It is widely recognised that political secularism, virtually everywhere in the world, is in crisis. It is also acknowledged that to overcome this crisis, secularism needs to be reimagined and reconceptualised. This article takes the first few steps towards doing so. It argues, first, that we need to move away from the standard church-state models of secularism and begin to focus instead on secularism as a response to deep religious diversity. Second, it claims that diversity must be understood as enmeshed in power relations, and therefore the hidden potential of religion-related domination must be explicitly acknowledged. Third, these two moves enable us to view secularism as a response to two forms of institutionalised religious domination, inter- and intra-religious. This way of conceiving secularism rebukes the charge that secularism is intrinsically anti-religious. Secularism is not against religion; it opposes institutionalised religious domination. Finally, the article argues that this conception entails that a secular state shows critical respect to all religious and philosophical world views, possible only when it adopts a policy of principled distance towards all of them.

If it is true that emotions must be brought back into social science then to begin doing so, surely no better site exists than the study of nation-building. This paper attempts to do just this. It discusses in some detail how the nation, the cultural community and the relation between the two were imagined by historical actors in India. The author argues that a failure to achieve the objective of living within a single unified state is to be explained not just by economic and religious causes but by a lack of political imagnination shaped as it was by distinct conceptions of nation and community, as by differing emotions.

Rajeev Bhargava Political secularism has little or no conception of community. It is non-communitarian. From this it does not follow that there are no secular communitarians and that to live together well we must prepare a gingerly mix of political secularism and nan-secular communitarianism. The pluralist version of ethical secularism which is both secular and communitarian is worth exploring and enriching.