Hindu nationalism, Muslim “vote banks”, anti-Christian violence, caste rivalry — Indian politics has more than enough interfaith tension to offer populist orators all kinds of “religion cards” to play. Coming only months after Islamist militants killed 166 people in a three-day rampage in Mumbai, the campaign for the general election now being held in stages between April 16 and May 13 could have been over- shadowed by communal demagoguery.

(Photo:Voters show IDs at a polling station in Ayodhya, 23 April 2009/Pawan Kumar)

But in this election, the “religion card” doesn’t seem to be the trump card it once was. It’s still being used in some ways, of course, but the main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has played down its trademark Hindu nationalism in its drive to oust the secular Congress Party from power in New Delhi. A BJP candidate who lashed out at the Muslim minority saw the tactic backfire. During a recent three-week stay in India, I found religious issues being discussed freely and frequently in the boisterous election campaign. But they were usually not the main issues under debate and not isolated from the pocketbook issues that really concern voters. Click here for the rest of my report quoted above.

(Photo: BJP leader L.K. Advani, 8 April 2009/Amit Dave)

This is one of those stories where context is king. Thanks to the internet and India’s lively English-language media, anyone around the globe can find Indian reports highlighting the religion angle. One of the news magazines, The Week, ran an interesting cover story about the “high priests of hate.” On balance, I think it looks a bit overdone — it was written at the height of the Varun Gandhi controversy — but it had this classic anecdote:

“A former BJP minister once said that he had won five times in a row using a simple trick: his men would make an issue of a Muslim boy marrying a Hindu girl or the death of a cow in a Muslim area on the eve of elections. He lost the last Assembly election when he campaigned with a development agenda.”

But religion isn’t just on the politics pages. Outlook, another news weekly, reported that an American investor long associated with the Hare Krishna movement has offered to build a huge Hindu temple in a planned Himalayan ski resort as part of a project previously nixed by religious leaders who feared it would desecrate the mountain home of their gods.

(Photo: Elderly voter helped to cast her ballot in Puri, 23 April 2009/Jayanta Shaw)

The Economic Times reported on its property pages that “more and more Indians want to have homes in religious centres.” Real estate developers and analysts differed on whether the financial crisis would hurt this trend, some seeing a lack of faith in the market while others firmly believed these investments were good. And the tabloid Mumbai Mirror had this story about a court defending religious names on clothes.

While in Mumbai, I went to see Asghar Ali Engineer to talk about the role of religion in politics in India. He explained the central role of communalism — the use of religious, ethnic or other loyalties to mobilise social groups — in Indian politics. A noted Muslim reformer, interfaith dialogue advocate and head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism, Engineer said:

Communalism is not actually a conflict between two religions but between the interests of two or more communities. It is using religious identity for political mobilisation. That is where religion becomes a tool. Religion is not a fundamental cause, religion per se does not cause any problem. Nobody is fighting whether Islam is right or Christianity is right or Hinduism is right. The main point is what the government does for Muslims, for Christians, for Hindus… The BJP bases its whole politics around accusations that Congress uses Muslims as vote banks and inclines towards them, does a lot of favours for them. ‘The Muslims vote for Congress and we are against vote bank politics,’ that’s what they claim. But the BJP itself is basing its politics on the Hindu vote bank.

India is not a nation in the classical sense as in Europe. France, for example, is built on the French language and culture. But India is a bewilderingly diverse country and we have made it one nation. Declaring it a nation was easy, but in the process of nation-building, all these forces have come into play. Whatever development takes place is not based on justice. It is highly skewed. Some religious communities get much more than others, some castes or regions get much more than others. That is why this question of identity has become so important. Those who are left out use their identity to mobilise their people. Similarly, those who are privileged see a threat when other communities mobilise, so they also have to use their identity to ward off this threat from lower castes and backwards religious communities. This is the interplay of religion and politics.

More from that interview in a later post. For more on the Indian election, see the Reuters India website and its special section on the 2009 election. Click here for a slideshow of election pictures.

Here’s a video from the second round of voting on April 23:

Berlin’s referendum on religion lessons in schools poses fundamental questions about how to foster inter-faith tolerance and the relationship between church and state in Germany, as Reuters reported.

The Pro Reli campaign wants to change the capital’s law to allow pupils to choose between faith-based religion lessons and an ethics course. Berlin, with its long secular tradition, is one of the only German states not to have compulsory religion lessons but a wider ethics course instead.

The main argument is whether children who spend hours at school learning about their own faith have a stronger moral foundation and end up being more tolerant of other religions than children who have a broader education in ethics.

The Pro Ethik campaign says it is wrong to split people up according to their faith at school as it can breed divisions. They say ethics classes should instil children with a strong set of values and a good understanding of other religions. Some people also warn that religion lessons in Berlin’s schools would result in a predominantly Christian agenda.

