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Unsettled Territories: State, Civil Society, and the Politics of Religious Conversion in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2010

Leela Fernandes
Leela Fernandes*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Leela Fernandes, University of Michigan, Department of Women Studies, 204 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48108. E-mail: leelaf@umich.edu
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Abstract

The article argues that the secular Indian state and the Hindu nationalist movement are invested in restricting changes in religious membership in ways that intensify religious and caste-based inequalities. The secular state and the Hindu nationalist movement attempt to enforce a shared model of religion that takes the form of a fixed territory. In this model, changes in religious membership through conversion are restricted. An analysis of state-civil society interactions in India must therefore move away from a presumed opposition between state secularism on the one hand and religious nationalism and conflict within civil society on the other. The article draws on three cases: (1) nationalist debates over caste and religious conversion, (2) Hindu nationalist mobilization against religious conversion, and (3) state caste-based affirmative action policies that restrict benefits based on religious conversion.

Type
Articles
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , April 2011 , pp. 108 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2010

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