once the electoral process was revived in the third decade, ulama and Islamists competed with each other for votes but also made strategic alliances as “Islam-pasand” (favoring Islam) parties. In Pakistan’s fourth decade, a military man, Zia-Ul Haq, functionalized Islamic laws to legitimize the execution of the frst popularly elected prime minister and prolonged authoritarian

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rule. The larger geo-strategic environment further contributed to functionalizing Islam to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan creating a thriving and competitive religious marketplace where various groups competed over resources by diferentiating their brands of Islam. This competitive environment around Islam and politics in Pakistan’s fourth, ffth, and sixth decades created increased sectarian confict, politicized blasphemy and hudud ordinances, nurtured a jihadi culture resulting in alliances between political parties, and armed criminal gangs. By the seventh decade of Pakistan’s existence, the three democratically elected governments of PPP, Muslim League (N), and PTI have attempted to reclaim the democratic and progressive role of Islam in public life with limited success because of strong opposition from Islamists and ulama.

Conclusions The 2018 election exemplifes key dynamics of Islam and politics in Pakistan (Table 7.1). First, like all the previous elections, the Islamists and the ulama had limited success at the polls. The parties in ffth and sixth position, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal and Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), represented the Islamic vote and their share of the vote in 2018 was under 10 percent. Thus, when it comes to voting behavior, Pakistanis do not vote for religious parties in any signifcant number pointing to my contention that in some ways Islam is marginal to Pakistani politics. Second, TLP is a new party that had emerged to prevent any modifcation of blasphemy laws which it and many other Islamic groups argue protect the honor of the Prophet Muhammad. The modifcation and expansion of blasphemy laws by Zia-Ul Haq’s regime illustrates another dynamic discussed in the introduction;

TABLE 7.1 Pakistan election results, 2018

Position

Party

Total Votes

Share

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Pakistan Muslim League (N) Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians Independent Muttahida Majilis-e-Amal Pakistan Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan Grand Democratic Alliance Awami National Party Muttahida Qaumi Movement Pakistan All Others Total

16,851,240 12,896,356 6,901,675 6,018,291 2,541,520 2,231,697 1,257,354 808,229 729,767 2,625,157 52,861,286

32% 24% 13% 11% 5% 4% 2% 2% 1% 5% 100%

Source: The Gazette of Pakistan, Islamabad, October 2, 2018; www.ecp.gov.pk/gazette2018/ National%20Assembly1.pdf

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functionalizing of Islam by authoritarian government equating Islam with a rigid framework of eternal “Islamic laws.” The irony is that blasphemy statues were frst introduced by the colonial British government and had nothing to do with sharia. Third, the three most popular political parties: PTI, PPP, and PML (N) tried and failed in their attempt to address the abuse of blasphemy laws which had resulted in hundreds of false accusations and convictions reinforcing the image of Pakistan as an intolerant country. Imran Khan, the leader of PTI and the prime minister, wants to reclaim a progressive and democratic vision of the Islamic state in Pakistan. In a 2019 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Imran Khan indirectly took on the question of blasphemy laws by telling his audience that when the West insists on its freedom of expression by insulting the Prophet Muhammad, it hurts Muslim sentiments because “It is important to understand this. The Prophet lives in our hearts. . . . When he is ridiculed, when he’s insulted, it hurts.”35 Imran Khan has made several statements supporting rights of religious minorities in Pakistan36 and has opened Kartarpur corridor to allow Sikh pilgrims to visit one of their holiest sites.37 His ability to deliver on the promise of a more tolerant and liberal Islamic state of Pakistan is limited by the functionalizing of Islam by civilian and military governments in Pakistan for the past seven decades.

Suggested readings Abbas, Hassan, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2004). Ahmad, Sadaf, Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009). Akhtar Sajjad Aasim, The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Shafqat, Saeed (ed.), New Perspectives on Pakistan: Visions for the Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Shaikh, Farzana, Making Sense of Pakistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Toor, Saadia, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (New York: Pluto Press, 2011). Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Notes 1 See for instance, Naveeda Ahmad Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) and Magnus Marsden, Living Islam. Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2 John Misachi, “Ethnic Groups in Pakistan,” World Atlas, July 30, 2019, (accessed June 6, 2020). 3 Focus Economics, “Pakistan Economic Outlook,” May 26, 2020, (accessed June 8, 2020). 4 Nawaz Sharif was deposed from power in 1999 in a military coup by the then-military chief Pervez Musharraf. Sharif and his predecessor, the leader of the Pakistan People’s

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

Party (PPP) Benazir Bhutto, were forced into exile by the military regime. Sharif took refuge in the Gulf and returned to Pakistan in 2007. Abdul Rehman, Luan Jingdong, and Imran Hussain, “The Province-wise Literacy Rate in Pakistan and Its Impact on the Economy,” Pacific Science Review B: Humanities and Social Sciences, 1 (3) (November 2015): 140–4. Mariam Mufti, Sahar Shafqat, and Niloufer Siddiqui (eds.), Political Parties: Surviving Between Dictatorship and Democracy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020). See for example, Jean-Claude Vatin, “Revival in the Maghrib: Islam as an Alternative Political Language,” in Islamic Resurgence in the Arab World, ed. Ali Hilal Dessouki (New York: Prager, 1982), 221–50. Richard M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Ulama in Contemporary Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 18. SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). Ibid. Farhat Haq, Sharia and the State in Pakistan: Blasphemy Politics (London: Routledge, 2019). Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (eds.), Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8. Quoted in Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 146. Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 20. Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 6. Jose Casanova, “Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective,” Berkley Center, Georgetown University, 2006, (accessed May 25, 2020). Joseph Sassoon, Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 143. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 157. Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, 47, Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina, 356. The case under consider was the famous Asma Jilani case challenging the legality of martial law. Martin Lau, The Role of Islam in Legal System of Pakistan (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2006), 14. Justice Afzal Zullah was one of the more enthusiastic proponents of incorporating Islamic injunctions into his decisions but as Lau notes, his behavior was different when he served in the Supreme Court where he appears to “proceed on the basis of broad ethical and moral principles,” as opposed to when he served as a judge of the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court, “there he insisted that Federal Shariat Court was to refer to concrete rules contained in the Qur’an and Sunnah whenever a law was declared to be repugnant to Islam” (Lau, The Role of Islam, 45). Lau, The Role of Islam, 112. Ibid., 210.

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28 The “Pakhtunistan” movement, supported by the Afghan government, claimed that Pakhtuns living in both the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan ought to have a separate state of their own. 29 Martin Lau points that “the Shariat courts never invalidated a statute on the basis that it discriminated against women” and have also failed to protect religious minorities” (Lau, The Role of Islam, 211). 30 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 151. 31 See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 91. 32 South Asia Terrorism Portal, “Fatalities in Terrorist Violence in Pakistan 2000–2019,” (accessed May 10, 2020). 33 Farhat Haq, “Banding for Blasphemy: Mumtaz Qadri and Pakistan’s Barelvis,” The Diplomat, April 6, 2016. 34 Sachchal Ahmad, “After Zarb-E-Azb: Now What?” Stimson Center, August 18, 2015, www.stimson.org/2015/after-zarb-e-azb-now-what/ (accessed April 18, 2020). 35 “To Combat Islamophobia, Imran Khan Bridges East and West,” Dawn, September 29, 2019, www.dawn.com/news/1507827 (accessed April 17, 2020). 36 See, for instance,” If Minorities are Targeted, We Will Act: Pakistan’s Khan,” Anadolu Agency, February 26, 2020, www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/if-minorities-are-targetedwe-will-actpakistans-khan/1745629 (accessed June 8, 2020). 37 Naveed Siddiqui, “This is the Beginning: PM Imran Inaugurates Kartarpur Corridor on Historic Day,” Dawn, November 9, 2019, (accessed March 21, 2020).

8 SRI LANKA The Buddhisization of politics in the Sinhala-South Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

In contemporary Sri Lanka, religion and politics is intertwined and inseparable.1 This is not unique to Sri Lanka. However, what is unique to Sri Lanka is the dual role of religion in the evolution of the democratic polity. On the one hand, it has played a very crucial role as an agent of the democratization, i.e., facilitating masses’ participation in the democratic political process, while on the other hand, it has become a vital factor of violent relationships between various ethno-religious communities – a distinct feature of the post-independence period in Sri Lanka.2 This chapter attempts to untangle this paradoxical role of religion highlighting the process that could be called Buddhisization. The role that Buddhism plays in the Sri Lankan polity may seem paradoxical because the secular democratic component has been quite strong in Sri Lanka for a long time. Although special constitutional provision has been provided to safeguard the Buddhist establishment (known as Buddha Sasana), religious freedom is guaranteed in the constitution. Besides, the meaning and implications of the special provision for the Buddha Sasana in the constitutions of 1972 and 1978 are unclear. However, the provision provides a strong ideological endorsement to the powerful campaign to promote the increasing Buddhisization of the state.

Sri Lanka: an overview of its ethno-religious profle Sri Lanka, an island located at the Southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, is approximately 65,610 square kilometers in size and has a total population of 21 million. There are a number of ethnic and religious communities. Ethnic Sinhala people constitute 75 percent of the total population, while Tamils account for 15 percent (out of which 4 percent are Tamils with recent Indian origin who were brought to the island to work in the plantations). The group known as Sri Lankan Moors constitute a little more than 9 percent, while a small group of

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Malay (0.22 percent) and even lesser number of Burgers (of European origin) and Eurasians are also found. Four major world religions are practiced. They are Buddhism (70 percent), Hinduism (12 percent), Islam (9 percent), and Christianity (7  percent). The majority of Sinhalese are Buddhist, although Catholicism and other denominations of Christianity are widely practiced. The majority of Tamils are Hindus, while some Tamils practice Christianity, too. Moors and Malays are exclusively Muslims and most Burgers and Eurasians are Christians.3 When Sri Lanka became a modern political entity with the end of British colonial domination on February 4, 1948, it inherited social and political formations that evolved through a long European colonial presence since the early sixteenth century. The evolution of modern political institutions, processes, and practices began in the nineteenth century under the British colonial administration. This included universal franchise, introduced in 1931, and the institutional arrangements of a parliamentary system of government. A competitive multi-party system, an essential part of a democratic polity, also began to evolve in the early phase of the postcolonial period. While these developments ensured a vibrant democratic polity, there were other developments damaging to the healthy growth of democracy. Historical developments since the thirteenth century had produced two diverse socio-demographic formations in the island, one in the northern parts and the other in the Western and southern parts. Even the administrative unifcation by the British could not unify those two formations. This bifurcation gave birth to two contesting powerful religio-cultural revivalist movements among local people – one underscored Hinduism while the other underscored Buddhism as the marker of identity. Both were opposed to the political and cultural domination of the colonial power. Both made lasting impacts on the postcolonial political process. These movements have largely shaped the postcolonial polity; these include the broadening and deepening of democratization, and the rapid growth of ethnoreligious political sentiments. The spectacular growth of educational opportunities, freely available for every child from elementary schools to university education, generated a socially and politically conscious active population. The educational attainment created massive demand for redistribution of wealth, particularly among the newer generations. Strong urges for the redistribution of state-controlled resources that greatly determined the trajectory of postcolonial political process were immediate outcomes of this “education revolution.” The intensifcation of confictual relationships between ethno-religious communities acquired a new dynamic because of this context. Engaging in the political process had become sine qua non for obtaining one’s share of wealth and, in turn, the political feld became an intense battleground to ensure access to resources. Against this background, religion, particularly Buddhism, became a key factor in mobilizing the masses by various political forces. The recent evocation of Buddhism as a powerful political tool by the political camp led by charismatic political fgure Mahinda Rajapaksa bears witness to this. The eventful political drama that unfolded since the defeat of the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa in January 2015 unquestionably points to the high relevance of the Sinhala version

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of Buddhism in politics of the Sinhala-South, that is geographically South with a large Sinhala population. The ability of the political camp led by the Rajapaksas4 to mobilize mass support to recover from an unexpected defeat in January 2015 was largely due to its ability to be associated with the religious domain of the SinhalaBuddhists. The victory of the Rajapaksas in 2019 is a testimony to their ability to recover the narrative and their position within the domain, rendering humiliating defeat to the opponents. During the recovery of the Rajapaksas’ political fortunes after January 2015, Buddhist temples became an important location of “Rajapaksa politics.” Mahinda Rajapaksa’s frequent visits to temples around the country became massive crowdpulling occasions. The line between politics and religion completely disappeared in these instances. In this context, the 2019 presidential election, which Mahinda Rajapaksa’s younger brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa won comprehensively,5 seemed to be as much an act of religion as of politics. This can be described as the pinnacle of the Buddhisization of the political sphere in modern Sri Lanka. This chapter seeks to answer two central questions: How was this nexus between the religious imagination of the Sinhala-Buddhist people and the political space established? What are the modes through which this relationship sustained itself?

