Crisis of Secularism in India

Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

Description

While secularism has been integral to India's democracy for more than fifty years, its uses and limits are now being debated anew. Signs of a crisis in the relations between state, society, and religion include the violence directed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the precarious situation of India's minority religious groups more generally; the existence of personal laws that vary by religious community; the affiliation of political parties with fundamentalist religious organizations; and the rallying of a significant proportion of the diasporic Hindu community behind a resurgent nationalist Hinduism. There is a broad consensus that a crisis of secularism exists, but whether the state can resolve conflicts and ease tensions or is itself part of the problem is a matter of vigorous political and intellectual debate. In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading Indian cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.Scholars of history, anthropology, religion, politics, law, philosophy, and media studies take on a broad range of concerns. Some consider the history of secularism in India; others explore theoretical issues such as the relationship between secularism and democracy or the shortcomings of the categories "majority" and "minority." Contributors examine how the debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and the popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion. Together the essays inject insightful analysis into the fraught controversy about the shortcomings and uncertain future of secularism in the world today.Contributors. Flavia Agnes, Upendra Baxi, Shyam Benegal, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, V. Geetha, Sunil Khilnani, Nivedita Menon, Ashis Nandy, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Paula Richman, Sumit Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shabnum Tejani, Romila Thapar, Ravi S. Vasudevan, Gauri Viswanathan

Sujets

• India

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 18 janvier 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822388418
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Crisis Secularism India The of in

Crisis Secularism India The of in Edited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

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Duke University Press Durham and London 2007

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication information and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of Oberlin Shansi for the funds it provided toward the production of this book. Oberlin Shansi is an independent organization which operates on the Oberlin College campus and promotes understanding and communication between Asians and Americans.

CONTENTS

vii Preface xi Acknowledgments 1 IntroductionRajeswari Sunder Rajan and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

I. Secularism’s Historical Background 45 Reflections on the Category of Secularism in India: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Ethics of Communal Representation, c. 1931Shabnum Tejani 66 A View from the South: Ramasami’s Public Critique of Religion Paula Richman and V. Geetha 89 Nehru’s FaithSunil Khilnani

II. Secularism and Democracy

107 Closing the Debate on Secularism: A Personal StatementAshis Nandy 118 Living with SecularismNivedita Menon 141 The Contradictions of SecularismPartha Chatterjee 157 The Secular State and the Limits of DialogueGyanendra Pandey 177 Secular Nationalism, Hindutva, and the MinorityGyan Prakash

III. Sites of Secularism: Education, Media, and Cinema 191 Secularism, History, and Contemporary Politics in India

Romila Thapar

208 The Gujarat Experiment and Hindu National Realism: Lessons for SecularismArvind Rajagopal 225 Secularism and Popular Indian CinemaShyam Benegal 239 Neither State nor Faith: The Transcendental Significance of the CinemaRavi S. Vasudevan

IV. Secularism and Personal Law 267 Siting Secularism in the Uniform Civil Code: A ‘‘Riddle Wrapped Inside an Enigma’’?Upendra Baxi 294 The Supreme Court, the Media, and the Uniform Civil Code Debate in IndiaFlavia Agnes 316 Secularism and the Very Concept of LawAkeel Bilgrami

V. Conversion 333 Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu Nationalism Gauri Viswanathan 356 Christian Conversions, Hindutva, and SecularismSumit Sarkar 369 Appendix: Chronology of the Career of Secularism in India Dwaipayan Sen

