Talk:Secularism in India

NPOV Problems
The article is dominant with arguments and references favoring a negative view of secularism in India. Requesting editors to incorporate both sides of the controversy proportionately in compliance with Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy. Solatido 05:40, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Small Change
Replaced the wording of "Religious conversion is a hot issue in India" to "Religious conversion are a contentious issue in India" - That I hope you will agree makes it sound less like a Magazine or tabloid article.

POV problems
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.

I've edited the article and added historical and philosophical analysis of the subject. The article accords with academic scholarship on the historical development of secularism in India and seeks to give a neutral account of the different perspectives and situation of it in India. As the title of the article conveys, it need not deal with secularism in the whole of South Asia for which other related articles may occupy their space.Platonic (talk) 14:30, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Secularism in India has had a completely different meaning from the standard meaning for separation of state from the church, which is a European concept. In fact, secularism in India predates even the Moghul and British rule of India. Secularism in the Indian context is to accommodate all religious points of view including atheism and to ensure that there are no religious persecution. So, I vote for keeping the Wiki Page titled as Secularism in India, which has kept its ancient roots while embracing modern (or contemporary) style of governance. I vote as such for the same of objectivity, which is the spirit of Wikipedia.

Overlinking
I just removed an amazing amount of overlinking. How amazing? Several hundred links. The thing is. Wikilinking is wonderful. But we should not link every instance of every word. This has a good discussion of what should be linked and what shouldn't be. 2, 3 or 4 links is fine. (Literally) 100 of just "English" is not. --User:Woohookitty Diamming fool! 09:26, 5 March 2009 (UTC) that is not for in made in Indian country, see in all over world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.111.105.154 (talk) 10:47, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Manual_of_Style/Linking says that linking is very important and requests its people to take care to avoid overlinking and underlinking. Care is to be taken while adding and removing links. Removing too many links from a complex topic such as this can result in inaccurate description of reality or history.

Split
This is a hulking beast of an article at about 119 kilobytes, much larger than the recommended size. I'm not sure how best to do it, but we should probably split this off into a few smaller articles per Summary style. Any suggestions? -- Explodicle (T/C) 16:49, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the article is long. I have split the article into sections, viz:

User:Platonic Guardian (talk) 03:53, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * History of Indian Secularism
 * Views on Indian Secularism
 * Religious Conversions in India

The section on History of Indian Secularism was split as follows in order to keep it readable and coherent.

* Secularism in Feudal India * Secularism and Caste System in India * Secularism during British colonialism * Secularism after British colonialism (talk) 10:34, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Creative Commons problem
Ok, it looks like we've got a problem. This source is under the Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India license. That "noncommercial" detail makes it incompatible with the GFDL, so we can't just cut and paste. We're going to have to either completely rewrite or delete these articles: I feel like a jerk doing this right after everything got split up per my suggestion and I'm very sorry, but right now it's violating copyright. -- Explodicle (T/C) 19:44, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * History of Indian secularism
 * Religious conversions in India
 * Views on Indian secularism

Merge proposal
I propose that pseudo-secularism be merged into this article, as I don't believe that article satisfies notability, in particular WP:NEO. There is only one reference using that term, and a subsection of this article devoted to the topic should suffice. Let me know your views. S Pat  talk 18:34, 9 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Definitely not neologism any more - the term finds 4800+ mentions on Google Books, minus the Wikipedia references. Also, I believe that the term is used outside India as well, though not as widely (and maybe not in the same context). A few examples -- Rachid al-Ghannouchi, Guy Haarscher and Leon McKenzie / R. Michael Harton. utcursch | talk 03:55, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Religious laws binding?
The leading paragraph of the article mentions that the Indian secularism envisages that "religious laws are binding on the State". This is a major fallacy, as far as I can see. In the first place, there is nothing in the Indian Constitution that says that religious laws are binding on the State. The State is entirely free to legislate whatever laws it sees fit, as long as they don't impinge on the "freedom of religion" (which is a fundamental right). Secondly, even if there were to be some bounds on the State, nobody would argue that it is part of "Indian secularism" to have such bounds. What do the references Smith and Larson say in support of the statement in the paragraph? Uday Reddy (talk) 17:46, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The recent good faith edit claiming "Muslim Indians have Sharia-based Muslim Personal Law, while Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and have their separate religious laws. There are separate laws for Hindus, Christians, Parsis etc in India. Info mentioned is incorrect" is based precisely on this confusion. Many people are under the misconception that there are separate religious laws in India.  There aren't.  This is only one religious law, viz., the Muslim Personal Law.  All other people are under the common law.  Claiming that "religious laws are binding on the state" exacerbates this confusion. Uday Reddy (talk) 19:33, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
 * That IP edit said something in the summary but added altogether a different conflicting statement. All I know that the Directive Principles mention Uniform Civil Code, I don't know anything about whether it's binding on the state, no anything mentioned in the Constitution of this sort. I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say, we do have personal laws for every major religion concerning domestic issues but also have a common criminal law from what I read.
 * Oh shoot. The given refs don't even have a page no, but here is a google book link to Larson. Try searching, I guess we could {verify} tag it and then remove it later. Does it seem like a possible case of misrepresenting the source? -Ugog Nizdast (talk) 10:16, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Yup, that is the problem. I don't find any mention of "binding" in the Larson book, or the allusion to the 1939 DMMA as setting a precedent for superceding the common laws.  The answer might lie in the Smith's book, which is not on Google books, but I could get it from my library if necessary. I don't actually buy the Smith's contention that there is some kind of fundamental inconsistency between a secular state and separate civil laws for different religious communities.  The inconsistency is really between secular state and religious laws.  (The point the IP edit was making was that there is nothing special about the Muslim Personal law being a religious law because other communities have religious laws too.  He is wrong of course because the so-named "Hindu laws" are not religious laws; they are common laws.  This kind of POV is likely to be pushed repeatedly.)  Uday Reddy (talk) 14:13, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Ronald Inden
I have removed the following content from the article that attributed views to Inden that I could not find in the cited source: "Others, particularly historian Ronald Inden, have also observed that the Indian government is not really "secular", but one that selectively discriminates against Hindu communities while superficially appeasing Muslim leaders (without actually providing any community or theological benefits to regular Muslims in India). He writes that poorly educated Indian so-called "intelligentsia" identify Indian "secularism" with anti-Hinduism and even a tacit Islamophobia. He also cites that often, leftist governments in India (such as in the Indian state of West Bengal) covertly support madrassa curricula for Muslims, helping traditional Islamic scholarship and teaching fundamentalism in "Islamic" disguise. (Added Up: Another view can be seen in the terminology used by Ronald Inden as Islamophobia is that the Government of India had a responsibility for the Islam minority who stayed back in India during the partition) )"

