Is Meera Nanda a Pseyudo Intellectual?
A genius can hold two contradictory ideas but the insanity is the condition of holding multiple contradictions without noticing any of them. Genius deliberates the paradox. The two opposing ideas are held consciously, examined, compared, and used to sharpen understanding. The tension is productive.
Nanda’s selective rationalism requires holding multiple mutually exclusive frameworks simultaneously. She simultaneously relies on Western secularism, Arya Samaj purism, postcolonial minority exceptionalism, and neo-liberal critique. But she fails to notice how each idea invalidates the other. That is not paradox in the genius sense. It is proliferation of contradictions disguised as coherence.
She has an idea of a hypothetical society which does not exist anywhere in the world. She does not have an example or a positive model. She does not take the trouble to describe this utopian society as it is, by definition, impossible to define. Therefore, she finds fault with the world’s only continuously existing civilization which has existed organically for at least 5000 years. But to prove her hypothesis that this civilization is wrong she cherry-picks logic from any available source.
The method of cherry picking is explained by her in her own academic language:
This book is not an academic report on a specific research project. But neither is it a book of polemics or ideological argumentation. Rather, this book combines political analysis and philosophical reflection with hard data, painstakingly collected from a vast variety of sources available in the public domain. The idea is to present the reader with the most cutting- edge social theories about globalization and resurgence of religion, backed with the best available facts and figures about everyday Hindu religiosity from the ground up.
If there is any doubt it repeats the process again in next paragraph:
Like any work of contemporary social history, this book tries to connect the dots between many diverse sources of information. It uses material obtained from the mass media, opinion polls, scholarly studies, government reports, research reports of think tanks, and websites of temples/ashrams.
So we have a ‘scholarly’ work which mixes politics, philosophy, opinions, media reports, and academic observation to reach a predetermined conclusion. This should not surprise readers. It is another way of saying we have a hypothesis and we will use any source of ‘content’ to support it.
Logic or Lack of It
Pseudo-intellectuals mimic academic scholars. They project expertise through confident delivery despite lacking depth. Psychological concepts like the Dunning-Kruger effect explain their overconfidence. The limited knowledge leads to inflated self-assessment. They succeed by mimicking logical structures, using buzzwords, and avoiding scrutiny.
Pseudo-intellectuals rely on wordy, obtuse language for simple ideas to appear smart. They repeat superficial facts without understanding. Arrogance masks insecurity, with poor sources like social media over reliable ones.
The Dunning-Kruger effect causes low-competence people to overestimate abilities, especially in detecting nonsense or expertise domains. Genuine discourse invites challenge; theirs seeks validation. Probe with specific questions and they falter on details or pivot evasively.
Meera Nanda displays several hallmarks of pseudo-intellectualism as described above. She hides behind fancy words and expect that readers will not turn around and ask her meaning of the fancy word and would simply follow her logic with her presumptive meaning of the fancy word. Secularism is such a loaded word in her thesis, yet she never bothers to define it. Let’s analyze it.
Secularism
The central grievance in Meera Nanda’s work is that India is no longer a “secular” state. Yet she never explains why India must be secular.
The United Kingdom is not a secular state. The head of state is also the head of the Church. Twenty-six Anglican bishops sit as unelected members of the House of Lords with full legislative voting rights. The monarch serves as Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The coronation of King Charles III in 2023 was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in an explicitly Christian religious ceremony. These institutional entanglements of religion and state attract minimal scholarly criticism as threats to secularism.
England’s long history of conflict between Christian factions is well documented. Mohammad Ali Jinnah observed this clearly when comparing religious tensions in different societies:
History shows that in England conditions, some time ago, were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discrimination made and bars imposed against a particular class.
In the United States, constitutionally committed to separation of church and state, religious ritual is deeply embedded in governmental life. Presidents are traditionally sworn in on the Bible. Christian clergy regularly participate in state ceremonies. The phrase “In God We Trust” appears on currency and has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Presidents routinely attend National Prayer Breakfasts and receive endorsements from religious leaders. These practices are defended as cultural traditions or civil religion, not as violations of secularism.
Several European nations, including Germany, Denmark, and Norway, maintain state churches or collect church taxes through government apparatus. Religious holidays structure official calendars, and Christian symbols appear in state institutions and public spaces. These arrangements are widely understood as historical and cultural heritage, not as theocratic threats.
By contrast, when India’s Prime Minister inaugurates the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya or participates in temple ceremonies, scholars like Nanda characterize this as “Hindu nationalism” threatening Indian secularism. Similar acts are interpreted differently depending on the civilization involved.
