.Speaker : Professor Rajeev Bhargava, Senior Fellow and Director, Centre for the Study of Developing SocietiesAbstract:Does Secularism have a future? It depends on what political project gets invoked by the term. If it means strict separation of state and religion, a wall of separation between the two or the privatization of religion, then secularism seems to me to have no future, even in those western countries where these ideas and formulae were born. If, on the other hand, it means, set of practices by which states nurture and defend deep religious diversity and counter two forms of institutionalized religious dominations- inter-religious and intra-religious, then it does indeed have a future. To achieve these objectives, it is mandatory that the state not stay away from religion but rather keeps principled distance from them. This form of secularism which is context-sensitive continues to have relevance for the whole world. It better have a future because our own lives, as well as the lives of millions of people in the world, depends on it