Secularism’s Unique Journey in India

When scholars discuss secularism, they almost always begin with European history – the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the gradual separation of church from state. But India’s story doesn’t fit that mold. A civilization with no single dominant church, a society where religious life has always been plural and layered, and a nation born out of a colonial encounter: India’s path to secularism is genuinely its own. Understanding it requires stepping away from Western templates and paying close attention to history, politics, and the deep diversity of Indian society itself.

Pre-colonial roots of religious coexistence 🔗

Long before any formal theory of secularism arrived, India had developed its own traditions of religious plurality. Ancient Indian society, shaped by Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and later Islam and Christianity, fostered a culture of tolerance and coexistence. The Mughal emperor Akbar’s policy of Din-i-ilahi – a syncretic creed drawing from multiple faiths – is a frequently cited example of this approach. Even at the popular cultural level, the Ganga-Jamuni tahzeeb (Ganga-Yamuna culture), a composite Hindu-Muslim culture that developed in North India during the medieval period, stood as a living example of pluralism and syncretism.

This is important context. Indian secularism was not invented from scratch after 1947 – it drew on deep cultural memories of communities living alongside each other, sharing spaces, practices, and even festivals. The theoretical challenge for post-independence India was to translate this social reality into a constitutional and political framework.

Colonial disruption and its lasting legacy 🔗

British colonialism did not simply introduce new ideas to India; it also actively disrupted existing arrangements. Colonial rule disrupted pre-existing harmony, as the British often pursued divide-and-rule policies, accentuating communal divisions for political gains. One of the most consequential colonial-era interventions was the 1937 Indian Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, which, instead of separating state and religion in the Western sense, did the reverse – establishing the principle that religious personal laws could govern Indian Muslims. This laid the groundwork for a legal framework in which different religious communities would be governed by separate personal laws, a feature that continues to generate debate in India today.

Scholars have also noted a deeper tension. The idea of secularism was one of the backbones of the colonial educational project, which approached India as a backward society in need of conversion to modern Western values. Critics argue this means some Indian intellectuals who champion secularism are, unwittingly, continuing the colonial tradition of measuring India against a Western standard. This critique is central to understanding why secularism remains contested terrain in India.

Nationalism and the making of Indian secularism 🔗

The anticolonial movement was where secularism and nationalism became deeply intertwined in India. The relationship of secularism with nationalism in India went hand-in-hand with the remodeling of Hinduism as a modern religion during the anticolonial movement, with its modernization gaining ground-up acceptance through anticolonial nationalism.

The Indian National Congress under Gandhi and Nehru embodied this fusion of the secular and the religious in a distinctly Indian way. While Mahatma Gandhi drew heavily on Hindu religious traditions and concepts like satyagraha (truth-force), he simultaneously embraced secular goals of democratic governance and religious pluralism. Gandhi’s vision was not a secularism that pushed religion out of public life – it was one that respected all religions equally. Nehru, by contrast, was a rationalist who believed the state should remain neutral and that science and modernity would gradually reduce religion’s hold on public life.

These two visions – Gandhi’s inclusive religious pluralism and Nehru’s rationalist state neutrality – would both shape the constitutional settlement of 1950, and their tensions have never been fully resolved. Mainstream nationalist thinking represented India’s religious diversity as its strength, and this secular nationalist ideology was not only intended to be unlike European nationalism but was designed to prevent that form of nationalism from emerging in India.

The constitutional framework: a distinctly Indian model 🔗

India since its independence in 1947 has been a secular country, with secular values enshrined in the Constitution. With the Forty-second Amendment of 1976, the Preamble was formally amended to assert that India is a secular nation. But what does Indian secularism actually look like in practice?

Political theorist Rajeev Bhargava has argued that the most accurate description of the Indian model is principled distance – a concept that sets it apart from both the French model (where the state excludes religion from public life) and the American model (where church and state maintain strict separation). Indian secularism did not erect a strict wall of separation, but proposed a “principled distance” between religion and state – and by balancing the claims of individuals and religious communities, it never intended a forcible privatization of religion.

In practical terms, this means the Indian state can intervene in religious affairs when doing so serves equality or social justice. Principled distance entails a flexible approach on the question of inclusion or exclusion of religion and the engagement or disengagement of the state, depending on the context, nature, or current state of relevant religions. So, for instance, the state may reform caste-based practices within Hinduism more actively than it might in other religions, because caste discrimination demands a specific remedy. One benefit of this distinctiveness is the space it creates for religious minority rights within the constitutional framework – something most Western models do not recognize as a basis for granting rights.

Sarva dharma samabhava 🔗

The philosophical cornerstone of Indian secularism is the concept of sarva dharma samabhava – equal respect for all religions. Indian secularism was loftily conceived as sarva dharma samabhava, which places it somewhat at variance with its Western counterpart – translating in practice as a project of equal sponsorship, or patronage, of India’s major religions, distinct from the broad Western understanding of secularism as separation of church and state. This is why the Indian government has historically funded Haj pilgrimages, Sikh shrine management, and Hindu religious endowments – not as a violation of secularism, but as an expression of it.

