Secularism II: The Indian Model — Sarva Dharma Samabhāva, Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Radhakrishnan, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the Constitutional Scheme and the Supreme Court

Humanism; Secularism; Multi-culturalism.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Section A, Unit 6

Indian secularism did not grow out of a war between Church and State. It grew out of a land of many religions living side by side for centuries, a freedom struggle that needed Hindu–Muslim unity, the trauma of Partition, and the urgent need to abolish untouchability and reform unjust customs. So it took a different shape from the Western “wall of separation”. In India, secularism is not a rejection of religion but an acceptance of all religions — sarva dharma samabhāva, equal respect for all faiths — combined with a state that may intervene to reform and support all communities even-handedly. This article explains the Indian notion of secularism and its two aspects, the views of its architects — Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar and Radhakrishnan — and of the earlier modernist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the constitutional scheme, and the main Supreme Court judgments up to 2026. The philosophical debate about Indian secularism — Bhargava’s “principled distance” and its critics — follows in Article 6.

Context & Problem

Why India Needed a Different Secularism

• Deep religious diversity. India is home to Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Jews, tribal faiths and non-believers — and each religion itself is internally plural (sects, castes, regional traditions).
• Religion is public and communal. For most Indians religion is not only private belief but festival, food, dress, family law and community identity — it cannot simply be “privatised”.
• Old traditions of coexistence. Ashoka’s edicts of mutual respect among sects, Akbar’s sulh-i-kul (peace with all), the Bhakti and Sufi saints (Kabir, Nanak), and the Ṛgvedic “Truth is one; the wise call it by many names”.
• Colonial communalism. British policies — separate electorates (1909), the Communal Award (1932) — hardened religious identities into political blocs and ended in Partition (1947) and massacres.
• Injustice within religions. Untouchability, caste exclusion from temples, child marriage, unequal personal laws for women — a state that refused to touch religion could not remove these.
• Hence two tasks for Indian secularism: (1) protect every community and keep peace among them; (2) reform unjust practices within communities, especially the majority’s.

Meaning of Indian Secularism

Two aspects:

1. Negative sense — similar to the Western notion: non-interference of religion in the public (state) aspects of life; no state religion; no discrimination on grounds of religion.
2. Positive sense — goes beyond religious neutrality and helps every citizen to realise his religious freedom: the state not only grants religious freedom but also makes provisions for its fulfilment (support to educational institutions of all communities, management of pilgrimages, protection of minority culture).

Sarva dharma samabhāva — “equal respect (or equal feeling) for all religions”:

• There is only one ultimate reality, and different religions are the various paths leading to it.
• Every creature is a manifestation of the same reality; hence no religion is superior and no believer inferior.
• The state should treat all religions equally — with equal respect, equal protection and equal distance from domination.

Radhakrishnan’s formula: “Neutrality in the West becomes impartiality in India; the apathy of the West becomes harmony in the Indian context.” He wrote: “When India is said to be a secular state, it does not mean that we reject the reality of an unseen spirit or the relevance of religion to life, or that we exalt irreligion. It does not mean that secularism itself becomes a positive religion or that the state assumes divine prerogatives… We hold that no one religion should be given preferential status.”

Indian and American Secularism Compared

Core Doctrine

Mahatma Gandhi — Secularism as Equal Respect, a Foundation of Democracy

1. Religion as ethics.

• For Gandhi, not only politics but every aspect of life must be guided by religion — “For me every, the tiniest, activity is governed by what I consider to be my religion.”
• But by “religion” he meant ethics — truth, non-violence, love — not sectarian dogma. “Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

2. Two aspects of every religion.

1. The ritualistic (external) aspect — rites, ceremonies, customs, forms of worship; it varies from religion to religion.
2. The universal moral principles — the internal values common to all religions (truth, compassion, non-violence, service).
3. Religions primarily stand for a set of moral values common to all; religions are identical in their essence and differ only in their outer forms. “Religions are different roads converging to the same point.”

3. Sarva dharma samabhāva — all religions true and all imperfect.

• One of the vows of his ashram was equal respect for all religions: “All religions are true; all religions have some error in them; all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism.”
• He preferred equal respect to mere tolerance, because tolerance may imply a gratuitous assumption that the other’s faith is inferior.

