What difference does it really make? The Indian State has made a commitment to secularity. Secular happens to be a western concept, and clearly it does not fit our situation. The western concept of the secular makes sense in contrast to the idea of a theocratic or mono-religious (say Hindu India or Muslim Pakistan); but it yields very little positive content for shaping the national goals and options for India today.
Chaturvedi Badrinath, in his article on Secularity in India (Times, Feb. 28), drew the readers' attention to my suggestion in my book Enlightenment-- East and West, that there is a specifically Indian Tradition of secularity which would fit our situation much better than the Western concept of the secular.
The western concept of the secular is best exemplified by two of its features: (a) modern science & technology and (b) the urban-industrial civilization with its special paradigms of institutions of state, education, health and development. It is to the questioning of these two features that one wishes to devote one's efforts. In focusing thus on the distinction between the western secular and the Indian secular, my interest is not just academic. It has to do with our way of life as a people and its unexamined value assumptions.
Let me first make it clear that the dual assumptions are common to both basic types of western political economy -- the Marxist-Leninist and the western Liberal-Democratic. For some years sensitive people in the west have been saying that the Liberal-Democratic ideology is empty and without real content, except for the undefined and unclear concepts of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity thrown up by the bourgeois French revolution two centuries ago. But today Marxism-Leninism is confessing its own bankruptcy, and beginning to adopt many of the features of the hitherto despised liberal democracy and its classic product, the market economy. Western liberal democracy has been trying for a long time to give a humanistic base to liberal democracy, but in terms of rational validity, humanism is confronted by many difficulties in justifying itself.
Liberalism has sought to add several new concepts to the Trio of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Equality is being replaced by the concept of justice, and fraternity by the twin notions of the dignity of all human beings and the unity of all humanity.
But neither the concept of justice nor the twin concepts of humanity as a unity and the personal dignity of each human being can be demonstrated on the secular ground of critical rationality. Harvard's John Rawls, in his The Concept of Justice, showed clearly that our present operative notion of justice is philosophically based on the prior concept of human rights (Recht), which in turn was based on untenable Kantian philosophical grounds. Neither can the concept of democracy be defended on purely secular rational-critical grounds. These are affirmations which have their roots in the western religious tradition, and have been smuggled into the secular philosophy without justification by critical rationality. Western secularity is thus built on very shaky philosophical foundations. In this neither Marxism-Leninism nor Western Liberal Democracy has any advantage over the other.
In India, however, at the time of independence, we were driven more by the need to abjure the concept of a Hindu India in opposition to an Islamic Pakistan, than by any positive commitment to secularity. Our founding fathers did not take note of the fact that we do have a secular tradition other than Samkhya or Charvaka. I refer to the Buddhist Sunya tradition, as developed by Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti and Dignaga.
The characteristic feature of western secularity and the European Enlightenment in the 18th century was the repudiation of the authority of religion and tradition. Dignaga also repudiates the authority of the Sabdapramana and builds rigorously on the twin principles of pratyaksha (appearance or sense-perception) and anumana (inference) without depending on any religious scriptures or traditions. Western critical rationality (and modern science) also claims to build exclusively on experience and reason without resorting to any tradition.
The starting points are the same in both, but they use two different logics, and the outcome of the two secularities are distinctively different.
Dignaga arrives at the Buddha-nature or Dharma-nature of all reality; while western secularity arrives at a critical rationality based on subject-object dualism, and the desire to dominate by external control. Buddhism in general rejected the authority of scriptures, but it did not enthrone critical reason or scientific rationality as the ideal.
The first major difference between Buddhist Secularism and western Secularism lies in the rejection of naive realism by the former and its acceptance by the latter. Western secularism takes things as what they appear to be. Dignaga insists that things are not what they appear to be. Neither is the consumer supreme, nor is the commodity all-important. Reality has to be sought beyond the mere appearance, through the transcendent experience of Samyaksambodhi or the auspicious Enlightenment.
The second difference lies in the ocean of difference between Enlightenment through critical rationality, and Enlightenment through an inner illumination that dispels the illusion of the centrality of the ego, and sheds light on the transcendent unity of God, humanity and the World. This is central to both the Buddhist and the Brahmanical-vedantic tradition. But properly interpreted and understood, it can be acknowledged by all traditions.
I am not pleading for a total rejection of the European Enlightenment and its categories. I am asking that we evolve in India a tradition that holds the outer illumination of critical rationality and the inner enlightenment of seeing the transcendent unity of all in a creative dialectical tradition, which can be both liberating and exhilarating.