State's Power of Intervention

The second way Indian secularism departs from the Western model is that separation between religion and state, in India, could never mean complete mutual exclusion. This is because certain religiously sanctioned customs — untouchability being the clearest example — stripped individuals of the most basic dignity and self-respect. Such customs were so deeply entrenched and pervasive that there was no realistic hope of dissolving them without the state actively stepping in; the state simply had to intervene in the affairs of religion in such cases. This kind of intervention was not always a negative, restraining one, either — the state could equally help religious communities, for instance by giving aid to educational institutions they run. Whether the state should help or hinder a religious community, then, depends on which of the two actions, in a given case, better promotes underlying constitutional values such as liberty, equality and social justice. In India, separation between religion and state therefore does not mean their mutual exclusion, but rather what the chapter calls 'principled distance' — a more complex idea in which the state stays distant enough from all religions that it is free to either intervene or abstain from interfering, depending entirely on which of those two courses would better serve liberty, equality and social justice in that instance. Together, the recognition of religious-group rights and this power of principled intervention make up the three core achievements the chapter groups under secularism and the broader liberal-cum-communitarian vision of the Constitution: first, that it reinforces and reinvents liberal individualism against a social backdrop where community values are often hostile to individual autonomy; second, that …