20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
came to a definite definition which can be called Archimedian. All one can say is that Nehru was struggling to create conditions 'whereby a distance could be created between religion and politics. And I believe that a carefully -worked out distance is tantamount to a minimal degree of separation in the Indian situation.
5. Foundationalism is a doctrine that establishes a principle outside of everything in terms of which everything else can be understood and criticized but which itself cannot be doubted or criticized. It is therefore atemporal • outside time and thus history. It is non-reconcilable with the dialectical way of looking at reality. Hegel, and following him Marx, used dialectics to overcome foundationalism whether of the Cartesian or Kantian variety. The "law of negation" is precisely basis for the rejection of foundational principles.
6. I have treated these problems in quite some detail in my book India: Living with Modernity (op. cit.). See part one of the book.
7. For an overview of a refutation of these critics of secularism see Thomas Pantham' s "Indian Secularism and Its Critics: Some Reflections" (The Review of Politics, Summer 1997). This article also contains a fairly extensive review of the writers who have written on the problem both for and against.
8. T.N. Madan, "Secularism in its Place," Journal of Asian Studies, 46 (4), 1987.
9. Ashish Nandy, "An Anti-Secularist Manifesto," Seminar, 314, October 1985.
10. Partha Chatterjee, "Secularism or Tolerance," EPW, June 9, 1994.
11. All these citations are from the above quoted article of Madan. Ten years after this article was published. Madan wrote a book-length study on these problems. In reading his Modern Myths, Locked Minds (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997). I found that, though the book goes beyond the paper cited here and introduces a number of nuances, it does little to resolve the problems with which I am concerned here. Both the conceptual framework and the direction of the argument remain the same. In fact, the original argument becomes middled. There is a distinction involved here in talking about secularism, in the context of our societies as my friend Rajeev Bhargava pointed out. There is an impossibility thesis and a difficulty thesis. Nobody will have a problem if one were to argue that the efforts at creating a secular society in India did not happen without great difficulties. But in the article cited earlier Madan argues for an impossible situation. All he does in the book is to confuse his owa position without being able to come out of it.
12. See Rajeev Bhargava' s "Giving Secularism Its Due," (EPW, July 9, 1994) for a detailed argument along these lines.
13. S6e his Collected Works, vol. 76, p.400-403 for a fuller discussion.
14. Chapters IV and VII in "Discourse Two" of his The Defender of Peace are devoted to this problem. There are many additions of this work. The one I am using is the Penguin paperback.
15. Ibid., p. 113.
16. Ibid., p. 113 and 114.
17. Ibid., p. 114, emphasis added.
18. Ibid., p.119-125.
19. See Quentin Skinner* s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought in two volumes. Volume one is on the renaissance (Cambridge, CUP, 1978). See also Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt' s Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford, OUP, 1992).
20. Ibid.