But yes, religion seems to be a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card these days - people and organizations get away with a lot of shady stuff under the disguise of religion and something really needs to be done about it.
>But yes, religion seems to be a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card these days - people and organizations get away with a lot of shady stuff under the disguise of religion and something really needs to be done about it.
Well that was my point: secularist impulses are often rejected, especially in the anglosphere. The people who could do something are often prevented from doing so, while religious orders are free to leave broken lives in their wake.
France doesn't understand freedom of religion, a fundamental human right which they have pledged to uphold. Take the french school headscarf ban or the stupid outrage about the Burkini
They believe in not forcing people to follow a state religion. That’s not the same as letting people do whatever they want because “religion”.
It’s not like most religions believe in freedom of religion anyway. The same people who argue for the right to wear certain headwear belong to a religion that prescribes the death penalty for apostasy.
Perhaps there are valid concerns that many women are being forced to cover themselves against their will, but are unable to do much about it. I havent studied this spesific issue enough to say either way, but I am not clear where your certainty is coming from.
ha
Unless you wish to wear religious articles.
As an indian, I have to somewhat disagree. I find the idea of secularism beautiful and necessary for a democracy but the french way of implementing it uncomfortable and some what extremist (but understand their historic roots).
Secularism in India is certainly inspired by US and European democracy (especially France), but is not similar:
The Court also discussed the concept of "Indian Secularism", which was said to be based on "equal tolerance of all religions". Indian Secularism was distinct from Western Secularism as it is not anti-religious. It gives to all its citizens equal freedom of conscience and religion.
In practice, this means that the state doesn't believe it has to compete with religious ideas for its existence.
So it doesn't mind if you display your religious identity in a government office or in public schools. So unlike France (and some other European states) that would frown on a Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim displaying their respective Gods or religion's symbols or even praying in government office, all these practices are quite common in India.
One of the idea behind this is that people tend to view the unfamiliar with suspicion and distrust.
And religion also introduces certain cultural beliefs in a society. Thus, in a multi-cultural and multi-religious country like ours, restricting cultural practices can create intolerance - people are generally more accepting of each other when they are exposed to each others culture, including religious ones, and understand it.
Thus, not being "anti-religious" is especially helpful for the majority to understand the minority, and the minority to be comfortable in the society because everyone is encouraged to treat differing beliefs with tolerance (if not acceptance).
Another reasoning is that the state understands that every human also aspires to spiritually develop. (The state doesn't consider spiritual development as necessarily religious in nature, but recognizes that it is the majority practice). Thus, indian secularism focuses on inclusiveness and equality by treating everyone as a spiritual being, and thus eschews being anti-religious.
Instead of forcing any religious reforms from the top, it encourages reformists to work with the respective section of society for the changes they seek. Only when they have gained a certain momentum do they start considering it as political issue which needs legislative intervention. (Over the past 100 years, this is how Indian society has slowly done away with retrograde religious practices). This slow approach is necessary to make the reforms more acceptable and lasting in society.
We could use the Guillotine too, but look at Turkey now after its staunch secularist leader who enforced secularism using state power, passed away ... if secularism doesn't come from society, it cannot survive. We in India too are now facing the same issue as the political party in power tries to push a religious identity on to our country and make many think that the ideas of secularism is not needed in India.
In case you want to know how bad it is, the ones the most oppressed and poor are the lower caste hindus, and even now, it's illegal for a lower caste hindu to open and run school exclusively for lower caste hindus even with his own money. It's not just that state won't do it, but it has made it illegal for individual citizens to do it as well. Remember these are the folks with no money, no land and no connections. Their only means for social mobility is education. Meanwhile, a christian or muslim does it, he/she gets state funding, and the upper caste hindus are well off and connected. It's just caste system with extra steps. Of course this is well supported by upper caste hindus, muslims and christians - the old elite class.
Aside from that, hindu temples and institutions are managed by the state and taxed, while other religions gets absolute freedom to run their institutions however - taxfree. Again, this is relic of colonial briton who really wanted to control the hindus as the main opposition to the raj came in the form of hindu nationalism.
