Q.How can a State treat all religions equally? Would granting equal number of holidays to each religion help? Or would banning any religious ceremony on public occasions be a way of doing this?

Equal treatment of religions does not require identical treatment — what matters is whether the state's approach, whichever form it takes, is applied consistently and even-handedly. …

The question of how a state can treat all religions equally runs directly into the idea of principled distance developed in this chapter: Indian secularism does not require the state to show identical respect, or identical treatment, to every aspect of every religion — 'equal treatment' is not the same thing as 'identical treatment.'

Granting an equal number of public holidays to each religion looks, on the surface, like a straightforward way to demonstrate equal treatment. But India's religions differ hugely in size, number of major festivals, and practices, so a rigid numerical equality could easily become a purely formal, symbolic measure rather than a genuine expression of equal respect — and it does not, on its own, address the deeper structural questions of inter- and intra-religious domination that this chapter is really concerned with.

Banning any religious ceremony on public occasions is closer to the strict western mutual-exclusion approach: the state achieves equal treatment by excluding every religion equally from the public sphere. This is a coherent way of pursuing equal treatment, but it is not the only valid one, and it is not how Indian secularism, which permits selective, principled engagement with religion, generally proceeds. …