[This version is a draft, not for quotation or citation without the express permission of the author. To read an annotated version of this document, please click the Microsoft Word link at the bottom of the page. The author would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Smith Richardson Foundation and the HarvardAcademy for International and Area Studies and the research assistance of Sarah Mehta, Arshi Hashmi, and Mohammed Imtiyaz.]

One can hardly begin a lecture on religious nationalism in South Asia without quoting that great Indian religious nationalist Mahatma Gandhi. The witticism that I would like to quote now Gandhi memorably delivered in response to a question: "What do you think of Western Civilization?" His mordant reply was, "I think it would be a good idea." Now if someone were to ask me what I think of the lecture I am about to give, I think my reply would have to be, "I think it would be a good idea." It is painfully true that the lecture I am about to give is not the lecture I would like to give. It contains very far from complete or developed thoughts about a very important topic.

In talking about religious nationalism in South Asia, and particularly what I am calling "extremist religious nationalism" in that part of the world, I seek to talk about it in a way that pays close attention to empirical detail — or at least as much as one can in a short lecture. On the other hand, I want to remain firmly fixed on one big and important question above all: namely, the globally urgent and important question of the relationship between religion and democracy. And I wish to examine this relationship in both causal directions. First: How has religious nationalism affected democracy in South Asia? What has religious nationalism meant for the theory and practice of democracy and shared self-government in South Asia? Second, how has democracy in practice affected religious nationalism in South Asia? What has democracy and the practice of a participatory politics of self-government meant for South Asian religious nationalism?

Before exploring these questions using these methods, however, I want to address the question of why the United States should care about South Asia. It is true that South Asia’s importance for US foreign policy has grown dramatically in the last five years. This is partly because of public nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and what has sometimes been a dramatic Indo-Pakistani confrontation over Kashmir — though now promising Indo-Pakistani talks have begun on that and other issues. However, beyond the war on terror, the US policy community has generally failed to appreciate the nature and depth of South Asia’s long-term significance for US interests. In particular, it has failed to appreciate how South Asia’s increasingly competitive and extremist religious nationalisms — Hindu nationalism in India, Islamic nationalism in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka — pose serious foreign-policy challenges for the United States. Such religious nationalisms endanger vital US interests on at least four fronts: the prosecution of the war on terrorism; the promotion of democracy and political stability in the Muslim world; nuclear nonproliferation; and the promotion of human rights and religious freedom throughout the world.

Historically, the tendency of the Americans has been either to ignore South Asia or to see it in ad hoc and instrumental terms. Henry Kissinger’s famously dismissed Bangladesh as a "international basketcase." This dismissal, I think, approximates a common view of the subcontinent as a whole: it is too poor and too powerless to figure very prominently in US strategic calculations. Tragically, however, America’s historic oscillation between indifference and shortsightedness concerning South Asia has caused it to be blind-sided in recent years — not once but twice — by rising religious nationalisms.

First, in May 1998, India’s newly elected government, dominated by leaders of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party or "Indian People’s Party" (BJP), shocked the US intelligence and policy communities by conducting public nuclear tests (to which Pakistan quickly responded with its own tests). Even though the performance of such tests was a publicly stated plank of the BJP platform, the US thus failed to anticipate one of the most crucial alterations in the regional and global security environment of the past twenty years. And it is crucial to emphasize that the assertive religious ideology of the Hindu nationalists, which was far less willing to tolerate a subordinate and pacific Indian role in the international community, was a clear precipitating factor in the decision to cross the nuclear threshold. In other words, it was not merely a change in India’s security environment but how that environment was refracted through a religiously chauvinist and daring (or "risk-acceptant," in Ashley Tellis’s jargon) ideology that caused Indian planners to make this literally earth-shattering decision — which led to Pakistan’s tests two weeks later.

Second, and rather more famously, in September 2001, Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was able to organize the massacre of nearly 3,000 Americans thanks to the secure base of operations and political protection Pakistan provided by way of its client state, the Taliban. While Zia ul Haq’s Islamized Pakistan was a key pillar of US Cold War strategy throughout the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s collapse abruptly ended the close US-Pakistani relationship as well as US engagement with Afghanistan. With American attention turned elsewhere, Zia’s radically Islamized Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) turned the disbanded mujaheddin into a new Afghan government — the Taliban — chiefly to strengthen its strategic position against its archrival India. With a secure base of operations and political protection provided by the Taliban and its patron Pakistan, Al Qaeda could organize a series of increasingly deadly terrorist attacks against American targets, culminating in 9/11.