It's a religious apartheid state against the poor hindus - a relic of colonialism happily continued by the Indian elites who wielded power once the british left most likely because they hated the poor hindus even more than the british themselves.
Due to the real danger of right-wing religious fundamentalism in India, the constitution of India does dictate that the government administrate some of the major religious institutes of the majority.
The reasoning is simple:
1. They can only administrate and not interfere in the religious affairs of the institutions.
2. This prevents the hijacking of the institutes by religious fundamentalists who can divert the huge funds donated, for political purposes.
3. India being a majority Hindu country, will always have majority Hindus in power. Thus, the religious institutes will always be managed by a Hindu.
4. Part of the funds donated to such religious institutes are ear marked for charitable purposes. People expect this to be fairly used, and trust the elected government to oversee this with strict rules and regulations.
5. Minority religions too have similar government administrative oversights to ensure that their donated funds are not misused in any manner. However, their religious institutions are rightly allowed to be run by members of their own community.
So why are the majority religious right-wing in India pissed by this? For them, the only right Hindu eligible to manage temples is a Hindu approved by them. And they hate the fact that government appointed secular Hindus prevent them from taking over the religious institutes and (mis)using them for political purposes.
>Due to the real danger of right-wing religious fundamentalism in India, the constitution of India does dictate that the government administrate some of the major religious institutes of the majority.
and there is real danger of religious fundamentalism among muslims, christians, sikhs, parsis.. you name it. In fact, if you look at instances of religious fundamentalism, both christian and muslim fundamentalism vastly outnumber anything from everyone else combined. It's nothing but bigotry that you justify discrimination based on religious identity. Especially when your argument is "fundamentalism" - given you want to discriminate all hindus based on the expectation that some would be fundamentalist? This is pure bigotry, and your own religious extremism that wants to discriminate every single hindu. Remember it's the lower caste hindus who are not only poor, but discriminated and oppressed for good thousand years, and you want to discriminate and oppress the more? because some hindus might be fundamentalist? what kind of bigoted thought is that?
anyway, let's look at the rest of the arguments.
>. They can only administrate and not interfere in the religious affairs of the institutions.
You cannot administer temples without interfering in religious affairs - as they are for only religious purposes. But that's not it. It's fundamental right - every where in the world - to be able to run your own religious affairs. Secondly, government oversight and management leads to plunder of Hindu religious institutions and temples by those appointed by the government. Almost every single major temple has lost it's lands and wealth. Wealth that should have been used to start schools, hospitals and colleges - things that are useful for the devotee base. The political appointees are given exorbitant salaries while temple affairs are ignored (hell in 2018, tamilnadu priests had to approach the high court to increase their monthly salary from RS 20 - almost a third of a dollar - https://www.thehindu.com/society/faith/petition-on-temple-pr...)
>2. This prevents the hijacking of the institutes by religious fundamentalists who can divert the huge funds donated, for political purposes.
I already covered this in my first para. Use this logic on your own religious affairs and see how you feel. It's nothing but bigoted excuse for religious discrimination.
>3. India being a majority Hindu country, will always have majority Hindus in power. Thus, the religious institutes will always be managed by a Hindu.
Nope.Patently false. The temples and institutions are managed by state governments. Almost every tamil nadu, kerala goverments have been openly inimical of hindu affairs. True for current Andhra government too. Sometimes the appointees are not even hindu. In fact the last government put a christian in charge of Tirumala affairs, and had to change it after public outrage. So, just not true.
A hindu politician in power means nothing to me as a lower caste hindu. Again, it doesn't matter. It's a fundamental right - anywhere in the world - to be able to manage your own religious affairs. I also want to address the "hindu majority" part - organized minority always wins against unorganized divided majority. The upper caste were minority. The hordes of islamic invaders who committed unspeakable horrors on native Indias were minority. The british who colonized entire India were minority. The europeans who conquered and genocided the natives in the Americas and Australia were minority. Also, Hindu community isn't monolithic. It's thousands of languages, millions of gods, even more traditions that wary within a few kilo meters, even more sacred texts - all collectively given a name. Hindu, Sindhu, India all have the same linguistic root. Viewing all of that with a single collectively identity is the work of Christianity and Islam - non Indic thoughts. It's like calling everyone on earth "people".
