Search results

The present paper seeks 'to explore the nature of Indian secularism, the difficulties it has run into, and the ways in which it may be revised'. This is a large undertaking for a short text, originally written as public lecture, particularly because the issues posed do nopt readily translate into plain questions. The most that I can hope to do is to raise some doubts and make a few suggestions for rethinking the issues involved.

Indian newspapers and academic journals assault their readers with stories of large-scale communal violence and of the communalization of India's political institutions. These stories are frequently accompanied by pious editorials which enact the well-known Indian ritual of paying lip-service to the concept of 'secularism'. Secularism is one question on which intellectuals have made common cause with social workers and politicians, joining them in meetings and seminars, even participating in the peace marches which are commonly organized in the aftermath of communal riots. There have even been occasions in which individuals who are known to have been involved, directly or otherwise, in communal battles, have participated in these rites of secularism.

Several critics of Indian secularism maintain that given the pervasive role of religion in the lives of the Indian people, secularism, defined as the separation of politics or the state from religion, is an intolerable, alien, modernist imposition on the Indian society. This, I argue, is a misreading of the Indian constitutional vision, which enjoins the state to be equally tolerant of all religions and which therefore requires the state to steer clear of both theocracy or fundamentalism and the "wall of separation" model of secularism. Regarding the dichotomy, which the critics draw between Nehruvian secularism and Gandhian religiosity, I suggest that what is distinctive to Indian secularism is the complementation or articulation between the democratic state and the politics of satya and ahimsa, whereby the relative autonomy of religion and politics from each other can be used for the moral-political reconstruction of both the religious traditions and the modern state.