Religious Practice and Democracy in India

Religious Practice and Democracy in India PDF Author: Pradeep K. Chhibber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139952560
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book demonstrates the close relationship between religion and democracy in India. Religious practice creates ties among citizens that can generate positive and democratic political outcomes. In pursuing this line of inquiry the book questions a dominant strand in some contemporary social sciences - that a religious denomination (Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and so on) is sufficient to explain the relationship between religion and politics or that religion and democracy are antithetical to each other. The book makes a strong case for studying religious practice and placing that practice in the panoply of other social practices and showing that religious practice is positively associated with democracy.

Religious Practice and Democracy in India

Religious Practice and Democracy in India PDF Author: Pradeep K. Chhibber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139952560
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book demonstrates the close relationship between religion and democracy in India. Religious practice creates ties among citizens that can generate positive and democratic political outcomes. In pursuing this line of inquiry the book questions a dominant strand in some contemporary social sciences - that a religious denomination (Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and so on) is sufficient to explain the relationship between religion and politics or that religion and democracy are antithetical to each other. The book makes a strong case for studying religious practice and placing that practice in the panoply of other social practices and showing that religious practice is positively associated with democracy.

Cultivating Democracy

Cultivating Democracy PDF Author: Mukulika Banerjee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197601898
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
An ethnographic study of Indian democracy that shows how agrarian life creates values of citizenship and active engagement that are essential for the cultivation of democracy. Cultivating Democracy provides a compelling ethnographic analysis of the relationship between formal political institutions and everyday citizenship in rural India. Banerjee draws on deep engagement with the people and social life in two West Bengal villages from 1998-2013, during election campaigns and in the times between, to show how the micro-politics of their day-to-day life builds active engagement with the macro-politics of state and nation. Her sensitive analysis focuses on several "events" in the life of the villages shows how India's agrarian rural society helps create practices and conceptual space for these citizens to be effective participants in India's great democratic exercises. Specifically, she shows how the villagers' creative practices around their kinship, farming and religion, while navigating encounters with local communist cadres, constitute a vital and continuing cultivation of those republican virtues of cooperation, civility, solidarity and vigilance which the visionary Ambedkar considered essential for the success of Indian democracy. At a time when so much of that constitutional vision is under threat, this book provides a crucial scholarly rebuttal to all, on Right or Left, who dismiss rural citizens' political capacities and democratic values. This book will appeal to anyone interested in India's political culture and future, its rural society, or the continuing relevance of political anthropology.

Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy

Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy PDF Author: David M. Elcott
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268200599
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy highlights the use of religious identity to fuel the rise of illiberal, nationalist, and populist democracy. In Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy, David Elcott, C. Colt Anderson, Tobias Cremer, and Volker Haarmann present a pragmatic and modernist exploration of how religion engages in the public square. Elcott and his co-authors are concerned about the ways religious identity is being used to foster the exclusion of individuals and communities from citizenship, political representation, and a role in determining public policy. They examine the ways religious identity is weaponized to fuel populist revolts against a political, social, and economic order that values democracy in a global and strikingly diverse world. Included is a history and political analysis of religion, politics, and policies in Europe and the United States that foster this illiberal rebellion. The authors explore what constitutes a constructive religious voice in the political arena, even in nurturing patriotism and democracy, and what undermines and threatens liberal democracies. To lay the groundwork for a religious response, the book offers chapters showing how Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism can nourish liberal democracy. The authors encourage people of faith to promote foundational support for the institutions and values of the democratic enterprise from within their own religious traditions and to stand against the hostility and cruelty that historically have resulted when religious zealotry and state power combine. Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy is intended for readers who value democracy and are concerned about growing threats to it, and especially for people of faith and religious leaders, as well as for scholars of political science, religion, and democracy.

Secular States, Religious Politics

Secular States, Religious Politics PDF Author: Sumantra Bose
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108472036
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Presents a comparative study of two major attempts to build secular states - India and Turkey - in the non-Western world

The Crisis of Secularism in India

The Crisis of Secularism in India PDF Author: Anuradha Dingwaney Needham
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822338468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.

The Clash Within

The Clash Within PDF Author: Martha NUSSBAUM
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674041569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history.

Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism

Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism PDF Author: Karen Barkey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019753001X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A collection of essays that situates and furthers contemporary debates around the prospects of democracy in diverse societies within and beyond the West. Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism examines the relationship between the functioning of democracy and the prior existence of religious plurality in three societies outside the West: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. All three societies had on one hand deep religious diversity and on the other long histories as imperial states that responded to religious diversity through their specific pre-modern imperial institutions. Each country has followed a unique historical trajectory with regard to crafting democratic institutions to deal with such extreme diversity. The volume focuses on three core themes: historical trends before the modern state's emergence that had lasting effects; the genealogies of both the state and religion in politics and law; and the problem of violence toward and domination over religious out-groups. Volume editors Karen Barkey, Sudipta Kaviarj, and Vatsal Naresh have gathered a group of leading scholars across political science, sociology, history, and law to examine this multifaceted topic. Together, they illuminate various trajectories of political thought, state policy, and the exercise of social power during and following a transition to democracy. Just as importantly, they ask us to reflexively examine the political categories and models that shape our understanding of what has unfolded in South Asia and Turkey.

Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism

Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism PDF Author: Jakob de Roover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199460977
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Even though the crisis of secularism was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil political religion. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.

Gods in the Time of Democracy

Gods in the Time of Democracy PDF Author: Kajri Jain
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012889
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”

Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective

Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective PDF Author: J. Christopher Soper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107189438
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Offers a new framework for understanding how religion and nationalism interact across diverse countries and religious traditions.