12.06.2002

Secularism and self-determination

It was good to see those old stalwarts - secularism and self-determination - back centre-stage at last Thursday's Socialist Alliance meeting on the India-Pakistan dispute. Issues that were almost totally ignored - or even derided - by the anti-war movement over Afghanistan. Yet there is still some confusion in our ranks on these subjects. To start with, secularism: the Punjab Kashmir region has a long history of different religious groups living in harmony. This was not mutual indifference or passive tolerance, but active social cooperation, based on a common shared humanity - a practice that has frequently been dressed in idealist theological clothes. Socialism has extended the concept of secularism to include atheists and given it a conscious, materialist, class content. But common usage has come to portray the word as meaning nothing more than keeping religion out of politics. Not that the bourgeoisie ever do that. Subtly bourgeois liberals subvert secularism by posing tolerance and individual rights as somehow opposed to human solidarity, instead of trying to combine them. They are of course primarily concerned with the marketplace, and it is here where not only religion, but human morality itself, is to be excluded - this is what it calls secularism. Asad Rehman called for the left to ally themselves with religious progressives against religious reactionaries. He complained correctly that the reactionaries did not represent the majority within their communities but had been given the field by the left's insistence on avoiding involvement in religious controversy. He was for including 'progressive clergy' on our platforms. I agree that we must engage with religion and support all those fighting religious bigotry and I have no objection to religious spokespersons being on our platforms, but his language leaves me uneasy because it ignores the fact that both islamic and hindu fundamentalists seek state power and defend private property. It is class, just as much as belief in god, that fires their bigotry. We oppose their politics, not their religion. In secularism we have the answer religious people need. At first everyone seemed to agree that self-determination was a good thing, but Gita Shagal pointed out that muslim nationalists had already driven many hindus out of Kashmir. She was afraid that self-determination would lead to ethnic-cleansing. Mike Marqusee supported her on the grounds that the situation was too complicated for simple answers, unlike national struggles for independence against imperialism, which apparently are less complex. But self-determination is not about creating nation-states. It is about a working class programme for democracy and power. For the bureaucratic state land means workers, army recruits, taxation, raw materials and strategic redoubts. Territory is given a mythical quality. People must be persuaded to die for it. In both India and Pakistan the aim of the political elite has been to cohere their states out of the most diverse national material. What Pakistsanis had in common originally is not nationality (eg, language) but religion. In India the situation was even more tenuous. India is a country of countless language groups and diverged dialects. The country is also riven by what are now religious fault lines - hindus, muslims, christians, sikhs and buddists. Hence the rise and rise of the hindu fundamentalist BJP has divided the country as never before. Hopes that the Indian and Pakistan governments could stand back and allow a local solution are misplaced. Kashmiri self-determination will have to be delivered by the masses of Pakistan and India in the teeth of the fiercest opposition from the reactionaries. The working class needs to take the side of the secular forces against the bigots and not be neutral. That would give the secular forces in Kashmir the greatest encouragement and produce the best conditions for a civilised outcome. Phil Kent