ABSTRACT
Though the election of a Congress-led coalition has opened up new opportunities for secular space, only someone with a blinkered vision would assert that the growth of militant Hindu nationalism has been stalled and deny that secularism in India con tinues to be in crisis. However, an ambiguity lying at the very heart of this claim has not altogether been dispelled: is the crisis due primarily to external factors as when a good thing is undermined by forces always inimical to it, when it falls into incapable or wrong hands, when it is practised badly? Or, is it rather that the blemished practice is itself an effect of a deeper conceptual flaw, a bad case of a wrong footed ideal? Madan, Nandy and Chatterjee have all argued that the external threat to secularism is only a symptom of a deeper internal crisis. Secularism in their view has long faced an internal threat in the sense that the conceptual and normative structure of secularism is itself terribly flawed. In different ways, each argues that secularism is linked to a flawed modernization, to a mistaken view of rationality, to an impractical demand that reli gion be eliminated from public life, to an insufficient appreciation of the importance of communities in the life of people and a wholly exaggerated sense of the positive char acter of the modern state. In what follows, I try to argue against this view. I do not dispute their claims about modernity, rationality and the importance of religion and community. But I do disagree on their understanding of secularism and with their view that it is necessarily tied to a flawed modernist project. In particular, I contend that these critics fail to see that India developed a distinctively Indian and differently modem var iant of secularism. Ideals are rarely if ever and never simply transplanted from one cul tural context to another. They invariably adapt, sometimes so creatively to suit their new habitat that they seem unrecognizable. This is exactly what happened to secularism in India. Indian critics of secularism neither fully grasp the general conceptual stmcture of secularism nor properly understand its distinctive Indian variant. Indian secularism did not erect a strict wall of separation, but proposed instead a ‘principled distance’ between religion and state. Moreover, by balancing the claims of individuals and religious com munities, it never intended a bludgeoning privatization of religion. It also embodies a model of contextual moral reasoning. All these features that combine to form what I call contextual secularism remain screened off from the understanding of these critics.
