Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freedom of expression
Author	Sita Ram Goel Arun Shourie Koenraad Elst Ram Swarup
Country	India
Language	English
Publisher	Voice of India
Publication date	1998
ISBN	ISBN 81-85990-55-7

Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy is a book edited by Sita Ram Goel and which he published under his Voice of India imprint in 1998. The book contains previously published official documents of court cases and newspaper articles.

The book is about censorship and Freedom of Expression in India. It criticizes the banning of books and the what he considers to be the banning of criticism of certain religions in India.

[edit] Secularism and Theocracy

In the first part of the book, the banning of books, particularly of Ram Swarup's "Understanding Islam through Hadis", is discussed.

Sita Ram Goel discusses the concept of Indian secularism. He makes the claim that the term "Indian Secularism" was borrowed by India's first Prime Minister, Nehru, from Western political parlance, who, he says, "perverted it" to mean "the opposite of what it meant" in the West.

Secularism in the West was a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity and had meant a freeing of the State from the clutches of the Church. But according to Goel, Nehru "turned Secularism in India into a poisonous slogan for the use of a Muslim-Communist Christian combine which he had forged in order to keep the national majority down." The term became "a euphemism for Hindu-baiting".

[edit] Liberal Democracy

The second part of the book is called "Liberal Democracy" and contains twelve reviews of Ibn Warraq's book Why I Am Not A Muslim. Most of these reviews were originally published in the West.