The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism, and other Masks of Deculturation

1997 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashis Nandy
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
Extreme Form ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Ways Of Life

What follows is basically a series of propositions. It is not meant for academics grappling with the issue of ethnic and religious violence as a cognitive puzzle but for concerned intellectuals and grassroots activists trying, in the language of Gustavo Esteva, to “regenerate people's space.” The aim of the article is threefold: (1) To systematize some available insights into the problem of ethnic and communal violence in South Asia, particularly India, from the point of view of those who do not see communalism and secularism as sworn enemies but as the disowned doubles of each other; (2) To acknowledge, as part of the same exercise, that Hindu nationalism, like other such ethnonationalisms, is not an “extreme” form of Hinduism but a modernist creed that seeks to retool Hinduism, on behalf of the global nation-state system, into a national ideology and the Hindus into a “proper” nationality; (3) To hint at an approach to religious tolerance in a democratic polity that is not dismissive toward the ways of life, idioms, and modes of informal social and political analyses of the citizens, even when they happen to be unacquainted with—or inhospitable to—the ideology of secularism.

scholarly journals A Case Report On Vitriolage

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-338
Author(s):  
Tamanna Tasmin ◽  
Nasreen Akther ◽  
Asma Begum
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Case Report ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Psychological Abuse ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Extreme Form ◽  
Public Consciousness

Vitriolage is an extreme form of violence in Bangladesh. The alarming increase in its frequency is a cause of concern. Violence against woman within South Asia includes rape and sexual abuse, trafficking, prostitution, domestic violence, dowry related deaths and psychological abuse. The reported case is of a 25 years old lady affected by acid burn in her face and adjoining part of the head during night while she was sleeping. On medicolegal point of view, the injury was homicidal in nature to run away without having a motive to kill the person. We should create public consciousness against this sort of brutal act. Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol.19(2) 2020 p.336-338

Modi's stance on religious violence faces major tests

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
Political Career ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
Religious Plurality ◽  
Bharatiya Janata Party

Subject Outlook for communal politics and conflict. Significance Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces growing pressure to distance himself from the Hindu nationalist hard-right, with which he has been associated throughout his political career. This pressure has emerged both externally and internally: while US President Barack Obama during his official visit to India underlined the necessity of preserving India's religious plurality, the heavy defeat of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi state elections was seen partly as the electorate's rejection of Hindu nationalism. Impacts Delhi's ties with Dhaka could worsen if election campaigning in Assam results in acute anti-migrant/anti-Muslim violence. A major episode of communal violence would damage India's ties with Middle Eastern and Western partners. Hindu nationalist groups will pose a risk to Modi's policies on land and subsidies.

Inclusive vis-à-vis Exclusionary Constitution: An Analysis of the Current Constitutions of Nepal and Bhutan from Ethnic Lens

2021 ◽  
pp. 097639962097863
Author(s):  
Krishna Prasad Pandey
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
Large Section ◽  
Royal Decree ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
Democratic Rights ◽  
Political Economic

Nepal and Bhutan, two Shangri-las of South Asia, share similar geo-political features but substantially differ in terms of demographic size and ethno-political history. The Constitution of Nepal 2015 which was promulgated by the second Constituent Assembly formed in 2013 came up with its inclusive character as it secured reasonable space for the ethnic minorities and owned their political, economic and cultural concerns. On the contrary, Bhutan adopted a different course in terms of accommodating ethnic and minority aspirations, although the country has also chosen parliamentary democracy in a narrow sense since 2008. From constitutional point of view, Nepal’s move from a liberal to an inclusive constitution made strenuous effort to bring all sections of Nepali society on board but Bhutan’s shift from a royal decree to an exclusionary constitution consciously left a large section of minority behind by suppressing their legitimate claims for basic democratic rights. This article explores the inclusive and exclusionary characters of the current constitutions of these countries from ethnic perspective.

La citoyenneté et la construction de l'Europe : discussions théoriques

Res Publica ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-380
Author(s):  
Paul Magnette
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The European Union ◽  
World War ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
European Citizenship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

This paper examines the evolving ideological content of the concept of citizenship and particularly the challenges it faces as a consequence of the building of the European Union. From an epistemological point of view it is first argued that citizenship may be described as a dual concept: it is both a legal institution composed of the rights of the citizen as they are fixed at a certain moment of its history, and a normative ideal which embodies their political aspirations. As a result of this dual nature, citizenship is an essentially dynamicnotion, which is permanently evolving between a state of balance and change.  The history of this concept in contemporary political thought shows that, from the end of the second World War it had raised a synthesis of democratic, liberal and socialist values on the one hand, and that it was historically and logically bound to the Nation-State on the other hand. This double synthesis now seems to be contested, as the themes of the "crisis of the Nation State" and"crisis of the Welfare state" do indicate. The last part of this paper grapples with recent theoretical proposals of new forms of european citizenship, and argues that the concept of citizenship could be renovated and take its challenges into consideration by insisting on the duties and the procedures it contains.

