Secular States, Religious Politics

A pioneering comparative study of the two major attempts to build secular states - where the state's constitutional identity and fundamental character are not based on or derived from any religious faith - in the non-Western world. This book explains the origins, evolution and latterly the decline of secularism as a core principle of the state in India and Turkey. The anti-secular political transformations of the twenty-first century are the rise of a Sunni-Islamist definition of Turkish national identity to hegemonic power, and Hindu nationalism as India's pre-eminent political force. Both secular-state models adopted a similar operational doctrine of state intervention in and regulation of the religious sphere, rather than a Western-style separation of church and state. But, Turkish state-secularism took a culturally deracinated and harshly authoritarian form that led to its failure, whereas India's secular state - though flawed in practice - followed a culturally rooted and democratic path that makes secularism indispensable to India's future.

“'The book shows why secular politics consistently fails to deliver on its promises.' Nick Spencer, The Tablet”

Sumantra Bose is Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His many books include Transforming India: Challenges to the World's Largest Democracy (2013), Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka (2007), Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (2003), and Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (2002). Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Bose graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1992 and received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in New York in 1998.

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