Engaging the Faithful - debating the demolition of a mosque in Delhi

The Patna Collective 'Rethinking Transformative Action' Workshop Series

Tags: India , Promoting Pluralism

Faith based activism should not be seen as the antithesis of secularism, but as complimentary to it. The Patna Collective’s raison d’être is to initiate a dialogue between secular, democratic politics and ‘libratory’ religion both at the level of discourse but also at the level of practice. February 11-12 a debate took place that brought together the different stakeholders around the demolition of a mosque in Nizamuddin/Delhi and the Right to Education Act. Some information on the background of these encounters:

Secular social activism has certain core values at its heart: equality and justice, human dignity and self-determination and also as the HIVOS website points out, “an aversion to dogmas and totalitarian regimes and a sense of mutual solidarity”. It emphasises the need for peaceful coexistence as citizens with equal rights. When it allies itself with development goals, it also aspires towards certain basic social and economic rights for all people. In our earlier years, The Patna Collective framed the objective of all transformative action within the aforementioned goal.

However, even within the given framework, The Patna Collective sought to rethink secularism and argued that faith-based activism should be seen as being complementary to it rather than its antithesis. If transformative action had certain goals, we believed that secular and ‘libratory’ activists within faith were equally equipped to service it. Our perception of faith included ‘liberation’.

Five years ago, when we founded the Collective and started a rather tentative (but wholesome) engagement with religion, our project involved mapping alternative and libratory theological strands within Indian Islam as also marginal histories and cultures of Islam that led to an alternative imagination of the self in at least some of its adherents. We wanted to see how these imaginations expressed themselves in a situation where the state largely recognized Muslims as a homogenous bloc. We were also interested in the way that the idea of a religious monolith was challenged from within by groups based on caste or class or gender. The secular world views religion as a site that might be studied in order to get a better understanding of how to navigate it; we wanted to find out, through a series of engagements with religion, how the faithful perceive the secular world and what are the terms of engagement that they have evolved for themselves. Our research was based in an actual community of the faithful and over the course of five years we covered a lot of ground: from being radical liberation theologians to liberal reformers to ethical ethnographers and back.

The work of the last five years has raised some important questions with respect to transformative action too (the biography of The Patna Collective reflects how some of these questions came to be, but of that narrative, later). It has further complicated our own positions where we believed that faith-based activism (at least of a certain variety) is complementary to equal citizenship goals of secular social action. The Indian state (like most modern states) has not been able to deliver on its promise of equal access to resources to all citizens. Histories of discrimination seem to have caught up with the idea of an abstracted neutrality of all citizens. Yet, the democratic playing field has expanded in the last two decades, with the interesting change that ‘filiative identities’ rather than ‘citizens’ now negotiate the polity. There is a crisis of citizenship and new vocabularies focussing on religion, caste or region are entering the political space. It is almost outside of the normative (liberal) discourse and will present a problem to social development policy formulation sooner rather than later. How will an essentially modern, welfarist effort engage with certain ‘unusual’ expressions of empowerment? These are comfortable projecting filiative identities and even argue that this is the only way to overcome narratives of group marginalization. We realized, thus, that faith-based activism is also as easily located in the ‘counterpublics’, where it may or may not be ‘libratory’ as per the normative goals of ‘transformative’ action.

The realization encouraged certain basic questions: how does development policy engage with the ‘non-liberal’? How do religious subjects engage and respond to otherwise (potentially) statist social policies?

Certain ethnographies of faith suggest that the idea of faith is a comprehensive one. It has a particular perspective on the ‘secular’ world and certain terms of engagement. They are not always sourced in externally located social, economic and political factors; sometimes there is a sudden inflection when these aspirations become internal to faith.

Such circumstances also point towards the need to rethink the nature of democracy and transformatory politics. As reluctant members of civil society, we have had to reconsider our relationship with ‘uncivil society’. Are we as interventionists trying to bring them into the fold? Do we have different, sometimes opposing projects?

The answers to some of these questions may also speak about a perceived failure of secular social action in making any ‘sustainable’ transformation. Does the mode of action also stand under scrutiny, then, particularly with the presence of religion persisting (and visibly growing) in the public sphere? Do notions of ‘populism’ and ‘affective action’ dilute secular action or merely complicate it?

The Patna Collective views itself as an interlocutor and wishes to map but also initiate newer conversations between activists, researchers and communities (if even in transition). It seeks to review ‘anti-plural’ tendencies, evaluate their impact on the normative core values of social action and find ways of engagement with such tendencies in an effort to make them more responsive to each other.

More information on the cases discussed during the debate - the demolition of the mosque in Nizzamuddin and the Right to Education Ace - here.