Q.Can you imagine a secularism that does not give you the freedom to keep the name you are identified with, wear the dress you are used to, change the language you communicate in? In what ways do you think Ataturk's secularism is different from Indian secularism?

Ataturk's secularism actively suppressed religious and cultural symbols from above, while Indian secularism protects cultural diversity and intervenes only selectively where injustice requires it. …

Freedom — including the freedom to keep one's own name, dress, and language — is one of the very values secularism exists to protect. A version of secularism that instead forces people to give these things up is, in an important sense, working against secularism's own spirit, even while claiming to advance it. This is exactly the tension Ataturk's Turkish secularism illustrates. Ataturk's secularism was not built on principled distance at all; it involved the state actively intervening in, and suppressing, religion and traditional culture from above. The public role of the Khalifa was ended; the Hat Law banned the traditional Fez; Western clothing was actively encouraged; the Western Gregorian calendar replaced the Turkish one; a new Latin-based Turkish alphabet was imposed in 1928; and Ataturk even changed his own name from Mustafa Kemal Pasha to Kemal Ataturk. This was a sweeping, top-down cultural transformation imposed in the name of secularising the nation. …