The Constitutionality and Rationality of the Secular Imperative

There is perhaps no more urgent and fraught issue in India today than the question of the relationship between the democratic State, secularism and religion. According to a widely held view, either secularism as a conceptnorm is inapplicable in India because of its origins outside of India, or any vaunted value of secularism that might exist has already been anticipated in Indian history outside of any external influence. The common ground between these seemingly contradictory propositions lies in the theoretical postulate according to which only that which can be said to have emerged in India is applicable, and ought to be applicable, in the country today. One finds this line of argumentation being made during the colonial period, in the Constituent Assembly and in the wake of the promulgation of the Constitution (Austin 1966, pp. 34–63, 405–08). In fact the Indian Constitution has been accused of not having its roots in the country and as being the result of ‘Western’ or foreign influence, and therefore defective (ibid.). Such has been the broader context for the critique of secularism, and it is a critique of this specific set of arguments on various registers – judicial, jurisprudential and social-scientific – that this essay engages in.