Buddhist-Christian encounter as the matrix of forming modern political imagination Although the community of Buddhist monks have played a seminal role in the state formation processes even before the nineteenth century, the cultural revivalist movements in the nineteenth century provided them a larger space within the polity. These movements emerged in response to some fundamental social, economic, and cultural changes occurring under the colonial domination. The interactions between European colonizers and the Sri Lankan population need to be understood not only in terms of occupation and exploitation of land but also in terms of its implications for cognitive shift of the local people. Vast diferences existed between the cognitive world of the European colonizers and that of the people in Sri Lanka. When the European encounter began, Sri Lanka was very much a part of the larger Indian cultural world, which began to change after interactions with the European world via colonization. Buddhism originally represented a dissenting voice against the dominant (Hindu) Brahmin tradition, but it was gradually transformed into another religious entity. Yet it was a part of the larger Indian cultural world. As such, cultural transactions that the island’s people experienced prior to its encounter with Europe were largely limited within the broader Indian cultural world. A possible exception would be the limited presence of Islam even before the arrival of Europeans. However, Islam at that time did not penetrate local society, and the small Muslim community largely lived as a separate entity. The European encounter was fundamentally diferent from the previous experience. Since the early Portuguese encounter, there were systematic eforts to penetrate the cultural world of local people. Religion, that is Christianity, was

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central to this cultural penetration. Although the early expansion of Christianity was not met with serious challenge, particularly in the Buddhist society, contestation between these two religious world views began to emerge over time. The opposition to colonial rule and the opposition to Christianity merged. All anticolonial initiatives underscored this aspect of religious diferences. Buddhist revivalism in the nineteenth century begun with the proliferation of Buddhist activities among new social classes in the Western and Southern parts of the island; these new classes emerged as a result of new economic activities during successive European colonial domination.6 Although these classes were closer to colonial projects, not all members of the new social classes were converted into Christianity. Thus, space for Buddhist activism was not completely withered away. This new round of Buddhist activism was made possible particularly by the eighteenth-century revival of Buddhism at the heart of the Kandyan Kingdom. This revival eforts occurred in the mid-eighteenth century under the aegis of Bhikkhu Walivita Saranankara.7 Some of his disciples continued the activism in the Dutch occupied deep-South of Sri Lanka.8 This Southward movement of Saranankara’s initiative coincided with the emergence of a new group of elites in the South. The immediate outcome was the emergence of a series of literary activities, which are known as “Matara literature.”9 This was more than a literary movement as it produced greater enthusiasm for education and a broader spectrum of religious and cultural activities. The religio-cultural activities that began in the deep-South, gradually moved toward the Colombo areas along the southern coastal belt. The intellectual drive it generated amongst a group of literati had long-term implications. It could be considered an initial stage of the evolution of a new cultural formation.

Emergence of the modern political sphere in the Sinhala-Buddhist South The emergence of the modern political sphere in the Sinhala-South paralleled the Buddhist revival, but several important developments equally contributed to the emergence of the modern public sphere in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The growth of education produced a new group of intellectuals who were active in this public sphere in various capacities. These intellectuals were produced not only by newly formed modern educational institutions, but also by rejuvenated Buddhist education institutes, known as pirivena. These intellectuals were able to propagate their ideas in mass scale because of the wider use of the printing machine. They were active in mass circulated press and engaged widely in literary works, which were made accessible to a large audience in printed form. The work of these intellectuals was quite signifcant in producing a unifed politico-cultural discourse that transformed soon into a powerful ethno-nationalist force. Buddhism was indeed the binding thread of this new mobilization. There were several immensely signifcant moments in this period for creating the Buddhism-politics nexus. The frst is the series of public debates between

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Buddhists and Christians in the 1860s. The Buddhist side, led by Bhikkhu Mohottiwatte Gunannada, gained massive popularity as an aftermath of the series of debates.10 These debates undoubtedly aroused cultural enthusiasm of the masses in the Sinhala-Buddhist South. Most importantly, these debates decisively established religion as the determining factor of the ideological battle, by placing Buddhism against Christianity. The other moment was the rise of Anagarika Dharmapala as a pioneering fgure of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism. He could be considered the modernist par excellence who sometimes is credited as the “Father of the Sinhala Nation.” He was very keen on establishing a close association between Sinhalese and Buddhism. It is noteworthy that the newspaper he founded was named Sinhala Bauddhaya (The Sinhala-Buddhist). When the democratic space and opportunities for mass participation expanded in the twentieth century, Dharmapala’s contribution became more infuential.11 When the democratic space was widened and the voting right was fast expanding, the need for ideologically attractive political appeal became vitally important. At popular elections, when there are competitions among the political elite to attract an electorate consisting of large variety of social groups, unifying ideologies were essential. The Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism was such an efective ideological tool. This was tested in the 1956 parliamentary election.

1956 as the turning point Compiling a detailed account of the 1952 parliamentary election, a well-known social scientist I.D.S. Weerawardana, observed: “[t]he Buddhists have no efective pressure group to speak of.”12 He made this observation while comparing the Buddhist religious bodies’ eforts with non-Buddhist religious groups’ organized mobilization during the election campaign. The same author drew a contrasting observation on the 1956 election: “[a]lthough Buddhist issue itself was not equally well covered by the press, it was a subject which evoked no less an emotional feeling.”13 This is somewhat an understatement considering the role of Buddhism in the 1956 election. Buddhism was not marginal to the 1956 election at any rate. The signifcance was indeed efectively represented by the well-known cartoon, “2500 Mara Yuddhaya,” which Weerawardana himself reproduced in his monograph on the 1956 election. This cartoon depicts all the forces that the MEP election campaign opposed to, including the governing UNP, as a grand alliance of all those who were against Buddhism. It used, as a metaphor, the famous mythical episode of the life of the Buddha, known as the battle against the god of death (Mara Yuddhaya).14 The parliamentary election held in April 1956 brought an end to the eightyear-old United National Party (UNP) regime, rendering landslide victory to the newly formed loose alliance, known as the People’s United Front (known popularly as Mahajana Eksath Peramuna – MEP) under the leadership of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.15 This alliance was a unique political entity because it was not a

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typical political party. There were several conventional political parties, such as Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and Viplavakaree Lanka Sama Samaja Pakshaya (VLSSP), a breakaway group of the main leftist party, Lanka Samasamaja Pakshaya (LSSP). The principal strength of the MEP, however, was its ideological power. This ideological power was provided by various elements organized around the political party-based electoral front. One of the infuential organizations in this connection was the United Bhikkhu Front (Eksath Bikshu Peramuna). The year 1956 was a highly symbolic moment for the Sinhala-Buddhist sociopolitical psyche. It was the year that Buddhists celebrated the 2,500 years of the passing away of the Buddha, which is known as Buddhajayanthi. There were plenty of mythifcations around this symbolic moment, and the most relevant one for the present discussion was the myth of the arrival of Diyasena, the mythical millenarian persona, who was believed to have appeared to save the people from the cosmic degeneration. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the symbolic leader of the 1956, was perceived by some quarters as Diyasena Kumaraya.16 Therefore, 1956 brought a sea change in the political psyche of SinhalaBuddhists. The Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism which evolved since the latter part of the nineteenth century and benefted from the deepening of the procedural democracy, including universal franchise and the establishment of a Westminster system of government, reached a great height. One of the highlights of the frst half of the twentieth century was the increasing politicization of the rural areas of the SinhalaSouth. This politicization occurred under the leadership of various social agents, mainly a rural mid-level landowning class. The fundamental economic and social interest of this social class was to dominate the peasantry, who were smallholder farmers and landless agrarian workers. Peasantry constituted the majority population of the rural areas. A signifcant proportion of small farmers and landless workers were economically dependent on the mid-level landowning class. As tenants and daily laborers, peasants were bound to serve the landowning class. This economic dependence strengthened the ability of the landowning class to dominate the peasantry, both socially and politically.17 This mid-level landowning class enjoyed higher status in the rural society and also benefted from their high-caste identity. Thus, the rural society in the Sinhala-Buddhist South in the mid-1950s consisted of various social groups with contradictory social and economic interests. The need for a unifying ideology to bring together these various social groups with diverse interests, under the hegemony of the rural landowning class, was satisfed by Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism. The meaning of the campaign slogan of the 1956 election, “Pancha Maha Balavegaya” (fve great forces), represents very well this complex situation.18

Buddhisization of the state in the post-1956 period It may seem ironic that S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the icon of the 1956 victory, was killed by a Bhikkhu, and the assassination plot was orchestrated also by another Bhikkhu. It may seem far-fetched to imply that the assassination is part of the

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Bhikkhu politics, as there seems to be various interests involved in the assassination plot. However, the fact that Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, the chief conspirator of the assassination plot, was a leading fgure of the Eksath Bhikshu Peramuna (United Bhikkhu Front) cannot be ignored. It is also important that the assassin, who was also a Bhikkhu, persuaded him to carry out the killing by Buddharakkitha in the name of “the protection of Buddhism.”19 The assassination saga helps us understand the religion-politics nexus in the post-1956 era in two ways. On the one hand, it points to the fact that leading Bhikkhus who were capable of manipulating Bhikkhu politics in the run-up to the 1956 election were trying to use the state power to gain various material benefts. It is important to note that Buddharakkitha has been identifed as a “business magnate.”20 He made several unsuccessful attempts to make several lucrative business deals with the government, which were opposed and obstructed by Bandaranaike with the help of other strongmen of the government. The assassin’s testimony supports the allegation of manipulation.21 He was approached by Buddharakkitha who convinced him that the plight of Buddhists was exacerbated by the way Bandaranaike handles the government. It shows that there was a possibility to evoke the ideological justifcations for blatant manipulation of the system for narrow individual gains. On the other hand, the assassination saga also helps us understand the growing tension between the Buddhist sentiments and the Bandaranaike government. Although Buddharakkitha’s motive could easily be understood in terms of his business and other personal interests, Thalduwe Somarama, the assassin, could not be associated with such immediate individual gains. One may understand the gravity of the growing tension between the government and the ideological sentiments of Bhikkhus through Somarama’s involvement in the assassination saga. The assassination of Bandaranaike was followed by a grave political crisis that his government was facing. There were several aspects of the crisis. There was a clash between various vested interest groups within the MEP. This also led to a clash among partners of the MEP, particularly left-wing and right-wing elements. What is more signifcant was that Buddhist lobby also began to challenge Bandaranaike, when he took some steps to pacify growing demands of Tamil ethno-nationalism. In general, serious political instability followed the 1956 election.22 While the Sinhala-Buddhist forces were victorious and overtly confdent in the ensuing period, 1956 victory cemented the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism as the ideological base of the state. History in the subsequent decades would prove beyond doubt that without the ideological legitimacy based on the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, governments will fnd it difcult to sustain stability.

Buddhisization of the state Although 1956 was not a full realization of the imaginary of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, it produced Buddhisization of the state to a signifcant extent. Perhaps this process was shaped by certain symbolic gestures of the governing elite

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to convince the Sinhala-Buddhist lobby that their interests are being looked after by the government. But it was no less signifcant as a process. It brought about fundamental change to the way the colonial state was constructed. The colonial state was intended to be secular and not to be predisposed toward one particular religion, although Buddhists perceived that there was a strong Christian bias. This perception was clearly represented in the well-known “Buddhist Commission Report.”23 There was a basis for this perception. Non-Buddhists, particularly Christians, were able to enjoy more opportunities, disproportionate to their number in the population. The reason for this anomaly was the majority of the Buddhist population were involved in the agrarian sector. They were strongly bound to the structures of rural society. The situation was changing gradually in the twentieth century. With more people leaving the agrarian sector and a massive increase of population, the nonagricultural proportion of the Buddhist population grew. Consequently, there was a higher demand for economic and social opportunities which non-Buddhist groups also competed for. This created an intense competition between Buddhists and other ethno-religious groups for various opportunities in the non-agrarian sector. This situation could indeed be very much understood in terms of the language controversy that was central to the 1956 election campaign. The demand of the Sinhala people to make Sinhala language the only ofcial language was the decisive campaign slogan of the election. A number of measures were taken, particularly after 1956, to strengthen the position of Buddhists, mainly, at the expense of Christians and Tamil speakers.24 It is against this background that the policy regarding language was declared, which made Sinhala the ofcial language of the state. This step was justifed in terms of the historical rights of the Sinhala-Buddhists. Some other steps were taken in the education sector in favor of Buddhists; for example, two major pirivenas were converted to universities, and the government took over schools ran by religious institutes. Additionally, there were reforms in distribution of state lands and government jobs, and standardization of university entrance, which efectively favored Sinhala-Buddhists. The contents of the frst republic constitution introduced in 1972 was also heavily infuenced by the Buddhist lobby. These measures were met with severe resistance from non-Buddhist sections. Some argue that the failed military coup in 1962 was a response from the Christian elite who were ofended by the aforementioned measures.25 Tamils also actively resisted these measures. The Tamil resistance movement became immensely popular because these measures severely afected the ordinary Tamil people. While there were concessions for Sinhala-Buddhists after 1956, the Buddhist lobby did not evolve as a unifed movement. It seemed to have been signifcantly absorbed by party politics in the 1960s and 1970s. These two decades could be considered the “golden era” of the two-party system in Sri Lanka dominated by the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Both parties managed to attract many of the major players into their fold, which was a major factor in losing the autonomy of the Buddhist lobby.

