Religion, politics and governance in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Tanzania: an overview

Abstract

This comparative analysis of the relationships between religion, politics and governance in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Tanzania draws on research undertaken as part of a wider research programme on religions and development. The starting point for these studies was the need to examine the implication of the ‘return of religion’ for ‘good governance’, in particular the extent to which religious actors (religious communities, faith based organizations and religious political parties) help or hinder development, especially with respect to pro-poor policy and practice.

Each country study provided a historical evaluation of state-religion relationships since independence and detailed case studies of religious actors that assess contemporary patterns of governance and engagement with politics. The analysis draws on the sociological principle of differentiation between politics and religion, set within the comparative historical context of the post-colonial state. What emerges is the gradual demise of the secular state to a condition today in which there are strong pressures towards conflictual relationships between politics and religion in highly differentiated polities and consensual relationships in integrationist (low differentiated) polities. These pressures, moreover, are reflected in the electoral mobilization of religious identities; state co-option of religious demands; modes of
resistance by marginalized groups through ‘religions of revolution’; and, post-9/11, new discourses and policy innovations centred on religious identities. Historically, the ‘crisis of governance’ in these states from the late 1970s onwards played a critical role in undermining the coalition of social and political forces that had underpinned the post-colonial secular state, in the process creating new public spaces for religious actors to occupy.