Challenge before advocates of secularism is to focus on its 'contradictions and frailties': Ansari

The challenge before advocates of secularism as a constitutional value today is to focus on its "contradictions and frailties" and improve its framework, former vice president Hamid Ansari said.

He was addressing a gathering during an interactive session on the recently-launched book 'Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey, and the Future of Secularism' by Sumantra Bose at the India International Centre here today.

Ansari, who read out from a prepared text, said it was an "unusual book" and a study of two States, their systems of governance, not in terms of institutions but their ideologies and their underpinning.

He also quoted the opinion of the author as expressed in the book, on the idea of secularism in both the countries.

"On India's track record, the author observes that -- 'Indian secular state has been most compromised and damaged not by any widespread rejection among the ordinary Indians, of deeply-rooted and well pragmatic everyday ethics of tolerance which will respect co-existence of faith, but it has been comprised by the elites and leaders who have sworn by the principles of secularism'," he said.

The author also gives examples of 'compromises' and opines that the future of secularism in India rests on 'capacity of Indian secularists' to address the 'contradictions and frailties' that have emerged in practice and have 'benefitted the proponents of Hindutva despite their limited number', Ansari said, quoting the book.

"The challenge before advocates of secularism as a constitutional value today, is to focus on its contradictions and frailties and improve it framework... The alternative of a non-secular state would impinge on both equality and fraternity, and thereby on the very idea of justice as a primary social virtue," he said.

The book, published by the Cambridge University Press, is a pioneering comparative study of the two major attempts to build secular states - where the state's constitutional identity and fundamental character are not based on or derived from any religious faith - in the non-Western world.

Ansari said the book traces the "origins and impulses" that propelled the two States which opted for secularism as an intrinsic form of governance.

In the book, Bose, a professor of London School of Economics and Political Science, explains the origins, evolution and latterly the "decline of secularism as a core principle" of the state in India and Turkey.

"Turkish state-secularism took a culturally deracinated and harshly authoritarian form that led to its failure, whereas India's secular state - though flawed in practice - followed a culturally rooted and democratic path that makes secularism indispensable to India's future," Bose said.

On Turkey, the author describes the 'challenges' in society and polity as they develop over decades, intertwined with political changes involving 'democracy, dictatorship and authoritarianism', Ansari said.

There are similarities and there are differences between the two states -- India and Turkey, Ansari said.