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Buddhism and nationalism after 1983 July 1983 is a crucial moment in the political history of modern Sri Lanka. It is marked by the anti-Tamil pogrom. The lasting impact of “1983” was that it triggered a new wave of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, providing Buddhism a crucial role in politics. Leading to the 1983 Sinhala nationalism became integrally linked to a particular mode of articulation of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. In this context, any surge of nationalist fervor required legitimation from Sinhala-Buddhism. By the mid1980s, Bhikkhu politics had considerably lost the unity that it enjoyed at the time of the 1956 election. Since then, Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism had lost, to a greater degree, the autonomy it enjoyed before. Two major political parties, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP) had absorbed politically active Buddhist monks into their folds. This was one of the outcomes of the political evolution of the postcolonial period. In the mid-1980s, however, the situation began to change. A new nationalist politico-ideological discursive space was emerging, signifcantly outside the domain of party-based political activities. This new politico-ideological space emerged owing to a new political challenge that the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist psyche faced. This was the challenge that came from the rising Tamil nationalism, where a strong political lobby had evolved with a set of territorially based political demands for Tamil ethnic community living in the North and the East.26 Ironically, there was considerable support for Tamil political demands within the political domain of the Sinhala society itself, while the dominant ideology of the same society opposed them. A large contingent of the Sinhala leftist political forces maintained a sympathetic attitude toward Tamil nationalist demands. Moreover, there were also scores of liberal intellectuals who saw a democratic basis for these demands. Parallel to this ideological and political justifcation of Tamil nationalist demands was a serious intellectual attack on Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism too. Since the late 1970s, a number of research institutes and group of researchers, well-funded by Western sources, continued to publish studies and commentaries which overtly or covertly attacked Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism.27 This particular intellectual intervention blamed the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism for the maltreatment of non-Sinhala-Buddhist communities by the state supported by the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism. Needless to say, this stance hurt the feelings of those who embraced the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism. There was also a growing political discontent among the Sinhala-Buddhist masses who perceived the growing Tamil secessionism an existential threat to Sinhala-Buddhist identity. The governing UNP was vehemently against the demands of Tamil nationalism, but a serious rift existed between the UNP leadership and the Sinhala-Buddhist political ideology. Although this rift could be considered a continuity of the 1956 moment, where UNP was perceived as the embodiment of all the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist forces, there was a new context too.

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A number of factors can be identifed for this emerging phenomenon. First, the new economic policies, referred to as “open economy” and adopted by the UNP government in 1977, signifcantly marginalized the social forces associated with Sinhala-Buddhist ideology. The policies emphasized the need to link a country’s economy with the global economy. Economic integration with the global economy was contrary to the policies pursued by the government in 1956. Most signifcantly, this economic approach was vastly unpopular among the rural upper middle class, the backbone of “Pachamaha Balawegaya” of 1956. While the SinhalaBuddhist ideology favored the SLFP more than the UNP, both of these parties in the pre-1977 period followed economic strategies relatively more benefcial for the rural upper-middle class. The year 1977 marked a radical departure from these erstwhile economic policies.28 Second, there was an obvious urban bias in the post-1977 economic and political dynamics. This was a major turning point in the modern political history of Sri Lanka, because 1977 brought the center of gravity of mass politics out of the rural areas. Third, the UNP think tank seemed to have decisively broken away from the dominant popular intellectual discourse and did nothing to appease these intellectual ranks; instead, it antagonized them. Many sharp-worded statements by none other than President J.R. Jayewardene particularly ofended them.29 Seemingly, the UNP think tank was of the strong view that appeasing the intellectuals and politically animated sections of the Sinhala-nationalist ideological forces will be a politically dangerous ploy.30 Hence, it systematically followed a strategy that intended to weaken the politically radical elements of the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. At the same time, it attempted to support more conservative forces that are not politically threatening to the UNP regime. Key fgures of the Jayewardene government such as Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa and cultural Minister W.J.M. Lokubandara were trying to mobilize and support nationalistoriented, but politically less vocal, sections of the Sinhala-Buddhist intellectual and cultural sphere. There was a strong opposition to this strategy from the politically and ideologically sensitive elements of the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist domain. Although religion was not directly linked to this opposition, it was an important factor. In 1977, J.R. Jayewardene (JRJ) used a Buddhist-oriented theme as his major campaign slogan. His promise was to build a “Dharmishta Samajaya” (Righteous society). Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist propagandists were annoyed by the way in which this important Buddhist notions were (ab)used. This was evident when a prominent public intellectual took over this notion to mock Jayewardene’s projects. In 1982, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, a wellknown public intellectual and a university professor, published his famous essay, “Dharmishta Samajaya,” to mock JRJ’s project.31 It became a rallying point for the Sinhala-Buddhist ideological forces. The situation took a turn to the worse when Sarachchandra and a popular politically active Buddhist monk, Maduluwawe Sobhita, were attacked by an organized group, which had strong links to the UNP at a public gathering.32

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Concurrent with this emerging tension between the Jayewardene government and the Sinhala-Buddhist political and intellectual forces was the weakening of opposition political parties. The SLFP faced internal strife and the political signifcance of the left parties diminished. The Sinhala-Buddhist psyche was further ofended by the strengthening of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), the main opposition party in the parliament. The declared objective of the TULF was to carve out a separate state for the Tamil-dominated North and East regions. These circumstances led to the emergence of new Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist politico-ideological discourse.

The role of Buddhism in the new wave of nationalism in the 1980s The new wave of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism that began in the 1980s was a multifaceted phenomenon. Taking the larger context into consideration, it could be argued that this is a response to the 1977 breakthrough. As “1977” had its impact in all aspects of the Sri Lankan social world, the responses were also equally complex. One of the highlights of the post-1977 political milieu was the remarkable weakening of traditional opposition parties in the Sinhala-Buddhist political South. Previously, left-wing political parties made a vital contribution to the oppositional politics, particularly because of their ability to mobilize masses for collective political actions. Quite signifcantly, the left parties, as the most secular political force, had minimal association with religious establishments for the promotion of their political ideology or actions. This kept the religion at bay and had lesser impacts on politics when the left parties were at the center stage. This is not to say that the left forces at times did not waver or compromise; for example, the 1972 frst republic constitution, where Buddhism was given special constitutional protection, received support from the left political forces. Colvin R. de Silva, the architect of that constitution, and a founding leader of the left movement, later admitted, somewhat implicitly, that these provisions were incorporated to the constitution because of the pressure from the Buddhist lobby.33 One may be tempted to revisit de Silva’s justifcation considering the fact that the Tamil nationalist opposition also exerted a similar pressure on constitution makers to incorporate their demand for the federal system of government, which was rejected forthwith. The left, however, maintained an efective distance from the Buddhist lobby. Therefore, the decline of the left in the post-1977 period became highly signifcant. In the frst place, the left completely lost its parliamentary presence at the 1977 election.34 Second, the total failure of the 1980 general strike organized by left parties further weakened the left’s ability to mobilize the masses. Not only the left parties, but also the SLFP lost its political signifcance immediately after 1977. It faced severe internal crisis from which it could not recover for a very long time.35

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Post-1990 politics and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism The nationalist buildup was signifcantly disturbed by the political circumstances after the signing of the Indo-Lanka Accord in July 1987. The accord was signed by President Jayewardene and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to end the armed confict between Tamil militant groups which fought for a separate state, and the Sri Lankan military forces. It also proposed a system of devolution of power to the provinces, to address the Tamil demands. In the following two years, the Sinhala-Buddhist South was dominated by the armed insurgency and the state’s brutal counterinsurgency measures. The southern insurgency was organized by the People’s Liberation Front, or the JVP as it was popularly known, ostensibly to oppose the Indo-Lanka Accord and expel the Indian Peace Keeping Force that occupied the North and the East in accordance with the provisions of the Indo-Lanka Accord. As the insurgents used nationalist rhetoric to legitimize the insurgency, the suppression of the insurgency at the end of 1989 signifcantly weakened the Sinhala-Buddhist revival. This is evident in the political scene in the frst half of the 1990s. This period is characterized by the rise of nonnationalist political forces. The ideological basis of this new political discourse was the postcommunist political imagination of “democratization.” The issues such as freedom of expression and human rights were popularized by opposition forces against the authoritarianism of the UNP regime. The Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist sentiments were sidelined and political mobilizations across the ethno-religious boundaries in support of this non-ethno-nationalist ideology were gaining momentum. The outcome of this non-ethno-religious mobilization was the series of election victories to the People’s Alliance led by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in 1993 and 1994 with overwhelming support from all ethno-religious communities, including Sinhala-Buddhists.36 This was the last time that a vast majority of all the ethno-religious communities collectively supported one political camp. Although a similar mobilization occurred in January 2015 to defeat the extremely popular Rajapaksa regime, the support for this non-ethno-religious mobilization was much less in the Sinhala-Buddhist South. The setback for the Buddhist-Sinhala forces was, however, proven to be brief. Gradual mobilization of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism gained momentum in the second half of the 1990s. Although it was still outside two major party formations present in the Sinhala-Buddhist South, it proved to be quite efective and appealing to the masses. This ethno-religious mobilization immensely beneftted from the reescalation of the military confrontation between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the state military forces, and the government’s ambiguous approach toward a comprehensive military ofensive against the former. Amidst the non-nationalist mobilization in the mainstream political space, two important developments became favorable to the later mobilization of SinhalaBuddhist nationalism. One is the emergence of a new mode of popular Buddhism that was so appealing to the new urban and semi-urban middle class, which could

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be called “temple politics.” The other is the new intellectual movement that came to be known as Jathika Chintanaya.37 Both warrant further explication.

Rise of “temple politics” The most important aspect of the new wave of the Buddhisization of the political process is the transformation of Buddhist temples into spaces of political activities. This is a gradual process that started with a new mode of Buddhist religious activism, which emerged outside the existing Buddhist hierarchy. This new activism at the beginning did not take a political shape. At a later stage, however, it transforms into a political process because of both internal and external factors. The early beginning of this movement was signaled by the popularity of Bhikkhu Panadure Ariyadhamma. He introduced a new mode of religious activism known as Bodhi Puja (worshipping sacred Bo tree).38 It was performed as an especially composed set of verses that were completely diferent from conventional Pali verses of Buddhist Cannons. His untimely death in 1986 and the subsequent political turmoil in the Sinhala-South interrupted this new movement of religious activities. The situation changed in the 1990s when a relative stability returned to the Sinhala-Buddhist South. The name that characterizes this new Buddhist movement in the mid-1990s is Bhikkhu Gangodawila Soma.39 Soma’s main contribution was the production of new politico-ideological discourse that transformed the Buddhist religious space into an efective political space. His sermons were unorthodox, by all measures. He astutely mixed ordinary messages of Dharma with contemporary political messages in his regular preaching sessions in temples and other public places, and television programs. The uniqueness of the political messages, communicated in an extremely subtle manner, was highly compatible with the political psyche of the SinhalaBuddhist South. The efectiveness of his intervention is attested to as the result of the election held a few months after his death, where the newly formed Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), which felded a large contingent of Bhikkhus as candidates, surprised everyone by winning nine seats in the parliament.40 The signifcance of Soma’s intervention is that it efectively blended the dayto-day religious activities of ordinary Buddhists and political discourse. Arguably, this is even more efective than what happened in the run-up to the 1956 election. This completely blurred the conventional demarcation between religious space and political space. Not only were Buddhist temples transformed into political spaces, Buddhist monks were driven to add explicit, or at least implicit, political content to their religious sermons. The traditional sermons (bana) devoid of any reference to contemporary politically sensitive afairs were becoming dull. A new generation of Buddhist monks who emerged as popular preachers, competing with each other to attract devotees, were not reluctant to add politically sensitive content to their sermons. The clear manifestation of the transformation of the religious space into a political space was to be seen in the JHU campaign at the 2004 parliamentary election.

