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Secularization and 'constitutive moments': insights from partition diplomacy in South Asia

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Book chapter

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Authors

Abstract

This essay proposes an argument – on the face of it, both outlandish and paradoxical – that the violent upheavals of partition, which divided British India along religious lines, encouraged trends towards secularization in India and Pakistan. In the very months when the subcontinent was engulfed in religious conflict, both countries took significant steps to produce common institutions – indeed a common statecraft -- to manage mass migration and lawlessness across the new borders that divided them. I suggest this process secularized both states simultaneously in specific, admittedly partial, but remarkably similar, ways.

Description

Title

Secularization and 'constitutive moments': insights from partition diplomacy in South Asia

Keywords

Democracy

Is Part Of

Tolerance, Secularization and Democratic Politics in South Asia

Book type

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

ISBN

1108450245
9781108450249