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The Second Fundamental:
3.
Enlightened Secularism and Common Heritage
This brings me to the second Fundamental for Renaissance. That is secularism. Since there are a great many people living in India of different religious faiths, hence we need a concept of how people bond together and mutually accommodate their religious aspirations without conflict. Since a thousand years ago, India was a country of 100% Hindus, there is also a question on how to bond with our past since Islam and Christianity were imported into India. This bonding question has not been made clear to the Indian people, hence there is a great deal of confusion in the country on the meaning of secularism.
In the original meaning, secularism had merely meant separation of the temporal power from the dictates of the spiritual authority. In Europe where the concept originated, the State was to be separate from the institutional authority or the Church. In a Hindu dominated country, there is no ‘Church’ for a Hindu religious authority, so secularism in its original sense is irrelevant for India. Another sense in which secularism has been used is the left definition: of the state as anti-religious. Some years ago, Marxist MPs objected to the Prime Minister inaugurating a public sector project by lighting lamps (that are in wide use in Hindu temples) and by breaking a coconut. They protested that these are Hindu symbols and a Prime Minister of a secular state should not indulge in them. This concept of secularism too we must reject. I may label it as the Aggressive Left Secularism. This variety of secularism has also been fostered in the country since 1969 by the partisan cultural patronage of Congress governments through communist leaning academicians, who are organized in Left-dominated institutions such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University and certain government funded research organizations. The aggressive Left secularism has many adherents amongst Muslim intellectuals too. It is a national tragedy for us all that after nearly six decades of independence, and after conceding Pakistan, Muslim intellectuals in India should see the choice before them increasingly as between Islamic Fundamentalism and Aggressive Left Secularism!
to be continued...