Author: Mukul Kesavan
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 138
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143027735
Description
Published under the series Interrogating India, this essay argues that secularism is the political common sense of the Republic. This series looks critically at the commonsense prevailing on some of the most pressing issues of our times.
In this essay, Kesavan argues that secularism is (and has always been) the political common sense of the Republic. Before Independence, secularism grew out of the necessary pluralism of Congress politics. The Congress was inclusive because it had to prove to a skeptical colonial State that it genuinely represented the diversity of India. After Independence and the traumas of Partition, the function of Nehruvian secularism was to reassure Indians of every sort that they lived in the Republic by right and not on sufferance. Secularism because a way of making the republican State credible to all its constituents.