Will Secular India Survive ?

Will Secular India Survive ?

Product ID: 13299

Normaler Preis
$60.25
Sonderpreis
$60.25
Normaler Preis
Ausverkauft
Einzelpreis
pro 

Shipping Note: This item usually arrives at your doorstep in 10-15 days

Author: Eminent Contributors
Editor(s): Mushirul Hasan
Publisher: ImprintOne
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 399
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188861006

Description

In the past decade, militant Hindu nationalism has emerged as a dominant political force in India, and it looks set to stay in the absence of a credible challenge from centrist and Left parties. The pursuit of an exclusivist agenda of cultural nationalism (Hindutva) by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena, and an assortment of other groups, that comprise the Sangh Parivar, is seen as a threat to India's pluralist traditions.

The liberal consensus that saw postcolonial India emerge as the only truly secular and democratic state in the subcontinent is now under threat. Religious minorities feel vulnerable in the wake of the widespread-and allegedly state-backed-communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 and the continuing campaign against Christian missionaries. They fear that their constitutionally guaranteed rights will be gradually eroded, and they will be reduced to second-class citizens for all practical purposes. Are these fears genuine? What is the actual condition of minorities under secular dispensations? In this book, some of India's leading academics and commentators discuss the issues that are likely to determine the future of secular India.

Examining the causes behind the use of Hindutva, this volume studies the role of secular parties and the Muslim leadership in precipitating what some believe is a Hindu backlash against a certain brand of secularism. It assesses the marginalization of minorities in education and jobs and how that has impacted on their place in Indian society, explores, in historical perspective, the BJP's intellectual agenda, and raises questions about the relationship between pluralism and political power in the context of minority rights.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
On Equal Conditions: Constitutions as Protectors of the Vulnerable
Re-presenting the Secular Agenda for India
Secularism and the Identity Trap
Anxieties, Identities, Complexity, Reality
In Bad Faith
The BJP's Intellectual Agenda:
Textbooks and Imagined History The Cast (e) of Anti-Secularism
Indian Politics t the Crossroads: Toward Elections 2004
Social Inequalities, Secularism and Minorities in India's Democracy
Whither Minorities Commission?
Muslims in Secular India: Problems and Prospects in Education
Prose after Gujarat: Violence, Secularism and Democracy in India
The Cry of the Terrorist: The Absentee Discourse of Social Humiliation
Notes from the Fourth Estate
Annotated Bibliography
List of Contributors