How deep does Indian secularism run? |
The Republic of India was founded seventy-six years ago, but the foundations of its inner life/ nature (‘svadharma’) were laid nearly 3,000 years earlier. The Indian Republic of today is a confluence of the currents of Bharatvarsha, Hindustan and India. Traces of every stage of this civilisational journey live in our collective subconscious. That is why the svadharma of the Indian Republic is neither rigid nor eternal. It is shaped by movement—both internal and external. Our svadharma is fluid, constantly in motion.
For this reason, the search for India’s svadharma cannot be conducted in the so-called eternal values of ancient India. India’s svadharma is not to be found only in formal documents, written ideals, established ideologies or institutional religious texts. It reveals itself in the language of movements. First Buddhist and Jain philosophy, then the Sufi and Bhakti traditions and, in the modern era, the national movement—each challenged entrenched power, interrogated civilisational values, stirred the public conscience, and in the process redefined our svadharma. By understanding these religious, social and political movements, we can broadly identify four threads that define the svadharma of the Indian Republic. This essay and the three that follow will examine these four threads.
The first thread of svadharma begins with ‘maitri’ (friendship), passes through the idea of ‘sulah-e-kul’, and arrives at the modern concept of secularism, or ‘sarva dharma sambhava’. In contemporary debates on secularism, both sides often assume that secularism is a new idea—a new solution to a new problem. But seen from the perspective of Indian civilisation, neither the problem nor its solution are new. The coexistence of diverse views, sects, traditions and lineages has long been one........