ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with secularism in China and then with secularism in India in order to show what kind of problems secularist projects attempt to address and what kind of violence their interventions entail. Secularism is a forceful ideology when carried by political movements that capture both the imagination and the means to mobilize social energies. Secularism is the battle against the misconceptions of natural processes that keeps the illiterate masses in the dark and in the clutches of feudal rulers and clerics. The Chinese and Indian cases show us that secularism is not simply anti-religious in these societies, although there are anti-religious elements in it, but that it attempts to transform religions into moral sources of citizenship and national belonging. "Smash temples, build schools" is a particularly telling slogan that was used in a campaign against temple cults and religious specialists during reforms in late Ching at the end of the nineteenth century.
