Balagangadara is a philosopher who has consistently exposed the Christian theological foundations of liberal political theory. His works are very important starting point for Indians who wish to explore the causes of religious violence in India. Balagangadhara asserts that religious violence in India is a necessary consequence of the violence involved in importing and applying Western political theories in India which have not only arisen in opposition to Semitic religions but more importantly, as he shows, presuming their theologies. The framers of the Indian constitution took over the theory of liberal state as it emerged in the West and tried to transplant it into the Indian soil. In the process, they also endorsed the theological claim that religion is an issue of truth. While such a stance makes sense in a culture where the problem of religious tolerance arises because of the competing truth claims of the Semitic religions, it does not do the same in another cultural milieu where the pagan traditions are a living force. Consequently, the Indian state is subject to contradictory demands. It must look at the Hindu traditions the way the Semitic religions do, as we have argued, while simultaneously playing the ‘agnostic’ with respect to the issue whether religion itself is a matter of truth. The first impels it to legislate on the issue of conversion; the second compels it to remain ‘neutral’ and let the communities decide. The first stance results in violence generated and sustained by the state; the second stance forces the involved communities to solve this problem on their own. The first attitude results in forcing the interaction between the Semitic religions and the pagan traditions to take the form of religious rivalry; the second forces the state to withdraw Excerpt from the chapter The secular state and religious conflict from his book Reconceptualizing India Studies (OUP 2012). The same is also published as a paper in Journal of Political Philosophy (Rao, B., & De Roover, J. (2007). The secular state and religious conflict: liberal neutrality and the Indian case of pluralism. JOURNAL OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 15(1), 67–92). PDF file available for download from University of Gent website: https://biblio.ugent.be/input/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=364874&fileOId=1186659
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 06:50:39 +0000
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