Breaking down the question
The command problematise is unusual and important. The examiner is not asking you to define secularism and praise it, nor simply to attack it, but to expose the tensions, ambiguities and difficulties that the concept carries — to treat it as a problem rather than a settled ideal. The phrase in the present context signals that you should ground this in contemporary conditions, especially the resurgence of religion in public life and the specificities of the Indian case.
Secularism has two distinct meanings that must be separated at the outset: the separation of religion from state and public life, and the equal respect of the state for all religions. Problematising the concept means showing why neither meaning works cleanly in practice, and why critics have questioned whether secularism, as conventionally understood, fits societies where religion remains a vital public force.
How to approach it
Open by distinguishing the two senses of secularism — Western separation and Indian equal-respect — so the examiner sees you know precisely what is being problematised. Then set out the difficulties in turn: the empirical failure of the secularisation thesis, the critique that Western secularism is culturally particular, the Indian critics who question its viability, and the practical tensions of managing religion in a diverse democracy.
Marshal named positions. T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy famously argued that secularism is ill-suited to the deeply religious societies of South Asia, while Rajeev Bhargava defended a reformed Indian secularism of principled distance. The wider setting is developed in our notes on religion in modern society. Keep the tone analytical, and close by presenting principled distance as a considered response to the problems you have raised.
Model answer
Secularism is a contested concept, and to problematise it is to bring out the tensions and ambiguities that lie beneath its apparent simplicity. At the outset two distinct meanings must be separated. In its classical Western sense, secularism means the separation of religion from the state and its confinement to the private sphere. In the Indian sense, by contrast, secularism means not separation but equal respect and equal treatment of all religions by a state that engages with them even-handedly. Because these two meanings pull in different directions, the concept is unstable from the start.
The first problem is empirical. The classical theory assumed that modernisation would bring secularisation — that as societies industrialised and grew more rational, religion would decline and retreat from public life. The present context contradicts this expectation. Across the world religion has proved resilient and even resurgent, reasserting itself in politics, identity and social movements. If religion is not fading but returning to the public square, a secularism premised on its privatisation stands on shaky ground.
The second problem is cultural. Critics argue that Western secularism, born of a specific European history of conflict between church and state, is a culturally particular arrangement wrongly presented as universal. Charles Taylor has shown how deeply the secular is bound up with a distinctively Western trajectory. Applied to societies where religion permeates everyday life and public identity, the demand to confine faith to the private realm can appear alien and coercive rather than neutral.
The third problem is sharpest in the Indian context. T. N. Madan argued that in a society as intensely religious as India, secularism as the privatisation of religion is neither viable nor sincerely held, and that it is a project of a small Westernised elite out of step with the majority. Ashis Nandy went further, contending that indigenous traditions of religious tolerance offer a surer basis for peaceful coexistence than an imported secularism that may actually inflame the very communal tensions it claims to contain. On this view the concept is not merely difficult but potentially counterproductive.
The fourth problem is practical. A state that promises equal respect to all faiths must constantly decide how far to intervene in religious practice — whether to reform discriminatory customs, how to treat personal laws that differ by community, and how to remain even-handed when religions make competing claims. Every such decision exposes secularism to the charge of either interfering too much or tolerating injustice, and in a charged political climate the same policy is readily denounced as favouring one community over another. Secularism thus becomes entangled in the politics of communalism it was meant to transcend.
Against these difficulties, Rajeev Bhargava has offered an influential defence. He argues that Indian secularism should be understood not as strict separation but as principled distance: the state keeps a flexible distance from all religions, intervening or abstaining not arbitrarily but according to principles of liberty, equality and justice. This allows the state to reform oppressive practices where required while respecting religious diversity, and it treats the Indian model as a distinctive and defensible form of secularism rather than a failed copy of the Western one.
In sum, secularism is problematic because its two meanings diverge, because the secularisation thesis it rested on has been falsified by the persistence of religion, because its Western form is culturally particular, and because in deeply religious and diverse societies its application is fraught with practical and political tension. Yet to problematise the concept is not to abandon it. The Indian idea of principled distance suggests that a reformed, context-sensitive secularism remains both necessary and possible in a plural democracy.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward candidates who honour the command problematise by exposing genuine tensions rather than offering a bland definition. The strongest ten-markers distinguish the Western separation model from the Indian equal-respect model at the outset, invoke the falsification of the secularisation thesis, and cite the Madan-Nandy critique alongside Bhargava's defence of principled distance.
The common weakness is a descriptive essay that praises secularism as a constitutional value without ever treating it as a problem, or a purely political rant lacking sociological grounding. To score well, keep the analysis conceptual, marshal the named critics, connect the discussion to the contemporary resurgence of religion, and close with principled distance as a reasoned resolution rather than a dismissal.