| Abstract: | The recent critique and outright dismissal of the concept and practice of secularism has not been informed by sustained historical and sociological analysis of Indian society. Critics of secularism have taken their theoretical and Indological abstractions too seriously and have paid scant attention to the complex relationship between ideologies and changing social structures and institutions. Their one-dimensional focus on religion per se has obscured the structural similarities between communal violence and other types of sectarian and ethnic conflicts. To accept the ideology of secularism is to accept the ideologies of progress and modernity as the new justification of domination, and the use of violence to achieve and sustain ideologies as the new opiates of the masses (Ashis Nandy, 1988:192). The principle of secularism basically demands symmetric treatment of different religious communities in politics and in the affairs of the state. It is not obvious why such symmetric treatment must somehow involve “the use of violence to achieve and sustain ideologies as the new opiates of the masses”…. There are good reasons to resist the contrary enticements that have been so plentifully offered recently. The winter of our discontent might not be giving away, right now, to a glorious summer, but the abandonment of secularism would make things far more wintry than they currently are (Amartya Sen, 1996:37–43). |