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Its list of candidates exclusively consisted of Buddhist monks. Most importantly, it included several monks who became popular preachers by emulating Panadure Ariyadhamma and Gangodawila Soma. The other feature of the JHU campaign was that the election meetings were held at temples, under the name of Daham Hamu (gatherings for Dhamma).41 This mode of “temple politics” was not at all a new phenomenon. Before JHU took this to a new level, Ranasinghe Premadasa used “temple politics” when the political legitimacy of the UNP was being severely questioned by the SinhalaBuddhist ethno-religious nationalism in the 1980s. But it was not successful as a serious rupture had already been created between the UNP and the SinhalaBuddhist ethno-religious sentiments. It was Mahinda Rajapaksa who attained massive success in using this new mode of “temple politics” in his political campaign. His 2005 presidential election campaign was supported by the JHU and all other groups of the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalist camp, which gave him the legitimate right to use the new political space of temples. The importance of “temple politics” for Mahinda Rajapaksa was evident after his defeat in the 2015 presidential election. Since then, his recovery campaign was almost entirely based on “temple politics”; he kept visiting temples around the country under various pretexts. In these “temple visits,” he was well received by the devotees and the clergy of the temple. He was surrounded by the media and he would make highly politically charged statements while addressing the people gathered in the temple. It was also a popular sight during that period that people rushed to greet Mahinda Rajapaksa when he made his almost daily temple visits and mothers competed with each other to ofer their babies for his blessing. His engagement in this regular “temple politics” was a major factor behind the long campaign that gave a comprehensive victory to his brother, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, at the presidential election in November 2019.

New intellectual Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in the 1980s By the mid-1980s, especially with the escalation of hostility between Tamils and Sinhalese, the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism encountered a heavy intellectual onslaught from a large contingent of intellectuals, both in Sri Lanka and the West. This onslaught intensifed and its credibility increased with the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom where hundreds of Tamils were killed, and their properties were destroyed around the country. The blame was targeted at the politically charged SinhalaBuddhist mentality.42 The conventional Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism was not well prepared to face this intellectual attack.43 Therefore, it was incumbent upon a new generation of Sinhala-Buddhist intellectuals which primarily rallied around the Jathika Chintanaya (JC) movement to fulfl that task. This movement initially came into being in the post-1977 period as a response to new economic and cultural changes. It also benefted from, and responded

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to, the failure of traditional left-wing politics to survive the political turn in the post-1977 era. The signifcance of this intellectual movement is manifold. First, it reenergized the Sinhala-Buddhist intellectual strength so that the aforementioned intellectual attack on Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism could be efectively challenged. Intellectual pioneers of this movement revisited the political demands of Tamil nationalism, which was perceived as a major threat to the realization of the SinhalaBuddhist cause. They also challenged the intellectual justifcation of these claims. In 1995, Nalin de Silva, a professor of mathematics and one of the two pioneers of the Jathika Chintanaya (JC) movement, published an essay in the mode of questions and answers to challenge the claims of Tamil nationalism and views of those who politically supported them.44 When Muslim politicians gained momentum by articulating their grievances against both Tamil militants and the Sinhala-dominated state and were perceived to be a threat to the Sinhala-Buddhist cause, another intellectual fgure of this movement, Patali Champika Ranavaka, who founded JHU, critically assessed Muslim politics from the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalist point of view.45 These intellectual interventions provided the much-needed intellectual impetus for the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism and were well received in the Sinhala-Buddhist South. Second, the JC produced a new generation of young intellectuals with a strong commitment to Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism. A notable feature of this generation of young intellectuals is that they were ideologically distanced from the once dominant Marxist infuence. Before 1990, politically engaged activists of the Sinhala-Buddhist South were greatly infuenced by Marxist ideology. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the consequent changes in the communist countries all around the world, Marxist ideology came under serious scrutiny. Along with developments in Sri Lanka,46 Marxism was no longer popular to the politically conscious younger generation. There were, of course, other factors. Since many unemployed youths were integrated into the expanding economy in the 1990s, revolutionary ideals became less attractive to youth, and the void was flled by ethno-religious nationalism. A signifcant number of these young intellectuals were highly educated and tech savvy. They emerged as the backbone of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious politics in the past two decades.47 Third, this intellectual movement conceptualized and stood for a political strategy to unify the Sinhala-Buddhist South under a stronger version of SinhalaBuddhist ethno-religious nationalism. This became appealing for the politically conscious elements in the Sinhala-Buddhist society. Major discontent was looming among a section of the Sinhala-Buddhist society, because they perceived that nonSinhala-Buddhist minorities were enjoying undue bargaining power in the political system. They blamed the internal divisions of the Sinhala-Buddhists along political party lines as the reason. Two major political parties were constantly blamed for betraying the Sinhala-Buddhist cause. In the 1990s, a sentiment emerged in the political realm that none of the two major political parties were capable of representing the stronger version of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism. The

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“temple politics” discussed earlier provided a strong platform for the consolidation of this idea. Moreover, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a fervently Marxist political party which engineered the armed insurgency in 1971 and in 1987–89, in their bid to regain the lost ground, leaned toward a Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist ideology. This also provided a good space for this new Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious intellectual movement to grow. The island-wide network and the organizational capabilities of the JVP was an ideal opportunity for some Jathika Chintanaya intellectuals to popularize their political message.48 The efort for the political unifcation of the Sinhala-Buddhist South, under single political ideology seemed to be becoming a reality when all the elements that formed the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalist camp came together for the victory of Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2005 presidential election. The presidential election of November 2019, which Gotabhaya Rajapaksa won, was also important. It busted the popular myth that a presidential election cannot be won only with the Sinhala-Buddhist vote. Although Gotabhaya Rajapaksa received some non-Sinhala-Buddhist votes, the overwhelming majority was from the Sinhala-Buddhist electorate.

Conclusions What is evident from the preceding discussion in this chapter is the increasing religionization of the political space, particularly among the Sinhala-Buddhists. This tendency is quite crucial because Sinhala-Buddhists are the most important electorate of the Sri Lankan polity. It might seem paradoxical that the increasing religionization of the political space has progressed hand in hand with the expansion of democracy. “Expansion of democracy” means, here, bringing more and more active participation of people into political realms and activism. In the case of the Sinhala-South, Buddhism played the role of an efective agency for the masses to get involved in the political sphere. Although a conceptual demarcation exists between the realm of politics and that of religion, increasingly it became blurred and inconsequential in the evolution of the modern political sphere in Sri Lanka. In the cognitive world of the Sinhala-Buddhist, politics is inter alia a practice through which at least some of the high ideals of the religious imagination could be realized. Although the emergence of the modern political sphere in the Sinhala-South was a multifaceted phenomenon, the signifcance of religious aspects is more prominent than others. An encounter between two religio-ideological worlds has become the matrix within which the modern political sphere in the Sinhala-South took shape in the nineteenth century. The cultural distance between the colonial project and the indigenous mind was so signifcant that the revival of proliferation of religious activities in the hand of an economically and socially powerful local elite had far more signifcance than religious importance. The Buddhist revival not only opened up a new realm of socially meaningful terrain of activities but also produced a new generation of intellectuals. These intellectuals were simultaneously

202 Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

religious as they relied on religious identity and secular as they underscored ethnic identity. The notable feature is that these intellectual activisms were largely placed within the matrix of colonial other vs. indigenous self. The religious mind was the easiest way to develop this indigenous self. Anagarika Dharmapala tirelessly devoted his life to the historical task of developing this prototype into a fully pledged nationalist discourse with strong religious appeal. The 1956 parliamentary election proved this discourse to be politically extremely efective. The notable aspect of the Buddhisization of the political process is that it defned the objectives of the political actions of the people in terms of the religious imagination of Sinhala-Buddhists. Although this was immensely attractive to the Sinhala-Buddhists, it excluded non-Sinhala-Buddhists. This became a major political problem, particularly since 1956 when the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism began to dominate the political process. Non-Sinhala-Buddhists were gradually and efectively marginalized.49 The period between 1956 and the mid-1980s was characterized by a dual process. On the one hand, there was an increasing Buddhisization of the state, while on the other hand, there were some eforts from the part of the ruling elite to pacify non-Sinhala-Buddhist groups, as they sensed a threat to political stability in the context of the growing anxiety among non-Sinhala-Buddhist groups. The second process was indeed a major concern for the Sinhala-Buddhist mindset, because that was perceived to be hindering the full realization of Buddhist ideals, particularly as envisaged in the 1956 election campaign. The discontent and perceived deprivation that was looming in the mind of Sinhala-Buddhists played a crucial role in the new wave of Sinhala-Buddhist ethnoreligious nationalism that emerged since the mid-1980s. In the 1980s, two major parties had more or less realized that aligning fully with the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism was politically risky as the support of the non-SinhalaBuddhist minorities were politically signifcant for them. It is in this context that a new wave of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism grew outside the major political parties. However, this version of nationalism was powerful enough to conquer the mainstream political arena of the Sinhala-South in the frst decade of the twenty-frst century when United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), the coalition that formed in 2014 around the charismatic political fgure Mahinda Rajapaksa, was adopted as its de facto ideology. As of mid-2020, the Sri Lanka People’s Front (SLPP), popularly known by its election symbol Pohottuwa (fower bud), represents the continuity of the UPFA. As of now, two of the major objectives of the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalist project have achieved the unifcation of the Sinhala-Buddhist political south and intense Buddhisization of the political process. But these have also engendered discontent among non-Sinhala-Buddhist sections of the population, and among signifcant sections within the Sinhala-South itself. This is a recipe for future political instability and put the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism’s desire for an order to a test.

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203

Suggested readings De Silva, K.M., Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies, Sri Lanka 1880–1985 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986). DeVotta, Neil, Sinhala-Buddhist Nationalist Ideology: Implication for Politics and Confict Resolution in Sri Lanka (Washington, DC: East-West Centre, 2007). Dewasiri, Nirmal Ranjith, New Buddhist Extremism and the Challenges to Ethno-Religious Coexistence in Sri Lanka (Colombo: ICES, 2016). Ethnicity and Social Change (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1984). Malalgoda, Kitsiri, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976). Moore, Mick, State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Seneviratne, H.L., Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Notes 1 For discussions on the religion-political nexus, see H.L. Seneviratne, Works of King, The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2 Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri, “Political Violence and Post-colonial State Building in Sri Lanka,” in Political Violence in South Asia, eds. Ali Riaz, Zobaida Nasreen and Fahmida Zaman (London: Routledge, 2018). 3 Department of Census and Statistics, “Census of Population and Housing – 2012,” (accessed June 9, 2020). 4 The Rajapaksa family occupies the center stage in Sri Lanka politics since 2004. It is an extended family that hailed from Hambantota in the down South and was a politically active family from the 1940s. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) led the political alliance that emerged victorious at the general election of 2004 and began to be dominated by the Rajapaksa family led by the charismatic Mahinda Rajapaksa. 5 Gotabaya Rajapaksa received 6.9 million votes (52.25 percent) against his main rival, Sajith Premadasa, who managed only 5.5 million (41.99 percent). See Election Commission of Sri Lanka, “2019 Sri Lanka Presidential Election Results,” (accessed June 8, 2020). 6 For the emergence of new social classes benefitting from new economic activities, see Kumari Jayawardena, Nobodies to Somebodies, the Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1999) and Michael Roberts Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500–1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For new Buddhist activities with the support from these new social classes, see Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society (Berkley, CA: University of Arizona Press, 1976). 7 Saranankara’s movement has been adequately documented. See Kotagama Wachissara, Saranankara Sangharaja Samaya (Time of Saranankara Sangharaja) (Boralesgamuwa: Visidunu Publishers, 1960). 8 See ibid., 240. 9 For “Matara literature,” see Pa Ba Ji Hewawasam, Matara Yugaye Sahithyadharayin Ha Owunge Nibandhana Matara Yugaye Sahithyadharayin Ha Owunge Nibandhana (Literary Figures of Matara Era and their Work, in Sinhala) (Colombo: Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Sri Lanka, 1960).

