The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief, Mohan Bhagwat, recently asked his volunteers at Bardhaman, West Bengal, to ‘‘make efforts to unite Hindu society”, since according to him it is the “Hindus who carry the responsibilities of Bharat”. The statement, prima facie, is a generous nudge to the Hindu community to be extra nationalistic—a pretty innocuous statement—but discursively, with a slight deeper probe, the call smacks of what may be called the ‘metastasis of binary’. It immediately throws up several binaries. One: us/them or self/other, wherein the Hindus are ‘us’ or ‘self’ and the rest of the religious groups are ‘them’ or ‘other’. Two: majority/minority where, in terms of numbers, the Hindus are imagined as the majority and the other religious groups as minorities. Three: among the real/pseudo nationals, it is the Hindus who are the ‘real nationals’ carrying the obligation, both political and religious, to shape up India and for the rest, to escape the pseudo-national tag, they must prove their nationalism and nation-building disposition time and 🐻again. And also, the unity/diversity binary, which stresses especially on Hindu unity, symbolising the Hindu nation. Against this Hindu unity lies the flourishing of this vast diversity only due to the tolerance of the majority. Such binaries spread from one part of the body politic to another, causing deep polarisation and lends to the crisis of common good.
The Binary
Binaries are socially constructed to categorise the dif🐎ference(s), quite often around pairs of unequally valued groups such as man/woman, human/animal, selfhood/otherness, inclusion/exclusion, good/evil and so on, to mirror continuously, what the philosopher Derrida calls, ‘the violent hierarchies of dualism’. The difference(s) inherent in the pair of a binary shape (s) both the intellectual and commonsensical geography of our social and political life. It shapes what we can think and how we can think it. The binary pair (let’s say man/woman), supposedly with the sleight-of-hand, privileges one (read man) as ethical, normative and standard and it marginalises and invisibilises the other (read woman) as dependent, insignificant, etc. What we have, in essence, is a series of inequitable, lop-sided conceptual pairs, establishing the dominant one in the pair as the central subject of analysis and further extrapolating their experiences for conceptual ordering. The binary of majority/minority (let’s take Hindu/Muslim), embedded in the Indian liberal democracy, is suffused with hierarchy and imbued with the subordination, marginalisation and exclusion of the minority—simply put as another instance of injustice which happens to concern the minority.
The most hotly debated and sin🥂cerely contested is the binary of good/evil. For the homogenisers, who believe in one-nation-one-culture, the ‘good’, often taken as the good life or common good, is arrived at considering the world or nature or the truth in one universal best way. And the other paths to arrive at good are either defective or not up to the mark. They argue that it is only one value that is supreme and the other values are merely associated with it. For them the good is inherently one, and evil, just like error, can have many forms. Theologians ground their beliefs in their own religion and argue that it is their religion alone that is good and true. Those following the theologians consider salvation within the confines of their religious goodness and take other religions as mis♕guided and inferior. This conception of good/evil binary becomes the source of much intolerance and violence between religions. Such a monistic understanding of the good, in the binary of good/evil, precludes the possibilities of engaging with the good as diverse and plural.
Indian Pluralism
India is a land of incredible diversity, particularly in terms of language, religion, caste, sect, culture and so on, that has defined the quintessential Indian identity from ancient times to the present. The presence of syncretic tradition and fuzzy identities, the visible cultural and ethno-religious diversity, and the passion for engaging in dialogues, dilemmas and disputations, have made India not only distinct but also authentic. Such profound diversity lends itself to heterogeneity, both within and outside of the communities, and it further transcends oppositional binaries. Gandhi, while talking about heterogeneity in Hinduism, said that Hinduism enables its followers to admire and assimilate whatever may be good in other faiths by transcending the theological orthodoxy, if any. Even Muslims in India are also distinct and diverse🧸, when compared to Muslims from other nations, and are quite heterogeneous in terms of caste and cultural differentiations. The binary of Hindu/Muslimꦆ obfuscates the deep heterogeneity and diversity within both religions.
The diversity and heterogeneity, in modern democratic India, have necessitated the institutional arrangements to recognise the existence of such a heterogeneous population. One of these arrangements included in our Constitution is the provision seeking the State to be secular by recognising different faiths and by treating them eq🃏ually. Freedom of religion for all (Article 25) and non-discrimination and equality of treatment (Article 14) form the bedrock of the secularism principle, and become more meaningful when they get embedded in the concepts of fraternity, equality, liberty and democracy.
Diversity gives the sense of difference and, logically, sameness. The sameness/difference binary, more like an eitheꦦr/or schema of oppositional alternatives, obviates our understanding of the way power is organised and effected. In fact, there are many centres of power in society, many ways to get to knowledge and several ways to organise the good life.
In a liberal democracy, pluralism is a belief which is opposed to the binary that privileges monism. Pluralism as the mode of social and political thought rejects any single philosophical idea, single culture or way of life, or single centre of the government. It stresses the strengths and creativity of social and cultural diversity, of having plural values, institutions and ways of life and of constitutional methods of accommodating diversity. It believes in ‘polyarchies’ that come with m🃏ultiple centres of power and in ‘federalism’ as to how to share power and act independently. A pluralist is a citizen who carries a plural belonging, which essentially means that one can have multiple belongings. One can belong to the nation and also at the same time to the sub-nation, and to the village where one is born.
In the call for ‘nation first’, we are witnessing a sort of ‘pathological homogenisation’ by the State-building elites in India. In the name of Hindutva, the Indian State is consolidating a singular Hindu Indian identity in a binary oppositional dichotomy of Hindu/non-Hindu. Any identity other than Hindu is either rejected or repressed. The politics of hatred combined with the neoliberal policies൲ of accumulation have led 🐈to multiple forms of dispossession. Hindutva or Hindu nationalism and Hindu unity, as aspired to by Bhagwat, is to co-opt oppressed castes and tribes against the non-Hindu and the anti-national ‘other’– Muslims, Christians and critics.
It is this ‘metastasis of binaries’ that is pushing democracy, human rights and social and eco𓄧nomic💜 equality into precarious terrain.
(Views expressed are personal)
Tanvir Aeijaz teaches Public Policy & Politics at University of Delhi and is Hon. Vice-Chairman at Centre for Multilevel Federalism (CMF), New Delhi
This article is a part of Outlook's March 1, 2025 issue 'The Grid', which explored the concept of binaries. It appeared in print as 'Metastasis Of Binaries'.
