Core themes of the regional team in India

The Indian part of the Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme focusses on two themes:

1. "Human Rights, Pluralism and Rethinking of the Secular State" and
2. "Faith and Diversity"

Human Rights, Pluralism and Rethinking the Secular State

This theme will engage with the challenges faced by the tradition of secular activism in India. The objectives of this activity include:

• Codifying and documenting the nature of data emerged from these activities and interventions with a view to provide a comprehensive archive of materials that indicate core political perspectives, social and legal strategies emerged from these interventions;
• Engage, with analytical objectivity, with the outcomes of processes of these interventions with the intention of help us rethink and strengthen those strategies and processes;
• Respond to what may appear as a highly politicised or trivialised debates on culture, identity and social conflict issues from knowledge activism vantage point to help reframe the terms of such debates and also provide broad-based understanding of those issues;
• More generally, to analytically reflect on the perspectives and strategies of secular activism and thought with a view to rethink constitutionalism and human rights to help energise them.

Current projects:

Under this theme, currently there are three kinds of activity being pursued:

1. Generating resource lists, materials and documentation of the existing secular activism is being done from the CSCS location.
2. A more focused study and documentation of social and legal strategies that emerged in the Gujarat 2002 and its aftermath is being pursued.
3. A focused study is being under preparation to understand the developments emerged over the last few years in the form of attacks on Christian faith in different parts of India. The focused work will at the first instance look into the socio-cultural contexts of Karnataka west coast.

Faith and Diversity

This theme will engage with the issue of ‘faith’, which has not been the focus of secular activism and thought in India, from two vantage points:

• The issue of globalisation and diversity of faiths and the emerging challenges within that context.
• Diversity in faith.

'Globalisation and diversity of faiths' is perhaps widely addressed in the western scholarship under various themes such as multiculturalism, identity politics and the problem of recognition etc. While these debates have some history and also numerically voluminous contributions, the predominant and somewhat uncritical liberal vantage point in majority of writings makes them vulnerable to recent reflections emerged from critical and the post-colonial vantage points. This has already complicated the dichotomised constructions such as the separation of the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’, for example, as the distinction between them is no longer perceived to be self-evidently opposing, and they are, in fact, related more intimately than what the liberal scholarship so far taken into cognisance. This has also opened up a number of issues around the theme of ‘faith’ itself.

The issue of 'diversity in faith' has been emphasized by social anthropologists for a while. However, the simplistic and often prejudiced stereotypes of the ‘religious other’ continue to predominate every discussion. This indicates the need to do new knowledge generation on the diversity issue within a faith, and its effective dissemination as an important requirement in the engagement with the idea of promoting pluralism in India.

Current projects:

Both these vantage points are being pursued through

1. collaborative activity with the Patna Collective, which currently focuses on ‘ethnographies of faith’ with the intended objective being documenting everydayness of religion/faith as mediated by categories of class, caste and gender and the consequent implications for the issue of faith in its socio-economic context; the field work is currently in progress
2. A review study on contemporary thought and action on multiculturalism and identity politics with a view to identify critical areas of reflection that need to be brought into contemporary theory and action.