Indian Secularism’s Last Sigh

Faisal C.K.

When secularism withers away, we are losing core democratic values like nonviolence, fraternity, and tolerance.

It is egregiously detrimental to India’s survival as a nation and its progress as a global power.

The word ‘secular’, along with ‘socialist’, was conspicuously missing from the Preamble of the copies of the Constitution handed out to MPs while moving to the newly inaugurated Parliament building recently.

Banishment of the term ‘secular’ from the Preamble is merely a mild symptom of a grave malady afflicting our body politic. Secularism has always been an elusive and amorphous concept in India.

In the gestation period of the Republic itself, a few members of the Constituent Assembly attempted to insert the word ‘secular’ in the Preamble of the Constitution while another flock attempted to begin the Constitution in the name of God.

Brajeshwar Prasad, a Congress member from Bihar, proposed that the Preamble should begin as ‘We the people of India, having resolved to constitute India into a secular cooperative commonwealth to establish socialist order...’. But it was only in 1976, that the term ‘secular’ was incorporated into the Preamble by the Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act.

Nehruvian secularism vs. Savarkarite majoritarianism

Post-colonial Indian secularism, based on the equal respect theory that emphasizes the State’s duty to respect and tolerate all religions, is fundamentally a Nehruvian idea.

It oscillates between sarvadharamma samabhavana (goodwill to all religions) to dharmma nirapekshta (the State’s neutrality in religious matters).

Nehru explained a secular State as one where there would be free play for all religions, subject only to their not interfering with each other or with basic conceptions of the State.

Rajiv Bhargava described this as ‘principled distance’ which is the primary characteristic of Indian constitutional secularism. Indian constitutional secularism has three major elements, namely, religious freedom, State neutrality, and reformatory justice.

The vision of Indian nationality by V.D.Savarkar, the arch icon of the Sangh pantheon, is diametrically opposed to Nehru’s inclusive and plural secularism.

Savarkar asserted that only Hindus have sole claim over India. Hindus were, according to him, the only population whose past, present, and future are most closely bound with the soil of Hindustan as their pitrubhumi and punyabhumi.

They constitute the foundation, the bedrock, and the reserved forces of the Indian state. In Savarkar’s scheme of things, Hinduism, Hindutva, and Indian nationality appear to be intertwined and work as natural corollaries to each other.

He opined that Hindus were not merely the citizens of India but were glued by a common motherland, a common blood, and a common religion. Savarkar excluded Muslims and Christians from the Indian nationhood and held that they were separate nations.

In his presidential speech to the 19th Hindu Mahsabha session at Ahmedabad in 1937, he stated that there were two antagonistic nations living side by side in India [Hindus and non-Hindus].

India’s contemporary political history is, by and large, a war between the Nehruvian concept of secularism and the Savarkarite vision of majoritarianism.

Secularism and nonviolence

Secularism and nonviolence are closely interconnected. The book Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (2021) by Shruti Kapila elaborates on this aspect. It examines the history of the political thought that laid the foundations of modern India.

Taking readers from the dawn of the twentieth century to the independence of India and the formation of Pakistan in 1947, the book is a testament to the power of ideas to drive historical transformation.

The book demonstrates why India, with its breathtaking scale and diversity, redefined the nature of political violence in the modern global era. In India’s civilizational odyssey, there have been two conflicting streams of thought and action from its very inception itself Brahmanism and Shramanism.

Shramanism stands for nonviolence, tolerance, equality, and reason. Meanwhile, Brahmanism took the stance of violence, graded inequality, hegemony, and superstitions.

Buddhism has been the major tributary of Shramanism. Shruti Kapila points out that Savarkar in his work, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, the conflict between Hinduism and Buddhism was awarded special prominence in the elaboration of Hindutva for this reason.

Savarkar considers emperor Ashoka, the great patron of Buddhism, as an internal alterity c