Impossible Project

A final, more cynical criticism holds that secularism simply cannot work, because it is trying to solve a problem that has no solution — that people with deep religious differences will never be able to live together in peace. This claim is, in fact, empirically false. India's own long civilisational history shows that this kind of coexistence is genuinely achievable, and it has been achieved elsewhere too — the Ottoman Empire is often cited as a striking historical example.

Critics can still push back here: that older coexistence, they might argue, was possible only because it took place under conditions of deep inequality, with everyone assigned a fixed place within a rigidly hierarchical order — and this, they claim, simply will not work today, in an age when equality has become an increasingly non-negotiable cultural value. …