Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist

Front Cover
Penguin Books India, 2006 - Religion and state - 290 pages
In Confessions Of A Secular Fundamentalist, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Crusader For A Secular Credo, Calls For An Unambiguous And Decisive Restoration Of Secularism To The Core Of Our Nationhood. In Doing So, He Revisits Every Dimension Of Our Secular Ethos And Exposes The Various Myths Perpetuated By Communal Elements Of All Hues. Putting Under The Scanner Contentious Issues Like Conversions, Uniform Civil Code And Article 370, He Nails The Falsehood Underlying Terms Like Pseudo-Secularism , Appeasement And Soft Hindutva . And He Places The Domestic Debate Over Secularism In India In The Wider External Dimension By Discussing The Experiences Of Countries Like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Israel And Erstwhile Yugoslavia.

Admitting To Wearing His Secularism On His Sleeve, Aiyar Reasons That Only A Determined And Inflexible Adherence To Secularism Can Counter Religious Bigotry And Fundamentalism. Clear In His Convictions, With History, Logic And Persuasive Argument At His Command, This Is Mani Shankar Aiyar At His Best, On A Subject That We Can Ignore Only At Our Own Peril.
 

Contents

An Overview
1
The Ideological Dimension
17
The Historical Dimension
38
The Constitutional and Legal Dimensions
86
Secularism in a Time of Communal Activism
127
Secularism and the Indian Religious Minorities
178
The External Dimension
204
Why I am a Secular
243
QuestionsA Catechism for Communalists
254
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