Democracy v. Fundamentalism: religious politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India

Abstract

Fundamentalism, understood as an uncompromising stance, and democracy defined as a government by consensus and compromise, are by their very nature antithetical. Religious fundamentalism as an incontrovertible faith in a purportedly secular state is even more unacceptable. Insofar as democracy is understood as majority rule with minority rights guaranteed, there is no place for a minority, or even a majority for that matter, to let its own private writ run large. History shows that when a logrolling majority party or a dictatorship had tried unilaterally to impose its own dictum, the results had been disastrous. Any number of contemporary examples can be cited: the Taliban in Afghanistan (which was routed out in 2001); Ayatollah Khomeini's fundamentalism in Iran (against which reformist President Mohammad Khatami is now fighting), General Zia-ul Haq's Islamization in Pakistan (which is being dismantled by General Pervez Musharraf currently); Mao Zedong in China (supplanted by "market socialism" as being advocated by President Jiang Zamin), and so on. There are, however, mechanisms in a democratic system which moderate such factious fundamentalist stances. James Madison wrote in The Federalist papers: "By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Were such a faction a minority, the majority would take care of it by curbing its ambition. If it were to be a majority, then what? The answer is of course the republican form of government where the representative principle, with its "tendency to break and control the violence of a faction," will take care of the problem.