The self-described "secularism" of the Indian elite is a special case meriting closer inspection. Secularism in India is certainly not a neutral position, as Western India-watchers tend to assume. In fact, it is one of the warring parties in India's religious conflict. This is a rather consequential insight, for it means that reliance on the presumed neutral Indian sources describing themselves as secularist (a reliance that pervades the entire non-Indian literature on the present topic) is actually a reliance on the version of one of the warring parties, which is the very last thing to do in scholarship.
Marxism
In allotting political labels to persons, I intend to be more circumspect than the Marxists, who systematically label all Hindu revivalists as RSS men if not Hindu fascists. Of course, I don't pretend to know every author's personal involvement, and allowance should be made for changes in people's commitment. So, the safest criterion is simply to go by the presence or absence of a conspicuous Marxist viewpoint or conceptual framework in an author's writings, then proceed to label that particular argument -- rather than the author himself -- as "Marxist." In a number of cases, however, the Marxist label is certified by Marxist sources. Thus, Romila Thapar and R. S. Sharma are quoted at some length as representatives of Indian Marxist thought in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.
To Marx, according to this same dictionary, Hinduism "was the ideology of an oppressive and outworn society, and he shared the distaste of most Europeans for its more lurid features. . . . he was as sceptical as his Hindu followers were to be of any notion of a Hindu 'golden age' of the past." Marx upheld the colonial view that India was not a country properly speaking, merely a stretch of land with a meek conglomerate of peoples passively waiting for the next conqueror. For him, the question was not whether it was right to colonize India, merely whether colonization by Britain was preferable (and in his view, it was) to colonization by the Turks or the Czar.
Marx's Indian followers have remained true to his view. They reject the very concept of India as a national unit and only accept India's unity and integrity to the extent that they consider it strategically useful -- e.g., in 1970-75, when they sincerely believed that they were about to come to power in Delhi. In an interview in Le Monde, Romila Thapar cheerfully predicted that India won't be able to stay together. CPM Politburo member Sitaram Yechury calls India a "multinational country" with "many nationalities."
After the Soviet implosion, many an Indian Marxist, or Left-talking opportunist has switched to free-market liberalism but remained a determined Macaulayite and secularist. Indeed, the intense polarization for and against Hindutva in the early 1990s is partly due to a regrouping of Leftist forces on the cultural front after they found that their fortunes on the socioeconomic front were down, as observed by G. Jain: "Deprived of the old legitimacy which the non-existent but effectively advertised success of the Soviet Union and China conferred on them, leftist intellectuals must now hang on desperately to Nehru. Secularism . . . and not socialism has to be their battle cry." The effect on international opinion is that "the 'secularist' and 'anti-Hindu-communalist' platform assures them the support of not only the Muslims at home and abroad but, interestingly enough, of a lot of people in the West," Jain concludes.
At the academic level, at least, this is very much the situation: Indian Marxists are welcomed in American seminars as privileged commentators on "Hindu communalism." It is ironic and disturbing that a movement which still swears by Lenin -- whose October 1917 coup d'état deposed the first democratic Russian Parliament -- and Stalin is hailed in Western universities as the guardian of a civil polity against the encroaching barbarism of Hindu revivalism.
Majoritarianism
Majoritarianism is the position that a majority has the right to determine the face of a country, whether in symbolic respects or in actual legislation. It is in effect a pejorative term for democracy, especially democracy in its unalloyed "one man, one vote" form, in which a majority can take decisions without bothering about the religious background of the decision's supporters or opponents.
One curb on unalloyed "majoritarian" democracy could consist in veto powers conceded to smaller units (though this means that a minority can impose its will on the majority, which obviously detracts from the "democratic" character of the system). This is what David Ludden refers to in his book Making India Hindu with his criticism of BJP majoritarianism: "As a majoritarian movement, Hindu nationalism defines the Indian nation as a whole and seeks to displace and remove alternative, pluralistic definitions." A "pluralistic" definition seems to imply a recognition of subnationalities or other units below the level of the nation.
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