Anti-Secularism in India: Critiques and Alternative Perspectives

India calls itself a secular state, yet it does not separate religion from public life the way France or the United States does. The state funds religious pilgrimages, manages temple finances, recognises separate personal laws for different communities, and declares holidays for many faiths. This gap between the textbook idea of secularism and how it actually works on the ground has produced one of the most fascinating debates in modern political thought. A group of influential thinkers argues that the Western model of secularism simply does not fit a society where religion shapes nearly every aspect of life. This critique is often labelled anti-secularism, though the word is misleading: most of these scholars do not oppose religious harmony. They oppose the specific way secularism was borrowed and imposed on a deeply religious society.

What does anti-secularism actually mean? 🔗

Anti-secularism does not mean supporting religious domination or theocracy. It is a scholarly critique of the standard, Western definition of secularism, which seeks to push religion out of the public sphere and confine it to private belief. Critics argue that this model was born from a specific European history, the conflict between the Christian Church and the state, and cannot be transplanted into a society with a completely different religious character.

The argument rests on a simple observation. Western secularism assumes that religion is a private matter that individuals can keep separate from politics, science, and public reasoning. But in much of India, religion is not compartmentalised. It is woven into food, marriage, festivals, social identity, and daily ethics. Asking people to treat faith as a private affair, the critics say, ignores how religion is actually lived. As a result, these thinkers propose alternatives rooted in Indian traditions of coexistence rather than borrowed European templates.

T.N. Madan: secularism as a borrowed idea 🔗

The sociologist T.N. Madan delivered one of the sharpest critiques in a 1987 lecture later published as “Secularism in Its Place.” His central claim was provocative. He argued that secularism in South Asia is impossible as a shared way of life, impractical as a basis for state action, and ineffective as a guide for the future. The reason, according to Madan, is that the major religious traditions of the region, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism, are “totalising.” They claim the believer’s entire life rather than occupying a small private corner of it.

Why secularism cannot simply be translated 🔗

Madan traced the roots of secularism to Protestant Christianity and Western modernity. He argued that transplanting an essentially Protestant idea into a deeply religious society like India was always likely to produce distortions. For most Indians, he claimed, secularism remains a distant, almost meaningless concept rather than a felt value. Madan also warned against arrogance: he criticised the small secularist elite for treating the religious majority as backward or primordial, simply because they had not embraced a Western worldview.

For Madan, the failure of secularism in India was not an accident of bad implementation. It was built into the attempt to apply a culturally specific idea universally. He suggested that any workable secularism here must accept that it is compatible with faith, and that rationalism in the Western sense is not the only force that can drive a modern state.

Ashis Nandy: when secularism becomes intolerant 🔗

The political psychologist Ashis Nandy pushed the critique further. In his widely discussed essay, often called the “Anti-secularist Manifesto,” he argued that secularism itself had become a new kind of intolerance. Nandy distinguished between two meanings of the word. One is the standard Western sense, which excludes religion from public life. The other is an Indian sense, which means equal respect for all religions without banishing faith from the public sphere.

The hidden hierarchy in modern secularism 🔗

Nandy’s most striking claim was that modern secularism creates a hidden hierarchy. He argued that the ideology of secularism sets up the modernised Indian as the standard of rationality in an otherwise supposedly irrational society. In this view, secularism quietly delegitimises traditional, religiously rooted ways of life while privileging a Westernised, English-speaking elite. He went so far as to argue that the opposite of religious intolerance is not secularism, but the genuine religious tolerance that already exists within India’s own traditions.

Nandy also made a disturbing observation about violence. He claimed that the rise of modern, ideological secularism had not reduced communal conflict but had often accompanied new and bureaucratic forms of it. He pointed to development, nationalism, and modernity as ideologies that, like secularism, could become faiths intolerant of other faiths. For Nandy, the solution lay in recovering the older, lived traditions of coexistence rather than deepening the secular project.

Bhikhu Parekh: the poverty of borrowed theory 🔗

The political theorist Bhikhu Parekh approached the question from the angle of political theory itself. He noted that with notable exceptions like Madan and Nandy, very few Indian theorists had seriously examined whether the term secularism even makes sense in the Indian context. Parekh asked a basic but neglected question: does a concept built around an organised Christian Church fit a country where the majority religion is unorganised, doctrinally diverse, and lacks a central authority?