Critical debates: is Indian secularism compatible with Indian culture? 🔗

Not everyone accepts that secularism – even in its Indian form – fits the country’s social and cultural reality. Two of the most influential critics are sociologist T.N. Madan and political psychologist Ashis Nandy.

T.N. Madan’s critique 🔗

Madan argued that secularism is fundamentally a product of Protestant Christianity and Western modernity, and that transplanting it into a deeply religious society like India was always going to produce distortions. For Madan, the majority of Indians – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or otherwise – live religion as a total way of life, not as a compartmentalized sphere of private belief. Nandy similarly observed that secularism has turned into an intolerant ideology, with modernization, development, and nation-building as its allies – and that this secularism alienates believers and breeds both old and new kinds of violence. For Madan, secularism is the dream of a minority imposing itself as the framework for a majority that simply does not share those assumptions.

Ashis Nandy’s critique 🔗

Nandy goes further. He draws a crucial distinction between religion as a way of life – accommodating, non-monolithic, and rooted in folk practice – and religion as a constructed ideology, in the shape of organizations like the BJP or the Muslim League. Nandy argued that many people expected secularism in India to supply the ethical framework for public life, but because it was not seen to have deep roots in religious faiths in this part of the world, the public sphere came to be seen as an arid area without moral grounding. He contends that India’s traditional, pre-modern pluralism – expressed in the fluidity of folk religious practice – was more effective at producing tolerance than imported Western secularism has been. In his view, India’s post-1947 attempt to mimic the Western liberal secular state has in fact produced communal violence, not reduced it.

Defenders of Indian secularism 🔗

Bhargava and others have pushed back strongly against these critiques. They argue that dismissing secularism as a Western import ignores India’s own constitutional traditions and the very real need to manage inter-religious conflict through law and institutional design. Indian secularism did not emerge from an intra-religious crisis as in the West – it evolved in response to an inter-religious crisis, and neither follows the complete separation thesis nor one-sided exclusion, but is based on principled distancing. The argument is that India needs secularism precisely because of its diversity, not in spite of it.

Contemporary challenges: Hindu nationalism and the secular state 🔗

The debate about secularism in India has become increasingly urgent in recent decades as Hindu nationalism has moved from the political margins to the center of power. For the first 50 years after partition and independence, Indians voted consistently to retain the multi-religious plurality of their state, with equal rights for all citizens and special protections for minorities. But the last quarter century has seen the rise of Hindu nationalist ideology, which seeks to rebuild India as a nation of Hindus.

Today, the assimilatory nationalism of India’s Hindu majority repeatedly prevails over the once hegemonic secular nationalism of India’s anticolonial founding moment. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been at the center of this shift. The BJP labels policies protecting minority rights as “minority appeasement” and accuses centrist parties of treating minority communities as vote banks, calling the existing arrangement “pseudo-secular.”

A concrete flashpoint has been the question of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) – a single set of personal laws that would apply equally to all citizens, regardless of religion. The 1978 Shah Bano case brought the secularism debate and demand for a uniform civil code to the forefront – Shah Bano, a Muslim woman divorced after 44 years of marriage, sued for maintenance, and the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, with the Chief Justice calling for a Uniform Civil Code. The case immediately became a political flashpoint, illustrating just how deeply the intersection of religion, law, and state neutrality divides Indian society.

What makes India’s secularism genuinely distinctive 🔗

India’s experience with secularism defies easy categorization. It is neither the strict church-state separation of France, nor the American “wall of separation,” nor a theocracy. It is something that emerged from the specific pressures of colonialism, from a nationalist movement that had to hold together an enormously diverse society, and from a constitutional tradition that saw religious pluralism as a national strength rather than a problem to be overcome.

For some, secularism is originally a Christian doctrine adapted to modern Western conditions, meaning strict separation of church and state – a predominantly single-value doctrine more suited to single-religion societies than to the socio-cultural context of India, where it is more appropriate to rely on resources of multiple and indigenous religious traditions. Bhargava’s response is that this misunderstands Indian secularism entirely: the Indian model is not a deficient version of the Western one. It is a contextually sensitive, ethically negotiated arrangement suited to one of the most religiously diverse democracies on earth.

Whether that arrangement can survive the current pressures of majoritarian politics, the unresolved debate over personal laws, and the ongoing contest over what it means to be “truly Indian” – these are questions that remain very much open. India’s secular experiment is not finished. It is still being fought over, defined, and redefined in real time.

What do you think? Is a model of secularism that maintains “principled distance” – engaging with religion rather than excluding it – genuinely better suited to a pluralistic society like India, or does it create more opportunities for political manipulation of religion? And given India’s pre-colonial traditions of religious coexistence, was Western-style secularism ever the right framework to begin with?

References

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7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principled_Distance
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11. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/27567/1/Unit-20.pdf
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14. https://www.upes.ac.in/blog/law/the-unique-character-of-indian-model-of-secularism
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16. https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CRII_035_0121–the-distinctiveness-of-indian.htm