Talk:Indian secularism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject India, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of India-related topics. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page. |
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. |
 |
This article is maintained by the Indian politics workgroup. |
|
More information about this article...
|
|
The article text appears to be problematic and POV. It seems to deal with secularism in India, and not in South Asia at large. For example, secularism has a different meaning in Bangladesh or Pakistan than it does in India. Secularism in either India or South Asia is a broad and complex idealogy; the article text consists solely of criticism of Indian secular movements, e.g. "Secularists in South Asia consist of Hindu-born Marxists, Muslims and other people" appears to be a red-baiting, Muslim-baiting statement. The article seems to paint secularism in India as marginal, although self-declared secular political parties have ruled India for most of its history as an independent nation. I recommend either deletion, or a substantial rewrite, as the article as it stands is POV, mislabeled, and misleading. Anirvan 02:47, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
You're right in that this article talks only about secularism in the context of India, and that if it is to follow its title, that it should talk about the concept in other South Asian. But, as unfortunate as it is, the article's description of Indian secularism seems to be the correct one. For example, many Indian "secularists" tend to be people who support the standing separate penal codes for members of different religions. But I doubt that a secularist from, say, the United States or Great Britain, would want Catholics to have one penal code and Protestants to have another. This is because secularism implies the separation of church and state, and not favoring one religion over another or letting a government foster religious division between the governed, as Indian secularism has invariably done. My point: keep religion in the house and the church, temple, synagogue, mosque or whatever. That's secularism, but that's not its Indian variant.