373 Works Cited 397 Contributors 401 Index

viContents

PREFACE

This volume is the outcome of a major three-day conference, entitled ‘‘Siting Secularism,’’ held at Oberlin College, Ohio, in April 2002. The conference was hugely attended and the debates, publicity, and reflection that were generated by the issues it raised led us to envisage the production of this volume of ∞ essays (written, for the most part, by those who gave the plenary talks). Though conceptualized and planned well in advance of Godhra and post- Godhra events, the conference took place in their shadow, giving a particular urgency to the question of secularism in India that was being discussed over the three days in Oberlin. On February 27, 2002, some Muslims, it was al- leged, had attacked the Sabarmati Express at the Godhra railway station in Gujarat. The train was carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, the site of the Babri Masjid–Ramjanmabhoomi dispute. This incident provoked widespread attacks, presented as retaliatory violence, against Muslims in Ahmadabad and other places in Gujarat. Several factors distinguished the communal violence in Gujarat 2002 from earlier riots, including the degree and kind of violence perpetrated against the Muslims; the links between this violence and what was largely viewed as a Hindutva strategy deployed to garner electoral gains; and the state’s participa- tion in this violence. ‘‘Gujarat,’’ therefore, functions as an important referent in what is viewed by many as the most recent crisis of secularism and resonates as the occasion and framework for most of the essays collected in this volume. Of course, the significance of the violence in Gujarat is not restricted to its di√erence from

other instances of communal violence in India or even what it presaged for the future of the Indian polity. For Gujarat, however ‘‘locally’’ one may name it as an event and symptom, is crucially linked to the global situation as well— specifically the events of 9/11 in the United States that have legitimized Presi- dent Bush’s ‘‘war on terror.’’ Thus, the special urgency of our renewed focus on secularism in India derives from the ways in which Gujarat articulates with present-day local and global politics. Although Gujarat constitutes our point of departure for this volume, other narratives of the crisis of secularism in India point to other symptoms that it is also cognizant of. For example, the Emergency of 1975–77, when, ironi- cally, the term ‘‘secularism’’ first entered the constitution via the Forty-Second Amendment; theShah Bano case in the 1980s; the anti-Mandal agitation and the Babri-Masjid demolition in conjunction with the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in the 1990s. Indeed, some analyses of the crisis of secularism in India view it as integrally connected to, and a product of, the exclusions, elisions, and contradictions of the o≈cial nationalist imagining of an inde- pendent India, in which secularism was conceived as central to the project of national integration; while yet other analyses view this crisis as proceeding not from specific events but rather as inhering in the very concept of secular- ism. At present, no matter when or where these analyses locate the crisis of secularism, there is a wide consensus that the rise of the Hindu right, par- ticularly the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), in Indian politics has brought to the fore with considerable force interrogations about the adequacy of the guaran- tees o√ered by secularism to the safety and rights of minority communities. Gujarat 2002 as the most recent and exacerbated instance of this phenomenon provides both occasion and provocation for examining the ills that beset secularism and the projects connected to it in India. The most recent (April 2004) general elections in India, which installed a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (upa) at the center, defeating the bjp-led National Democratic Alliance (nda), are viewed by many as provid- ing the crucial breathing space within which a di√erent—perhaps renewed secular—politics may be articulated. However, few are sanguine about this, not least because the communalization intensified by, but not restricted to, the rise of the Hindu right in India is now deeply and pervasively entrenched and is likely therefore to require strenuous and sustained intervention in order to dislodge. One such set of interventions is provided by this volume. For though Gujarat has provided the occasion for the essays here, almost all of them are

viiiPreface

future-directed—diagnosing the ills that beset the projects of secularism in India, but providing as well sites for present and future transformations. This volume also sets out to take stock of the theoretical debates around the concept and program of Indian secularism, reflected in the following broad questions: Is secularism the solution it was envisioned to be for the multireligious Indian polity? If not, is it merely an inadequate solution? Or is it, instead, itself the problem? How may it be understood, clarified, and recast to serve the ends of the nation-state? The contradictions in the ideals, policies, and practices of secularism are in urgent need of further understanding, deliberation, and debate. We envisageThe Crisis of Secularismas an opportunity for such a retrospect, as well as an opening for productive interventions.

Note 1. This volume is not, however, the proceedings of the conference. Almost all the partici- pants have chosen to write entirely new essays, primarily as a result of the crisis pro- duced by the events in Gujarat. Not all the plenary speakers were able to contribute to this volume. Mushirul Hasan, Prasenjit Duara, and Kumkum Sangari are therefore regrettably absent from this collection. We have also included contributions from the following scholars who were not present at the conference: Flavia Agnes, Sunil Khil- nani, Sumit Sarkar, and Romila Thapar; Paula Richman invited V. Geetha to collaborate with her.

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