Secular India

At the end of his waiving the white flag article A missive to distraught liberals | Times of India Blogs , Dileep Padgaonkar tells his co liberals, “….we must not lower our vigil to ensure that casteist, communal, sexist, hyper-nationalist and regional chauvinist forces of all shades do not threaten the fundamental rights of citizens. These rights are the foundation on which rests the edifice of our Republic.” Now being an intelligent man, he conveniently drops the S word & replaces it with Liberals!!

Do we conclude that all those named above are not seculars, against whom Mr. Padgaonkar wants to keep vigil of the Republic along with the sepoys in his platoon?

A Secular as defined by Oxford is: “Not connected with religious or spiritual matters”

By this definition:

1.     Every person in any way connected to any religion becomes non secular. In short only an atheist can be termed as secular.

2.      Nations that can be called secular are the Communist Countries, which do not believe in religion. But then we are left with just a handful of such Countries.

Since the majority of Nations have religious freedom or are declared religious states, seculars as a community based on this definition are in a grave minority in the whole world.

India has been a Nation of religious worshippers with a spiritual heritance that has a history of Thousands of years; hence by no stretch of imagination can this Country be called secular based on this definition of secular.

But then, the way of life adopted by Indians is the Hindu way or Hinduism in colloquial terms. This way of life gives liberty for discussions, disagreements, acceptance for new thoughts and amalgamating them in the main discourse, including those which have come from lands afar.

India was one of the first Countries that has had people of all shades, religions in its land for centuries, living in harmony with each other for due to the ethos practiced by the natives.

Every community, religion that faced threat in their Country / region of birth, rushed to India as they found it to be the only place that they knew would accommodate and absorb them. Today we have Jews, Parsis, Siddis & innumerable explorers from Europe, Persia, and China etc.., who have settled here for centuries. Each one has continued to practice their faiths without fear or favor.

This is now an anti-thesis to the definition of Secular as described in the beginning.

Probably, this is the real definition of being secular and was established before the word was coined or came into popular usage. Ethos of which, are expressed as Sarva Dharma Samabhava  and Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb.

This definition of Secular is all inclusive whereas the oxford definition is all exclusive.

The Padgaonkar platoon should reorient their liberal & secular values to this definition and look at India from this prism instead of the Victorian value prism of secular. Remember this definition was coined to keep the church at bay.