4. Politics as lokanīti, not rājanīti.

• Politics should be service of the people (lokanīti), not a game of power (rājanīti). In his ideal of sarvodaya, lokanīti means the service of daridra-nārāyaṇa (God in the form of the poor).
• Hence there is no contradiction between religion and politics: religion (as ethics) provides vision to politics. “Politics bereft of religion is a death-trap, because it kills the soul.”

5. But the state must be secular.

• “If I were a dictator, religion and State would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The State has nothing to do with it. The State would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion.” (1946)
• “The State should undoubtedly be secular. Everyone living in it should be entitled to profess his religion without let or hindrance, so long as the citizen obeyed the common law of the land.” It “could never promote denominational education out of public funds”. (1947)
• Teaching of fundamental ethics, common to all religions, is a function of the state; denominational religious education is the concern of religious associations alone.

6. Why secularism is a foundation of democracy (for Gandhi).

1. Equal citizenship — “every man enjoys equality of status, whatever his religion”; democracy cannot rest on a hierarchy of faiths.
2. Non-violence — democracy is the rule of persuasion, not force; communal violence destroys it.
3. Moral politics — without ethics politics becomes a scramble for power; equal respect gives democracy a moral core.
4. Unity — Hindu–Muslim unity was, for him, the precondition of swaraj; he died for it, on 30 January 1948.
5. Freedom of conscience — a democrat must accept that others may reach truth by other paths.

7. Gandhi on the political misuse of religion.

• The political use of religion never serves either the state or religion:
  1. The state remains economically, socially and politically poor and backward.
  2. Religion gets polluted by constant riots in its name.
  3. Politically the country becomes unstable through separatist tendencies based on religion.
• Criticism: Gandhi’s view may be theoretically sound, but in practice the mixing of religious idiom with politics can be misused and can lead to the communalisation of politics (critics cite the Khilafat alliance of 1919–24 and the later use of religious symbols in mass politics).

Jawaharlal Nehru — Secular State and Scientific Temper

• Influenced by the Western notion. Nehru favoured a clearer separation of religion from politics; he saw organised religion as often tied to superstition and reaction.
• Broad sense of “dharma”. He preferred to use dharma in its broader ethical sense — duty and moral order — rather than as sectarian religion.
• Different goals. The goals of religion are other-worldly; the goals of politics are this-worldly — food, shelter, education, health.
• Scientific temper. A great supporter of the scientific temper, he believed that dogmatic religion discourages it; science alone could solve hunger, poverty and superstition.
• Definition. Secularism means “freedom of religion and conscience, including freedom for those who may have no religion“, with equal treatment of all and no state religion.
• Communalism the main enemy. He called communalism of the majority more dangerous than that of the minority, since it can pass itself off as nationalism; he insisted on protecting minorities after Partition.
• Reform. He pushed the Hindu Code Bills (1955–56) — monogamy, divorce, inheritance rights for daughters — through Parliament.
• Progress. He dwelt at length on the importance of a secular policy and secular outlook as the road to national progress.

B.R. Ambedkar — Secularism, Reform and Fraternity

• Meaning of a secular state. “It does not mean that we shall not take into consideration the religious sentiments of the people. All that a secular state means is that this Parliament shall not be competent to impose any particular religion upon the rest of the people.”
• Religion must not cover the whole of life. If personal law and every social practice are claimed as religion, the state can never reform society; religion must be limited to beliefs and rituals that are truly religious, so that social reform is possible.
• Constitutional design — as chairman of the Drafting Committee he shaped the guarantees of Articles 14–17 and 25–30: equality, prohibition of discrimination, abolition of untouchability (Article 17), freedom of conscience with the state’s power of reform (Article 25(2)), and minority rights.
• Hindu Code Bill — he resigned from Nehru’s cabinet in 1951 when it was stalled, seeing personal-law reform as the test of a secular, democratic state.
• Religion and democracy. Democracy is “primarily a mode of associated living“; it needs fraternity — a sense of common brotherhood — which, he held, is “another name for democracy“. A religion that sanctions caste cannot supply it; hence his turn to a rational, ethical Buddhism.
• The label “secular” was not written into the original Preamble; Ambedkar held that the Constitution’s provisions already made the state secular, and opposed fixing such policy labels in the text. The word “secular” was added by the 42nd Amendment (1976).

Gandhi and Ambedkar on the Foundations of Secular Democracy

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan — Modernist Reform and the Communal Question

Life and work (1817–1898).