However, one professor of religion, Harmut Zinser, argues that by learning about several beliefs, pupils can get confused as they are not presented with a single, coherent set of norms.

“It puts ethics on the market and in that respect it achieves the opposite of what it sets out to achieve,” he said.

Then there is the cultural argument. Christianity is part of German history, literature and culture. Students who have no knowledge of the bible will find it hard to understand their heritage — take Goethe’s Faust, for one.

In addition, some Muslim groups in Berlin who have long called for Islam lessons, back the Pro Reli campaign. They say mainstream lessons for Muslims at school could help fight radicalisation which can result from unregulated Koran lessons in mosques.

In western Germany, the relationship between church and state was consolidated after World War Two to try to strengthen values in a people shaken by the horrors of war and Holocaust. It was then that most states introduced compulsory faith-based religion lessons. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most former communist eastern German states also have religion courses.

Is that model, more than 60 years old, still suitable? Which model do you think works best to boost tolerance?

Much has been written about Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati's inventive politics that saw her forging an unlikely alliance between Dalits and Brahmins -- from the two ends of the Hindu caste spectrum -- to win an election in Uttar Pradesh in 2007.

She did this with a promise to widen the appeal of her party beyond her traditional Dalit voters and bring Brahmins and other upper castes into her programme of all-round development.

As proof, she gave tickets to scores of Brahmins in 2007 and appointed a Brahmin (Satish Misra) as her chief adviser and strategist.

The move paid rich dividends, securing an absolute majority for her party in a state that last saw single-party rule almost two decades ago.

It also bolstered the chances of her party in the general election. She began being spoken of as a potential prime minister.

But two years have since passed, and there is speculation that all may not be well with Mayawati's social engineering.

A report says the alliance between Dalits and Brahmins could be fraying at the edges.

This time too, Mayawati has given tickets to about 20 Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh, but will that be enough?

Analysts smell disenchantment in the air, given the fact that not much has changed for Brahmins who thought their vote for Mayawati would qualitatively change their lot in a state where the middle castes have by and large held sway over land and jobs.

Secondly, Brahmins are miffed at the lack of access to the Brahmin ministers and lawmakers who seem have ensconced themselves in a cocoon of power and pelf.

So will Brahmin voters extract revenge now, undermining Mayawati's ingenious politics of caste?

(Reuters photo of Bahujan Samaj Party President Mayawati releasing the party's election manifesto in Lucknow March 20, 2009. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar)

Muslims are seen as a crucial vote bank in several possible swing states in India's general election and many politicians are making the right noises to court the community.

In the state of Bihar, which I recently visited, its chief minister Nitish Kumar told me his campaign focused on caste-blind development but also communal harmony:

"Now everybody is happy. There is complete communal harmony," he said as we sat at night on the veranda at his residence.

If what he says is true, then communal harmony could be a vote winner for Kumar, whose party still has far fewer seats in the national parliament than that of his main rival in the state, the federal Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Prasad was chief minister for years, backed mainly by the Yadav caste and the Muslim vote. Could that Muslim vote now be slipping away from him?

Hussain Ansari, a Muslim rickshaw driver whom I met, ironically, outside Prasad's campaign office, told me he will vote for Kumar: "The situation is changing. Lots of development is taking place."

It remains to be seen to what extent Biharis believe Kumar has changed Bihar under his tenure as they go the polls.

But Kumar may also face a problem: he is an ally of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of whom many Muslims are still wary.

So it is no wonder the issue of Varun Gandhi, a scion of India's powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a BJP election candidate, has reared its head in the state.

Gandhi has just been released from jail, accused of making an inflammatory "hate speech" against Muslims in March. Gandhi said video clips of his campaign rally were doctored in a political
conspiracy to tarnish his image.

The BJP has so far stuck by its candidate. Kumar, on the other hand, for a long time demanded legal action against Gandhi.

Enter Lalu Prasad, who told a rally he wanted to flatten Gandhi with a roller and said he would have done so if he were the country's home minister.

In a twist, local police in Bihar filed reports against Prasad for his speech against Gandhi.

The BJP in its manifesto also revived an old promise to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the northern town of Ayodhya, on a site revered by Hindus but disputed by Muslims.

Mobs tore down a 16th century mosque on the site in 1992, which led to Hindu-Muslim riots that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Analysts say the BJP's pledge will garner Hindu votes. But it won't necessarily help Kumar's attempts to woo Muslims, and he vocally opposed his ally's pledge:

"The BJP as a political party is free to hold its views on the Ram Temple and several other issues, but when we form a coalition government, no communal or contentious issue is on our agenda," he is quoted as saying.