204 Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

10 For a discussion about this event, including the broader context, see Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750–1900, 191–231. 11 For Anagarika Dharmapala’s career, see Sarath Amunugama, The Lion’s Roar: Anagarika Dharmapala & The Making of Modern Buddhism (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2016). 12 I.D.S. Weerawardana, “The General Elections in Ceylon, 1952,” The Ceylon Journal of Historical Studies, II (July & October 1952): 129. 13 I.D.S. Weerawardana, Ceylon General Election, 1956 (Colombo: M.D. Gunasena & Co., 1960), 109–10. 14 Ibid., 174–5. 15 The MEP secured 51 seats in the 95-member parliament, with 40 percent of the total votes; the UNP was reduced to a mere eight seats with 27 percent of the total votes. Two leftist parties, which had a no-contest agreement with the MEP, secured 17 seats, while the Federal Party, which dominated the Tamil areas in the North and the East won ten seats. Independent candidates also secured eight seats. See Weerawardana, Ceylon General Election, 1956, 219–52. 16 Richard F. Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekera, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 203. 17 Mick Moore, State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). He has provided a vivid explanation of this problem. He asks the valid question about the absence of mobilization of peasantry as those who are engaged in agricultural production. 18 “Five great forces” are “Sangha, Weda, Guru, Govi, Kamkaru” (Buddhist monks, indigenous physicians, school teachers, farmers, and wage workers). The first three groups, together with public notaries, were socially powerful groups in the Sinhala-Buddhist rural areas. They were groups that were capable of articulating the hegemonic ideology of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism. 19 For a review of the circumstances of the Bandaranaike assassination, see D.B.S. Jeyaraj, “Buddharakkitha and Somarama Theras: Role of Two Buddhist Monks In The Assassination Of Prime Minister S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike,”Daily Mirror, September 28, 2019, (accessed on June 10, 2020). 20 K.K.S. Perera, “Assassination of SWRD Bandaranaike: How Did Buddharakkitha Acquire the .45 Revolver?,” Daily News, January 18, 2019, (accessed June 10, 2020). 21 Jeyaraj, “Buddharakkitha and Somarama Theras,” 2019. 22 For a useful outline of the political instability following the death of Bandaranaike, see K.M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins, J.R. Jayawardena of Sri Lanka: A Political Biography Volume Two (Colombo: A. Blond/Quartet, 1994), 62–79. 23 See Weerawardana, Ceylon General Election 1956, 109–14, for a useful overview of the “Commission Report’s” view on the perceived injustice caused for Buddhists owing to the predominant position enjoyed by Christians. 24 For more details about these measures, see K.M. De Silva, Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies, Sri Lanka 1880–1895 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 96–206. 25 K.M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins, J.R. Jayewardene of Sri Lanka: 1956–1989 (Colombo: J.R. Jayawardene Cultural Centre, 1994). 26 For a general history of the evolution of Tamil nationalist demands, see de Silva, Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies, Sri Lanka, 1880–1895. 27 See Michael Roberts, Collective Identities, Nationalisms, and Protest in Modern Sri Lanka (Colombo: Marga Institute, 1979); Committee for Rational Development, The Ethnic Conflict (Colombo: Committee for Rational Development, 1984); Charles Abeysekera and Newton Gunasinghe (eds.), Facets of Ethnicity (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1987).

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28 Newton Gunasinghe, “Open Economy & Its Impact on Ethnic Relations in Sri Lanka,” in Sri Lanka: The Ethnic Conflict (Colombo: Committee for Rational Development, 1984), 197–214. 29 One such statement was the negative remark he made on learning literature. The occasion of the statement was also remarkably symbolic. It was uttered at the annual state literary festival as the chief guest. 30 See H.L. Seneviratne, Works of King, The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), for broader perspective on this issue. 31 Ediriweera Sarachchandra, Dharmishta Samajaya (Righteous Society) (Colombo: Nirmala Publishers, 1982). 32 Dewasiri, “Political Violence and Post-colonial State Building in Sri Lanka,” 192. 33 Colvin R. de Silva, Safeguard for the Minorities in the 1972 Constitution (Colombo: Young Socialist Publications, 1987), 24. 34 Two major left parties, namely, Lanka Sama Samaja Party and Communist Party of Sri Lanka fielded candidates for 107 parliamentary seats but failed to win even a single seat. For the result of the 1977 election, see Election Commission of Sri Lanka, “Parliamentary Election – 1977,” (accessed June 7, 2020). 35 For details, see Amita Shastri and Jayadeva Uyangoda (eds.), Political Parties in Sri Lanka, Change and Continuity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018). 36 At the parliamentary election held in August 1994, People’s Alliance (PA) led by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga managed to secure a slender majority. However, the latter secured a major victory at the presidential election held on November 1994. She received 62 percent of the total votes as against 35 percent of UNP candidate, the main rival. For complete results of these elections, see Election Commission of Sri Lanka, “2019 Sri Lanka Presidential Election Results,” (accessed June 8, 2020). 37 For Jathika Chintanaya movement, see Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri, “Jathika Chinthanaya: History and Political Significance,” Colombo Arts Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, II (3) (Faculty of Arts, University of Colombo, 2018). 38 For the popularity of Bodhipuja, see Seneviratne, Works of King, 58. 39 Gangodawila Soma was born in 1948 and entered the order of Buddhist monks at the age of 26, contrary to the common practice of entering the order at the child age. After spending some time in Victoria, Australia, he returned to Sri Lanka and soon became a popular figure owing to his unorthodox style of sermons. He died under controversial circumstances in Russia in December 2003. For a critical evaluation of Soma’s career, see Jayadeva Uyangoda, “Soma Thero: Significance of His Life and Death,” in Religion in Context Buddhism and Socio-Political Change in Sri Lanka, ed. Jayadeva Uyangoda (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2007), 166–71. 40 Election Commission of Sri Lanka, “Parliamentary General Election 2004,” (accessed June 7, 2020). 41 For JHU campaign of 2004 parliamentary election, see Niel Devotta, “Sri Lanka in 2004: Enduring Political Decay and a Failing Peace Process,” Asian Survey, 45 (1) (January– February 2005): 98–104. 42 Gunasinghe, “Open Economy & Its Impact on Ethnic Relations.” 43 Ian Goonetileke compiled a comprehensive bibliography with 405 entries of the intellectual work that responded to the 1983 pogrom. Ian Goonetileke, “July 1883 and the National Question of Sri Lanka a Bibliography,” in Sri Lanka: The Ethnic Conflict, 243–77. 44 Nalin de Silva, Prabhakaran, Ohuge Seeyala, Bappala ha Massinala (Prabhakran, his Grand Fathers, Uncles and Cousins, in Sinhala) published in 1995, translated English version, An Introduction to Tamil Racism in Sri Lanka (Maharagama: Chintana Parshadaya, 1997). 45 Patali Champika Ranavaka, Al Jihad Al Quaida: Islam Muladharmavadaye Atheethaya, Varthamanaya ha Anagathaya (Al Jihad Al Quaeda: Past, Present and the Future of Islam

206 Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

46

47 48

49

Fundamentalism) (Colombo: Author, 2003). Ranavaka is presently a leader of the Jathika Jana Balawegaya, headed by opposition leader Sajith Premadasa. Ranavaka began his political career as a student activist of the JVP and joined the Jathika Chintanaya movement when he was at the University of Moratuwa as an undergraduate student in engineering. But he broke from Nalin de Silva very soon and started his own organization called Janatha Mithuro (Friends of the People), which later evolved into the JHU. He held ministerial positions from 2005 to 2019 under successive governments. For more about Ranavaka, see Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri, New Buddhist Extremism and the Challenges to Ethno-Religious Coexistence in Sri Lanka (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2016). Both the decline of the old left, which was marked by the parliamentary defeat in 1977 and losing the grip on mass politics in 1980s, and the terrifying experience of the JVP insurgency diminished the popularity that Marxism enjoyed among the youth in the pre-1990 period. See Patali Champika Ranavaka, Patisothagamiwa Tis Wasak (an Autobiography) (Nugegoda, Sri Lanka: Author, 2009). This work particularly give some important insights into how nationalist politics were popularized in Science Faculties of Sri Lankan universities. Gunadasa Amarasekara, a pioneer of JC and a strong advocate of the need for a Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism, managed to forge a close association with the JVP’s most popular young leader, Wimal Weerawansa. Although JVP’s inclination towards Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism was tactical, Weerawansa drifted toward SinhalaBuddhist nationalism very fast and later left the JVP to form a new Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist, which allied with the Rajapaksa political camp. For more details, see Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri, Jathika Chinthanaya, and Harshana Rambukwella, The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (Nugegoda, Sri Lanka: Author, 2018). For more details about how this happened, see Ethnicity and Social Change (Colombo: Social Scientists Association, 1984).

36.64 162.65 1,326.09 .39 30.32 233.50 22.88

Afghanistan Bangladesh India Maldives Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka

652,230 148,460 3,287,263 298 147,181 796,095 65,610

Size of the Country (in sq. km.) 57 1,240 455 1,719 196 275 346

Population Density (per sq. km.) 2.38 0.98 1.1 −0.08 .98 2.07 0.67

Population Growth rate (%)

40.62 26.48 26.31 22.13 28.36 36.01 23.11

Population under 15 (%)

2.68 6.82 6.72 4.81 5.69 4.44 10.63

Population above 65 (%)

19,093.28 81,666.65 703,042.61 323.52 12,770.05 109,209.94 10,408.79

Male (in thousands)

Gender

18,079.10 79,689.39 649,574.72 192.17 15,317.82 103,005.09 11,261.21

Female (in thousands)

Source: The CIA World Factbook (2018) for population data and country area, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/, The World Bank data (2018), https:// data.worldbank.org/ for Gender disaggregation.

Total Population (millions)

Country

TABLE A.1 Basic indicators of South Asia

APPENDIX

18,734 19,630 3.024 317,465 288,424 7.097 2,935,570 2,718,730 7.436 5,786 5,328 7.436 29,813 29,040 5.044 284,214 314,588 4.005 86,566 88,901 4.300

1.031 7.864 6.982 6.053 6.290 5.430 3.209

2018

2019

2019

2018

GDP Growth Rate (%)

GDP (in million dollars)

513.1 1,905.7 2,171.6 15,562.5 1,047.7 1,388.2 3,946.6

2019 545.0 1,749.3 2,037.7 14,571.3 1,033.9 1,565.4 4,099.1

2018

GDP per Capita ($)

20 13 15 6 25 23 8

Agriculture 22 29 27 13 13 18 27

Industry

Economic Structure (2019, % of GDP)

52.7 53.0 49.1 67.9 51.4 52.7 56.8

Service 11.1 4.2 5.4 6.1 1.4 4.5 4.2

Unemployment Rate in 2019 (%) 54.5 24.3 21.9 8.2 25.2 24.3 4.1

Poverty Rate in 2019 (%)

31.0 32.1 35.2 38.4 32.8 30.7 39.2

Inequality (Gini coefcient) in 2020 (%)

Source: International Labor Organization (ILO) 2020 data for unemployment rate, International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the GDP data, The World Bank data for economic structure; Asian Development Bank (ADB) 2019 data on “Proportion of Population Living below the National Poverty Line” based on most recent available values until 2017; World Population Review (WPR) 2020 data on Gini Coefcient by country population (Afghanistan’s Gini Coefcient from South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE) 2019 based on the most recent available values till 2017).

Afghanistan Bangladesh India Maldives Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka

Country

TABLE A.2 Economic indicators of South Asia

208 Appendix

Appendix

209

TABLE A.3 Social indicators of South Asia

Country

Afghanistan Bangladesh India Maldives Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka

Population Urban (%)

Rural (%)

Life Expectancy at Birth (years)

26 38.2 34.9 40.7 20.6 37.2 18.7

74 61.8 65.1 59.3 79.4 62.8 81.3

52.8 74.2 69.7 76.4 71.8 69.2 77.5

Adult* Literacy Rate (%)

HDI Index Value 2018 (0 to 1)

Gender Inequality Index Rank 2018

43 73.9 74.4 97.7 67.9 59.1 91.9

0.496 0.614 0.647 0.719 0.579 0.560 0.780

143 129 122 81 115 136 86

Source: CIA World Factbook 2018 for population, life expectancy, and adult literacy rate (*age 15 and over); United Nations Development Program (UNDP) 2019 data on human development index and gender inequality index rank in 2018.

