Religious Nationalism and Faith Based Organizations

• In Event: Religious Nationalism (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

The past two decades have seen a rising role for faith based organizations (FBOs) in development work- both in advocacy and service provision. These groups have been lauded for reaching communities that are suspicious of the state and also faulted for engaging in discriminatory practices. In this paper we investigate how FBOs understand their position under a religious nationalist government in India. The BJP came to power in 2014 and has used a number of provisions originally introduced by the outgoing Congress government to reshape the landscape for civil society organizations. We look at how religious CSOs in particular have experienced these pressures. Drawing on interviews with eighteen FBOs and our observations in the field we find that the impact of the government is highly differentiated based on the religious tradition of the FBO. Considering India’s religious diversity we are able to share narratives from Hindu, Dalit, Christian, Sikh, and Muslim organizations to illustrate how the past ten years have changed the political opportunity structure for FBOs in India.

All civil society organizations in India feel the state is hostile to dissent and uses a range of regulations and extra-legal practices to limit the freedom of FBOs. Rules introduced by the Congress government on accounting practices, permissions needed to access foreign funding, corporate social responsibility collaborations, and the use of the intelligence agencies to investigate activists have been adopted by the BJP government and implemented in ways that stifle dissent and limit religious freedom. The everyday corruption of the state is seen as something everyone must face, but some Hindu organizations are exempted from the worst excesses of the system. Religious nationalism offers some protection for the favored FBOs, but overall seems to have a chilling effect on civil society. While CSOs still engage in some limited advocacy, they do so with sensitivity to the limited space available to them. We suggest that this finding means that even those FBOs that anticipate a friendly political environment from a religiously chauvinist government should be careful that the general hostility of authoritarian ideology to civil society can overshadow the affinity they may have expected. The wider development community should resist religious nationalism as a broad threat to civil society and religious freedoms.

Authors

• Nandini Deo, Lehigh University

• Rajeshwari Balasubramanian, G D Goenka University

• Farhat Naz, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur

• Margit van Wessel, Wageningen University & Research