Equality in Secularism

M. A. Bhat
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Abstract

The transnational legal literature has often approached secularism as a normative doctrine that organizes institutions regulating religion in public life. Scholarship on India is not an exception. Considerable ink has been spent on a normative and historical assessment of the content of secularism under the Indian constitution. The most influential accounts of secularism in India stress the uniqueness of the Indian constitutional experiment, interpreting it as principled, ameliorative and contextual. Nevertheless, this methodology may have blind spots. The Indian state institutions have often fallen short of the normative promise of secularism. Religion-inspired reasons – directly or through proxies – have come to dominate the legislative agenda.6 Institutions have not maintained their neutrality, among other things, in dealing with the concerns of security and protection of minority populations.The Indian literature has yet to consistently probe and problematize secularism’s ubiquitous inconsistency in the institutional mechanisms of the country. The chapter approaches Indian secularism from the perspective of social stratification, by focusing on the intersecting institutional debates on affirmative action for Muslims in India. I argue that Indian secularism, as a regulatory practice, is far more slippery and disjointed than most contemporary accounts may concede. Indian secularism is marked by patterns of contradictory constructions of what counts as ‘religious’ as opposed to ‘secular’. Thus, the everyday regulation of religious claims through secularism often does not offer a coherent normative content but is more of a negotiation with religious claims that are seen to be dangerous.
世俗主义中的平等
跨国法律文献经常将世俗主义视为一种规范性学说,它组织了规范公共生活中宗教的机构。关于印度的学术研究也不例外。对印度宪法下世俗主义内容的规范和历史评估已经花费了大量的笔墨。关于印度世俗主义的最具影响力的论述强调了印度宪法实验的独特性,将其解释为原则性、改良性和情境性。然而,这种方法可能存在盲点。印度的国家机构常常达不到世俗主义的规范承诺。宗教启发的原因——直接或通过代理人——已经开始主导立法议程除其他事项外,各机构在处理安全和保护少数民族人口方面没有保持中立。印度文学尚未始终如一地探索和质疑世俗主义在该国制度机制中普遍存在的不一致性。本章从社会分层的角度探讨印度世俗主义,重点关注印度穆斯林平权行动的交叉机构辩论。我认为,作为一种监管实践,印度的世俗主义远比大多数当代报道所承认的要狡猾和脱节得多。印度世俗主义以“宗教”与“世俗”对立的矛盾结构模式为特征。因此,通过世俗主义对宗教主张的日常监管往往没有提供连贯的规范性内容,而更多的是与被视为危险的宗教主张进行谈判。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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