With such events in the background, it is clear of course that dismissive US indifference to South Asia was no longer an option, and we have a suddenly intensified US-South Asia relationship, occasioned largely by the war on terror. But this new level of relationship entails a host of risks and challenges that urgently require exploration. Although US-India relations were already steadily improving, 9/11 increased India’s strategic profile for US military strategists and other policy makers. And Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf (in a repeat of a similarly dramatic reversal in the early 1980s) went from the US dog house — as a nuclear-armed, Taliban-sponsoring dictator — to being a guest of honor at the White House. Yet dangerous forms of religious extremism remain embedded in these countries’ political systems, and it is not clear that their influence is on the wane. Indeed, a major point I wish to emphasize in this lecture is that India’s democratically elected coalition government no less than Pakistan’s military dictatorship depends in no small part on extremist religious nationalism for its legitimacy and political survival.

The pervasive influence of extremist religious nationalism, not only in India and Pakistan but also in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, directly endangers the vital US interests noted above. It makes Pakistan a haven for terrorists, including Al Qaeda, and it inspires terrorist activity in Kashmir, which has repeatedly brought India and Pakistan to the nuclear brink. Notwithstanding the current peace talks, it makes the Kashmir issue virtually intractable, by increasing the domestic political pressures in India and Pakistan for total victory in the disputed region as well as for total resistance to any serious concessions or compromise. The resulting hostility not only stimulates "vertical" nuclear proliferation and increases the risk of nuclear war but also could strengthen China’s strategic position in the region: Pakistan’s conventional inferiority causes it to depend on Chinese strategic assistance, and India has little choice but to remain preoccupied with its aggressive rival to the west. Furthermore, concerning America’s ambitious goal of fostering democracy in the Muslim world and human rights throughout the entire world, extremist Islamic nationalism is a major factor in preventing Pakistan from becoming a democracy, and extremist Hindu nationalism is a major factor in making India less of a democracy, thus preventing the enormous Muslim populations of both countries from fully enjoying the fruits of political pluralism and liberalism.

Not only the war on terror but a range of economic and strategic considerations virtually guarantee that the US will continue its close engagement with "the most dangerous place on earth" for the foreseeable future. With deepening US ties to the region, it is even more crucial that American policymakers avoid the costly surprises and pitfalls of the past. To succeed in doing so, however, they must tackle basic questions: Is the long-term cost of America’s new engagement with this volatile region the inadvertent encouragement or deliberate neglect of the region’s religious extremisms, with possibly devastating consequences the US again fails to foresee? Is US policy failing to address the ways in which the region’s homegrown religious extremisms threaten its fundamental interests? And answering these questions requires a comprehensive and comparative analysis of extremist religious nationalism South Asia, in terms of its causes as well as its consequences.

In analyzing religious nationalism, it is first of all important to understand that religious nationalism is not one thing but many things. In particular, contrary to what Mark Juergensmeyer and others have suggested, not all religious nationalisms are species of reaction to liberal modernity or globalization. Religious nationalism is not a new phenomenon or a late reaction to the globalizing and liberalizing forces of Benjamin Barber’s "McWorld." The history of religious nationalism long predates the latest round of "globalization," and, furthermore, much of the political role of religious nationalism in South Asia has been constructive.

Indeed, religious nationalism has historically played a constructive and nation-building role in South Asia’s politics. Mahatma Gandhi’s pluralistic religious nationalism mobilized the Indian masses for independence. Buddhist nationalism in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) awakened national pride and fostered anti-colonialism. Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim nationalism gave Muslims important bargaining power in pre-independence India and a South Asian homeland after the end of the Raj. All of these religious nationalisms were importantly and constitutively religious: they mobilized religious identities for nation-building and other national purposes, and they defined national identities in at least partly religious terms.

At the same time, all of these religious nationalisms were liberal and "ecumenical." Gandhi’s religious nationalism was eclectic in content and pluralistic in spirit: it both drew from and made room for all of India’s diverse religious traditions and communities, whether these were indigenous (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism) or imported (Islam, Christianity). The Buddhist antecedents of Ceylonese nationalism did not prevent Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils from working together for independence, nor did it prevent interethnic political comity in the first few years after independence. While Jinnah believed that Pakistan’s core identity was Muslim, he also believed that this religious-nationalist vision required an ecumenical and tolerant politics: "You may belong to any religion or caste or creed," he said in 1947, "that has nothing to do with the business of the State."

