Hurt Sentiments and Blasphemy in South Asia

Neeti Nair, University of Virginia

Research Grant, 2019

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At the time of Partition and the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, it was widely expected that India would be “secular,” home to members of different religious traditions and communities, whereas Pakistan would be a homeland for Muslims, and an Islamic state.

Almost seventy-five years later, India appears to be on the precipice of declaring itself a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu state, and Pakistan has drawn increasingly narrow interpretations of what it means to be an Islamic state. The one-time eastern wing of Pakistan, now the independent nation-state of Bangladesh, has oscillated between professions of secularism and an Islamic ideology. How did this come to pass? 

[V]arious ideologies of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that were first debated in their constituent assemblies evolved to support the claims of “hurt sentiments” of majoritarian communities—Hindus in India, and Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

Hurt Sentiments conducts an analysis of landmark debates—on the constitutional status of religious minorities before and after M.K. Gandhi’s assassination, the changing meaning of secularism in India, the shifting meaning of an “Islamic state” in Pakistan, and the resurgence of secularism as a state ideology in India and Bangladesh as a consequence of the 1971 war. In doing so, the book reveals how the various ideologies of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that were first debated in their constituent assemblies evolved to support the claims of “hurt sentiments” of majoritarian communities—Hindus in India, and Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

In this book project, I cross political and territorial boundaries to bring together cases of censorship that allegedly “hurt sentiments” of individuals and religious communities. The landmark lawsuits that I discuss were debated in the subcontinent’s courts and parliaments but are increasingly decided on its streets in acts of vigilantism and plays for power. My close reading of a wide range of sources also shows how hurt religious sentiments have fueled a secular resistance, both in the decades immediately following Partition, and in the present.