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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Ronojoy Sen, Asia Research Institute and Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Was there political secularism in ancient India? Yes, an ancient Indian secularism, if the term can be used anachronistically. At any rate, a conception was conceived that belong to a family of concepts of which modern Indian secularism is a member too. For several millennia, India has not only had deep religious and philosophical diversity but robust, morally defensible, political responses to it. One such response is found in the edicts of Emperor Asoka (3rd century B.C.E) in which an explicit attempt was made to  conceive a pluralist policy of Dhamma that could provide the common foundation of coexistence of different and conflicting religious and philosophical groups (pasandas). The paper argues that Asoka’s conception and policy of Dhamma cannot be properly understood unless we vividly imagine the background conditions within which it emerged. The ambition of a new public morality widely endorsed by all affected groups could not have been possible without the pressing need to come up with a novel initiative in conditions of acute conflict among rival world views. At the centre of these struggles were bitter disputations between predominantly one-world oriented practioners of ritual sacrifice and those who opposed such violent rituals and sought a new transcendental, world-negating morality for all. The availability of new conceptual resources forged during these disputes made it possible to devise a new policy that, though not guaranteed to succeed, gave the hope for a durable principled coexistence between groups engaged in fierce verbal disputes. This new political morality placed at the centre a series of self and other-related self-restraints. Only the simultaneous exercise of these new voluntary  constraints could ensure amicable collective living. This policy might be called ‘toleration’ but only by a massive change in its dominant meaning. On standard interpretations, toleration involves the privatization of ill will or hatred. Both must be neutralized if not expunged. However, this new notion implies no such thing. Quite the contrary, for it presupposes in the background something closer to good will and respect. This is closer to modern Indian notions of secularism which requires crucial respect of all religious and philosophical view points than it is to notions of toleration, western or Indian.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Rajeev Bhargava is Professor and former Director of CSDS., Delhi (2007-2104). He  was Professor, JNU, New Delhi (1980-2005), and was Head, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi (2001-2005). He is Honorary Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford and Professorial Fellow, ACU, Sydney. He has been a Fellow at Harvard University, University of Bristol, Institute of Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, and the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He has also been Distinguished Resident Scholar, Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia University, and Asia Chair at Sciences Po, Paris.

Bhargava’s publications include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010), and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010). His edited works are Secularism and Its Critics (1998) and Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (2008). His work on secularism and methodological individualism is internationally acclaimed.

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