Muslims in parts of India say they feel alienated from the rest of the country, often left behind by India's economic boom and tarnished by the same brush as Islamist militants.

In Bihar, though, communalism has not played a large role in the past, said Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute, who is based in the state.

He argues Hindus in Bihar have been split along caste lines to the extent that they do not present a united front in which communalism thrives.

"In the absence of a Hindu consolidation, communalism is not a very powerful force in Bihar."

But Varun Gandhi and the BJP have become a talking point in 2009. Prasad will try his hardest to keep Muslims on side, and what better way than to play up Kumar's ties with the BJP and the prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani?

"It's a contradiction that the chief minister has criticised Varun Gandhi but on the other hand supports the BJP and L.K. Advani," Ram Bachan Roy, a member of Prasad's party, told me. "L.K. Advani is an incarnation of communalism."

(Reuters photos of federal railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav and a Muslim voter)

The third annual list of “America’s Most Influential Rabbis” is out, with the top spot going to David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reformed Judaism and co-chair of the Coalition to Preserve Religious liberty.

Saperstein, described in the announcement as a ”Washington insider and political powerbroker,” took the No. 1 ranking away from Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who held that position on last year’s list.

The rankings were made by Jay Sanderson, chief executive officer of JTN Productions (the Jewish Television Network), Michael Lynton, chairman and head of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Gary Ginsberg, executive vice president of News Corp.

There are 50 rabbis on the list, which the executive say they drew up to provoke discussion about the role of religious leaders among Jews and non-Jews. Rounding out the top five were Mark Charendoff, president of the Jewish Funders Network, an international grouping of foundations and philanthropies; Yehuda Krinsky, global leader of the Chabad Lubavich movement; and David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College.

Anyone know if there’s a comparable global ”most influential” rabbi list? Who would be your top choice?

(Photo: Undated handout photo of America’s oldest continuously used synagogue west of the Mississippi/REUTERS STRINGER)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that a Utah city can refuse to put a religious group’s monument in a public park near a similar Ten Commandments display. You can see our story here.

The justices unanimously sided with the city of Pleasant Grove, which had said a ruling for the religious group would mean public parks across the country would have to allow privately donated monuments that express different views from those already on display.

The Summum religious group, founded in Salt Lake City in 1975, sought in 2003 to erect a monument to the tenets of its faith, called the “Seven Aphorisms,” in a park where there are other monuments, including a Ten Commandments display.

In the court’s opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said the placement of a permanent monument in a public park was not subject to scrutiny under the U.S. Constitution’s free-speech clause.

The public display of religious objects is a frequent flash point in America’s never-ending “culture wars.”

What do you think? Does the decision violate the group’s right to free speech? Or were attorneys for the city right in arguing that a favorable decision for the Summum group could force cities and states to remove long-standing monuments or result in public parks nationwide becoming cluttered with monuments.

(Photo: REUTERS/Jason Reed, June 27, 2005, USA)

Thousands of Shi’ite Muslims in southern Iraq are wrestling with a choice of religion or democracy before a pilgrimage which may prevent them from voting in elections to provincial councils on Saturday.

Pilgrims from the southern city of Basra are setting out on an arduous walk hundreds of km (miles) long to the holy Shi’ite city of Kerbala, far from the election centres where they are registered to vote. The pilgrimage for Arbain, or 40 days of mourning for the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Imam Hussein slain in battle at Kerbala in the 7th century, culminates in mid-February.

(Photo: Pilgrims in Kerbala for Arbain, 27 Feb 2008/Mohammed Ameen)

“Kerbala is more important than voting, and so far I haven’t seen any candidate that deserves my confidence. I still have no job after the last election,” said Mohammed Ali, one of a group of pilgrims at a roadside tent.

Read here the full story from Mohammed Abbas in Basra. Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau reported last week that Iraq’s religious parties could face a backlash at the polls because voters have tired of too much religion in politics.

Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau sees a possible drop in support for religious parties in Iraq:

BAGHDAD - When Iraqis last voted in 2005, some in Washington feared the mainly Muslim nation would veer in the direction of Iran, an Islamic theocracy, instead of becoming the moderate democracy they envisioned for post-Saddam Iraq.

The question when Iraqis elect new provincial leaders on January 31 will be whether the religious parties that have dominated politics since then can hang on to power despite a bitterness felt by voters starved of services and security.

“Religious parties didn’t keep their promises. They exploited our problems,” said Safaa Kadhim, a teacher in Basra, reflecting anger voiced across Iraq toward the major parties, mostly founded along sectarian lines and seen by many as corrupt and self-serving…

In an opinion poll by the government’s National Media Center in November, 68 percent of those questioned rejected the use of religious appeals in the campaign and 42 percent said they favored secular parties, while 31 percent supported religious parties.

Read the full story here.