I also want to address your majority/minority thing. Why do you view everyone through the prism of religious believes/identity? Why not left handed person vs right handed ones? coffee lovers vs tea lovers? football vs cricket? Just because religious believes and identity is important to you and you view the world through the prism of religious believes doesn't mean the world should run based on it. It definitely shouldn't mean laws should be based on that. The only reason i speak on behalf of hindu rights is because the poor lower caste hindus who were oppressed for a millennia are discriminated even now based on their religious identity. Otherwise, who cares? Keep your religious believes to yourself and let others have theirs.
>4. Part of the funds donated to such religious institutes are ear marked for charitable purposes. People expect this to be fairly used, and trust the elected government to oversee this with strict rules and regulations.
Again, upto every single institution to prioritize things important to them. What is priority for your community maynot be what is priority for others. If you think government oversight is so good, do it for everyone. All I am asking is for equality. No discrimination. If I donate to a temple, I am donating to that temple/deity. This is not charity. Again, maybe different for you, but that is fine. Don't generalize and apply your worldview on others. That's the literal definition of religious fundamentalism - that even others live your religious code.
>5. Minority religions too have similar government administrative oversights to ensure that their donated funds are not misused in any manner.
No they don't. I know instances of Sunday masses and mosque committees openly campaigning for chosen political candidates. Article 29/30 gives you absolute freedom to run religious institutions and affairs however you want. Then you have article 25, NCMEI, and a slew of local bodies. Not saying it's good or bad, but this is what it is.
>So why are the majority religious right-wing in India pissed by this? For them, the only right Hindu eligible to manage temples is a Hindu approved by them. And they hate the fact that government appointed secular Hindus prevent them from taking over the religious institutes and (mis)using them for political purposes.
Ahh yes. Every hindu voicing about discrimination is because he is "right-wing". Never mind it's oppressing the ones who were already oppressed for good thousand years. Never mind overwhelming majority of the Hindus is impoverished. Never mind the only means for social mobility for vast majority of them is education, and these bigoted discriminatory laws prevent opening schools. I want you to look at your own sentence and replace "hindu" with your religious identity.
I also want to address a few points mentioned in your other post.
1) secularism is a function of state. Individuals aren't secular. In India, it's just code for non hindu, or a hindu that isn't religious.
2) caste schools - if you are so concerned, why not minority status for the lower caste hindus?
3) 50% - patently false. There are islamic schools where i am from that is 100% muslims. Schools which start at early morning and ends at 6 PM evening. Schools that kids young as 6 year old go in purdah. I want to know where you got the 50% from?
4) Hindus are allowed to operate schools - yes, but making it practically impossible with article 25, 29, 30, RTE and 93rd amendment. Also, as a dalit who escaped the system, it's ILLEGAL for me to start a school for impoverished and ignored dalit kids, as RTE forbids me in screening kids. Now if you argue this is to prevent upper caste only schools, then the same must be applicable to Muslims only schools and Christians only schools. Also, read point 2. Do the same exceptions for lower caste hindus.
I want to end this long post by saying that if you want to discriminate based on religious believes/identity, then you are a bigoted religious supremacist. No two ways about it.
That is a false propaganda spread by the right-wing because the indian constitution also permits the government to oversees the administration of even the minority religious institutes by framing laws and regulations. And they do so. (Some states even have a whole ministry and their own state laws added to it).
E.g:
- Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee - This organisation is governed by the Chief Minister of Punjab (an elected politician) and is entrusted with the security and maintenance of all Gurudwaras and religious places of importance of the Sikhs. Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1971 defines how Sikh's religious institutes can be administered in the Delhi union territory.