However, since India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) achieved independence, the ecumenical religious nationalisms that helped spawn these nation-states have been successfully challenged by "extremist" variants. Unlike their ecumenical forebears, these variants have at least four distinguishing characteristics. First, they posit the religious identity of the majority as not merely one important aspect of the nation’s identity but as central and overriding. Second, they consider ethnic or religious identities different from those of the majority presumptively alien and disloyal and thus create a tiered conception of citizenship. Third, extremist religious nationalisms are often propagated by movements that believe that communal and even terrorist violence are "normal" and legitimate means of promoting their nationalist visions and of keeping religious and ethnic minorities in their (subordinate) place. Finally and perhaps most dangerously, extremist religious nationalisms foster intense rivalries with other South Asian nations that do not share their religious identity.

A brief look at recent history demonstrates how these extremist variants of religious nationalism have played an increasingly prominent role in South Asian societies, particularly in the last twenty-five years.

In the early 1980s, Indira Gandhi mobilized Hindu majoritarianism in India to suppress regional and separatist movements, including the extremist Sikh nationalism that sought to create a separate state. Her increasingly brutal tactics culminated in a raid on the Sikh Golden Temple, in revenge for which her Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in 1984. This in turn prompted the murder — semi-officially sanctioned by the Congress Party and Rajiv Gandhi himself — of as many as 3,000 Sikhs. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Hindu nationalists of the BJP and its affiliated extremist organizations — the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — propagated an even more assertive and narrow Hindu majoritarianism that targeted Muslims as India’s latent fifth column. They used violence to press their cause, destroying a mosque in the city of Ayodhya at the supposed site of Ram’s birth, and combined an effective organizational base with a willingness to adopt a more moderate face when necessary to surpass the Congress in national elections by the late 1990s. Having formed a stable governing coalition at the center since 1998, they have used their unprecedented national power to make India an official nuclear power, rewritten history textbooks to exalt the glory of Hindu civilization at the expense of Muslim and Christian "foreign" invaders, orchestrated the destruction of churches and killing of missionaries, passed legislation that would subject religious conversion to government regulation, and organized a pogrom (in Gujarat in 2002) that killed as many as 2,000 Muslims. Their national political position has remained solid, and the April-May 2004 national elections are almost certain to return them to power.

Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through most of the 1980s, the government, military, and society of Pakistan were increasingly "Islamized" under the dictatorship of Zia ul Haq. An extremist Islamic nationalism continues to pervade Pakistan, despite President Musharraf’s putatively moderate leadership. Extremist Islamic nationalism and an accompanying "jihad culture" infuse the country’s political, educational, and military institutions, partly as a result of a combination of Zia’s Afghan policy and his Islamization campaign. With the collapse of the Taliban in 2001 and the curtailment of aid to the Kashmiri "freedom struggle" (compelled by Indo-US pressure) in 2002, the Pakistani government’s export of extremism has fallen dramatically, but the domestic trade appears brisk: about a million people read jihadi publications and "banned" terrorist groups continue to operate under new names and with virtual impunity. The recent arrest of a major Al Qaeda figure in Pakistan is but one sign that the country may be the world’s epicenter of Islamic terrorism. Pakistan’s longstanding involvement in Kashmir has, among other things, taken Kashmiri nationalism in an increasingly fundamentalist and violent direction, which has brought India and Pakistan to the brink of (nuclear) war. Also suggestive is the success of Islamist parties in the October 2002 elections: united in a coalition for the first time, they received twice as many votes as ever before, gained control of two provinces (Baluchistan and the North West Frontier), and became Pakistan’s third largest party.

In Sri Lanka, post-independence politics quickly became virulently anti-Tamil, Buddhism was established as the constitutionally favored religion in the 1970s, and aggressive anti-Tamil policies along with anti-Tamil violence proliferated wildly thereafter. This extremist Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism quickly spawned a Tamil insurrection, which neighboring India, impelled by its own large Tamil minority, began to support. However, fearing that its Tamils as well as other minority groups might be emboldened by a successful Tamil secessionist movement, India sent troops to the island in 1987 to suppress the uprising. The intervention proved disastrous, and India withdrew in 1990. The main Tamil group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or Tamil Tigers, took their revenge the following year, when a Tamil suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv Gandhi. Partly because of 9/11, which resulted in the LTTE being put on the official US list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), negotiations are currently underway to end the civil war, which has killed at least 60,000 people. However, it remains unclear how extremist Buddhist nationalists (including Buddhist bhikkhus or monks) — who have spoiled otherwise viable accommodations in the past — as well as extremist Tamils will react to a future settlement, which will require painful compromises for both parties.

