Indian Secularism and Religious Philosophy
INDIAN SECULARISM AND RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY The Introduction Is India a secular state and society, and can it be? What are the forces, secular and non-secular, curently operating in the Indian polity? Can our Constitution and governments live up to the large secular claim made by our national leadership! Do religion and para-religion infiltrate into neighbouring areas of labour, education and social servies corrosively? A geo-secular glance reveals that Pakistan is openly Islamic in politis while Bangladesh is secular by constitutional assertion. People’s China and the Soviet Union possess a flavour of anti-godism. Britain has an established religion coexisting with with a democratic set-up and America has built a wall of separation between God and Caesor. India that is Bharat is a Curious hybrid secular in text but sacerdotal in attire, with a leaning wall of State-Church separation and suffering from a constitutional solicitude for religious minorites.The paradox of liberal religious thought and communal belligerncy, of constitutional commitment to a social revolution and the polities of relgion which even revlulutionary parties play, and the phenomenon of two ‘total’ religions that regulate worldly and other-worldly affairs-can this vast Indian mosaic fulfil a secular promise or should we so cndition the genetic code of the nation aas to ensure an Indian humanity not blotted by deities and divided by Gods but spurred on by science and socialoism and informedd by cosmic spoiritualism? The Aim What do we mean be a secular state and a secular society in the indian context? The former implies a national policy and the latter a social philosophy. The Church-state controversy of the West is absent here and so the role of the state vis-àvis the majority and minority religions is more pertinent for us. Secularism is not an end in itself, nor another ‘religion’ but a specific defensive plus-offensive mechanism at the service of India’s million in their march towards the