- Waqf Act (1954 and 1995) and the Central Waqf Council of India: The religious and charitable institutions of muslims are administered by Waqfs (Trusts). The Central Waqf Council is headed by a Union Minister, along with 20 other members appointed by the Government of India. They oversee the administration of all the musim waqfs in India, creating the rules and guidelines and advising the state bodies. (By the way, there are now 30 government run Waqf boards in 28 states and other UTs in India).
- Indian Church Act, 1927 - Till it was repealed in 1960, it dictated the rules on administration of Churches. No new law replaced it. One of the reason being that that Christians forms less than 3% of the population and they often choose to register their movable and immovable properties under the the Societies Registration Act, and not under the Religious Endowment Act or The Charitable and Religious Trust Act, 1920. Thus, many of them come under the more stringent NGO laws in India, voluntary, and are managed more professionally. (After a recent scandal on misuse of church funds and properties in Kerala, the Kerala government plans to introduce a law to oversee their activities more stringently - https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kerala-draft-bill-regu... ).
So understand clearly that such arguments and propaganda of the right-wing that only Hindu religious institutes are governed by the Government of India is an absolute lie. Their real anger is with the fact that they cannot take-over the Temples and manage and misuse it for their political purposes. It has nothing to do with "secularism".
All the rest of your arguments that you believe and are just plain lies of the right-wing, without an iota of truth in them (some are facts that you have been misled into believing is wrong). I can point out the actual facts to you if you cite your sources for them.
Please don't do anything like this on HN again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
But it was hijacked and derailed. As I have pointed out to you before, it's a tactic of the right-wing online to deliberately generate controversies on ideas they don't like and then abuse the reporting tools to get it removed if they can't browbeat the original poster.
I mention this not to pick an argument with the mods here but to make you recognize this pattern.
If other comments are egregious, flag them and/or let us know at [email protected] and we'll take a look.
I can see how one can conclude that. But I replied to a post with honest intention (it hadn't been flagged, and I assumed secularism was a "safe" topic :). But it wasn't certainly on the topic, and I'll keep that in mind from now before contributing.
1) in the case of temples, the money to run it comes from devotees, but the complete administration is done by the government. This means government hires and fires the employees, decides the salaries, have complete oversight of the money incoming and outgoing, decides what to do with the money. All of this is funded by the temple devotees.
I don't know much about gurudwara, and by own admissions, church act is null and void, but i can speak for waqf and mosques. Mosques have zero external interference. It's run by mosque committees formed of the local Muslim community elders. How is this even comparable?
As for waqf comitte, let's see. Sure they have namesake goverment appointee. But he does nothing in terms of setting the agenda on the waqf properties and institutions' administrations. They are completely decided by the Muslim community leaders who form bulk of the committee. They not only have complete independence on administration, in some cases (for eg: in kerala) their salary comes from state exchequer. So just to reiterate, temples are completely run by the state government with the funding coming from Hindu devotes, while the exact opposite is true for Muslim religious institutions, and you want to say both are same? Temple priests had to go to court (Indian courts that takes decades to settle a case) just to increase their salary from 20 rupees and you say they are same type of interference? That's a whole another level of gaslighting and bigotry.
To quote waqf kerala state website (first link on state waqf board google search): "The State Government appoints a Chief Executive Officer for the Boardin consultation with the Board . Also the Board is empowered by the Act to appoint such number of officers and other employees as may be necessary for performance of its functions in consultation with the State Government under section 24 of Wakf Act,1995. All the employees of the Board are deemed to be public servants within the meaning of Section 21 of the IndianPenal Code(45 of 1860)"
2) Now let me address this doesn't even remotely address the main point that i was making. Waqf plays no role in the administration of educational institutions.
Things matter here are:
article 29(1), 30(1), TMA Pai judgement, Art 15(5) through 93rd Amendment, RTE.