(Photo: Election campaign posters in Baghdad’s Sadr City, 13 Jan, 2009/Kahtan al-Mesiary)

“Top 10 Stories” lists are a perennial feature,  especially in the United States (which explains a lot of the picks below). Now that they’re all out there, I took a quick look at the “Top 10 Religion Stories 2008″ lists to see if any pattern emerged. Of course one did: “It was the election, stupid.” Even a website dedicated to pagan news found a “pagans and politics” angle to top its list.

The Religion Newswriters Association, which polls member religion reporters, has been drawing up such lists for about 30 years. Election-related stories swept the top three slots last year. They did the same in 2004 as well, but the election shared the top spot back then with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ movie. The election-dominated lists show some divergences, but the most interesting compilations were the more specialised ones down in the second list below.

Here’s a quick list of the Top 10 lists, first those dominated by the U.S. election and then others I actually found more interesting:

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few months on this and other blogs about Barack Obama and religion. Looking back at it now that the campaign is over and he is starting to shape his administration, it’s interesting to see how many of those discussions shed little light on what he would actually do. There were comments about him being a hidden Muslim, for example, or not a real Christian. That speculation seemed based on thin evidence and the assumption he was running for preacher and cleric-in-chief rather than president and commander-in-chief. As a journalist covering religion in public life, after learning whether a candidate professes a certain faith, I want to know how that faith will really influence his or her decisions in office. This is not necessarily the same as listing the soundbite positions used on the campaign trail.

(Photo: Barack Obama at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, 15 June 2008/John Gress)

Seen from this point of view, probably the most interesting fact about Barack Obama’s religious views is one that rarely gets mentioned. It’s that he’s an admirer of the late American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). The President-elect has clearly named “America’s leading public theologian” as a major influence on his thinking. It comes out less in specific positions than in the way he looks at problems and discusses policies in terms with a ”Niebuhrian” ring about them.

In April 2007, Obama told David Brooks of the New York Times that Niebuhr was one of his favourite thinkers.  So I asked, What do you take away from him? Brooks asked:

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

Brooks noted that this was “a pretty good off-the-cuff summary” of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. Although written in 1952 during the Cold War (and recently republished), that short book reads today like a warning against what historian Andrew J. Bacevich calls “the evangelical moment in U.S. foreign policy” marked by “an urge to launch crusades against evil-doers.”

Since domestic issues are so different now, I asked Niebuhr’s biographer Richard Wightman Fox for his view of the theologian’s influence here. He first mentioned Niebuhr’s belief — which he shared with another Obama favourite, Abraham Lincoln — that God acts in history but human beings cannot know his plans. This puts limits on utopian aspirations and quick-fix approaches. “This is very much part of Obama’s sensibility,” Fox said.

(Photo: cover of The Irony of American History)

But both also have a larger vision behind their realism, he added, taking Obama’s economic plans as an example: “It’s about a sort of green New Deal. This is not just about economic stimulus or putting people back in their homes. It’s about a kind of social justice where the green revolution would actually make life better for the poor, the sick and the old who suffer disproportionately from environmental devastation.   He may not talk about that side of it as much as he talks about economic stimulus, but if we were to ask him what the Christian side or Niebuhrian side of his politics was, he would say something like this. There’s a vision behind the pragmatism.”

The Niebuhr perspective gives Fox a different view of another big blogosphere issue, Obama’s relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church. “He didn’t go there because it was racially inflected ministry. He went there because it was a social justice inflected ministry. It was the United Church of Christ, and therefore I don’t think he ever subscribed to the particularly racial view Wright had,” Fox said. “It’s much more a Niebuhrian vision, where social justice comes first, and that’s for everybody, not just blacks but other groups that are excluded.”

One big unanswered question is what a Niebuhrian outlook means for Obama when it comes to an issue like abortion. “I don’t recall Niebuhr ever weighing in on that. It never came up,” Fox said, noting that Niebuhr focused mostly on foreign policy in years before his death in 1971.  But Obama has spoken about the “moral dimension of abortion” and ways to reduce the level of abortions — remarks that are not usually heard from Democrats.

(Photo: University of Southern California history professor Richard Wightman Fox)

Niebuhr could be so nuanced in his positions that both conservatives and liberals cite him as an influence. During his campaign, Obama pleased liberals by pledging to pass the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) as soon as he became president, which would effectively scrap federal and state limits on abortion. This has become a major issue for anti-abortion activists, including the Roman Catholic Church, who are actively campaigning against it. Since being elected, though, several of Obama’s key appointments have pleased conservatives and disappointed liberals. Some observers think Obama has no real intention of pushing FOCA through when he has so many pressing economic issues before him.  Is he planning to finesse his position here to something more balanced, complex and, well … Niebuhrian?