The Politics of Secularism

This article analyzes how concepts of gender, gender equality, and secularism have been addressed by the higher judiciary in India in cases dealing with matters of religion. The discussion focuses on three landmark decisions of the Indian Supreme Court on gender equality. The cases involve challenges to discriminatory religious practices that target women in the Muslim-minority and Hindu-majority communities. In each case, gender equality is taken up in relation to religion in ways that produce several outcomes for women that are problematic rather than ones that are unequivocally progressive or transformative. The judicial reasoning in each case resonates with the Hindu Right's approach to gender, gender equality, and secularism. Each concept is used to advance the Hindu Right's majoritarian and ideological agenda, which seeks to establish India as a virile “Hindu” nation. Ironically, interventions by progressive groups, including feminist and human rights advocates opposed...

Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at “strengthening the family.” Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the “moral fabric of the family” and devaluation of “family values” in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in  fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals’ self-ascribed mission to “strengthen the family” emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members. [Keywords: Islam, television, media, family, family values, secularism, neoliberalism, Turkey]

You can download the paper at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670934

This article analyzes how concepts of gender, gender equality, and secularism have been addressed by the higher judiciary in India in cases dealing with matters of religion. The discussion focuses on three landmark decisions of the Indian Supreme Court on gender equality. The cases involve challenges to discriminatory religious practices that target women in the Muslim-minority and Hindu-majority communities. In each case, gender equality is taken up in relation to religion in ways that produce several outcomes for women that are problematic rather than ones that are unequivocally progressive or transformative. The judicial reasoning in each case resonates with the Hindu Right's approach to gender, gender equality, and secularism. Each concept is used to advance the Hindu Right's majoritarian and ideological agenda, which seeks to establish India as a virile "Hindu" nation. Ironically, interventions by progressive groups, including feminist and human rights advocates opposed to the Hindu Right's makeover of the Indian nation, have not proved to be disruptive of gender norms; nor have they pushed back the tides of Hindu (male) majoritarianism that are increasingly determining the terms of engagement on issues of gender and faith in law.
Keywords: secularism, Hindu Right, gender, equality, freedom of religion, religious majoritarianism.

With a view to analyzing the varieties of political secularism, this article takes into consideration four states - France, the USA, Turkey and India. State level initiatives in the formative phase relating to secularism have been scrutinized in the cases of France and the USA. How the main liberal political parties deal with the question of secularism has been analysed in the discussions on Turkey and India. The two political parties under scrutiny are the Republican People's Party (RPP) in Turkey and the Indian National Congress (INC).  This article attempts to conclude that in spite of similarities in the basic understanding of political secularism in the separation between religion and politics and state affairs, existing realities and historical trajectories shape the formation of definition, experiments and working of political secularism in a state.

D’innombrables ouvrages, articles, conférences et colloques ont traité – et traitent encore chaque année – de la complexe question des relations qui se tissent entre les groupes religieux et les États en Occident1, alors même que les deux entités se trouvent séparées de droit à travers des modèles variables de laïcité. En effet, malgré le caractère semblant désormais acquis de la laïcité dans cette région du monde, des influences continuent à s’exercer en continu entre religions et États à travers les relations qui les lient, qu’elles soient de nature régulatrice, d’influence ou encore mimétique. Bien que les avocats d’un abandon de la laïcité – même partiel – soient peu nombreux de nos jours, de leur côté, tant les acteurs étatiques que les acteurs religieux s’efforcent, à travers leur action, d’étendre un tant soit peu le pouvoir et l’influence de leurs entités respectives. De ce fait, des myriades de configurations possibles entre politique et religion se dessinent, au gré des acteurs, de leur culture et du contexte dans lequel ils évoluent.