TABLE A.4 Religious composition of South Asia

Country

Islam (%)

Hindu (%)

Buddhist (%)

Christian (%)

Afghanistan Bangladesh India Maldives Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka

99 90 14.5 100% 4.4 96.28 9.71





– 0.3 2.3 – 1.4 1.59 7.45

9 79.5 – 82 2 12.61

0.6 0.7 – 9.0 – 70.19

Source: World Atlas available on www.worldatlas.com/articles/religious-composition-of-the-countriesof-south-asia.html (accessed on June 30, 2020). TABLE A.5 Systems of government in South Asia

Country

Form of Government

Last Election Held

Name of the President

Name of the Prime Minister (where appropriate)

Afghanistan Bangladesh

Presidential Parliamentary

2019 2018

– Sheikh Hasina

India Maldives

Parliamentary Parliamentary

2019 2018

Ashraf Ghani Mohammad Abdul Hamid Ram Nath Kovind Ibrahim Mohamed Solih

Narendra Modi – (Continued )

210 Appendix TABLE A.5 (Continued)

Country

Form of Government

Last Election Held

Name of the President

Name of the Prime Minister (where appropriate)

Nepal

Parliamentary

2017

Pakistan

Parliamentary

2018

Bidhya Devi Bhandari Arif Alvi

Sri Lanka

Parliamentary

2020

Gotabaya Rajapaksa

Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi Mahinda Rajapaksa

Source: Editor’s compilation.

TABLE A.6 Major political parties in South Asia

Country

Major Political Parties

Year Founded

Party Ideology

Afghanistan

National Democratic Front (NDF) National United Front (UNF) Bangladesh Awami League (BAL) Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Bangladesh Jamaat-eIslami (BJI) Jatiya Party (JP)

2003

Democracy and secularism

2007

National unity and federalism

1949

Democracy, nationalism, socialism, and secularism Democracy, nationalism

Bangladesh

India

Maldives

1978 1941 1986

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

1980

Indian National Congress (INC) Communist Party of India (CPI) Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) Jumhoore Party (JP)

1885

Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) Adhaalath Party (AP)

1925 2001 2008 2011 2005

Islamism, conservatism, and welfare society Democracy, nationalism, and conservatism Cultural nationalism, integral humanism, Hindutva ideology, democracy Democracy, socialism, and secularism Socialism, communism, and Marxism-Leninism Democracy and parliamentarianism Islamic democracy, economic liberalism, and conservatism Islamic democracy, nationalism, and presidentialism Islamism and conservatism

Appendix

211

Country

Major Political Parties

Year Founded

Party Ideology

Nepal

Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) The Nepali Congress (NC) Madhesi Jana Adhikar Forum (MJAF) Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N) Pakistan Tehreek-eInsaf (PTI)

1995

Communism, MarxismLeninism, and Maoism Democracy, nationality, socialism, and pluralism Social democracy, federalism, and regional autonomy Islamic socialism and democracy

Pakistan

Sri Lanka

Muttahida Majlis-eAmal (MMA) United National Party (UNP) Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU)

1946 1997 1967 1992 1996

2002 1946 1951 1964 2004

Nationalism, conservatism, and pragmatism Democracy, federalism, egalitarianism, and tolerant Islamic welfare state Islamism and conservatism Anti-communism, economic liberalism, conservatism Democracy, socialism, and nationalism Communism and MarxismLeninism Buddhism and Sinhalese nationalism

Source: Ideologies are derived from party ofcial websites, constitutions, manifestos, and other scholarly sources.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a fgure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. 9/11 terrorist attacks 4–5, 56, 168, 180 Abdullah, Farooq 113 Abdullah, Sheikh 108, 109–10; about his fears 109; in Pakistan 110; success in first state election 109 Abdulla, Sheikh Imran 128 ABT see Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh Acharya, Anirban 101 ACMC see All Ceylon Makkal Congress Adeeb, Ahmed 126 Adhaalath Party 130 ADRA see Adventist Development and Relief Agency Adventist Development and Relief Agency 150 AF see Asian Foundation affirmative action system 119 Afghanistan 4; agricultural sector 58; civil war, religion and politics during 65; constitution 8, 57–8; Corruption Perceptions Index of 75n56; economy 58; electoral system 57; insurgency’s intensity in 69; Islamic agenda of political actors 53; literacy rates 58; major religions of 58; official religion of 59; popullation religious composition 58–9; religio-political parties and groups 59–60; state apparatus 58; state established by coalition allies 59 Afghan jihad 58, 96

Afghan mujahideen: emergence of 62, 63; factions aligned with 65; ISI-supported actions 64; threats 64; threats for freedom 64 Afghan National Army 58 Afghan politics and conflict, Islam use in: Afghan civil war 65; American occupation 69–72; modernist Islamist parties 62; motives for 60; rise and fall of Taliban 65–9; Soviet occupation and 61–5 Afghan regime 69; appeal to Hazara population 63; attempt to discredit mujahideen 62; challenges to counter Taliban 71–2; escaping anti-Muslim reputation 62–3; legitimization strategies 63; non-Muslim identities of 70; reversal of unpopular reforms 63; revolt against 62; shari’a-based laws 71 Afghan Tajik commanders 74n27 Ahmadiyas/ Ahmadiyya 19, 167 Akhundzada, Hibatullah 72 AL see Awami League Al-Huda 172 Ali, Afrasheem 131 All Ceylon Makkal Congress 46, 47 All India Muslim Personal Law Board 114 all-Union Islamic Renaissance Party 63 al-Qaeda 69 Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent 89 Amanullah, King 61

Index

Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 104, 119 Aminee, Fazlul Huq 94 ‘Amr bil-Ma’rouf wal Nahi’ an al-Munkar 68 Amu Daria River, ISI-supported mujahideen actions across 64 Anandpur Resolution 113 Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh 89 Ansarullah Bangla Team see Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh anti-colonial movement and religion 20–1; Buddhist revivalist movement 14–15; “Muslim separatist” ideology 12–13; peasant movements 14, 15; ‘rebellion’ of 1848 14; Santhal Rebellion 14; secular nationalist movement 12, 13; Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 13–14 antimodernist movement 12 anti-Tamil pogrom 193 AQIS see Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent Asia Foundation 29 Association of the Most Learned 130–1 attitudes toward religion 36 authoritarian system of governance 16 Awami League: and BNP, wrangling between 80; contacts with JI 93; 2001 election manifesto of 93; government formation by 77; MOU with BKM 94; opposition to 78; performance in 1996 election 80; performance in 2008 election 81; performance in 2014 election 82; performance in 2018 election 83; populist agenda of 77; religious discourse used by 92; rigged election of 1973 91; stance against HI 81; transformation of 76 Babri Mosque agitations of 1990s 114–15 Bajrang Dal 116 Bandaranaike, S.W.R.D. 190–2 Bangladesh 4; bomb attacks in 89; connection with Middle Eastern countries 96–7; de facto “one party state” 82, 83; democracy redux era 81; democratic backsliding era 81–3; electoral democracy era of 80; emergency rule 78, 81; first general election 78; foreign revenue sources of 97; independence of 111; Islam as state religion of 76, 79, 85, 91–2; Islamist militant groups in 88–9; militarydominated interim government 80–1; military dominated rule 78–80, 91–2; parliamentary system 80; population of 77; populist authoritarianism era 77–8;

213

religio-political parties and groups 87–9, 88; religious composition of population of 83, 84; religious law 85; secession from Pakistan 77; state support to religious communities 85 Bangladesh constitution: caretaker government as part of 80; declaration of faith before preamble 79, 85; Eighth Amendment of 85; Fifteenth Amendment of 81, 85; Fifth Amendment of 79; Fourth Amendment of 78; fundamental principles, amendment of 78–9, 85; salient features of 77; secularism as state principle 76, 79, 83, 85, 90; Sixteenth Amendment of 82; Sixth Amendment of 79; Thirteenth Amendment of 80 Bangladesh, parliamentary elections of: 1973 election 91; 1991 election 80, 86; 1996 election 80, 86; 2001 election 80, 86; 2008 election 81, 87; 2014 election 82, 86, 92; 2018 election 83; Islamist parties’ share of votes in 44–5, 45, 86–7 Bangladesh, perception on religion-politics mix in 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; Islamic parties vs. political parties 38–9, 39; politicians and religious leaders 38, 39; questions to measure 30, 32; sharia law and religious judges 38, 39; theoretical insights in 36–7 Bangladesh, religion and politics of: antiblasphemy law 92; appeasement of HI 92–3; embracing Islamists 94; moral legitimacy crisis 91–2; political discourse and election manifest 93–4; political legitimacy of JI 93; religious idioms and icons 92; resurgence of 76; secularism 90; Shahbag movement 92; social activism 90–1 Bangladesh, religiosity in 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; questions to measure 30; rise of 34, 35 Bangladesh Election Commission 32, 87 Bangladeshi Islamists 19 Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) 86, 87, 92; academic studies on 25n7; deregistered 87–8; 2001 election manifesto of 93; emergence as Kingmaker 94; leaders tried by ICT 81; protests against ICT verdicts 81–2; setback in 2008 election 81, 95; share of popular votes of 94–6, 95; tacit support to BNP 80 Bangladesh Khelafat-e-Andolon 44, 45

214 Index

Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish 94 Bangladesh Muslim League 44, 45 Bangladesh Nationalist Party 79, 85; coalition government 80–1; contacts with JI 93; 1991 election 80; 2001 election manifesto of 93; on ICT 81; performance in 2008 election 81; performance in 2018 election 83; street agitations for CTG restoration 82; violent general strikes 82 Bangladesh Tarikat Federation 45 “Basmachi” revolt 63, 74n26 Basu, Subho 141 BBS see Bodu Bala Sena Bengali liberation movement 111 Bengali nationalism 90 Berger, Peter 9 Bharatiya Jana Sangh 111, 116–17 Bharatiya Janata Party 4; ascent in Indian national electoral map 117–18, 118; authoritative studies on 25n5; and BJS, connection between 116–17; decline in support bases of 42–3; foundation of 116; in 2009 general election 41, 42; in 2014 general election 41–2, 42; in 2019 general election 42, 42; Hindutva ideology 6, 30, 41, 116–17; legislative activism 117–18; loss in 1984 election 117; majoritarian principle 30; party Manifesto from 1984 elections 117; religious nationalist attitude 42; scrapped Article 370 110; similarity with JHU 7 Bharatiya Navshaki Party 116 Bhikkhu politics 192 Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh 113 Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali 16 Bibi, Aasia 165 Birendra, King 153 BJP see Bharatiya Janata Party BJS see Bharatiya Jana Sangh BKM see Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish blasphemy laws 182–3; conflict over 165, 169; Pakistani governments attempt to reform 165; politics surrounding 165 BNP see Bangladesh Nationalist Party; Bharatiya Navshaki Party Bodu Bala Sena 47 Bodu Jana Peramuna Sri Lanka (BJP) 47 bomb attacks 7, 89, 155 Bossy, John 12 BTF see Bangladesh Tarikat Federation Buddhajayanthi, mythifications around 191 Buddharakkitha, Mapitigama 192 Buddha Sasana 186

Buddhisization of state 186, 191–3 Buddhist nationalism 11; after 1983 194–6; Buddhisization of state 192–3; Buddhism as political tool 187; Buddhist-Christian encounter 188–9; Buddhist restoration 7; and fundamentalism 11; intellectual onslaught 199–201; modern political sphere in 189–90; as multifaceted phenomenon 196; 1956 parliamentary election and 190–1; post-1956 era 191–2; post-1990 politics and 197–8; rise of “temple politics” 198–9 Buddhist political party 46 Buddhist Sinhalese identity 18, 19 CAA see Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 capitalism 102 caretaker government 80–2, 92 Casanova, Jose 9 Central Asian populations, growth of 64–5 Chatterjee, Partha 13 church and state, separation of 8 Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 25n3, 42, 118 Civil Code see Muluki Ain Civil Rights Acts of 1964 106 “Coalition to Defend Islam” 135 Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) 153 Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) 147, 148, 153 Constitution (Fourth Amendment) Act of 1975 78 counterinsurgency operations 70 Cow Protection vigilante groups 25n3 Cow vigilantism 119 CPN-UML see Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) CTG see caretaker government cultural factors of religiosity 36 cultural revivalist movements 188 dalits 103–4; politics 117; social and economic equality of 119 Dalrymple, William 13–14 Dar al-’Ulum Haqqania madrasa 68 Daud, Muhammad 59 deadly identity 19–20 delegitimization process 53 Delhi Accord 147 democracies: foundation of 101; “gap between legitimacy and power” in 101 Desai, Morarji 112 Dewasiri, Nirmal Ranjith 186

