October 27 & 28, 2016: The Haas Institute’s Religious Diversity cluster hosted a two-day workshop at UC Berkeley last October that brought together academics and thinkers from diverse disciplines to share scholarship related to “Democracy and Religious Pluralism in India, Pakistan, and Turkey.”

 The workshop was the second event in a larger project that aims to examine how religious actors and democratic institutions renegotiate early compacts drawn at constitutional moments and the role of religious pluralism in these societies today. The “Religious Toleration and Plural Democracies” project, originally funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and now part of the Haas Institute’s Religious Diversity research cluster efforts, seeks to identify and promote a culture of coexistence within democratic society.

The project rooted its work in three nations that have historically faced the challenge of fashioning democratic institutions within societies with long-standing religious traditions: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. Firstly, it looks at how these nations have negotiated the balance between the claims of religious groups and those modern democratic institutions; Secondly, how democratically-elected regimes may now pose challenges to pluralism and coexistence. These questions were further elaborated during the workshop in October, which was organized by Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and chair of the Haas Institute’s Religious Diversity cluster, and Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University.

The workshop kicked off with a look at the transitions three countries experienced as they went from societies with great degrees of religious and ethnic pluralism to simplified versions of nation-states. Rochana Bajpai (SOAS, University of London), Uday Mehta (CUNY Graduate Center), Christine Philliou (UC Berkeley) and Faisal Devji (University of Oxford) presented papers that problematized the notion of the transition, discussed the understandings of religious diversity, liberalism, and democracy before and during the transition to the modern state. They highlighted not only the social diversity within the society more broadly, but also the diversity of intellectual and political views present in these moments, and the implications of these for the winners and losers of the struggles for national liberation that followed. The papers explored key parts of the constitutions and the political techniques responding to religious diversity that were implemented during initial moments of state and nation-building.

The second set of discussions focused on democracy, secularism, law, and religious diversity. Ates Altinordu(Sabanci University) discussed the possibilities of a post-secular construction in contemporary Turkey and what that would entail in terms of particular arrangements in the social and political order of the country. He demonstrated serious tensions between the state’s vision of religion and post-secular ideals.