Indian Secularism and Its Challenges
Abstract
[...] Jaffrelot's essay traces the trajectory of the current crisis of Indian secularism, documenting the demise of principled distance and impartiality toward religious minorities and majorities in the relevant court decisions from the mid-1980s onward. The equation of Hinduism with Hinduvta, Hindu nationalist ideology, began to penetrate those decisions and to undermine Indian secularism by entrenching an ethno-religious, exclusionary version of national identity and of the Indian "cultural" way of life at the expense of religious minorities' equal citizenship and equal standing in the polity. He considers two competing explanatory approaches to the crisis of Indian secularism: one culturalist, the other political, and clearly favors the latter. [...]