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Pandit Nehru on his greatest challenge: "Creating a secular state in a religious country"

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Pandit Nehru on his greatest challenge: "Creating a secular state in a religious country" Empty Pandit Nehru on his greatest challenge: "Creating a secular state in a religious country"

Post by Guest Fri Mar 10, 2017 2:37 pm

The French writer André Malraux once asked Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, what his greatest challenge had been since independence. "Creating a just state by just means," he replied. Then, after a pause, he added: "Perhaps, too, creating a secular state in a religious country."...

Secularism, as leaders of the Indian independence movement such as Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Nehru recognised in the 1930s and 1940s, was not an alien ideology, but "an inextricable part of the nationalist self-conception at independence", says Shabnum Tejani, lecturer in south Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. But while Gandhi (a Hindu) and Azad (a Muslim) embraced secularism from their respective religious perspectives, the atheist Nehru was the first to accept it in a political sense. On 3 April 1948, he declared in the Constituent Assembly that: "The alliance of religion and politics . . . is a most dangerous alliance, and it yields the most abnormal kind of illegitimate brood."

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/07/india-secularism-state

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