Rights of Religious Groups

The first way Indian secularism departs from the Western 'mutual exclusion' model is by recognising rights that belong to religious groups, not only to individuals. The Constitution's framers recognised that inter-community equality mattered just as much as equality between individuals, because a person's own sense of freedom and self-respect is directly tied to the standing of the community they belong to. If a person's community is dominated by another community, its members will in practice be significantly less free, even if they hold identical individual rights on paper. But if communities relate to each other as equals, free of domination, then their members can walk about with genuine dignity, self-respect and freedom. On this reasoning, the Indian Constitution grants rights to all religious communities, such as the right to establish and maintain their own educational institutions. This is why, in the India …