• A Mughal-era noble who served the British judiciary; during 1857 he remained loyal and saved Europeans at Bijnor, but lost family members in the reprisals.
• Wrote Asbāb-e-Baghāwat-e-Hind (The Causes of the Indian Revolt, 1859), boldly telling the British that the revolt arose from their misgovernment and from the absence of Indians in the legislature.
• Founded the Scientific Society (1864), the journal Tahzīb-ul-Akhlāq and the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh (1875; later Aligarh Muslim University, 1920) to bring modern, scientific education to Muslims.

His religious thought — a rational Islam.

• The Qur’ān is the “Word of God” and nature is the “Work of God”; the two cannot contradict each other. Where they seem to, the interpretation of scripture must be revised in the light of reason and science.
• He rejected blind imitation (taqlīd), superstition and the belief that prayer changes the laws of nature; he called for independent reasoning (ijtihād).
• Orthodox ulema opposed him, some branding him a kāfir (unbeliever) and calling his followers nechari (“naturists”).

His political thought — from “two eyes” to “two nations”.

• Early composite nationalism. “India is like a beautiful bride blessed with two lustrous eyes — the Hindus and the Muslims. If they quarrel, the bride will look cross-eyed; if one destroys the other, she will be one-eyed.” At Gurdaspur (1884) he said that “Hindu” and “Muslim” are religious words, and that all who live in India are one nation.
• The turn. The Urdu–Hindi controversy (from 1867, when Hindus in Banaras demanded Hindi in Devanagari in place of Urdu in courts) convinced him that the communities’ interests were diverging.
• Opposition to the Congress. In speeches at Lucknow (1887) and Meerut (1888) he urged Muslims to stay away from the Indian National Congress: if the British left, could “two nations — the Mahomedans and the Hindus — sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not.” He feared that majority rule by elected councils would reduce the educationally and economically backward Muslims to a permanent minority.
• Interpretations. Some see him as the forerunner of the two-nation theory; others as a reformer and educationist whose politics was a cautious response to minority fear, and who never asked for a separate state.

Relevance to secularism.

1. He shows the modernist path of reforming religion from within by reason — a parallel to Ram Mohan Roy and Vivekananda.
2. He exposes the core problem Indian secularism had to solve: in a majoritarian democracy, a minority’s fear of permanent subordination. The constitutional answer was equal citizenship plus minority guarantees (Articles 29–30) — not separate electorates.
3. His journey — from “two eyes of one bride” to “two nations” — warns that communal anxieties, if not answered by fairness, harden into separatism.

The Constitutional Scheme of Indian Secularism

1. No state religion; equal citizenship

• Preamble: “Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic” (“secular” added by the 42nd Amendment, 1976). In Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India (November 2024) the Supreme Court dismissed challenges to the words “socialist” and “secular”, holding them part of the Constitution’s basic character.
• Article 14 — equality before law; Article 15 — no discrimination on grounds of religion (among others); Article 16 — equality of opportunity in public employment; Article 325 — no separate electoral roll on grounds of religion.
• Article 27 — no person shall be compelled to pay taxes for the promotion of any particular religion.
• Article 28 — no religious instruction in institutions wholly maintained out of state funds.

2. Freedom of conscience and religion

• Article 25(1) — all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to public order, morality and health and the other fundamental rights.
• Article 26 — every religious denomination may manage its own affairs in matters of religion, establish institutions, and own and administer property in accordance with law.

3. Protection of minorities

• Article 29 — any section of citizens with a distinct language, script or culture has the right to conserve it.
• Article 30 — all minorities, religious or linguistic, have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice; the state shall not discriminate against them in giving aid.
• National Commission for Minorities (statutory since 1992).

4. The state’s power to reform

• Article 17 — untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form forbidden.
• Article 25(2) — the state may regulate economic, financial, political or secular activities associated with religious practice, and provide for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.
• Article 44 (Directive Principle) — the state shall endeavour to secure a uniform civil code for citizens throughout India.
• Article 51A(e) and (h) — the duty to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood transcending religious divisions, and to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.

The Supreme Court and Secularism

Critical Evaluation

“Not a Rejection of Religion but Acceptance of All Religions” / “Fellowship of Religions”

What the statement means:

• Indian secularism is not anti-religious: it does not ask citizens or the state to turn away from religion.
• It means equal respect (sarva dharma samabhāva) and fellowship — friendly coexistence, mutual learning and shared festivals — among faiths.
• It also includes freedom for those with no religion (Nehru) — “acceptance of all religions” must not become compulsion to have one.

