What forms of exclusion related to religion occur in South Asia and how can these be addressed? This paper from the United Nations Development Programme examines the role of religion in inclusion and exclusion in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A South Asian society with a secular state such as India is most likely to be inclusive or to have potential for inclusion. Conversely, a society without a secular state such as Pakistan or Bangladesh has much greater potential for exclusion.
South Asian societies inherited chronic hostility between majority and minority religious groups and tend to thwart the internal reform of religion. These societies began with the intention of being inclusive. Only India managed to contain ethno-religious exclusionary forces, however, at least for a time, and India alone has the capacity to resist and perhaps even transform them. This is largely due to the presence of certain institutional structures. Today, Pakistan and Bangladesh have abandoned their commitment to secularism and currently, the secular state in India is undergoing a major crisis. There is an urgent need to articulate notions of freedom and equality that are compatible with a plurality of cultural identities and ethical orientations.
Where many forms of religion-related exclusion are present in a society, many policies of inclusion are needed to counteract them. Religion-related exclusion may be ‘religious’ (exclusion from religion) or ‘religion-based’, ‘internal’ (within a religious group which excludes its own members) or ‘external’ (for example when one religious group persecutes another), ‘direct’ (directly sanctioned by religion) or ‘indirect’ (a consequence of religiously sanctioned exclusions).
Only a contextually sensitive, liberal and democratic secular state is maximally inclusive. An intrinsically anti-religious secular state is likely to score low on the index of freedom and equality and is bound to be exclusionary. Other findings are that:
- Theocracies and states with substantive singular religious establishments are least inclusive. They allow both internal and external religious exclusion as well as religiously grounded political and economic exclusion.
- States with substantive multiple establishments may have external religious inclusion but they allow internal religious exclusion as well as religiously grounded exclusions.
- States with formal singular or multiple establishments have religious inclusion as well as religiously grounded inclusion. But they may lack full citizen identification and therefore citizens may feel alienated from them. They may also have remnants of laws, conventions and practices that are potentially exclusionary.
In order to tackle exclusion related to religion, a package of policies is required. Some of these need to be immediate and simultaneous and others need to be planned to follow today’s policies at an appropriate time. Further implications include the following:
- A maximally inclusive society is one in which all citizens identify with the state and enjoy the maximum possible religious liberties consistent with the liberties of others, plus equal passive and active citizenship rights.
- The kind of secular states that are necessary for building inclusive societies do not involve strict separation of the state from religion or strict neutrality.
- Principled distance is the best interpretation of ‘separation’ in this context.
