Religion in public space: Two centuries of a problem in governance in modern India

Global Sceptical Publics

“…The widespread criticism of this prescriptive model for its lack of empirical significance was taken up in Habermas's later proposal of the 'post-secular', which, however, fails to fully transcend the normative and liberal binaries inherent in his theory (see Casanova 2013;Cooke 2010). For South Asia, even more than elsewhere, it has been argued that many publics are structured both religiously and, more specifically, communally, for a number of historical and structural reasons, many of which are rooted in colonial policy (Embree 2002;Scott and Ingram 2015). They range from the partial intersection of language or print communities with religious affiliation 12 to legal pluralism and the significance of contested religious nationalisms that are partially a legacy of the divide-and-rule policy, including the two-state solution of the British colonial government.…”