Secularism

The relation between religion and politics remains one of the important issues of our time. The discussions on this relation swing between two extremes: religious fundamentalism and liberal secularism. These are regarded as opposites. As the liberal perspective sees it, the secular state and its principles of neutrality and toleration are antidotes to religious fundamentalism[1]. Recently, this …

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy. Authored by SN Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover. For an alternative research programme (paradigm) for studying India, Indian culture and Indian culture, study Balagangadhara’s Reconceptualizing Indian Studies, published by OUP, India. There are few places in the contemporary world where the problems of cultural …

We all agree that events like the Gujarat riots are tragic and terrible. But what is the role of intellectuals in avoiding similar tragedies in the future? Why can’t religion be political? Obviously, the duty of the intellectual is to try and help us understand the nature of the events and the violence involved. In India and abroad, the concepts of ‘communalism’ and ‘communal violence’ are often …

Sasheej Hegde in his EPW article says: “A theory of secularism in the sense of a theory about possessing the concept ‘secular’ is quite distinct from a theory about how the concept secular represents.” It is downright incoherent. He obviously thinks that a theory about secularism (which is a political theory) is about ‘possessing the concept of the secular’ (which is a psychological theory about …

The theories (and discussions) about secularism constitute a test case for the claims advanced in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’ about the universalizing drive of religion. I have suggested that religion spreads by secularizing itself, and that the distinction between the secular and the religious is drawn by and within a religion. If this is the case, …

A text like my article on the secularism debate (EPW, September 28, 2002), is something more than a sequence of sentences. This is a scientific text, which builds an argument. Therefore, the different sentences have different status according to their function in the argument. Some are premises, and others state the conclusions that follow from these. Some sentences illustrate the point made, yet …

On the Indian Debate and Its Western Origins The rise of Hindutva has often been interpreted as a threat to the secular state. Similarly, the recent outbursts of Hindu-Muslim conflict are said to be related to the decay of secularism. The author argues that the concept of secularism is fundamentally obscure, since it is founded upon an arbitrary distinction between the religious and the secular. …

In the last few decades, “secularism” has become the subject of caustic debate in the Indian media. The dispute about the value of this idea to contemporary India is no longer confined to the academic circles. Politicians, journalists and others have strong views on the topic. Secularism regularly surfaces in newspaper articles, speeches and public meetings. The critics of the idea, however, are …

I want to go deeper into the claim of my earlier post that Shabnum Tejanis and Neera Chandhokes of this world do not think but merely talk. In other words, is it possible to identify the problems with their accounts (that explicates more clearly why I say that they do not think) in such a way that it is susceptible to some sort of solution? If, indeed, we can show that such people do not think and …

Consider the thought that ‘meanings’ (leave aside the distinction between words and sentences on the one hand and concepts and categories on the other) do not exist outside historical contexts. What exactly does this thought say? Begin with ‘historical context’. Either every situation that an individual human being finds himself is a ‘historical context’ (because human beings are always ‘in a …