Speaking the Nation ‘Secular’

Abstract

This chapter shows how Prime Ministers have profiled India as ‘secular’ and how the discursive production of Indian secularity converges with the staging of India’s emergence, both for the ‘outside’ world as also for those deemed as ‘Indian’. It investigates how the PMs translate the paradigm of secularism to the Indian population by showing which vocabulary is adopted to lend credibility to this claim, as well as how the Indian state, through the addresses of the elected head, positions itself vis-à-vis the wider world through the same concept. It follows from the analysis that the paradigmatic notion of secularism constitutes an interface, ‘a common shared boundary’, a zone of contact between the perceived ‘internal’ and ‘external’. In internal settings, it acquires different ambivalent understandings which draw their resources from the Indian context of religious pluralism. In the external settings, the term is used as such to concretize the image of India as being in ideological cohesion with the world as an ‘emerging’ yet ‘secular’ democracy.