The Indian Model of Secularism

It is sometimes said that Indian secularism is simply an imitation of western secularism. A careful reading of the Indian Constitution shows this is not the case — Indian secularism is fundamentally different from the western model. Indian secularism does not focus only on separating church and state; the idea of inter-religious equality is just as crucial to the Indian conception.

What gives Indian secularism its distinct character? To begin with, it arose in the context of deep religious diversity that existed in India long before modern western ideas or nationalism ever arrived. India already had a culture of inter-religious 'tolerance.' But tolerance and domination are not opposites — tolerance is compatible with continuing religious domination. Tolerance allows some space to everyone, but that freedom is usually quite limited; it lets people put up with others whom they may find deeply repugnant. That kind of grudging coexistence may be a real virtue for a society recovering from a major civil war, but it is not enough in times of peace, when people are struggling for genuine equal dignity and respect.

A simple comparison brings this out. Both France and India describe themselves as secular states, yet the French government has banned the wearing of religious markers such as turbans and veils in educational institutions, while India prohibits no such thing in its own public institutions. The reason is that the ideal of secularism India has adopted is genuinely different from that of France.

The arrival of western modernity brought previously neglected ideas of equality into sharper focus in India — it sharpened attention to equality within a community, and it also introduced ideas of inter-community equality that helped displace older notions of religious hierarchy. Indian secularism therefore took shape as an interaction between what already existed in a deeply religiously diverse society and ideas that arrived from the west. The result is equal attention to both intra-religious and inter-religious domination: Indian secularism opposes the oppression of dalits and women within Hinduism, discrimination against women within Indian Islam or Christianity, and the threat that a majority religious community could pose to the rights of minority communities. This is the first major difference from mainstream western secularism.

A second, closely connected difference follows. Indian secularism is concerned with the religious freedom not only of individuals but also of minority communities as such. Within this framework, an individual has the right to profess the religion of their choice; equally, religious minorities have the right to exist and to maintain their own culture and their own educational institutions.

A third difference concerns state-supported religious reform. Because a secular state must be equally concerned with intra-religious domination, Indian secularism has made room for, and is genuinely compatible with, the state actively supporting religious reform. This is why the Indian Constitution bans untouchability, and why the Indian state has enacted laws abolishing child marriage and lifting the taboo, sanctioned by Hindu tradition, on inter-caste marriage.

The secular character of the Indian state rests on the fact that it is neither theocratic nor has it established any one religion, or even multiple religions, as official. Beyond this bare minimum, it has adopted a genuinely sophisticated policy for pursuing religious equality — one that allows it, depending on the situation, either to disengage from religion in the American style, or to engage with it where needed. Engagement can be NEGATIVE, as when the state opposes religious tyranny — the ban on untouchability is the clearest example. Or it can be POSITIVE, as when the Indian Constitution grants every religious minority the right to establish and maintain its own educational institutions, institutions which may even receive state assistance. All of these different, even seemingly inconsistent, strategies are ultimately in service of the same three values: peace, freedom, and equality.

This complexity is exactly why the whole of Indian secularism cannot be captured by the simple phrase 'equal respect for all religions.' If that phrase is meant to describe peaceful coexistence among religions, or plain inter-religious tolerance, it understates the case — secularism demands considerably more than mere coexistence or toleration. If instead it is meant to describe an equal feeling of respect towards every established religion and every one of its practices, the phrase becomes genuinely ambiguous, because Indian secularism actually permits PRINCIPLED state intervention in every religion. Such intervention necessarily involves some disrespect for particular aspects of every religion — religiously sanctioned caste hierarchies, for example, are simply not acceptable within Indian secularism, regardless of which religion sanctions them. The secular state, in other words, does not owe equal respect to every single aspect of every religion; it is equally entitled to withhold respect from some aspects of every organised religion alike, wherever those aspects conflict with the values of peace, freedom, and equality it exists to serve. This calibrated, case-by-case form of engagement — sometimes distant, sometimes actively intervening, always guided by the specific values at stake rather than by a single fixed rule — is what is meant by the idea of PRINCIPLED DISTANCE, and it is Indian secularism's own answer to the western model's mutual exclusion. …