You can read about these on your own. The tl;dr of it is that, Muslims/Christians/Jains/Sikhs etc have absolute freedom to create and run schools with complete autonomy with the magical "minority status". Also, in case of Muslims/Christians/Jains/Sikhs as opposed to linguistic minorities, there is this thing called NCMEI who will automatically grant the status to a new institutions if the state does nothing on the application for the status. These institutions are run with complete autonomy on hiring/firing teachers, failing students, expelling students, some of the curriculum (that allows such human rights violations as a christian school forcing a non christian student enrolled to attend bible classes, or parading the students for political causes etc.). The schools can screen 100% of students on whatever criteria decided by the management setting whatever tuition fee. The teachers doesn't have to be SET/NET qualified. In some cases (aided schools), the funding comes from the government. These aided minority colleges are exempt from quotas (for poor, SC/ST etc) that are applicable to fully unaided Hindu run colleges.
For a Hindu run school, no screening allowed, teachers have to be SET qualified, at least 25% of the seats have to be reserved for government, students can't be expelled, and a lot more.
3) Then there are things like MSDP, hunaar haat, scholarships, subsidy for religious pilgrimages, salaries and pensions for priests and scholars and lot more that the Indian state discriminates massively on religious identity - which you ironically call "secularism".
You can't make your arguments by forever shouting right-wing after every sentence. There is no right or left wing. It's a meaningless adjective to shutdown any discussion to dehumanize the other.
There are authoritarians and religious fanatics. I argue that everyone must be treated equally irrespective of their religious believes or identity, and you want to discriminate others based on their religious identity and believes.
Please don't do anything like this on HN again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
(Note that in India around 80% of the population is Hindu, and the minorities are less than 20%).
The sophistry of argument is interesting here when it is claimed that lower caste Hindus cannot setup their own exclusive schools, while the minorities can (the right-wing claims this as "discrimination" introduced in the name of secularism). Funnily, such demands for a caste-exclusive institutions have always come from certain upper-caste dominated religious right-wing in India, who actually look down on the lower caste in India and don't socially interact with them unless they absolutely have to. They yearn for the days were every caste was educated by their own community, thus "preserving the purity" of the caste system (which is part of the Hindu religious system).
With such a mindset, it is quite understandable why they would like to set up "exclusive and pure" schools that is only for their caste community. Caste discrimination continues to be a huge problem in India, and it should be thus quite obvious why the government of India has no interest in allowing such exclusive caste-based schools - it can lead to caste ghettoization that would just prolong and make the evils of caste discrimination worse.
Hindus can absolutely setup their own private schools and colleges in India, but it cannot be "exclusively Hindu" or some "caste exclusive" only institution. But this is true for minority run institutes too - they can only allocate 50% of the seats to students of their community, while the remaining 50% has to be filled with students from other community.
Apart from this 50% seats for their own community, they are also given more autonomy to run their institutions.
Why are they so allowed?
The indian state believes that minorities rightly have a concern that they can be deprived of educational opportunities as the majority hugely outnumber them. Thus, to allay this fear the constitution grants them the protection and privilege of running their own institutions which can be exclusively for their community to a certain extent, with more autonomy (which implies less interference from a "majority" run government).
Since any Hindu can start and run a school or a college, and thanks to the nature of India's population, it is guaranteed to be filled with more than 50% Hindus, we can rightly guess that the real issue that the Hindutva right-wing have is:
- They can't run castiest schools.
- They have issues with the "extra" autonomy granted to minority run institutes.
I have already addressed why India doesn't allow castiest institutes. On autonomy in minority institutes, it should be clear that this constitutional guarantee of autonomy is what prevents those in power from interfering in the affairs of minority run institutions (and was added in the constitution for precisely such a purpose - to protect the minorities from abuse by an unsympathetic majority in power).
This kind of fair balancing of the rights of the minorities, which the majorities are expected to defend and uphold, is what is attacked in the name of "flawed secularism".
The "Indian Secularism" is mostly what was leftover from the colonial era mixed with Traditional Hindu values.
However, the Govt tries to "correct" or "change" the Native traditions periodically.