Summary of indian political theory by rajeev bhargav
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With the growth of Hindu nationalism and the consequent alienation of religious minorities, it is obvious that secularism in India is in crisis. The question is whether this crisis is due primarily to factors external to it, i.e. poorly practiced, in the wrong hands, undermined by inimical forces, or whether the cause of the crisis is internal to secularism itself, i.e. a deep conceptual flaw, a case of a wrong-footed ideal.
Indian Critiques of Secularism
T.N. Madan, Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee have argued that secularism in India is in crisis in the second deeper conceptual, sense.
Madan argues that “in the prevailing circumstances, secularism in South Asia as a generally shared credo of life is impossible, as a basis for state action impracticable, and as a blueprint for the foreseeable future impotent”[1]: impossible because a majority of the people in South Asia cannot make a distinction between the sacred and profane, as required by secularism, as they are deep adherents of some religious faith or other; impracticable because religion is pervasive and disestablishment of religion, predicated as it is on a particular mainstream Enlightenment view which sees religion as irrational, would be culturally unacceptable; and therefore, secularism is impotent to either fight fundamentalism — which, ironically, is a product of state-sponsored anti-religiosity (i.e., secularism) — or serve as a blueprint for political action.
Nandy draws a distinction between religion-as-faith and religion-as-ideology. The former refers to “a way of life, a tradition which is definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural” while the latter means “a sub-national, national or cross-national identifier of populations contesting for or protecting non-religious, usually political or socio-economic, interests”.[2] The crisis of secularism lies in the fact that modernisation creates religion-as-ideology, while ignoring religion-as-faith, and then generates secularism to meet this ideological challenge. The public/private distinction, so central to modern secularism, does not hold for the faithful and so, to ask people for whom religions hold immense importance to expunge their faith from the public realm is insensitive at best. At worst, it forces the communalisation of politics. Religion is forced, if you will, to enter public life through the back door.
Secularism, for Madan and Nandy, “is a comprehensive rationalist world view that, because of the incontestable irrationality of religion, seeks first the reversal of hierarchy between the secular and the religious and eventually the demise of religion altogether, its ejection from the belief systems of people”. It seeks to first depoliticise and then depublicise religion until it is thoroughly privatised.
Chatterjee’s analysis of secularism[3] is a little different. For him, secularism is guided by non-religious principles. It is characterised further by its commitment to neutrality towards religions. In other words, the project of active exclusion of religion from the public or political domain must be carried out in a non-preferential manner. Clearly, these have not been met by the secularism practiced in India. The state has intervened in the affairs of some religions more than others deviating from the norm of neutrality making it deserving of the charge of favouritism and minoritism. For example, it changed Hindu personal laws quite significantly: polygamy was made illegal, the right to divorce was introduced, child marriage was abolished, inter-caste marriages were legally recognized. But it has been non-interventionist with respect to Islam.
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