The contradictions of Nehruvian secularism 🔗

Parekh pointed to the practical contradictions in the secularism practised after Independence. Jawaharlal Nehru’s government accepted Muslim personal law for political reasons, which gave that religion a legal and political status. It extended similar status to other minorities and funded religious schools. At the same time, the state reformed Hindu personal law. Parekh observed that Nehru’s brand of secularism was impossible in a deeply religious society, so his government found it impossible to live up to its own demands. The point was not to attack Nehru but to show that a strict, Western model could never be applied consistently here.

Sarva dharma sambhava: the alternative vision 🔗

If the Western wall of separation does not work, what is the alternative? Many of these thinkers point toward an indigenous principle: sarva dharma sambhava, which means equal respect for all religions. The idea suggests that different religions are different paths leading toward the same destination, so all deserve dignity and respect. This principle was popularised during the freedom struggle by leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda.

This vision is sometimes called “positive secularism.” Instead of the state staying indifferent or hostile to religion, it actively respects and engages with all faiths. The aim is religious coexistence and inter-religious dialogue rather than the privatisation of belief. Supporters argue this approach is more honest about Indian society, since it does not pretend that religion can be neatly removed from public life.

The critique of sarva dharma sambhava 🔗

This principle is not without its own critics, and a good blog should be honest about that. The political theorist Rajeev Bhargava argues that equating secularism with sarva dharma sambhava is too thin. He points out that equal respect for all religions is entirely consistent with ignoring the freedom of individuals within each religious group. A respectful dialogue between communities can still leave caste discrimination and gender injustice untouched. In other words, treating religions equally is not the same as protecting the rights of every individual inside those religions.

The defence: principled distance 🔗

The strongest response to the anti-secularism critique comes from Rajeev Bhargava, who argues that India developed its own distinct model that the critics underestimate. He calls it principled distance. According to Bhargava, Indian secularism never erected a strict wall of separation but instead maintained a principled distance between religion and the state. This means the state can engage with religion or stay away from it depending on the situation, guided by core values like equality and freedom.

The crucial point is that principled distance allows the state to intervene against what Bhargava calls institutionalised religious domination, both between religions and within them. This is why the state can ban untouchability, reform discriminatory practices, or open temple entry to all castes. Bhargava argues that this flexible model is not a failure of Western secularism but a more sophisticated answer to the problem of diversity, one that he believes even Europe could learn from as its societies become more religiously varied.

Where the constitution stands 🔗

India’s constitutional practice reflects this middle path. The word “secular” was added to the Preamble only through the 42nd Amendment in 1976, and the Supreme Court later declared secularism part of the basic structure of the Constitution in the S.R. Bommai case in 1994, where the court rejected the Western wall-of-separation model in favour of a distinctly Indian conception. The Indian state treats communities, not just individuals, as bearers of rights, and reserves the power to reform religious practices when they violate fundamental rights.

Why this debate still matters 🔗

The anti-secularism debate is not just an academic exercise. It touches live questions about the Uniform Civil Code, anti-conversion laws, temple management, and the place of personal law. Each of these issues forces a choice between two visions: a strict separation that may feel alien to many citizens, and an engaged model that risks the state playing favourites. The critics warned decades ago that an elite-driven, top-down secularism could alienate ordinary believers and even fuel the religious nationalism it was meant to prevent. Whether they were right remains one of the central questions of Indian politics.

What unites Madan, Nandy, and Parekh is not hostility to harmony but a demand for honesty. They asked Indian thinkers to stop borrowing concepts without examining whether they fit, and to take seriously the country’s own long history of religious coexistence. Their critics, in turn, insist that abandoning secularism altogether would leave minorities and vulnerable individuals exposed. The most thoughtful position may lie somewhere between the two, in a secularism that is genuinely Indian yet still committed to protecting every citizen.

What do you think? Is the Western idea of separating religion and state truly unsuitable for a deeply religious society, or is it precisely such societies that need it most? And can a model like sarva dharma sambhava protect individuals within communities, or does it risk respecting religions while ignoring the rights of the people inside them?

References

1. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/secularism-in-its-place/
2. https://sociology.institute/sociology-of-religion/secularism-journey-india/
3. https://english-studies.net/the-twilight-of-certitudes-secularism-hindu-nationalism-and-other-masks-of-deculturation-by-ashis-nandy-summary-and-critique/
4. https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/6142/1/BLR%20conf,%20Bhikhu%20Parekh%20article.pdf
5. https://www.studocu.com/en-us/document/creighton-university/political-science-hons/bhargava-04-bhargava/107757764
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principled_Distance
7. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/R/bo208646552.html
8. https://anantamias.com/5-secularism/