“Minorities are the natural custodians of the secular state [ D.E. Smith] Discuss. (2010)
The sentence comes from “The Building of a Secular State”, the closing chapter of Donald Eugene Smith‘s India as a Secular State (1963). Weighing the forces for and against Indian secularism, Smith counted “sizable and influential religious minorities” among its strengths, beside Hindu tolerance, the Constitution, the Supreme Court, the Congress and Jawaharlal Nehru. His claim concerns interest, not virtue: those who would lose most under a confessional state have the strongest motive to defend a neutral one.
Smith’s Argument in Context
- Smith defined the secular state through three relations: freedom of religion, equal citizenship, and separation of state and religion. His verdict on India was a qualified “Yes”: secular in the sense in which India was a democracy.
- He was exact about the minorities’ role. Muslims and Sikhs had little in their traditions that endorsed a secular state; they would strengthen it chiefly by guarding the rights of their respective communities. Only Protestant Christians brought a doctrine of church–state separation.
- Custodianship is thus defensive, secularism as the minorities’ insurance.
Why the Claim Has Force
- Structural logic. A religious majority can capture the state under majority rule; a minority cannot. Minorities therefore hold the largest stake in Articles 14, 15 and 25–30 and in judicial review.
- Litigation. Minority petitioners built much secular jurisprudence: Bijoe Emmanuel (1986), where Jehovah’s Witness children could not be compelled to sing the anthem, and the Article 30 cases culminating in T. M. A. Pai (2002). The challenge to the Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025 won an interim stay (15 September 2025) of its five-year-practice condition.
- Electoral leverage. Steven Wilkinson‘s Votes and Violence (2004) shows state governments stop riots when minority votes are pivotal. Muslim voting in 2024 was defensive, not confessional.
The Objections
- Guarding community is not guarding secularism. Orthodox mobilisation undid the Shah Bano judgment (1985) through the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986. Smith foresaw the dilemma: probably over 90 per cent of Muslims, he judged, saw their personal law as the essence of Islam, so a uniform civil code would test minority secularism itself.
- Custodians without keys. Guardianship needs leverage, which the majoritarian turn since the Ayodhya movement has eroded: Muslim MPs fell from 49 in 1980 to 24 in 2024, about 4.4 per cent of the House.
- The appeasement trap. Neera Chandhoke notes that the model’s engagement with religion let a communal project brand it pseudo-secular; a doctrine seen as one group’s shield loses the majority.
- Anti-secularists. T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy locate tolerance in the everyday faith of all communities, not in a state creed defended by one group.
- Principled distance. For Rajeev Bhargava, secularism opposes inter-religious domination and intra-religious oppression alike. It protects Dalits within Hinduism and Muslim women within their community, as Shayara Bano (2017) did, so its custodians must include the majority and dissenters within minorities.
Assessment
Smith is sociologically right, minorities feel a secular state’s failure first, but incomplete as a theory of guarantee. The institutional custodian is the Constitution: S. R. Bommai (1994) made secularism part of the basic structure, and Balram Singh (2024) upheld the word in the Preamble. Smith himself warned that the secular state becomes a hollow mockery unless it protects every citizen, whether he be of a minority or the majority religion.
Conclusion
Minorities are the natural sentinels of the secular state, not its sole trustees. A secularism left to those who need it is already precarious, which is why Smith, while calling the Hindu parties marginal, cautioned that the forces of Hindu communalism are biding their time. Its survival depends on a majority that sees in it its own freedom.