Bangladesh, though it achieved independence late (through its secession from Pakistan in 1971), originally had a strongly secular foundation consisting in a non-religious Bengali nationalism. Yet after 1975, strong opposition to secularism surfaced, and the state was made officially Islamic in the late 1970s. And in the course of the 1990s, Islamic extremism became more pervasive. Attacks on religious minorities, especially Hindus, have been on the upswing, partly in retaliation for Hindu-extremist attacks on Muslims in India, which Bangladeshis have observed with increasing alarm since the Ayodhya incident in 1992. In addition, politicians increasingly score political points by attacking Hindu India. In October 2001, parliamentary elections saw a decisive victory for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its coalition partners, which included two Islamic parties. Religiously charged rhetoric was a prominent feature of the campaign. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the BNP and its Islamic allies played on Bangladeshi fears that the large Muslim country might become a target of Western and Indian machinations. The BNP further argued that the previous Awami League (AL) government had been unduly dominated by Hindu India. The AL contended in reply "that a victory by the BNP and its Islamic-party partners would lead to the Talibanization of Bangladesh." In the end, the BNP and its allies won more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament.

From these developments as well as the relevant literature, it is clear that several factors explain why South Asia’s extremist religious nationalisms have moved from the margins of their societies to center stage. One is the real and perceived failure of secular individuals, ideologies, and institutions, such as the secularism and socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party in India or the Western-style army of secular military dictator Yahya Khan in Pakistan, which created openings for entrepreneurial leaders and movements to press for extremist-religious alternatives. In several cases, they were successful in propagating these alternatives because they built strong civil society organizations as well as social movements combining populist and elitist elements. In addition, the extremism of these movements did not consist in world-rejecting fundamentalism or politically withdrawn revivalism. Rather than shun politics, South Asia’s extremist religious nationalists consider the state an essential instrument and object of their transformative ambitions. They accordingly deploy effective political parties and other political formations to influence the makeup and decisions of governments. Third, they are politically pragmatic: they join forces with other groups to advance their aims, and they employ rhetoric, promote causes, and build on social discontent in a way that resonates with the broader national population.

The political consequences of South Asia’s socially ascendant extremist nationalisms have been enormous. First, they have fostered religiously defined conceptions of national identity that politically unify and mobilize peoples and serve as touchstones of governmental legitimacy. Second, they have undermined democracy in the region by promoting a majoritarian theory and practice of "illiberal democracy" that marginalizes, subordinates, intimidates, and disenfranchises religious and ethnic minorities, often through semi-officially sanctioned "communal violence." Third, they have weakened the prospects for regional peace and stability by further intensifying the longstanding hostility between India and Pakistan and by laying the basis for new rivalries defined on ethno-religious lines, particularly between Hindu India and Muslim Bangladesh and to a lesser extent Hindu India and Buddhist Sri Lanka.

Much of the existing academic literature, however, fails to appreciate that extremist religious nationalism in South Asia is an important political phenomenon. Preoccupied with sterile questions of taxonomy — Are the movements and ideologies in question "fascist," "fundamentalist," "revivalist," "communalist," or "nationalist"? — the literature neglects the political causes, motivations, methods, and impact of extremist religious nationalism. Even where religious extremism is regarded as an important political phenomenon, it is often assumed that it is an abnormal and merely periodic interruption of the normal course of South Asian politics and national political development, rather than an increasingly embedded and constitutive feature of the region’s national political cultures. Religious extremism by its very nature is assumed to operate at the margins of society rather than on the center-stage of national political life. But the consequence of this is that the politically crucial and growing alliance between religious extremism and political nationalism throughout South Asia — which I emphasize through the concept of "extremist religious nationalism" — is therefore almost completely ignored.