Index

Dharmapala, Anagarika 190 Dhivehi language 124 Digital Security Act 83 Dipendra, King 148; assassination of 141, 148; refusal to sanction military operation against Maoists 148, 153 Diyasena Kumaraya 191 doctrinal Buddhism 11 DSA see Digital Security Act economic dislocation 15 Election Commission of India 32, 41 Election Commission of Pakistan 32 Election Commission of Sri Lanka 32 Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order 1968, The 41 Ershad, Hossain Muhammad 44, 78, 79 Ershad regime 93 existential anxiety and religion 18–19 existential security 36 Faraizi movement 14 Federal Shariat Court 176 FSC see Federal Shariat Court fundamentalists 10 Gandhi, Indira 17, 110; anti-government movement 111–12; assassination of 113; declaration of national emergency 112; independence of Bangladesh 111; legal challenges to electoral win of 112; loss in 1977 elections 112; Operation Blue 113; political machination of 112–13; success in 1971 elections 111; success in 1980 elections 112 Gandhi, Rajiv 197; assassination of 115; 1989 election campaign 115; on mass killings of Sikhs 113; Shah Bano case and 114 Gayoom, Maumoon Abdul 132–4 Ghani, Ashraf 53, 57–8 Ghaznavid dynasty 54 Giddens, Anthony 18 global information networks 19 globalization: influence on religio-political groups 10, 21; religion–politics nexus 18–19 Godse, Nathuram 116 Gono Forum 83 “Grand Alliance” 94 group identity, religious dimension to 16 Gunannada, Mohottiwatte 190 Gyanendra, King 153 Gyanendra, Prince 148

215

Hadden, Jeffrey 9 Hanafi Sunnis 59 Hansen, Thomas Blom 101 Haq, Farhat 165 Haq, Zia-ul 64 Haqqani, Jalaludin 68 Harkatul-Jihad al Islam 89 Hashmi, Taj ul-Islam 15 Hasina, Sheikh: assassination attempt 89; 2014 declaration 76, 93; 2014 election and 82; as prime minister 80; third consecutive term as prime minister 83 Hefazate Islam 4, 6, 81; appeasement of 93; spectacular rise of 92 Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin 60, 62, 71, 73n19, 179; peace agreement with Kabul regime 69; return from exile 69 HI see Hefazate Islam Hidden War, The (Borovik) 74n33 Hindu caste social stratification processes 151 Hindu icons and sensibilities 118 Hindu identity 20 Hinduism: liberation theology 119; as national culture in Nepal 149; Nepalese construction of 19 Hindu Mahasabha 104 Hindu majoritarianism 115, 117 Hindu militant group 8 “Hindu nation” 20 Hindu religion 6 Hindus in Bangladesh, persecution faced by 25n3 Hindu state ideology 7 Hindu system of SC/ST 104 Hindutva/Hinduness 114–18; discourse of Sangh Parivar 19; discourses of 115–16; nationalism 115; worship in Babri Mosque 114–15 Hindutva ideology 8, 11, 20 Hizbi Islami 60, 62, 65, 69, 71 Hudud Ordinance 179 HUJI see Harkatul-Jihad al Islam IDL see Islamic Democratic League India 4; accessions to 108; affirmative action system in 119; ban on discriminatory segregation 106; caste system 103–4; electoral democracy 102; emergency period 111–12; Hindutva/ Hinduness 114–18; Khalistan movement 112–13; Operation Blue Star 113; partition and independence of 102–3; population by religion 102, 103; pulled

216 Index

into civil war in East Pakistan 111; religion and liberation 118–19; religious animosity in 102 India, perception on religion-politics mix in 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; politicians and religious leaders 37, 37; questions to measure 30, 32; theoretical insights in 36–7 India, religiosity in 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; questions to measure 30; rise of 32–3, 33 Indian Congress 17, 107–8; 1989 election campaign 115; 1984 elections 113; electoral competition to 111; electoral performance of 107, 110; move toward Hindu majoritarianism 115; party Manifesto from 1984 elections 117; as party of consensus 107, 117; split of 111 Indian constitution: Article 370 109, 110; Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV of 106; freedom of press 106–7; freedom of speech and expression in 106–7; philosophy and principled purpose of 104–5; and religion 105–6; secularism 104–5; state and religion, relation between 105 Indian General Elections: 1989 election campaign 115; 1952 elections 109; 1967 elections 110–11; 1971 elections 111; 1977 elections 112; 1980 elections 112; 1984 elections 113; performance of major parties 107; performance of national political parties in 41–3, 42 Indian parties: electoral performance of 107; religious metaphors for electoral purposes 116; at state level 111; Swatantra Party 111; see also Bharatiya Janata Party; Indian Congress individual factors of religiosity 36 Indo-Lanka Accord 197 Indo-Nepal border, blockade in 143 Indo-Pak war 109 International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) verdicts and violent protests 81 IOJ see Islami Oikya Jote Iranian Revolution 96 ISIL see Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant IS-KP see Islamic State’s Khorasan Province Islam: as Afghanistan official religion 54, 59; ideology of 65; as ideology of resistance 62–3; Islamic education 90; resurgence 172; strategic use of 53; see also Afghan politics and conflict, Islam

use in; Maldives, Islam in; Pakistan, Islam in “Islamic Constitution” 175 Islamic Democratic League 44, 87 Islamic Foundation 132 Islamic Movement of Bangladesh 96 Islamic revivalist movements 10 Islamic rhetoric and symbols 53 Islamic social justice argument 176 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant 4–5 Islamic State’s Khorasan Province 71–2 Islamic symbolism 16 Islami Oikya Jote 44, 45, 45 Islamism, political objectives of 10–11 Islamist Adhaalath party 128 Islamist militant groups: Bangladesh-based 8, 88–9; Pakistan-based 8 Islamist parties 6 Islamists 10, 170–1; factors leading to political power of 176–7; global prominence of 96 Islamization of Bangladesh: domestic factors attributed to 90; electoral politics and 94–6; social conservatism and 97 Islamization of Pakistan 177–9 Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh 44–5, 45 Jamaat-i-Islami 4, 6, 79; historical background of 25n6; performance in Pakistan’s national assembly elections 43, 43–4 Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh 89 Jamait Ulema-e Islam 43, 43–4 Jamiat Ahle Hadith 6 Jamiat-i-Ulamai-Islam 180 Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) 6 Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (S) 6 Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl 6 Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan 6 Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam 175 Jamiyyath Salaf: campaign to abolish MDN 130; followers of 129–30 Jammatt-e-Islami 169 Jana Sangh 111 Janata Party 112, 117 Jathika Hela Urumaya 10; ideology of 7; similarity with BJP 7; vote shares in Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections 46, 46–7 Jatiya Party 79, 80, 85; 2001 election manifesto of 93–4; performance in 2008 election 81; performance in 2018 election 83 Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini 78 Jatiyo Oikyo Front (National Unity Front) 83

Index

JHU see Jathika Hela Urumaya JI see Jamaat-i-Islami JIB see Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh jihad 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 70, 89, 96, 130, 179–81 jihadists 133, 134, 181 jihadi violence 181 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 27n51, 174 JMB see Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh JP see Jatiya Party; Jumhooree Party JRB see Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini JS see Jamiyyath Salaf Juergensmeyer, Mark 16 JUI see Jamait Ulema-e Islam; Jamiat-iUlamai-Islam; Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam JUI-F see Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl Jumhooree Party 126 Junagadh 108 Karmal, Babrak 62–3 Karzai, Hamid 53, 71 Kashmir: accession of 109; Article 370 and 109, 118; autonomy accorded to 109; constitution proposed by National Conference 108–9; dissent in 109; jihad against India in 179; opinions about future course of 110; ruler of 108; UN brokered ceasefire 109 KGB (Russian intelligence agency) 64 Khalqi faction 68 Khan, Imran 6, 183 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad 172 Khorasan Province 69, 131 Kishtmand, Shi’a Sultan Ali 63 Laden, Osama bin 67, 68 La-Dheenee 135 Last Mughal: The Fall of Dynasty, The (Dalrymple) 13–14 liberation theology 119 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam 197 lower castes and untouchables 103–4 LTTE see Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Machiavellian nature of politics 112 madrasas 6, 44, 56, 59, 67–8, 68–9, 90, 168, 180 Mahendra, King 153 majoritarianism 19, 115–17 majority–minority discourse 20 Maldives 4, 124; anti-government protests 128, 135–6; corruption in 125–6; crime rates in 126; customary religious practices banned in 130; December 2004 tsunami impact on 134;

217

“defending Islam” rhetoric 136; democracy movement 133–4; economy 125; Gayoom’s government 132–4; GDP per capita 125; HDI value of 125; high-profile killings in 131; human rights abuses 129; Internet penetration rate in 130; Islamic Ministry 134–5; Malé-based governance 125; Ministry of Islamic Affairs 128–9; multiparty democratic system 124; Nasheed’s government 134; “100 percent Muslim status” of 129; political developments 7; politicoreligious protests 135–6; population 125; 2013 presidential election 136; Salafi activist-challengers 128–9; Solih’s coalition government 126, 131; Yameen government 128, 136 Maldives, Islam in 124; “authentic Islam” 134; Maldivian Islam 127; SalafiJihadism 131; Salafism 124, 127–8, 132–6; Sufi-influenced Islam 124 Maldives Police Service 131 Maldives Reform Movement 126 Maldivian Constitution 124 Maldivian Democracy Network (MDN), campaign to abolish 130–1 Maldivian Democratic Party 126, 128 Maley, William 63 Mamdani, Mahmood 96 Mansour, Akhtar Mohammad 71–2 Maoists 147, 148 Marxism 61 maslaks 171–4 materiality and spirituality 13 Matwali 151–2 Maududi, Abul Ala 11 MDP see Maldivian Democratic Party media coverage 4–5 Medina Charter 76, 93 Menon, Rao Bahadur Vappala Pangunni 108 Miles, William 15 military regimes: of Bangladesh 78–92; of Pakistan 17, 177–9 Mir, Titu 14 ML see Muslim League MMA see Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal MNUA see Muslim National Unity Alliance modern Islamism 171 modernist paradigm 12 modernity, sociological analysis of 18 Modi, Narendra 117 Mongol National Organization 159 Mookerjee, Shyama Prasad 109, 117

218 Index

moral legitimacy crisis of military regime 91–2 MPS see Maldives Police Service MRM see Maldives Reform Movement Muhajir Quami (National) Movement 167 mujahideen 56, 62–5, 96, 179 mujahideen organizations 53 Mujibism 91 Muluki Ain 151 Muslim appeasement 114 Muslim identity: of Bangladesh 20, 90; of Taliban 68 Muslim League 44, 168, 169, 174–5 Muslim League (N) 169 Muslim League (Q) 169 Muslim National Unity Alliance 7 Muslim Personal Law 114 Muslim Personal Law Ordinance 1961 85 Muslim Soviet republics 58 Muslim women’s groups, protests from 114 Muslim women’s rights 114 Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal 4, 6, 43, 43–4 Najibullah regime 65 Narain, Raj 112 Naryan, Jayprakash 111–12 Naseem, Azra 124 Nasheed, Mohamed 126; alleged irreligiosity of 128, 135–6; alliance with Adhaalath Party 134; anti-Nasheed sentiment and protests 135–6; resignation of 136 National Conference 108 National Counter Terrorism Centre 136 National Defense Force see Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini National Heritage Party see Jathika Hela Urumaya nationalist movements tied to religion 4 National Register of Citizens 42, 118 National Value Survey Sri Lanka 2011 29–30 NCTC see National Counter Terrorism Centre NEFIN see Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities Nehruvian consensus 107–8 Neo-JMB 89 Nepal 141; administrative structure of 143; 2008 constituent assembly elections 148; 2013 constituent assembly elections 148; ecological zones of 142; economy of 143–5; Indo-Nepal border, blockade in 143; as multireligious pluralistic society 149, 150; population distribution

by religion in 151; population growth and transformation in 145, 145–6, 146; religio-political parties in 154; religious “minorities” 142; as secular republic, declaration of 142, 148, 154–6; state ideology of 7; trade treaty with India 142–3 Nepal, monarchical regime of 146–8; caste system 151–2; Civil Code 151–2; Delhi Accord and 147; Hindu identity of state 152; implicit bias against minorities 150; Panchayati system 147, 153, 157; people’s movement against king 148, 153–4; quasi-democratic era 147–8, 150–1; quest for legitimacy 149–52; Rana rulers 146–7, 157; rebellion by Nepali Congress Party 147; religion ideology 17–18; royal absolutism 153–4; royal massacre 148; Shah dynasty 146, 149 Nepal, religion and politics in 156–61; affirmative action politics 158; Hindu caste structure 157–9; myths and legends about royal families 157; Panchayati regime 157; political movements 157; projection of Hinduism 157–8; quotidian religiospiritual practices 156; rhetoric of state building 158 Nepal Communist Party 148 Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities 159, 161 Nepali Congress Party 147, 148, 153 Nepali constitution 149–50, 155–6 Nepal Mongol Organization 158 Nepal Sanatan Dharma Sewa Samiti 154 Nepal Shiva Sena 7, 154 NRC see National Register of Citizens “Objectives Resolution” 175–6 Omar, Mullah 66, 67, 68 ontological insecurity 21 ontological security 18–19 Operation Blue 113 opium production 58 organizational dynamics 60 outside aid 60 Pakistan 4, 179, 181–2; agricultural economy of 167; attempt to reform blasphemy statutes 165; borders of 166; boundary disputes 166; confusion about identity of 17; constitution of 175, 176; consumer credit boom 167; economic growth in 167; 1970 election 177; 1977 election 177; election results 182;

