Secularism, Indian-Style: Still Under Construction

There is no country on earth more devoted to secularism than India, and no country that spends more energy proving it. Every election season, some minister will visit a temple at dawn, a dargah by noon, and a church before dinner, and the photographs will be presented as proof of a state that has transcended religion, rather than, say, a state that has simply made sure to touch every base. Secularism here does not mean the absence of religion from public life. It means its extremely even distribution, with cameras present at every stop.

Take Uttarakhand, which in January 2025 became the first state to roll out a Uniform Civil Code. A landmark moment for secular uniformity, except the code requires live-in couples to register with the state, on pain of jail time, and to produce a certificate from a religious leader confirming they are actually eligible to marry. Somewhere, a civil law drafted in the name of keeping religion out of the state managed to insert a priest into the paperwork. The Supreme Court, weighing in this past March, essentially shrugged and said the time has come and Parliament should decide, which is the judicial equivalent of forwarding an email back to sender.

Then there is the Preamble, that small paragraph every schoolchild memorizes, which contains the actual word "secular." Somehow the government's own official artwork of it has, on more than one Republic Day, gone out missing that word entirely, along with "socialist," as though the Constitution had quietly gone on a diet. Nobody ordered the omission. Nobody explained it either. It just kept happening, like a typo that refuses to be corrected because correcting it would require admitting it was ever there on purpose.

Meanwhile the Waqf Amendment Act, passed last April, rewrote the rules for how Muslim religious endowments worth over a trillion rupees are governed, and promptly drew sixty five petitions and counting. A year of that argument later, a Foreign Contribution bill showed up in March aimed squarely at Christian institutions and their overseas funding, and was pulled from the table within a week after Kerala's churches and opposition parties made enough noise. The government did not lose the fight so much as postpone it to a more convenient election cycle, which in Indian politics counts as a full and dignified retreat.

And the word itself keeps doing its double duty. To one half of the country, "secular" is a badge of moral seriousness. To the other half, the same eight letters are practically an accusation, shorthand for a tolerance that always seems to run in one direction. It is possibly the only term in Indian political vocabulary that functions simultaneously as a compliment and a slur, often deployed by the same commentator in the same news cycle without apparent notice of the contradiction.

None of which makes the whole project a hoax. It makes it a genuinely difficult problem that keeps getting handed a much simpler name than it deserves. The Constitution's framers were not attempting the French style of religion locked out of the public square. They were attempting something closer to principled distance, a state that engages with all religions rather than pretending none of them exist, on the theory that pretending would have been its own kind of dishonesty. Whether that balance still holds is a genuinely contested question, not a punchline. Critics on the right argue the state still tilts toward minority appeasement. Critics on the left, and increasingly religious minorities themselves, point to a widening gap between the promise on paper and the incidents on the ground, from mob violence to legal restrictions that seem to arrive one community at a time. Scholars have spent entire careers arguing about whether "secular" was ever quite the right label for what India set out to build.

The jokes write themselves because the contradictions are real and current, not historical footnotes. But the contradiction is also the actual news story: a nation of over a billion people, a dozen major religions, and one Constitution, trying to hold the arrangement together in real time, missing words from its own Preamble, writing priests into its civil codes, and relitigating the same argument every single year without ever quite finishing it.