Why it fits India:

1. Cultural roots — Ṛgvedic pluralism, Ashoka, Akbar, Bhakti and Sufi saints, Kabir’s “Ram and Rahim are one”.
2. Social reality — religion is part of public life; a hostile secularism would be rejected.
3. Constitutional design — Articles 25–30 protect and even assist religion; the state manages pilgrimages and endowments.
4. Political wisdom — equal respect binds a diverse nation; Gandhi saw it as the basis of swaraj.

Problems with the formula:

1. Accepting all religions is not accepting all practices. “Acceptance” cannot extend to untouchability, sati, instant triple talaq or the exclusion of women — the state must also reform (Ambedkar).
2. Equal respect is hard to apply equally. The state reformed Hindu personal law but left other personal laws largely unreformed — critics call this asymmetry; others reply that reform of minority law must come with the community’s consent.
3. Majoritarian slide. “Respect for all religions” can slide into public patronage of the majority’s rituals and symbols.
4. Fellowship is an ideal, not a fact — communal riots (1984, 1992–93, 2002, 2020) show how fragile it is.
5. Non-believers must not be pushed out by a “religious” secularism.

Balanced conclusion: the statement is true of Indian secularism’s spirit (equal respect and fellowship) but incomplete as a description of its structure, which also contains non-establishment, equal citizenship and the power of reform. Secularism in India stands not for irreligion but for deep religious understanding (Radhakrishnan) — and for equal rights under law.

Criticisms of the Indian Model

1. Vote-bank politics and appeasement — parties are accused of using minority protection for votes.
2. Selective reform — Hindu law reformed, others not; the Uniform Civil Code long left unfulfilled.
3. Majoritarian encroachment — state patronage of majority religious events and symbols; religious mobilisation in elections.
4. Judges as theologians — the “essential religious practices” test makes courts decide what is essential to a religion (questioned in the 2026 Sabarimala reference hearing).
5. Communal violence — the model has not prevented riots or the rise of religious nationalism.
6. Conceptual vagueness — “equal respect”, “equal distance” and “principled distance” can justify almost any policy.

Strengths of the Indian Model

1. Fits a deeply religious, plural society — no community is asked to give up its faith in public.
2. Combines liberty and reform — the state can protect religion and also fight caste and gender injustice within it.
3. Protects minorities with enforceable rights while keeping equal citizenship.
4. Has endured — seventy-five years of a secular constitution in the world’s most religiously diverse democracy.
5. Exportable — scholars now offer it as a model for other diverse societies (Article 6).

Critics and Defenders

Cross-Tradition Comparison

Architects of Indian Secularism

Indian Secularism and Western Thinkers

Synthesis (Siddhānta)

• Indian secularism has two aspects — a negative one (no state religion, no discrimination) and a positive one (helping citizens realise religious freedom) — united by sarva dharma samabhāva, equal respect for all religions.
• Gandhi gave it its ethical spirit: religion as morality, equal respect, a secular state and a moral politics; Nehru its modern, scientific and anti-communal edge; Ambedkar its constitutional structure and reforming power; Radhakrishnan its formula of impartiality and harmony; Sir Syed a reminder of the minority’s fear that secularism must answer.
• The Constitution combines freedom (Articles 25–26), equality (14–16, 27–28, 325), minority protection (29–30) and reform (17, 25(2), 44), and the Supreme Court has made secularism part of the basic structure while struggling with the “essential practices” test.
• “Not rejection but acceptance of all religions” captures its spirit; its structure adds equal citizenship and the duty to reform.
• Contemporary relevance.
  1. Uniform Civil Code — Uttarakhand’s code in force since 2025; Gujarat’s and Assam’s received the President’s assent in September 2026 (all exempt Scheduled Tribes) — reopening the balance between uniformity and pluralism (Article 6).
  2. Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 and the Sabarimala reference (judgment reserved in 2026) — the limits of state regulation of religious institutions and of judicial review of religious practice.
  3. Hijab, temple-entry and mosque-entry disputes — individual rights versus community autonomy.
  4. Election law — appeals to religion as a corrupt practice (Abhiram Singh) in an age of identity-based campaigning.

“We hold that no one religion should be given preferential status, or unique distinction… This view of religious impartiality, of comprehension and forbearance, has a prophetic role to play within the national and international life.” — S. Radhakrishnan