Reframing political religion, reinventing secularism: The Indian BJP's and Egyptian Muslim brothers' engagement of secular public discourse (1980s--1990s)

As religiopolitical movements like the Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India have entered electoral politics, they have sought to expand the acceptability of religious discourse and religious reason in the secular political sphere. Yet they have appealed increasingly to 'secular' constitutional norms to circumvent legal restrictions and reach new audiences as they have shifted more of their activity into the electoral sphere. What internal strategies, political incentives and historical opportunities pushed the movements to use 'secular' legitimation, what aspects of their ideology were they able to 'translate' in secular terms and how were the movements transformed by dealing not just with the institutions but also the values and symbolic frameworks of the secular political sphere?;Identifying core themes in the religious discourse of both movements and key historical episodes --- election campaigns, judicial challenges to the use of religious campaigning, legislative and public campaigns on the political uses of religion --- and using a political discourse analysis approach to compare internal (movement-oriented) with external (public) framing strategies, I explore the ways in which the Muslim Brothers and BJP `translated' core movement frames as compatible with secular political norms and processes for new audiences and potential allies (the 'secularization' strategy) while remaining credible to their 'base' as the voice of religious interests and values. I then consider the extent to which movement ideology was transformed in these episodes by tracing shifts in the use of core religiopolitical themes by the end of the periods under study, and ask whether this transformation has enabled the movements to participate more effectively in electoral democracy and the secular public sphere. I also consider how successful both movements were in challenging and eroding the limits on the public role of religion in the Indian and Egyptian constitutional orders.