The academic literature, for example, contains numerous accounts of religious extremism in South Asia that trace the genealogies of religious-extremist movements. These accounts diachronically recount their anthropological, sociological, cultural, economic, and religious origins and development, yet they tend to neglect their nature, effectiveness, and impact as political organizations. In such accounts, extremist religious nationalism is often reductively explained in terms of the social or economic interests of its key constituencies, or in terms of the material interests of cynical politicians. These accounts leave little room for extremist religious nationalism as an ideology that can independently mobilize political opinion, stimulate the construction of political institutions, alter the political optic of elites and masses, and define a blueprint for political governance.

For example, because the literature typically focuses on extremist religious nationalism as an extra-governmental social movement, it neglects how it functions in power and particularly how it uses violence as a semi-official instrument of governance and political self-preservation — as Hindu nationalists in India effectively used communal violence to win elections in Gujarat in December 2002, a strategy the national leadership of the BJP has committed itself to replicating across India. In this connection, it is crucial to appreciate the systematic impact of extremist religious nationalism on democratic practice and specifically how its South Asian variants promote majoritarian and illiberal conceptions of democracy that weaken the political rights and civil liberties of religious minorities. In other words, it is crucial to grasp the important political role extremist religious nationalism actually plays in South Asia, particularly in democratic politics, and how it attracts political support and exerts political influence beyond core supporters and succeeds in shaping national politics throughout the subcontinent.

When one adopts a comparative perspective, the extent to which extremist religious nationalism is a subcontinental phenomenon — a phenomenon that affects the whole region — is truly striking. Proper understanding of the phenomenon depends therefore on sustained and comparative discussion of all the politically important cases of extremist religious nationalism — Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist — across South Asia’s major states. Without this, we are in danger of having only a series of isolated national or sub-regional perspectives, based on a "single case-study" approach, which fail to illuminate the extent to which movements of extremist religious nationalism in different parts of the subcontinent inspire and provoke each other. For example, the funneling of Pakistani militants and support into Kashmir, particularly after the anti-Soviet Afghan war, gradually "fundamentalized" Kashmiri nationalism. Straightforward demonstration effects have also been evident: the separatist movement inspired by extremist Sikh nationalism in the Punjab and the Tamil separatist movement in Sri Lanka grew more formidable at the same time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, emboldening each other as well as other ethno-religious separatist insurgencies, particularly in Kashmir, Northeast India, and the Chittagong Hills. In addition, reactive or "retaliatory" effects are observable: Hindu-extremist attacks on Muslims in India have helped inspire Muslim-extremist attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, and strengthened the resolve and ferocity of Islamic militants in Kashmir.

In what has been an especially unfortunate lacuna for policymakers, the lack of a comparative and subcontinental perspective has yielded a neglect in the literature of the extent to which extremist religious nationalism has — either directly or indirectly — fostered dangerous hostility and confrontation between South Asia’s major states.

In the early 1980s, ferocious Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism compelled India to support the Tamil insurrection in Sri Lanka, directly and indirectly, through various organs of the Indian government, which put the two governments directly at odds. The BJP’s nuclear tests profoundly deepened Pakistani distrust of the Hindu nationalists. The Kargil incursion a year later resulted from a characteristic Pakistani tendency — partly a product of extremist Islamic nationalism — to underestimate Indian resolve and overestimate the capacity and willingness of other countries (the US especially) to perceive and champion the "justice" of their position on Kashmir. The Kargil attack, in turn, played into the hands of Hindu nationalists and encouraged their confrontational approach to Pakistan. More recently, Hindu-extremist violence in Gujarat bore greater ramifications for subcontinental relations than is usually appreciated. It was seen as an opening by extremist religious nationalists in Pakistan to crack open the Indian state and even by moderates as proof that India was not an acceptable homeland for Muslims. This had the effect of increasing Pakistani commitment to the Kashmir militancy, and the Gujarat violence directly emboldened the militants themselves. Furthermore, in a key speech at the height of Indo-Pakistani tensions in late May 2002, Musharraf bracketed Gujarat with Kashmir to underline what he considers India’s Hindu fanaticism and rapaciousness. More than anything else in the speech, the Gujarat reference enraged the Indians and further exacerbated tensions, which were already at an exceedingly dangerous level. Finally, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Islamic nationalism in Bangladesh has unquestionably increased distrust between those two countries.

