Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (By Sumantra Bose)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism by Sumantra Bose James M. Dorsey (bio) Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism Sumantra Bose Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 380 Pages. When Sumantra Bose was researching and writing Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism, there is no doubt that the question of whether religious parties with an anti-secular vision of nationhood had an impact, since India and Turkey were non-Western societies. Bose, scion of a prominent Indian political family, demonstrates that the rise of intolerant, anti-pluralistic religious parties has little to do with either colonialism or immediate post-independence political systems. He attributes the rise of sectarianism to the fact that non-Western states like Turkey and India never adopted the Western principle of separation of church and state, and bases their secularism on the principle of state intervention, and regulation of the religious sphere. Bose notes that although modern Turkey was an authoritarian state carved out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, while secularism in India was rooted in culture and a democratic, pluralistic form of government, the two countries' adoption of secularism was considered a success story for the longest period of time. This changed recently, however, with the rise of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. The break with secularism in two countries with different political systems and histories and their embrace of majoritarianism, cloaked in the [End Page 96] terminology of nationalism, suggests that the fate in non-Western societies of religious and/or ethnic pluralism, which ensures societal inclusion and equal rights, is not related to any one political system. The fact that secularism was not embedded in a state that was agnostic towards religion, and had no regulatory role in the spiritual realm explains more accurately how and why secularism was derailed in Turkey and India. Bose explains that the abandonment of secularism by the Turkish and Indian states was enabled by the fact that they were both legally and constitutionally able to act intrusively and regularly in religious issues and institutions, thereby creating excessive predicaments between religion and state. Unlike the Indian independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who saw its multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious demography as a driver of a secularism which had a soft spot for a tolerant Hinduism, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the visionary who carved modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, had no such confidence in his country's ability to sustain secularism. In Ataturk's view, state-control of the religious sphere served to enforce secularism as a pre-condition for anchoring Turkey in the European West as a full-fledged member of a civilized world, ensuring that Islam would not be a defining factor in the formation of national identity. Kemalism amounted to a rejection of key elements of Turkish history and culture. As a result, secularism in Turkey became identified with repression and authoritarianism in the wake of the 1924 abolition of the Caliphate and the repression of ethnic and religious minority identities associated with Kurds and heterodox Muslim Alevis. Pockmarked by military interventions, secularism was increasingly associated with restriction of religious freedom and excessive social control by the government. Bose notes the main problem with the Turkish Republic is that the plural nature of its society is at odds with the state. He cautions that Erdogan's replacement of secularist authoritarianism with an equally anti-liberal and anti-secular ideology is not unlike Kemalist's state-centrism, which concentrated power and politics around a strongman leader. In contrast, Bose also notes that Modi, operating in an environment of greater decentralization that was pluralistic and viewed diversity as an asset in the quest for development, repackaged developmental concepts pursued by his Congress Party predecessors as an expression of majoritarian Hindu nationalism, or what the writer terms as Hindutava 2.0, an upgraded version of the BJP's Hindu nationalist ideology. Modi enhanced his voter-base by reaching out and empowering the predominantly Hindu lower castes that...