Conceptualizing Religious Offences and Understanding Secularism Under the Indian Legal System

Conceptualizing Religious Offences and Understanding Secularism Under the Indian Legal System

Author: Junu Das

Publisher:

Published: 2021-06-23

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781636482484

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Religion and law have been the most influential means of social control and change throughout history. They are mutually interconnected and their interrelationship defines the nature of a particular society. As such Assam, being a state of India is known for having diverse religious communities across the territory governed by the Rule of Law under the Constitution of India which mostly represents the entire Indian Territory including Assam as a secular country. However, most often it has been found that due to religious intolerance and conflict between traditional religious beliefs and the modern common law system, there have been disruptions in the law-and-order situation in the state of Assam in the last few decades. The study in this field is important, to know the validity of the present-day legal institutions for promoting religious tolerance amongst the local communities in the state of Assam, thereby upholding secularism by transcending the gap between the traditional religious beliefs and the modern needs of the civilization, for maintaining order in the society, we will have to know the relationship between law and religion concerning Assam and the extent to which law can promote secularism in the minds of the local people. This research will therefore study the evolution of different religions in the State of Assam to understand their hold over the local people and will also study the legal framework governing the state to analyze the extent to which this framework is secular or is in conformity with religious sentiments of the people. This study will also highlight some of the cases where anti-secular activities were promoted to justify the role of law in such situations. At last, the study will highlight the opinions of different experts and scholars in the profession of law for having a better understanding of the subject.


Secularism and Its Critics

Secularism and Its Critics

Author: Rajeev Bhargava

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9780195650273

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This book puts together the most important contemporary writings in the debate on secularism. It deals with conceptual, normative and explanatory issues in secularism and addresses urgent questions, including the relevance of secularism to non-Western societies and the question of minority rights.


Landscapes of the Secular

Landscapes of the Secular

Author: Nicolas Howe

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-05

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022637680X

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“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.


America’s Religious Wars

America’s Religious Wars

Author: Kathleen M. Sands

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0300245378

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How American conflicts about religion have always symbolized our foundational political values When Americans fight about “religion,” we are also fighting about our conflicting identities, interests, and commitments. Religion-talk has been a ready vehicle for these conflicts because it is built on enduring contradictions within our core political values. The Constitution treats religion as something to be confined behind a wall, but in public communications, the Framers treated religion as the foundation of the American republic. Ever since, Americans have translated disagreements on many other issues into an endless debate about the role of religion in our public life. Built around a set of compelling narratives—George Washington’s battle with Quaker pacifists; the fight of Mormons and Catholics for equality with Protestants; Teddy Roosevelt’s concept of land versus the Lakota’s concept; the creation-evolution controversy; and the struggle over sexuality—this book shows how religion, throughout American history, has symbolized, but never resolved, our deepest political questions.


Regulating Religion in Asia

Regulating Religion in Asia

Author: Jaclyn L. Neo

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1108416179

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Examines how law regulates religion and explores the influence of world religions on the legal systems in Asia, including how religion responds to such regulations. It looks at underlying norms influencing state regulation of religion, and the challenges emerging from such regulation.


A People's Constitution

A People's Constitution

Author: Rohit De

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0691210381

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It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.


Secularism Or Democracy?

Secularism Or Democracy?

Author: Veit-Michael Bader

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 9053569995

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Policies dealing with religious diversity in liberal democratic states—as well as the established institutions that enforce those policies—are increasingly under pressure. Politics and political theory are caught in a trap between the fully secularized state and neo-corporate regimes of selective cooperation between states and organized religion. This volume proposes an original, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary approach to problems of governing religious diversity—combining moral and political philosophy, constitutional law, history, sociology, and religious anthropology. Drawing on such diverse scholarship, Secularism or Democracy? proposes an associational governance—a moderately libertarian, flexible variety of democratic institutional pluralism—as the plausible third way to overcome the inherent deficiencies of the predominant models.


Entangled Legalities Beyond the State

Entangled Legalities Beyond the State

Author: Nico Krisch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-11

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 1108843069

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Shows that law it is often better understood as an entangled web rather than as a coherent, orderly system.


Constituting Religion

Constituting Religion

Author: Tamir Moustafa

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-07-25

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108334075

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Most Muslim-majority countries have legal systems that enshrine both Islam and liberal rights. While not necessarily at odds, these dual commitments nonetheless provide legal and symbolic resources for activists to advance contending visions for their states and societies. Using the case study of Malaysia, Constituting Religion examines how these legal arrangements enable litigation and feed the construction of a 'rights-versus-rites binary' in law, politics, and the popular imagination. By drawing on extensive primary source material and tracing controversial cases from the court of law to the court of public opinion, this study theorizes the 'judicialization of religion' and the radiating effects of courts on popular legal and religious consciousness. The book documents how legal institutions catalyze ideological struggles, which stand to redefine the nation and its politics. Probing the links between legal pluralism, social movements, secularism, and political Islamism, Constituting Religion sheds new light on the confluence of law, religion, politics, and society. This title is also available as Open Access.