The Constitution of India as enacted in 1950 did not contain the word “secular.” It was inserted into the Preamble by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment in 1976, during the Emergency, when the opposition was suppressed and civil liberties were suspended. Several provisions of the 42nd Amendment were later struck down or diluted by the Supreme Court. The constitutional status and scope of “secularism” therefore remain matters of legal interpretation rather than settled doctrine.
Nanda, however, ignores these real-world nuances and continues to test the actions of people and politicians against a notion of secularism that she neither defines nor demonstrates in practice.
Public Celebration of Religion
Nanda has a special aversion to public celebration of Hindu festivals and rituals in public. She does not appreciate that there is no country in the world where religion exists socially but is confined entirely to private space. The moment a religion has a calendar, festivals, collective memory, or shared ritual time, it inevitably enters public life. Streets are closed, holidays are declared, symbols appear, crowds gather, and the state adapts its rhythms accordingly. This is not an exception, it is a structural feature of religion itself. Even societies that describe themselves as secular do not eliminate public religion. They merely normalize their own.
In Europe, Christianity appears publicly as heritage, tradition, or culture. In the United States, religious language, prayer, and symbolism permeate civic ceremonies and political speech while being defended as civil religion rather than sectarian intrusion. In Islamic societies, public prayer, fasting rhythms, and religious festivals shape daily life openly and unapologetically.
In East Asia, temple festivals and ritual calendars occupy public space regardless of the state’s official ideology. India, long before the modern state, functioned on the same principle and religion was never a private hobby but a civic rhythm.
The issue, therefore, is not the public celebration of religion. The issue is which civilization is allowed to treat its religion as culture and which is accused of threatening secularism when it does the same. Identical acts are interpreted differently depending on the civilization involved.
When religion appears publicly in Western societies, it is read as history, heritage, or benign tradition. When it appears publicly in Hindu society, it is reclassified as majoritarian assertion or political danger.
This is the same civilizational mindset that once operated in the mind of General Dyer, who ordered firing on an unarmed gathering of people celebrating Baisakhi in Amritsar in 1919. Dyer interpreted celebration as disorder. Nanda interprets celebration as majoritarianism and fires with her pen. The analogy is not one of violence but of perception. Both have a prior suspicion that renders collective expression illegitimate before it is even examined.
Thus, Nanda’s work is less a dispassionate sociological study and more a polemic. She follows a specific ideology namely secular fundamentalism dressed as left-liberal critique. She appears to stand with those Islamic fundamentalists who would call any non-Islamic celebration fitna and condemn it. Her special protection for Muslims will be discussed in the next article. But suffice it to say that her projection is that state action for minorities is protective, corrective, and necessary for equality. However, the state action for the majority is labeled majoritarian, oppressive, and a threat to secularism.
Additionally, she is so passionate about a vague idea of secularism in the Constitution but not about article 25 which gives freedom to practice religion to all citizens, subject to limited restrictions. She also selectively choose to ignore the Representation of People Act of 1950 which is a law governing the elections in India and takes care of involvement of religion in politics. She as a Prophet of Rationality has her own special canons which should be implement.
Her view cannot concede that a democratic state might legitimately reflect, celebrate, and invest in the culture of the overwhelming majority of its citizens without malign intent. Normal democratic expression is pathologized.
Thus, Nanda is not engaged in a critical study of a civilization. She begins from an epistemological dead end. This is cognitive dissonance.
In the next article we shall deal with specific examples of her writing in which she cherry-pick content to prove her logic.
References:
- Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121
- Dunning, D. (2011). Chapter One – The Dunning–Kruger Effect: On Being Ignorant of One’s Own Ignorance. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 44, pp. 247–296). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385522-0.00005-6
- Schlösser, T., Dunning, D., Johnson, K. L., & Kruger, J. (2013). How unaware are the unskilled? Empirical tests of the “signal extraction” (error model) for meta-perception in competence and social domains. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 122(2), 119–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.08.001
- Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Speech to the Constituent Assembly, 11 August 1947.
- United States Code, 36 U.S.C. § 302 (“In God We Trust”).
- Meera Nanda “God Delusion at Work: My Indian Travel Diary” Economic Political Weekly 2008: https://www.epw.in/journal/2008/42/commentary/god-delusion-work-my-indian-travel-diary.html
- God Delusion at Work: My Indian Travel Diary https://www.jstor.org/stable/40278070?
- The God Market: https://www.academia.edu/65857600/The_God_Market_How_Globalization_is_Making_India_More_Hindu