As Indonesia passed the chairmanship of the Group of 20 (G-20) to India earlier this month, major Muslim and Hindu organisations, some backed by their governments, are battling to define the role of religion in global politics and whether the world’s significant faiths need reform to harness the power of their convictions.

The battle’s outcome could determine what constitutes religious moderation, the state’s role in defining what religion stands for, and whether notions of reform will involve significant jurisprudential and doctrinal reforms aimed at erasing concepts of supremacy and enhancing principles of pluralism and greater freedom.

The stage for the battle was set at the Religion Forum-20 (R-20), a gathering of religious leaders in Bali, earlier this month in advance of a summit of the Group of 20 that brought together leaders of the world’s major economies.

Like the summit that positioned Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country and the world’s largest Muslim democracy, as a rising power, the religious gathering positioned Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest and most moderate major Indonesian Muslim civil society organisation, as a leading force in defining moderate Islam and promoting concepts of genuine religious reform not only of Islam but also of other major faiths such as Hinduism.

From Nahdlatul Ulama’s perspective, jurisprudential reform of religious law is the key to positioning religion “as a source of solutions, not problems.”

Nahdlatul Ulama puts forward a strong proposition that it hopes will inspire other faith groups as the world continues to grope for a socially and politically pluralistic version of Islam in the wake of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

The movement promotes what it dubs Humanitarian Islam, that in contrast to state-driven attempts at moderation in autocracies such as Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, and the United Arab Emirates,  unambiguously embraces the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the principle of religious and political pluralism.

Moreover, Nahdlatul Ulama advocates reform of what it terms “obsolete” elements of Islamic jurisprudence.

On the back of being a grassroots movement with an estimated 90 million followers, 18,000 religious seminaries, 44 universities, tens of thousands of Muslim scholars that constitute a religious authority independent of traditional centers in the Middle East, and a political party that is part of Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s coalition government, Nahdlatul Ulama throws down a gauntlet for proponents of a state-controlled, autocratic Islam as well as religious nationalists in other faith groups.

Its proposition was bolstered in 2019 when the group took the first step towards jurisprudential reform with a ruling issued by 20,000 religious scholars that eliminated the category of the kafir or infidel in Islamic law.

Nahdlatul Ulama had hoped that gathering religious leaders in advance of this month’s G-20 summit would position reformist religious leaders as an institutionalised engagement group of the world’s most powerful political leaders and spark a movement that based on shared civilisational values would promote moderate and pluralistic expressions of religion across faith groups.

Less than a month after the religious gathering, that is proving to be easier said than done.

Rather than creating real buy-in from other major Muslim organisations, like Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled Muslim World League, whom Nahdlatul Ulama invited to co-host the religious summit, and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the right-wing Hindu nationalist group, that constitutes the ideological cradle of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the summit appears to have sparked a subtle power struggle below the semblance of a common goal.

The RSS and the BJP are widely seen as attempting to hollow out Indian democracy and secularism while instigating anti-Muslim sentiment in India, which is home to 200 million Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim minority.

Barely back from the religious summit, Ram Madhav, an RSS national executive member and close associate of Mr. Modi whom many see as a moderate, fired the first Indian salvo in the inter-faith power struggle as Indian officials and religious leaders conceptualise what they want to achieve at next year’s G-20 and what role religion and religious leaders may play.

Chipping away at Indonesia’s designation of the Religion Forum-20 as an official G-20 engagement group with a permanent secretariat hosted by Nahdlatul Ulama’s Jakarta and North Carolina-based Center for Shared Civilization Values (CSCV), Mr. Madhav was non-committal in his first public remarks after returning from Bali to India.

Mr. Madhav expressed a personal preference for maintaining the Religion Forum with the caveat that it remained unclear whether the gathering would be allowed to retain its official G-20 status.

“The (Indian) government will take an appropriate decision,” Mr. Madhav said in a television interview.

Mr. Madhav dodged the issue of religious reform, insisting that the “R-20 per se is not necessarily about religion, it’s about humanity.”

