“Discuss the challenges thrown by religious revivalism to a secular nation-state.” (2018)
A secular nation-state grounds its legitimacy in citizenship rather than faith. It separates religious authority from state power and treats all believers and non-believers as equals. Religious revivalism, the public reassertion of faith and religious identity, contests each of these principles. Mark Juergensmeyer (The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, 1993) described the late twentieth century as a struggle between secular nationalism and resurgent religious nationalism.
Challenges to the secular state
1. Legitimacy and the definition of the nation
- Revivalist movements often redefine the nation in religious terms, as in Iran after 1979 or Afghanistan under the Taliban since 2021.
- T. K. Oommen warns that fusing religion with nationality turns religious minorities into outsiders, which weakens equal citizenship.
2. Majoritarianism versus minority rights
- Electoral democracy lets numerically dominant faiths turn revival into policy.
- In India, the Supreme Court’s interim order of 15 September 2025 stayed parts of the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, including the condition that a donor must have practised Islam for five years. The case shows how disputes over religious institutions now reach the Constitution.
3. Personal law and gender justice
- Revival strengthens community control over marriage, divorce and inheritance, which clashes with equality before the law.
- The Court invalidated instant triple talaq in Shayara Bano (2017) and allowed women of all ages into Sabarimala in Indian Young Lawyers Association (2018). Uttarakhand brought a Uniform Civil Code into force on 27 January 2025. Each step drew revivalist resistance from different quarters.
4. History, sacred space and public order
- Claims over places of worship turn history into a religious battlefield. After the Ayodhya verdict (2019), fresh suits over mosques multiplied. On 12 December 2024 the Supreme Court barred the registration of new suits while it examines the Places of Worship Act, 1991.
- Paul Brass showed how an institutionalised riot system turns such disputes into violence. NCRB recorded 857 communal riot cases in 2020 and 378 in 2021.
5. Hate speech, conversion and education
- Revival also works through speech and law: contested state anti-conversion statutes, debates over school curricula, and polarising speech online.
- In 2023 the Supreme Court directed all states to register hate-speech cases on their own, irrespective of the speaker’s religion.
6. Neutrality of state institutions
- Pressure grows for state patronage of festivals, pilgrimages and temple boards, which blurs what Rajeev Bhargava calls “principled distance”.
- The Supreme Court declared secularism part of the Constitution’s basic structure in S. R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994).
Counter-view
- T. N. Madan (Secularism in its Place, 1987) and Ashis Nandy argue that a secularism imported from the West, and blind to lived faith, itself provokes revival. Tolerance, on this view, must draw on religious traditions too.
- José Casanova notes that public religion can also defend democracy, as the Catholic Church did in Poland and Black churches did in Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement. Not all revival is anti-secular.
Conclusion
Revivalism challenges the secular state less by abolishing it than by hollowing it out: redefining the nation, bending institutions and polarising citizens. Indian experience suggests the answer lies neither in suppressing religion nor in yielding to it. It lies in constitutional morality: courts, equal citizenship and everyday inter-faith civic ties, which Ashutosh Varshney found to be the strongest guard against communal violence.