In the recent discussion on Hindutva, the bogeyman has been the notion of secularism. Secularism is established in India's Constitution, but acolytes of Hindutva ask why India should not, like so many other Third World nations, find refuge in the assertion of its own religious identity. It is a reasonable question, which requires a reasonable answer - an Indian answer.

My generation grew up in an India that rejected the very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. That was the basic premise of Indian nationalism. We never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a State for the Muslims, what remained was a State for the Hindus. To accept the idea of India, you had to spurn the logic that had divided the country

This was what that much-abused term 'secularism' meant for us. Western dictionaries might define 'secularism' as the absence of religion, but such a notion is foreign to India: religion is far too deeply rooted in all our communities to be wholly absent from our perceptions of ourselves ... I remember how, in the neighbourhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the chant of the mantras at the Hindu Shiva temple and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh gurudwara reciting verses from the Granth Sahib.

.. Every religion flourishes in India. But secularism as an Indian political idea had little to do with Western ideas privileging the temporal over the spiritual. Rather, it arose from the 1920s onwards, in explicit reaction to the communalist alternative. Secular politics within the nationalist movement rejected the belief that religion was the most important element in shaping political identity. Indian secularism meant recognising that India had a profusion of religions, none of which should be given privileged status by the State.

All the cant about 'genuine' and 'pseudo' secularism boils down in the end to simply this. Amartya Sen has put it rather well in declaring that political secularism involves merely "a basic symmetry of treatment of different religious communities". This kind of secularism is actually the opposite of classic Western ... secularism, because, in effect, it actively helps religions to thrive, by ensuring there's no discrimination in favour of, or against, any particular religion.

In a country like India, our secularism recognises the diversity of our people and ensures their continued commitment to the nation by guaranteeing that religious affiliation will be neither a handicap, nor an advantage. No Indian need feel that his birth into a particular faith automatically disqualifies him from any profession or office. That is how the political culture of our country reflected 'secular' assumptions and attitudes.

Do the critics of secularism want to end an India in which this kind of 'secularism' is practised? And if so, what is their alternative? Hindu chauvinism has tended to portray itself as qualitatively different from Muslim sectarianism. A.G. Noorani has reminded us that as far back as 1958, Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru had warned against the dangers of Hindu communalism in a speech to the All India Congress Committee. Nehru's point was that the communalism of the majority was especially dangerous because it could present itself as nationalist; since most of us are Hindus, the distinction between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism could be all too easily blurred.

Obviously, majorities are never seen as 'separatist', since separatism is by definition pursued by a minority. But majority communalism, in fact, is an extreme form of separatism, because it seeks to separate other Indians, integral parts of our country, from India itself.

... The Hindutva movement mirrors the Muslim communalism of 1947; its rhetoric echoes the bigotry that India was constructed to reject. Its triumph would mark the end of India ...