Secularism in India

The word “Secular” has many meanings in the Indian context. To begin with, secular connotes ‘antireligious‘. To be secular is to be anti-religious, an atheist or agnostic.

Likewise, a secular state must be actively hostile to religion, discourage religious practices, prevent the growth of religious institutions. The secular state in this sense has never existed in India. A small minority of atheists do, but this is nothing new. There is a long and venerable tradition of atheism in Indian culture; it follows that such secular persons have existed even in the past.

• Secondly, the word “secular” means not anti-religious but non-religious. On this view, the secular state is non-religious but permits religious practices outside its sphere. It neither encourages nor discourages religion. It keeps off all kinds of religious and quasi-religious activities. Although Nehru may not have always lived up to this ideal, this may well be the nehruvian conception of secularism.
• Third, the word “secular” has also been identified with multi-religious. Its defenders argue that in India, a land that has given birth to and nourished some of the major religions of the world, a state policy of indifference to religion is neither justified nor workable.

Since most People in India are religious, the state cannot keep away from religious matters or adopt a stance of mere neutrality between the religious and nonreligious. Rather, it should actively promote religion.

The state should play a positive and dynamic role in the pursuit of a religious life. But in a land of many religions, the state cannot discriminate in favour of any one religion. It should grant equal preference to all. So the word “secular” here clearly means an equal preference to the religious and the non-religious and within religions equal respect for all religions. It does not take long to guess that this is the Gandhian conception of secularism.

• Fourth the word “secular“has come to mean multi-communal. This degeneration has been characteristic of the Indian polity over the last 35 years or so. To be secular is to grant equal preference to the fanatical fringe of all religious communities.

Here, the more desirable, universalisable aspects of all religions are overlooked or deliberately neglected and their closed, aggressive and communal dimension is over emphasised.

The BJP has systematically undermined each of the four connotations of the word “secular” and has infused it with a meaning consistent with the rest of its ideology. It attacks the first conception for being anti-religious, the second for being indifferent to religion, and the third and the fourth for granting equal preference to all religious and communal practices. Each of these, for the BJP, is pseudo-secular. For the BJP, secularism in the Indian context must mean granting special favours to a particular brand of freshly manufactured, aggressive Hinduism.

To be secular is to favour a particular communal group. The argument behind it is simple minded but dangerous.  India is a uniquely religious land; religion has a special place in the life of every Indian. No state in India can afford to ignore this fact and therefore it should actively promote religious life. But it must not favour all religions equally. Hinduism is the religion of the majority and therefore the state must favour the Hindu over other religious groups. To even conceive this within traditional forms of Hinduism is impossible, So a new aggressive Hinduism is necessary to articulate this demand.

The word “secular” must accommodate this brute fact; either it goes or it must be clipped to mean “pro-aggressive Hinduism”. This is positive secularism because it is positive towards this brand of Hinduism. Needless to add that a such a position is highly contentious because it has neither been endorsed by the state nor has it been found reasonable