It will require less exertion to base the Constitution of Pakistan on the sharia than to base the Indian Constitution on the dharmashastra. But should we regard this as a matter for regret and set Pakistan up as the guide to our future?

Fragile Secularism

India is larger and socially more diverse than Pakistan, and it has gone further along the road to modernity. Turning back will be much more difficult for India than for Pakistan. Our secular legal and constitutional order has not done all the work it was expected to do. But undoing the work that has already been done will exact incalculable social and political costs.

We should not underestimate the hostility to secularism in India, and the many sources from which it draws its sustenance. There is antipathy to secular ways of life and to secular principles of governance, but the two kinds of antipathy do not necessarily spring from the same source. Much of the hostility to secularism is derived from our lack of ease with modernity and the modern world which is dominated economically, politically and culturally by the West ... But it has also come under attack from persons whose hostility few had the foresight to anticipate: cosmopolitan and well-travelled intellectuals who have tasted of the bitter fruit of what they call 'post- Enlightenment modernity'

Secularisation that is characteristic of our times ... is not necessarily destructive of religion in the true sense of the term, although it is easy to represent it as such. What it does is to bring about a change in the place of religion in the social order, particularly in the public domain. The .. opponents of secularism argue on the other hand that there can be only a religious morality and no secular morality, and that secularisation is destructive of both religion and morality.

... Opposition to secularism does not arise solely from feelings of religious piety ... Their opposition has less to do with religion than with politics and culture. At the same time, their arguments serve to fuel the passions of those who adhere to established religious beliefs and practices.  In a country like India - or Pakistan - it does not take much to convince the masses of impoverished, undernourished and uneducated people that whatever is modern or of western provenance is godless, immoral and socially disruptive.

Over the last 50 years, there has been growing disenchantment, particularly among the intelligentsia, over the poor performance of our secular Constitution, our secular legal system and our secular public institutions. None can deny the yawning gap here between expectation and attainment. But to be disenchanted with all of this is one thing and to put the responsibility for communalism, casteism and social violence on the advance of secular and ideas and institutions is quite another. If we have failed to keep religion and politics apart, surely this has happened despite our secular Constitution and not because of it.

Disenchantment with the present should not lead to the construction of an imaginary past and a programme for the future modelled on that past. It is increasingly argued  that our present form of secularism, based on western ideas of modernity and progress, is a sham, and that true secularism, based on the tolerance of diversity, is what prevailed in our own society ... The latter is at best a half- truth. The tolerance of the past included the tolerance of a great deal that ought not to be tolerated in a democratic society based on the rule of law: the indignity, oppression and violence inflicted on women, Harijans, Adivasis and many others. The challenge before secularism today is to create tolerance among communities on the basis of equality and not on the basis of hierarchy as in the old social order.

There is no denying violence and disorder ..Communal riots and caste pogroms have become the staple of the ... media. The forms of violence have changed with changes in technology ... But we should not delude ourselves into the belief that there was little or no violence in pre-modern India. Violence inevitably takes a different form in a democratic as against a hierarchical society. We will never be able to reckon the scope and extent of violence inflicted on the disadvantaged ... and tolerated by them ... in the past.

.. (We) can only hope that it will not be argued in our Parliament that recasting the Constitution of India along the lines of the dharmashatra will ensure a better future for women, Harijans and Adivasis.                                                          (Source: The Times of India, 29 October, 1998)