I have been wondering why, in spite of all our tall talk of national integration, secularism, communal harmony, casteless society, social justice etc. since Independence, we are going just in the opposite direction. Either we are not sincere about these ideals or we are prisoners of some perceptual distortions about the very meaning and contents of these noble terms.

As far as sincerity and commitment goes having been an insider, I can say with certainty that our political leaders have become helpless prisoners of electoral politics and vote arithmetic. Their first concern has been to create favourable vote banks and vote combinations. According to their understanding, Muslims constitute the biggest vote block as they generally vote as a religious community while the Hindu consciousness at political level gets fragmented along caste, linguistic and regional lines. And, therefore, these politicians, under the cover of secularism, try to appeal to the religious sentiments of the Muslims by raising the bogey of ‘majority communalism’, and ‘Hindu chauvinism’, etc. Their secularism has always been negative in character. With an eye on Hindu votes, they play up caste, linguistic and regional loyalties in the Hindu society and they feel no compunction in joining hands with parties or individuals with caste, linguistic or regional bases. In short, these politicians have developed a vested interest in the communal and caste divides of our society....

...Muslims...were given more than equal rights and privileges in the new Constitution of Independent India. This decision of the much-maligned ‘Hindu majority’ was not dictated by any compulsion or by the presence of a small section of English educated, Westernised pseudo secularists. It was because secularism, namely the freedom to follow any form of worship and equal respect to all forms of worship, had always been an article of faith with it from time immemorial and had been a projection of its philosophy of life rooted in the Vedic saying - Ekam Sad Vipraa Bahudhaa Vadanti” (The truth is one, sages call it by various names).

If in spite of all provocations, India is holding fast to the ideal of secularism today, it is because of this ‘Hindu majority’ with Hindu ethos, which they denigrate day in and day out... The vast majority of secular voices arise only from within the Hindu society, and... secular voices in the vast Muslim population of India are so rare to find... Muslim finds who display genuine secular feelings... find themselves almost ineffective and totally isolated within their own community, the majority of which gets swayed by the call of the fundamentalists who do not allow any reform or self-criticism....

Obviously, secularism cannot be one-sided affair between a secular Hindu society and a non-secular Muslim community.... Since the birth of the Indian National Congress in 1885, the most important problem facing the national leadership had always been how to inspire the Muslim masses to join hands with Hindus in the freedom movement... 95 per cent of the Muslim voters chose to follow Jinnah’s and not Maulana Azad’s call.

“…We had hoped that with the departure of British imperialists and the partition of the country... we will be able to change Muslim attitude and build a homogeneous national society fully committed to the ideals of democracy and secularism... Instead, the compulsions of vote politics drove the political leadership to encourage, and also defend, fundamentalism and separatism amongst the Muslims, in the name of defending ‘minority identity’. Hindu intellectuals... sought to support this opportunistic power game in the name of secularism.

...The British imperialists, in the process of laying down the intellectual foundations of their policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ transformed the geographical and cultural connotation of the word ‘Hindu’ into a religious one... They deliberately treated Hinduism as a ‘religion’... As a religious category on par with Muslims.

It is impossible to achieve national integration without pride in a common cultural heritage and tradition and a devotion to the concept of a common motherland for whose unity and integrity one lives and dies.... If ‘secularism’ means equal respect to all forms of worship, (i.e. Sarva Dharma-Samabhav) it was never asked whether Islam, as an ideology, was prepared to accept this position... The Muslim question proved to be a main hurdle in the way of our long freedom struggle and ...has been playing havoc with our post-Independence politics. It will not be an exaggeration to say that Indian politics has been held to ransom by organised Muslim ‘block votes’. There seems to be a mad race among different political parties to woo Muslim voters under the cover of a fake secularism.

Because of this perceptual distortion, any assertion of Indian nationalism against this separatist religious identity is dubbed as ‘Hindu chauvinism’ or ‘majority communalism’...

“...The time has come for a serious and dispassionate debate with an open mind on the definitional content of the terms ‘Nationalism’, ‘Communalism’ and ‘Secularism’...

“...So long as Indian society remains vertically divided on religious lines, it cannot hope to concentrate on the basic task of socio-economic reconstruction...”

(Source: The Indian Express, 26 Nov., ’90)