Suchergebnisse

After fifty years of independence India maintains a constitutional
commitment to secularism. However, the practice of secularism in India is
now increasingly under attack. In the quest for electoral advantage, the
once-dominant Congress Party, made a series of choices that compromised
India's secular ethos. These choices enabled the explicitly anti-secular
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to dramatically expand its political base
through the pursuit of a blatantly anti-secular and majoritarian political
agenda. In recent years, as a direct consequence of the BJP's rhetoric
and policies, a range of religious minorities have been subjected to
discrimination and violence. Despite this adverse trend it is still
too early to ring the death-knell of Indian secularism. The growing
electoral strength of hitherto disenfranchised groups, the existence
of institutions committed to secularism and the continuing secular
constitutional dispensation offer some hope for sustaining the secular
order in India.

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.

A major source of the problems in recent discussions of the continued relevance to contemporary Indian political life of the secular state and the practices associated with secularism lies in the heavy burden that has been placed upon these terms. Secularism, properly speaking, is an orientation and a set of practices. However, in India, it has become an ideology seen as both contesting with Hindu communalism by those who uphold it, and as contesting against the faith of the Indian peoples by those who lately stand against it. Secularism as an orientation and a set of practices is indispensable to India's future as a liberal democracy. However, it loses its force as a binding principle of Indian unity if it is transformed into an ideology.

More than a century after Nietzsche's proclamation of the "death of God," some recent books speak alarmingly of "the revenge of God" and the prospect of a "new cold war"—a conflict pitting religious "fundamentalists" against agnostic secularists on a worldwide scale. Remembering the cultural struggles of nineteenthcentury Europe, one might say that today Kulturkampfhas been globalized. At this juncture it seems timely to reexamine the meaning of secularism and secularization and their relation to religious faith.