Index

ethnic groups of 166; foreign exchange earnings for 168; and global jihad 179–81; liberalization policies 167; literacy rate in 168; political landscape of 168–9; provinces of 166; relationship with Afghan insurgents 180; religions 167; religious discrimination in 167; religious vote in 169; terror attacks in 181; Urdu-speaking immigrants 166–7 Pakistan, perception on religionpolitics mix in 40, 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; Islamic law 37; Islamic parties vs. political parties 37, 38; politicians and religious leaders 37, 38; questions to measure 30, 32; religious judges 37; theoretical insights in 36–7 Pakistan, religiosity in 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; questions to measure 30; rise of 33–4, 34 Pakistani politics: fragmentation of authority shaping 172–3; Islamization of 177–9; Saudi government’s influence over 168; social transformations 165 Pakistani ruling elites: challenges faced by 17; hegemonic crisis 17 Pakistan, Islam in 166; debate on role of 174–9; Islamists 170–1; maslaks as political identity 171–4; sufis 169–70; ulama 170 Pakistan National Alliance 177 Pakistan People’s Party 168, 169 Pakistan Therik-e-Insaf 169 Pani Nachalne 152 partition of Indian subcontinent 1, 102, 174 Pashupati Sena 7 Patel, Sardar Vallabbhai 108 PDPA see People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan peasant movements 14 People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan 53, 55, 61–2 People’s United Front 190 perception of religion-politics nexus 28, 40, 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources and measurement of 29–32; data sources for 29–30, 31; Islamic law 37; Islamic parties vs. political parties 37, 38, 38–9, 39; politicians and religious leaders 37, 37, 38, 38, 39, 39, 40; questions to measure 30, 32; religious judges 37; religious statues and places of

219

worship 39–40; sharia law and religious judges 38, 39; theoretical insights in 36–7 Pew Research Center (PRC), public opinion surveys of 29 PNA see Pakistan National Alliance pogrom 113 political Buddhism 11; see also Buddhist nationalism political Islam 96; see also Islam political modernity 101 Political Parties Regulation of 1976 87 “politicos” 127 politics index 30 postcolonial South Asian history 15 poverty, in South Asia 16 PPP see Pakistan People’s Party predatory identity 19–20 Prevention of Terrorism Act 2015 136 Promotion of Virtue and Discouragement of Vice see ‘Amr bil-Ma’rouf wal Nahi’ an al-Munkar PTI see Pakistan Therik-e-Insaf public schooling 173 “purists” 127 Pushtun uprisings and symbols, collective memories of 67 Pushtunwali norms 67 Qadiyani see Ahmadiyya “Quetta Declaration” 176 Radcliff Commission 166 radical and militant groups 7–8 radical Islamization of Maldives 4 radicalization 7 Radio Sharia 70 Rahman, Amir Abdul 61 Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur 16, 77, 78, 91 Rahman, Ziaur (Zia) 78–9 Rajapaksa, Gotabaya 188 Rajapaksa, Mahinda 46, 187–8 Rama Rajya 13 Rana, Jang Bahadur 146 Rana, Md. Sohel 28 Rasheed, Yameen 131 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 6, 104, 116, 117 Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) of Nepal 4, 7 religion: European modernist construction 12; as marker of identity 1; modes of use of 15; multivocal 5; as political ideology 30; as political mobilization tool 1; portrayal as monolithic category 5

220 Index

“Religion Gap” see “God Gap” religion in public life: causes of 15–16; claim of gradual decline of 9; claim of return of 9 religion–politics nexus 5; antimodernist movement 12; contextualizing 9–12; globalization 18–19; as global phenomenon 9, 10; hegemonic crisis 16; historical antecedents 12–15; historical antecedents of 12–15; normative discussion on 4; ontological insecurity 18–19; predatory identity 19–20; religio-political forces 10–11; religious revivalist movements 10–12; secularization process 9–10; South Asian countries, constitutional provisions regarding 2–3; state failure 15–16 religio-political forces 2–3; emergence of 16–17; global rise of 16; Islamists 10–11; vs. religious revivalist movements 10–12 religio-political parties and groups: Afghanistan 59–60; in Bangladesh 87–9, 88; globalization influence on 10; in India 6; in Nepal 7, 154; in Pakistan 6; presence and influence of 8 religiosity among people 48; in Bangladesh 34, 35; complexity of understanding 32; data sources and measurement of 29–32; data sources for 29–30, 31; empirical evidence of; in India 32–3, 33; individual, societal, and cultural factors of 36; in Pakistan 33–4, 34; questions to measure 30; in Sri Lanka 34–5, 36; Western countries and developing countries 28 religiosity index 30 religious adherents 28 religious centers 16 religious group 28 religious identity: appeal of 12; resurgence from ontological insecurity 19 religious ideologies 21 religious-inspired violence 4 religious institutions 9 religious justifications 102 religious language and symbols 53–4 religious minorities 4 religious participation and political participation 36–7 religious political parties, performance of 29, 40, 48–9, 94–5, 95; ACMC 46, 47; Bangladesh Khelafat-e-Andolon 44, 45; Bangladesh Muslim League 44, 45; BJP 41–3, 42; BTF 45; election results data for measuring 32; IJOF 45; IOJ 44–5, 45;

JHU 46, 46–7; JI 94–6; JIB 44–5, 45; JUI and JI 43, 43–4; JUI-F 43, 44; MMA 43, 43–4; SLMC 46, 47; Zaker Party 44, 45 religious practices/participation, questions to measure 30 religious public sphere 28 religious referents 12 religious revivalist movements vs. religiopolitical forces 10–12 religious rhetoric 4 Religious Unity Act 1994 132, 135 religious values 30, 41, 48 Riaz, Ali 1, 76 Rilwan, Ahmed 131 RPP see Rastriya Prajatantra Party RSS see Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ruling blocs, hegemonic crisis 16–17 SAD see Shiromani Akali Dal Sahliyeh, Emile 15–16 Salafi Abd-Rab al-Rassul Sayyaf 65 Salafi Islamist language 54 Salafi-Jihadism 131 Salafism 124, 127–8, 132–6 Sangh Parivar 6, 115 Santhal Rebellion 14 Saudi Wahhabism 62 Savarkar, V.R. 115 Sayyaf, Abd Rab-al-Rasul 60 secularism 2, 4, 7, 9, 13, 16–17, 22, 76–7, 79, 83, 85, 90–1, 104–5, 107, 109, 116, 154–6, 169, 173, 210 secularist liberal ideology 16 secularization: challenges to 4; theory 9–10 secular liberal states, delegitimization of 12 secular state 16 Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 13–14 September 2001 suicide attacks see 9/11 terrorist attacks Shahbag movement 81, 92 Shah Bano case 114 Shia Hazara community, persecution of 25n3 Shi’a Hizbi Wahdat 60, 65 Shi’a Islamist organizations 60 Shinwari, Fazal Hadi 71 Shiromani Akali Dal 113 Shiv Sena (Soldiers of Shiva) 6 Shiv Sena Nepal 7, 154 Shultz, George 64 “sickulars” 116 Sikhism 119 Sikh nationalism 112–13 Sikhs, massacres against 113 Singh, Charan 112

Index

Singh, Hari 108 Sinhala Buddhist nationalism see Buddhist nationalism Sinhala-Buddhist South, modern political sphere in 189–90 Sinno, Abdulkader H. 53 Skinner, Quentin 101 SLFP see Sri Lanka Freedom Party SLMC see Sri Lanka Muslim Congress social conflicts and organizational dynamics 60 social conservatism 97 social differentiation 5 social Islamization of Bangladesh 91 social upheaval 15 societal factors of religiosity 36 socio-religious organizations 90 Solih, Ibrahim Mohamed 126 Somarama, Thalduwe 192 South Asian countries: basic indicators of 207; constitutional provisions regarding religion and politics in 2–3; economic indicators of 208; political parties in 210–11; religious composition of 209; social indicators of 209; systems of government in 209–10 Soviet casualties 73n4 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan 179; Afghan mujahideen 62–5; jihad against 179; PDPA’s anti-Muslim stance 61–2; revolt against communist regime 62 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan 63–4 spirituality and materiality 13 Sri Lanka: Buddhism as political tool 187; Buddhist-Christian encounter 188–9; constitutions of 186; ethnic and religious communities of 186–7; ethnic majoritarianism 20; historical developments of 187; 1952 parliamentary election 190; 1956 parliamentary election 190–1; parliamentary elections, parties’ share of votes in 46, 46–7; 2019 presidential election 188 Sri Lanka, perception on religionpolitics mix in 40, 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; politicians and religious leaders 39, 40; questions to measure 30, 32; religious statues and places of worship 39–40; theoretical insights in 36–7 Sri Lanka, religiosity in 48; complexity of understanding 32; data sources for 29–30, 31; questions to measure 30; rise of 34–5, 36

221

Sri Lanka Freedom Party 7, 46, 194 Sri Lanka Muslim Congress 7, 46, 47 state religion adoption 8 Steins, Graham Stuart 116 student movements 111–12 Subedi, Arun 154 Sufi-influenced Islam 124 Sufi orders 59 Sufis 169–70 Sunni mujahideen organizations 60 Sunni Muslims 58 Tabligh Jamaat 90 Tagadhari 151 Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, incursions into 63 Tajiks 58 Taliban 75n39; co-optable commander 68; court system 75n56; financial and military aid to 68; goals of 65; insurgency against foreign occupation 53; Islamic ideology of 66–8, 70; leaders 66, 67; madrasa education 68–9; military operations against IS-KP 72; “morality police” 59; perceived neutrality of 67; Pushtun identity of 66–7, 69, 72; recruitment of fighters 68; religious message and image, credibility of 66–7, 70–2; reorganized as insurgent force 69, 70; rise of 4, 60, 65–6, 180; strict moral order 66, 68; territorial gains by 69; three-tiered judicial system of 68 Tamil militant groups, armed conflict of 197 Tamil nationalism 194 Tamil United Liberation Front 196 Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan 165, 182 Tehrik-e-Jafaria Pakistan 6 Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan 69 Third British–Afghan War 61 TLP see Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan top-down sovereignty power, dissolution of 101 transcendental source of worldly rule 101 Transnational Islamist terrorist groups 6 Transparency International 75n56 Tribhuvan, King 147 Trump administration 69 TTP see Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan TULF see Tamil United Liberation Front ulama 170 UMN see United Missions to Nepal uniform civil code 106 United Missions to Nepal 150

222 Index

United National Front for Good Governance (UNFGG) alliance 46–7 United National Party 6, 46, 190, 194 United People’s Freedom Alliance 46 United States see US UNP see United National Party untouchables and lower castes 103–4 Upadhyaya, D.N. 117 UPFA see United People’s Freedom Alliance Urdu language 166 US: Constitution, basic creeds of 8; funding for Afghan covert action 179; invasion of Afghanistan 69; occupation of Afghanistan 58, 69–72 USSR: anti-Muslim reputation of 63; fear of spread of political Islam 63–5; population growth of 65; withdrawal from Afghanistan, effect of 63–4

Veer, Peter van der 12 violence by religio-political groups 20 violent campaigns against Muslim community 4 Wahabbi Islam 168 waz mahfils 90–1 Wiktorowicz model of Salafi actors 127 World Religion Project (WRP) data 28 World Values Survey 29 WVS see World Values Survey Yameen, Abdulla 125–6, 136 Yousaf, Mohammed 58 Zia, Khaleda 82, 83 Zia regime 78–9, 91 Zia-ul Haq, Islamization policies of 177–9