Accepted Panels

This paper interrogates discourses on secularism in new online media between December 2019 and March 2021, a period marked by intense controversy. Indian online media outlets mushroomed in the lead-up to the Indian general elections in 2014. It focuses on six new online media outlets and found that opinion writers use discourses of secularism to further their political perspectives and echo the debates of the political class. All writers reference an authentic form of Indian secularism that privileges a postcolonial perspective and confirm its failure as an anchor for India’s societal fabric. Simultaneously, writers in this new medium presented multiple and contested origins of secularism and identified different roles played by the Muslim other in perpetuating these discourses. This paper argues for a decolonial view of secularism that engages with how secularism manifests in everyday practices of religious pluralism in India as a way out of the historical and ongoing political stalemate.