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B. S. Raghavan

THE burning issue of Gujarat has stoked the embers of the eternal debate on the precise interpretation of secularism. It was the pet concept of the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. But, for some unexplained reason, he did not make it an integral part of the Objectives Resolution, which he drafted and moved in the Constituent Assembly. With the result, secularism as an inalienable attribute of the Indian State nowhere figured in the original Constitution as adopted on November 26, 1949.

The Committee on Communalism, set up by the first National Integration Council convened by Nehru in 1961, of which Ashok Mehta was the chairman and Indira Gandhi and Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, among others, were members, examined a number of eminent persons in public life to arrive at a definition. However, it folded up immediately after the Chinese invasion of October 1962, impressed by the nationalist upsurge which, it felt, had made all divisive tendencies things of the past! The Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, passed during the Emergency, amplified the Preamble to make what was merely a "sovereign democratic Republic" both socialist and secular, leaving the words undefined. The Janata Government, under Morarji Desai as the Prime Minister, brought the 44th Amendment Bill, defining secularism as "equal respect for all religions" and socialism as "freedom from all forms of exploitation, social, political and economic". The Rajya Sabha saw no need for any such annotation and rejected the proposed Bill.

The votaries of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar have in recent years come up with terms such as "positive secularism" and "pseudo-secularism", further complicating the issue. However, piecing the clues together, it would seem that a positive secularist is one who subscribes to "cultural nationalism" in which the religious minorities will defer to the way of life and preferences of the majority, earning its goodwill by congenial behaviour, instead of making strident demands of special protective rights and privileges; and a pseudo-secularist is one who regards as communal any attempt by the religious majority to preserve, promote and protect its well-being and way of life, and who subordinate the rights and entitlements of the majority to those of the minorities.

Left out of the entire debate is the venomous role of castes, which vitiate the content of secularism construed in its broadest sense of insulating affairs of State from their pernicious effect, and instilling harmony and humanity among all sections. Caste-based fanaticism is as dangerous to the nation's unity and integrity as any other variety, especially when it intrudes into Christian, Muslim and Buddhist minorities also.

In sum, true secularism is antithetical to intolerance and fanaticism of every kind. It makes it particularly incumbent on those responsible for governance to eschew anything that smacks of sectarianism and parochialism. When asked what his biggest challenge was, Nehru said: "To build a secular state in a religious society". How true!

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