I have left in a direct quote from Inden's text. If someone can find views matching the above somewhere else in Inden's writing, please link to it here so that we can discuss what can and should be added back to the article. Abecedare (talk) 20:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 29 August 2019 and 5 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ordinarynao. Peer reviewers: Conner.hobson, Kumakaa.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 08:53, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Please check the validity of this statement in the current version
"For example, the minimum age of marriage for girls is 18 for Hindu and Christian Indians, while the personal law according to sharia allows Muslim Indians to marry a girl less than 12 years old"-Looks lik thi is factually incorrect & is propaganda based. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 43.224.129.74 (talk) 22:27, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

secularism means separation of religious powers from the state (govt)and give religious freedom to all their citizens — Preceding unsigned comment added by 223.182.17.168 (talk) 10:41, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

New WP:UNDUE content in the lead
, Wikipedia is written through WP:CONSENSUS. All new content is reviewed and vetted by fellow editors, and and the WP:ONUS for its inclusion rests on you, as the contributor, to demonstrate that it belongs in the article. WP:Edit warring will get you bocked.

The edit history indicates that you have edit warred with four different editors over the last few months, , ,. All without any discussion.

And your last edit summary is ridiculous, because my revert had said clearly: "MOS:LEAD is supposed to summarise the article". Did you see the edit summary? Did you read MOS:LEAD? If so, can you explain how your editing is in line with its requirements? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:34, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

POV
User:Kautilya3 recently removed some amboxes that I placed at the head of the article. Here is why I believe that these amboxes are needed.

T:POV: The article is clearly written from the point of view of an anti-secularist. There have been multiple issues raised with this article's content over the years (expressed in previous sections), and most of these remain unresolved.

T:Essay: The article is much more like an essay, to argue the POV outlined. There are multiple instances where the article attempts to argue that secularism is merely a front for "muslim appeasement", such as in this passage:
 * Supporters state that any attempt to introduce a uniform civil code, that is equal laws for every citizen irrespective of his or her religion, would impose majoritarian Hindu sensibilities and ideals. Critics state that India's acceptance of Sharia and religious laws violates the principle of Equality before the law.

This section is basically implying that equality for all religions is not what secularism is, when in fact that is exactly what it is. There is certainly valid criticism regarding the implementation of secularism, but passages like this clearly demonstrate POV.

T:Rewrite: Much of the content in the lead section belongs in the "Criticism" section.

As for the split template, that one's not debatable (there's a split discussion at Talk:Pseudo-secularism).

For this reason, I have readded the amboxes. YttriumShrew (talk) 23:06, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Political theory
Discuss nature of secularism in Indian context 2409:4065:D0E:8038:0:0:3C0A:BC04 (talk) 02:19, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

Incomplete discussion of non-secular laws
This article does not mention several elements of Indian law that discriminate among different religions. They are summarized in an Economic Times article by Ashwini Anand. Please look into his points. I am willing to research them and cite legal references, if asked to. Sooku (talk) 07:51, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * You need to find scholarly sources for these kind of issues. This book is a good starting point:
 * -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:25, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:25, 22 August 2022 (UTC)