Ratna Kapur
Professor Kapur is a Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, India. She is currently the Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker and Hosteteler Professor of Law Endowed Chair at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. She has worked as a practicing lawyer in India and been a visiting Professor at the National Law School of India; served as a visiting scholar at Cambridge and Harvard Universities; and was recently the Bertha Wilson Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Dalhousie Law School, Halifax, Canada. She has lectured and published extensively on issues of secularism, freedom of expression, equality and women’s rights, including an edited collection entitled Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law, as well as co-authoring Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (1996), and Secularism’s Last Sigh?: Hinduvata and the (Mis)Rule of Law (1999).
I analyze the implications for religious minorities (in particular Muslims) of this dominant understanding of secularism based on a formal model of equality. I briefly discuss how this approach has produced tensions over the construction of Indian Muslims as Other exemplified in recent judicial decisions on secularism and the treatment of religious difference in equality discourse This approach has had two significant implications. The first is to regard Muslims as subjects to be assimilated through the performance of some form of cultural strip. Refusal to conform has justified a second response – that is – casting the Muslim as a threat, dangerous and disloyal, to be either incarcerated or justifiably eliminated because of the threat that they pose to liberal rights, the Indian nation and the legitimate Indian subject.
The paper exposes how violence against religious minorities is partly produced in and through the discourse of secularism and the judicial interpretations of the right to equality. I propose ways in which secularism can be rescued to accommodate the rights of religious minorities.
