JMD on NBN: Sumantra Bose, "Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism"
SUMANTRA BOSE Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 2018 November 28, 2018 James M. Dorsey Sumantra Bose ‘s new book Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties in the non-Western world’s two major attempts to establish a post-colonial secular state. The secular experiments in Turkey and India were considered success stories for the longest period of time but that has changed with the rise of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India and the capture of state power by political forces with an anti-secular vision of nationhood. In his ground-breaking book, Bose attributes the rise of secularism to the fact that non-Western states like Turkey and India never adopted the