This paper attempts to do just this. It discusses in some detail how the nation, the cultural community and the relation between the two were imagined by historical actors in India. The author argues that a failure to achieve the objective of living within a single unified state is to be explained not just by economic and religious causes but by a lack of political imagnination shaped as it was by distinct conceptions of nation and community, as by differing emotions.
On the other hand, his place as a political philosopher is far less secure. It is non-communitarian. From this it does not follow that there are no secular communitarians and that to live together well we must prepare a gingerly mix of political secularism and nan-secular communitarianism. The pluralist version of ethical secularism which is both secular and communitarian is worth exploring and enriching.
Without the support of the ethical vision provided by the left, liberalism can be easily swept aside by racism, exclusivist nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Related South and Central Asia. Rajeev Bhargava's Profile. He is also professor emeritus at Georgetown University, where he previously taught in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies.
Library of Congress' John W. He has published works on a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory.
Equally, the state may engage with religion or disengage from it, engage positively or negatively, but it does so depending entirely on whether or not these values are promoted or undermined. A state that intervenes or refrains from interference on this basis keeps a principled distance from all religions. This is one constitutive idea of principled distance. This idea is different from strict neutrality, that is, the idea that the state may help or hinder all religions to an equal degree and in the same manner, that if it intervenes in one religion, it must also do so in others.
Rather, it rests upon a distinction explicitly drawn by the American philosopher Ronald Dworkin between equal treatment and treating everyone as an equal. T he principle of equal treatment, in the relevant political sense, requires that the state treat all its citizens equally in the relevant respect, for example, in the distribution of a resource or opportunity.
On the other hand, the principle of treating people as equals entails that every person or group is treated with equal concern and respect.
This second principle may sometimes require equal treatment, say equal distribution of resources, but it may also occasionally dictate unequal treatment. Treating people or groups as equals is entirely consistent with differential treatment. This idea is the second ingredient in what I have called principled distance.
I said that principled distance allows for differential treatment. What kind of treatment do I have in mind? First, religious groups have sought exemptions from practices in which states intervene by promulgating a law to be applied neutrally to the rest of society.
This demand for non-interference is made on the ground either that the law requires them to do things not permitted by their religion or prevents them from doing acts mandated by it.
For example, Sikhs demand exemptions from mandatory helmet laws and from police dress codes to accommodate religiously required turbans. Elsewhere, Jews seek exemptions from air force regulations to accommodate their yarmulkes. Muslim women and girls demand that the state not interfere in their religiously required chador. Jews and Muslims seek exemption from Sunday closing laws on the ground that this is not required by their religion. Principled distance allows that a practice that is banned or regulated in one culture may be permitted in the minority culture because of the distinctive status and meaning it has for its members.
F or many republican or liberal theories, this is a problem because of their simple, somewhat absolutist morality that gives overwhelming importance to one value, particularly to equal treatment or equal liberty. Religious groups may demand that the state refrain from interference in their practices, but they may equally demand that the state interfere in such a way as to give them special assistance so that these groups are also able to secure what other groups are able to routinely get by virtue of their social dominance in the political community.
It may grant authority to religious officials to perform legally binding marriages, to have their own rules or methods of obtaining a divorce, its rules about relations between ex-husbands and ex-wives, its way of defining a will, or its laws about postmortem allocation of property, arbitration of civil disputes, and even its method of establishing property rights. Principled distance allows the possibility of such policies on the grounds that it might be unfair to hold people accountable to an unfair law.
H owever, principled distance is not just a recipe for differential treatment in the form of special exemptions. It may even require state intervention in some religions more than in others, considering the historical and social conditions of all relevant religions. For the promotion of a particular value constitutive of secularism, some religion, relative to other religions, may require more interference from the state.
For example, suppose that the value to be advanced is social equality. This requires in part undermining caste hierarchies. If this is the aim of the state, then it may be required of the state that it interferes in caste-ridden Hinduism much more than say Islam or Christianity. However, if a diversity driven religious liberty is the value to be advanced by the state, then it may have to intervene in Christianity and Islam more than in Hinduism. If this is so, the state can neither strictly exclude considerations emanating from religion nor keep strict neutrality with respect to religion.
It cannot antecedently decide that it will always refrain from interfering in religions or that it will interfere in each equally. Indeed, it may not relate to every religion in society in exactly the same way or intervene in each religion to the same degree or in the same manner. To want to do so would be plainly absurd.
All it must ensure is that the relationship between the state and religions is guided by non-sectarian motives consistent with some values and principles. A state interfering in one religion more than in others does not automatically depart from secularism. Two objections might arise on reading this. First, it might be said: Look at the state of the subcontinent.
Look at India. How deeply divided it remains. What about the violence against Muslims in Gujarat and against Christians in Orissa? How can success be claimed for the Indian version of secularism?
I do not wish to underestimate the force of this objection. The secular ideal in India is in periodic crisis and is deeply contested. Besides, at the best of times, it generates as many problems as it solves. B ut it should not be forgotten that a secular state was set up in India despite the massacre and displacement of millions of people on ethno-religious grounds, and it has survived in a continuing context in which ethnic nationalism remains dominant throughout the world.
Practitioners of Indian secularism can learn from the institutional mechanisms set up by European states to prevent intergroup violence: some facets of the institutional basis of Indian secularism can be strengthened by the example of western states.
To consolidate its minimally decent character, India can still learn from the contemporary West. In any case, this account must not be read as an apologia for the Indian state but as a reasonable and sympathetic articulation of a conception that the Indian state frequently fails to realize.
My discussion is meant to focus on the comparative value of this conception and its potential for the future and not on how in fact it has fared in India. The fate of ideal conceptions with transcultural potential should not be decided purely on the basis of what happens to them in their place of origin.
S econd, it might be objected that I do not focus on the best practices of western states and emphasize the more vocal articulations of western secular conceptions. But that precisely is my point. The dominant conception of western secularism is derived from an idealized self-understanding of two of its versions rather than from the best practices of western states, including the practices of the U. It is my view that this doctrinal conception a obstructs an understanding of alternative conceptions worked out on the ground by morally sensitive political agents; and b by influencing politicians and citizens alike, it frequently distorts the practice of many western and non-western states.
Further, c it masks the many ways in which inter- or intra-religious domination persists in many western societies. Moreover, it is this conception that has travelled to all parts of the world and is a continuing source of misunderstanding of the value of secular states. My objective is to displace these conceptions or at least put them in their place. I hope to have demonstrated that there are at least two broad conceptions of secularism, one mainstream western the American and the French and the other which provides an alternative to it and is embodied in the Indian model.
Of these, the Indian conception has better ethical and moral potential to deal with deep religious diversity. I do not wish to suggest that this alternative model is found only in India. The Indian case is meant to show that such an alternative exists. It is not meant to resurrect a dichotomy between the West and the East. As I have mentioned, I am quite certain that this alternative version is embedded in the best practices of many states, including those European states that are deeply enamoured by mainstream conceptions of political secularism.
My objective in this essay is to draw attention to the frequent inability of ethical and political theorists to see the normative potential in the secular practices of these different states because they are obsessed with the normative value of mainstream conceptions.
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