At the same time, some recent academic literature intriguingly hints at how extremist religious nationalism might undermine peace and stability in South Asia. Sumit Ganguly has shown how extremist Islamic nationalism and insulation from countervailing opinions have led Pakistani military planners to repeatedly undertake aggressive — and disastrous — military campaigns against India. In addition, he briefly makes the pregnant observation that extremist Hindu nationalism might lead India to make similar strategic mistakes. Anti-secular "propensities" in India, he writes, "could contribute to military tensions and possibly prompt another war in the subcontinent." Teresita Schaffer, in a recent report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described a series of simulations of Indian political decision-making and performance over the next 10 years. According to these simulations, the worst future scenario for India and the region would occur if various factors — including a strident BJP — were to generate a more "nationalistic" Indian foreign policy. Stephen Cohen, in the September 2002 preface to the Indian edition of his India: Emerging Power, lists last year’s Gujarat violence as one of three major recent events that underscore India’s ongoing weaknesses as a world power. And he hinted at one aspect of its geopolitical and strategic implications: "the Gujarat riots…had the perverse effect of strengthening Pakistan’s resolve to resist what it views as Hindu chauvinism."

Of crucial importance for understanding South Asian religious nationalism’s impact on democracy is understanding the relationship between extremist religious nationalism and violence committed by non-state actors. In particular, extremist religious nationalism tends to inspire religious violence and terrorism and also, because of its persistence and virulence, to provoke "reactive" religious violence, terrorism, and even terrorist movements. The Gujarat pogrom of 2002 shows both: extremist Hindu nationalists, many of them in government, used systematic violence in a systematic fashion on innocent people to achieve political purposes — a practice which certainly fits textbook definitions of terrorism. At the same time, such violence has provoked a wave of reactive violence — almost certainly by Indian Muslims, perhaps with Pakistani support — in the form of indiscriminate bombings in Gujarat and Mumbai (as recently as August 2003) and carefully planned assassinations of extremist Hindu leaders. Sri Lanka shows the potential long-term consequences of implementing an extremist religious nationalism and then enforcing it through semi-official pogroms. In 1983, 4,000 Tamils were killed in Colombo and other Sinhalese-dominated areas. Within two years, the country was the site of a full-scale civil war.

Several major conclusions – methodological as well as substantive – emerge from this brief survey of religious nationalism in South Asia. The first is that one cannot understand religious nationalism in South Asia without a rigorous application of the comparative method. In other words, one simply cannot understand religious nationalism in one part of South Asia — Hindu nationalism in India, for example — in isolation from the other forms of religious nationalism that have swept over the politics of all the other South Asian countries — Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and forms of Islamic nationalism in Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is true not only because these distinct cases help illuminate each other and clarify what factors generate the phenomenon in question, like so many cases and controls in a scientific experiment. This is true also because these distinct cases interact with and influence each other, in some cases directly and in other cases through demonstration effects.

The second conclusion is that context is almost everything. An emphasis on context contrasts with an emphasis on abstract doctrine and tradition (or what is sometimes called "essentialism"). An abstract reading of the political significance of religious traditions presumes straight and automatic causal connections between theological doctrines and political outcomes. A contextual reading of the political significance of religious traditions does not necessarily deny the importance or significance of theological doctrines. It is not or need not be reductionist in that sense. But it holds that what theological doctrines occupy the foreground of a religious movement’s self-understanding depends partly on context. No abstract reading of the political significance of Buddhism, which is of course generally quiescent and non-violent, would predict that it could be the basis of a militant, violent, and extremist form of religious nationalism — and under the auspices and leadership of Buddhist monks, no less. But this is exactly what has happened in the context of democratic and post-independence Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Context matters. No abstract reading of the political significance of Hinduism, which is pluriform and flexible and almost infinitely absorptive, would predict that it too could be the basis of a militant, violent, and extremist form of religious nationalism — often with the support and involvement of Hindu sadhus or holy men, no less. But this is exactly what has happened in the context of democratic and post-independence India. Context matters.

