Gandhi in His Time and Ours: Some Reflections on Secularism and Multiculturalism

It is widely known that Gandhi, for most of the long period of the freedom movement that he led, was indifferent to the claims of what has come to be called ‘secularism’. In fact, ‘secularism’ was not a concept that was much wielded by him or by Nehru1 till the 1940s, when the acrimonies around an impending threat of partition inevitably made the rhetoric of secularism  surface. A little later, during the Constituent Assembly debates, though issues around secularism were of course discussed, it is also widely known that the term made no entry into the Constitution till the mid-1970s.