Inclusion and exclusion—We and the Other. Response to Vamik Volkan’s Key-note Lecture

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mies
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Specific Group ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
German Nation ◽  
History Of

This response is focused on the following question: What may be the specific group analytic point of view on phenomena as the resurgence of nationalism in the western world, the so-called refugee crisis and the confrontation with Islamism and Islamist terror? The guideline of this response will be the idea of the ‘group of individuals’, which Norbert Elias characterized as his main contribution to group analytic theory. The response will emphasize the significance of the Other for the formation of personal and collective identities. It will argue that we face the Other, not only outside our own group, but also inside, and that xenophobia goes hand in hand with the denial of real differences and conflicts inside one’s own group. Finally, the history of the German nation-state is discussed as an exemplary case.

scholarly journals Recovering the Vertical

PhaenEx ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-85
Author(s):  
Michael Staudigl
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Phenomenological Point

This paper examines the relationship between religion and violence from a phenomenological point of view. In the context of the so-called "return of the religious" and the crisis of contemporary social imaginaries, it deals with the supposedly disruptive and liberating potentials of religion in general, and religious violence in particular. The discussion revolves around the concept of "verticality" as developed by A. Steinbock and offers a generative interpretation of verticality's liberating and transformative potentials. The paper proceeds to demonstrate how religion and violence are interrelated on a variety of levels. In conclusion the author argues that we need to understand the relationship between religion and violence in terms of its contingent actualization and display but must avoid pitting it down as an essential feqture of religious systems of knowledge and practice.

Geography, Genre, and Narrative in Kipling's Kim

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Emily Laskin
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Spatial Development ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Temporal Development ◽  
Geographic Regions

Abstract This article examines Kipling's 1901 novel Kim in light of the period's contemporary geopolitical events, arguing that the novel imagines both the end of the British Empire and a utopian state in which empire is static and eternal. The essay uncovers a parallel between the geographic regions on India's periphery, toward which the novel's action drives but which it never ultimately reaches, and two “developmental genres,” the picaresque and the bildungsroman, which the novel holds in tension. It argues further that whereas earlier studies of Kim and the bildungsroman have explained Kim's thwarted temporality as a novel about a period newly unmoored from the stabilizing concept of the nation-state, they do not account for the politicized space of Kipling's South Asia. This article shows that just as temporal development was becoming more open-ended and abstract, spatial development in the non-European world was becoming increasingly circumscribed. Kim therefore requires not just a youthful hero and a deferred Bildung but also an unreachable region—Central Asia, to India's north—and a thwarted picaresque narrative in order to represent the newly burgeoning globalized order.

The Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study of Ahmedabad in the 1980s

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 861-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
ORNIT SHANI
Keyword(s):  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
Muslim Minority ◽  
Shed Light

The massacre of Muslims in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat in February 2002 demonstrated the challenge of Hindu nationalism to India's democracy and secularism. There is increasing evidence to suggest that government officials openly aided the killings of the Muslim minority by members of militant Hindu organisations. The Gujarat government's intervention did little to stop the carnage. The communalism that was witnessed in 2002 had its roots in the mid-1980s. Since then, militant Hindu nationalism and recurring communal violence arose in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat. This study aims to shed light on the rise and nature of communalism since the mid-1980s.

Religion and Politics in South Asia

Worldview ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Donald Smith
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Geographical Region ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The West

The relation of religion and politics in South Asia is a subject of unusual complexity, with a richness of phenomena which at once intrigues and embarrasses. In the West we are concerned chiefly with the major branches of the Christian church; in South Asia we find a compact geographical region which is the meeting place of three major world religions. The majorities in the three most important South Asian countries, India, Pakistan and Ceylon, profess respectively Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism. From a comparative point of view it is important to note that the three countries share a similar colonial background: all three were part of the British Empire. British policies with respect to religion in undivided India and in Ceylon were not identical, but they did follow the same general lines.

Tangled Lands: Burma and India's Unfinished Separation, 1937–1948

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Bérénice Guyot-Réchard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Complex Networks ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies

In 1937, Burma formally separated from India. The separation might seem self-evident, given India and Burma's framing as distinct, bounded spaces. Yet, in the Patkai mountains straddling them, separation was a complex process with only a murky sense of finality, more problematic and contested than generally acknowledged. The border ran through similar groups and complex networks, which posed recurring problems for local inhabitants and frontier officials. As independence neared, colonial officials unsuccessfully tried to reshape the Patkai's territorialization. Viewed from the Patkai, the narrative of an amiable divorce between two ill-suited partners crumbles. The separation was one of several partitions that created bounded spaces across South Asia during the twentieth century. Seeing Burma and India as distinct others privileges spatio-cultural hierarchies rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship. This article foregrounds the need to explore how India and Burma were made against one another and recover alternative spatialities.

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