Spinning the R-20’s slogan of ensuring “that religion functions as a genuine and dynamic source of solutions, rather than problems,” Mr. Madhav suggested that religion could help solve global problems such as climate change and tackle what he described as “woke” issues “like LGBTQ; issues related to family, marriage, even gender;” rather than exercise introspection to eliminate problematic religious tenants as advocated by Nahdlatul Ulama.

“This forum was intended to discuss…global issues. In that sense, the focus of this…religious forum was and will not be religions alone… It will be not religion-centric but humanity-centric. So, an effort to bring religions together on larger issues,” Mr. Madhav said.

Similarly, the Muslim World League has used the R-20 to tout its own horn while paying lip service to lofty values Mr. Bin Salman would like to be identified with but has yet to embrace wholeheartedly.

“Leaders participating in the #R20Summit express their appreciation of the great efforts and quality work of the Muslim World League, under the leadership of His Excellency the Secretary General, Sheikh Dr. @MhmdAlissa, the founder of R20, whose efforts contributed to its success,”  the League said in a tweet that falsely took credit for an initiative that belonged wholly to Nahdlatul Ulama.

The Indonesian group invited the League after the Saudi government asked Indonesia to assist in carving out a role at the summit for Mr. Bin Salman’s chief propagator of a socially less restrictive but autocratic interpretation of Islam that demands absolute obedience to the ruler.

The invitation fit into a bold but risky strategy that also underlies Nahdlatul Ulama’s engagement with Hindu nationalism.

In the League’s case, Nahdlatul Ulama hopes the alliance will undercut Saudi and League support for an Indonesian political party associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).

Some analysts and pundits believe that a PKS-backed candidate could do well in the presidential elections scheduled foR-2024.

Moreover, like in the case of the Hindu nationalists, Nahdlatul Ulama aspires against all odds to persuade the League to adopt a genuinely moderate vision of Islam rather than one that serves Saudi Arabia’s autocratic rulers. However, that is a long shot, if not pie in the sky.

Instead, the League has since the religious summit capitalized on Nahdlatul Ulama’s dubious recognition of the Saudi government vehicle as an allegedly non-governmental organisation.

Furthermore, the League presumably seeks to prevent Nahdlatul Ulama from becoming a serious competitor for hearts and minds in the Muslim world through a policy of cooptation that fits into a broader Saudi and UAE effort aimed at seducing Indonesia with financial incentives.

In the latest move, Mr. Bin Salman last week offered to fund the restoration of the Jakarta Islamic Center after the large dome of the complex’s mosque suffered fire damage during renovation work.

Saudi Islamic Affairs Minister Abdullatif Al-Asheikh made no bones about the purpose of the funding. Mr. Al-Sheikh, according to Arab News, said the funding was in “the Kingdom’s interest in serving Islam and Muslims, based on its leadership in the Islamic world.”

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Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Dr. Muhammad Akram Zaheer

The Hindu nationalist project, as conceived by its founders in the 1920s, aims to create a Hindu state in which there is congruence between the main cultural force in Indian society and political power. Since the 1980s, this goal has been sublimated into policies to build a Ram temple in place of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, repealing article 370 of the constitution, which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and creating a uniform civilian body code that would abrogate Muslim personal law.

While previous BJP-led NDA governments have preferred to put these policies on the back burner, rather than promote cultural nationalism, the valorization of Hindu majority religion, language and history in everyday practices, under Modi there has been a clear shift in the valorization of Hindu majority religion, language and history in everyday practices, a redefinition of the sphere public, the secular space between state and society, in the language of Hindu nationalism.

In contrast to Nehru secularism, the post-independence India ideology associated with Jawaharlal Nehru, and the socialist outlook of the Congress, the icon of the contemporary BJP is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, whose Unity Charter was inaugurated by Modi in October 2018. These norms have been taken further by the Modi government in trying to control dissent. Feminists, radicals, writers, intellectuals, social activists and human rights defenders who have opposed government policies have been marginalized or physically attacked. Directly or indirectly, the government has used its influence in the media, particularly the burgeoning digital media, to unleash a tidal wave of sectarian Hindu nationalism as the official state ideology in which opponents are regularly labeled as anti-national. Sedition laws have been used against women, students, and political activists. Sangh parivar street activists: the family of Hindutva organizations that includes the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Vishva Hindu Parshad (VHP), Bajrang Dal (BD), Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS). ), and a wide variety of vigilante groups, have been regularly employed to discipline opponents, often resulting in physical confrontations or death.