The third conclusion is more substantive and turns to the issue of the relationship between religious nationalism and democracy. What I have already said about Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Hindu nationalism in India suggests that religious nationalism has at least to some extent undermined the practice of liberal democracy in those countries. That is profoundly true and important, it seems to me, and this fact deserves much more attention than it generally receives. But the relationship is much deeper and more complex. It is not just true that religious nationalism has undermined democracy; it is also true that democracy has facilitated religious nationalism. Precisely a close and comparative look at South Asia’s different contexts reveals that mass electoral democracy has been one of the principal causes of the rise of extremist religious nationalism in South Asia. In Ceylon for a short period after Independence and in India for about 30 years after Independence, politics was largely a matter of elite bargaining, and mass participation was severely constrained or narrowly channeled through the dominance of a single political party. There was little opportunity for bottom-up social movements to change the political agenda. As the scope for political contestation and participation increased, religious-nationalist movements gathered increasing mass support. They often mobilized disaffected people (such as the poor and rural Sinhalese Buddhists of Sri Lanka) and made them a political force to be reckoned with. And in Bangladesh, which was of course part of Pakistan as East Pakistan until 1971, the country saw the rise of a strong Islamic nationalism almost as soon as the country began to enjoy independence and a modicum of democratic self-government. This raises of course the question of Pakistan. In a sense, Pakistan’s very spotty experience of democracy proves the point about the importance of democracy as a facilitating condition for the rise of a mass-based extremist religious nationalism: Pakistan’s politics has tended to be most secular when it has been most elitist and restrictive, and what has chiefly been a cadre-based extremist Islamic nationalism has become more mass-based and pervasive partly as a consequence of democratic openings – short-term and isolated as these have been.

One large implication of this is that globalization has helped spur the rise of religious nationalism in South Asia, but not in the sense in which we tend to think of it today. Not the latest round of globalization in the form of the spread of Barber’s "McWorld" but a much earlier round of globalization in the form of post-colonial democratization is what has been decisive for the expansion of extremist religious nationalism.

These conclusions yield important policy-relevant insights for understanding the fraught relationship between religion and democracy in the world today. First, religion as such is not necessarily the enemy of liberal democracy. In South Asia, the problem is not and has not been religion or even religious nationalism per se. The problem has come in the form of palpably extremist variants of religious nationalism. Second, liberal democracy as such is not necessarily the antidote to extremist religious nationalism, or perhaps any form of religious nationalism. The proposition that liberal democracy is the best if not the only antidote to the religious extremism that threatens the world’s security and freedom is now of course a major premise of President Bush’s foreign policy. But from South Asia it is striking how frequently democratic openings do not inhibit but facilitate the rise and even dominance of religious nationalism, sometimes in extremist form.

Here, of course, the present case of Iraq looms large. What we are witnessing in Iraq now, in the context of the opening of Iraqi society and the prospect of self-government and democratization in the near future, can perhaps best be described as a rising Shiite religious nationalism. The Shiites have a special claim on Iraq not only because they are a majority of the population but also because of the historic preeminence of Najaf as a center of Shiite theological learning. When this fact is combined with the fact of their decades-long suppression and consequently a justified sense of grievance, as well as the fact that a non-Islamic or even what they perceive to be an anti-Islamic external power, the United States, is the only force preventing them from having their due influence at the moment, all the conditions are in place for a powerful religious-nationalist movement that can unite a broad range of Shia, even those who are not militants or theologically conservative. We should not expect that democracy will necessarily be the antidote to this kind of religious nationalism. We should expect instead that democracy will whet its appetite and give it the incentive to push harder and further, to intensify and expand its demands rather than moderate and restrict them.

A further lesson from South Asia is that precisely what form Shiite religious nationalism will take — and let me again say that such religious nationalism is not necessarily a bad thing in itself — will depend much on its leadership. Gandhi was an ardent religious nationalist who believed, as he put it, that he who would separate religion and politics understands neither religion nor politics. His political vision was integrally religious, and his religious vision was inevitably political. But whatever Gandhi’s faults (and they were numerous, particularly on issues of caste and religious conversion), he took what could have been a militant and vengeful Hindu nationalism and made it peace-loving, democratic and ecumenical – which is of course precisely what prompted a vengeful Hindu-nationalist to fire three bullets into Gandhi’s chest in January 1948. Since Independence, others have taken Hindu nationalism in a very different direction. The antidote to this ongoing danger is not democracy or more of it. Mere participation in democratic politics and coalition government has not essentially moderated the character or demands of India’s Hindu-nationalist movement. As India prepares for national elections next month, and as the Hindu-nationalists campaign, it is clear that their extremism has not been moderated so much as it is being kept conveniently in the background. Nor is the antidote to extremist religious nationalism a more vigorous secularism and the banishment of religion from politics. The antidote can only be a new and different religious leadership animated by a new and different religious vision.