Articles by Rudolf C Heredia

Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action by Dennis Dalton; New York: Columbia University Press, 2012; pp xxiv + 311, $27.5 (paperback).

Communal Violence, Forced Migration and the State: Gujarat since 2002 by Sanjeevini Badigar Lokhande; New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015;pp xii + 215, price not indicated.

In society, art is in the domain of culture; equity is in that of structure. Any holistic transformation of a society must impact both these domains.

The idea of secularism as expressed in our Constitution and as articulated over the years through the political process is embedded in the concepts of equality and democracy rather than in the Western concept of secularism which denies religion any space in the public sphere. This secularism, admittedly, is a peculiar Indian invention. But it is one necessitated by the historical conditions of Indian society in which a modern democratic state is being introduced into a traditional and religious society by our national leadership and our Constitution makers at the time of independence. It demands an affirmation of religious freedom against religious oppression, of religious tolerance against religious chauvinism. What this calls for is an open-ended but value-committed dialogue between believers of various faiths and followers of different traditions in an "heretical response" to our present challenges, or in other words, in a search for collective alternatives to modernity and secularisation. Neither the "positive secularism" of the Hindu right, nor the Nehruvian version of the liberal left, nor the anti-secularism of the anti-modernist are able to provide an adequate basis for such a quest in the changing socio-religious situation of our times. Rather we need to recapture the inspiration of our freedom struggle as expressed in the vision of our Constitution.