There have also been intensive efforts to redefine citizenship by restricting the right of Indian citizenship to immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh to non-Muslims only. A bill proposing this change failed only because the BJP was unable to secure a majority in the Upper House State institutions have also been used to foster crude jingoism. In 2014, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s annual speech was broadcast live on the national television network, Doordarshan; and in October 2016, the College Scholarship Committee, in an official circular, called on affiliated universities and colleges to make a security pledge on Patel’s birth anniversary to commit to “preserving the unity, integrity, and security of the nation” in the presence of a freedom fighter who would speak of nationalism. This initiative came simultaneously with the government’s attempt to make it compulsory to play the national anthem in all cinemas before a film screening; and although this decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, it created an atmosphere of collective vigilantism against movie-goers who did not follow up the ruling with a reported case in Tamil Nadu. In seeking to redefine the public sphere as a non-secular space of majoritarian nationalism, the BJP and its ideologues argue that they are acting within the spirit of the constitution. So far, the initiatives taken by the government to water down Article 370, Muslim Personal Law, and to build a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Masjid, within the framework of the constitution, but the political results are sought out in line of the Hindutva agenda. Even the most key feature of the constitution, its state secularism, in the logic of Hindu nationalism, is being redefined from being “pseudo-secular” to “genuine secularism”. Gradually but inevitably, a new Hindutva republic is emerging in which there are no profound constitutional changes but where the “political processes” have already “begin to change”. The main antagonistic “other” of Hindu nationalism has been the religious minorities Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and Zoroastrians against whom the ideology of an ethnicized nation has been built. Traditionally, by making a distinction between religious minorities for whom India is a ‘holy land’ and ‘homeland’, and others, Hindu nationalists have tried to ‘assimilate the former within the broader pantheon of Hinduism and politically and socially exclude the latter as alien to India. This strategy has been applied vigorously in the BJP government’s policies towards minorities since 2014. Funding for minority development programs has been significantly reduced; policy initiatives undertaken by the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to improve equality and equity, especially for Muslims, in service delivery have been abandoned; Socioeconomically disadvantaged Christian and Muslim communities have been deliberately excluded from affirmative action, while that provision has been expanded to include the “poor” upper castes; and steps have been taken to restore legislative protections for scheduled castes and tribes against violence, in contrast to the denial of any equivalent protection to religious minorities, especially Muslims. These policies have also been carried out in an atmosphere of hostility, often emanating from the government itself. The Minister for Minority Affairs openly stated that “Muslims are not a minority and that the community’s concerns about security stemmed largely from a “psychosis of fear” that had taken hold of the Muslims of India. Similarly, the BJP’s Scheduled Caste Cell Secretary has urged poor Christians and Muslims to “convert back to Hinduism” if they wanted the benefits of the reserves. The campaigns orchestrated by the BJP mass organizations have had a far more debilitating impact on India’s religious minorities, particularly Muslims. Love Jihad was launched in Uttar Pradesh ahead of the and captured the national imagination as a fight against sexually rapacious Muslim youth who convert Hindu women to Islam through false declarations of love. Orchestrated by Yogi Adityanath, who later became the state’s Chief Minister in 2017 in a sweeping victory in the state’s elections, the campaign demonized interfaith marriages, framing it as an affront to traditional notions of patriarchy, family and community. Ghar wapsi emerged shortly after the election of the BJP government to convert Christians and Muslims to Hinduism, often with incentives such as ration cards to access state assets. It quickly turned into a debate about the need for national anti-conversion legislation to reinforce the highly restrictive freedom of religion legislation passed by many BJP state governments. Now it is time for the countries of the region to raise the issues arising from the Hindutva-driven policy in international and regional forums. The world community should not turn a blind eye to the continuing violations of human rights in India and Jammu and Kashmir.