Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider

This investigation focuses on a heavily mediatised debate that has been repeatedly reignited in India since the second half of the 1980s by the use of terms such as “pseudo-secularism”, “Hindu secularism” and, most recently, “neo-secularism”. The project investigates the conditions, actors and dynamics that are currently shaping the conflictual negotiation surrounding the status and meaning of the term “secularism” in the Indian context. The project assumes that the entanglement of ideas, discourses and practices can never be regarded as a completed historical process, but is instead a process that continues in the present, especially through international media and communications.

It has frequently been stated that a key difference between “Indian secularism” and Western guiding principles is that Indian secularism is less oriented towards the privatisation of religion, and instead focuses on state neutrality in religious matters and the equal treatment of religions in India. The ongoing debate surrounding the “crisis of secularism” in India over the past three decades makes it clear, however, that the Indian constitution is in no way the only normative point of reference for the manifestation and determination of prevailing guiding principles.

It is ironic that, over the last few decades, the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has, for example, continually attacked the “pseudo-secularism” of the Indian National Congress (INC), which it alleges has given India’s Muslim minority a privileged status and resulted in a failure to replace personal laws based on religion with a uniform civil code with a secular basis. It could be argued that the BJP’s calls for a uniform civil code as a prerequisite for “national integration” and successful modernisation have made substantial reference to laicistic policy, particularly that of the Kemalist modernisation project. Equally, the BJP’s discourse on integration has arguably been shaped by current, international media debates in Europe such as the headscarf debate in France and Germany.

The enormous popularity of both Narendra Modi and his ‘Gujarat economic success model’ contributed significantly to the BJP’s success in the 2014 parliamentary elections. The term “neo-secularism”, coined by Prime Minister Modi, is supposed to underline that Modi’s government recognises the principle of state neutrality in religious matters and the equal treatment of all religions. Despite this, the BJP-led government used a photocopy of the original preamble to the Indian constitution in an official Indian Republic Day advertisment in 2015, which did not include the two terms “socialist” and “secular” that were later added in the Forty-second Amendment of the Indian Constitution in 1976, thereby sparking the debate anew.