We lost our first war of independence in 1857-58.

The inefficiency, intrigues and the rot that plagued the Mughal Empire finally paved the way for the establishment of British rule in India. Right from the beginning the British were very clear that if they had to rule India for a long time and that too with the help of Indians they had to change the mindset of the people by educating them in such a way that they not only felt ashamed of their own past, their own culture, their own tradition but also appreciated and followed everything British. T.B. Macaulay's minutes regarding the Indian education policy made all these very clear. All these contributed not only towards the consolidation of British Rule in India but also perpetuating various myths and wrong policies such as:

• That new education system with the feeding of distorted versions of India's past took its toll. That this country was never a nation, it was in the process of becoming one because of the British magnanimity; that India was a land for invasions and the Vedic Aryans came from Europe or central Asia.
• Knowledge contained in the entire Brahmanical literature - Right from Vedas to Sayam of 14th century - was not more than what was contained in the 'paltry abridgment' of preparatory books in England. India was an uncivilized pastoralist country.
• Political awareness and occasional confrontation brought in their wake some measures of self-rule and with that came in the British treatment of the Indian People class-wise i.e. the policy of divide and rule. They treated Muslims and depressed classes as separate identities and gave them separate electorates.
• The psyche of the Muslim leaders was that of dethroned rulers treating other Indians as their subjects.
• For Hindu leaders, Muslim participation became a must for the success of the freedom movement. (Savarkar's call: "If you come along with you, if you do not, without you; if you oppose, in spite of you, I will fight for independence," - came a little late).
• In Europe the concept of national identities and religious and linguistic minorities developed with the collapse of five empires after the 1st world war and the birth of several nations. The same is being thrust upon India ignoring completely the cultural unity of this country.
• A strident assertion by the Muslim leadership of their separate religious identity eliciting assurance of protection and a policy of appeasement is again becoming prominent.
• These assurances getting the title of secularism, and resulting in 'Negationism'; negating everything from the National tradition, which preceded all aggressions, and which was described by others as Hindu.

The confusion prevails even after 15th August, 1947. The Independence of the country was marked by the pain and trauma of a bloody division. Pakistan was founded on the fallacious two-nation theory and it proclaimed itself to be an Islamic State: A large Muslim population (which had voted for Muslim League's Pakistan) remained in India and the Indian leadership got afflicted with the 'minority' syndrome.

Indian tradition and ethos have never been in favour of theocracy, and hence on the eve of Independence it proclaimed itself to be a sovereign, Democratic Republic securing to all its citizens, among other thing, Liberty of though, expression, belief, faith and worship.

The process of constitution-making as reflected in the Constituent Assembly Debates was burdened by the concern for the 'minorities' and by the presence of a theocratic state in the neighbourhood. While rejecting the original proposal for communal reservations, the constitution-makers ensured, through the enactment of Articles 25,26,27 and 28, Right to Freedom of religion and through Articles 29 and 30, the Cultural and Educational Rights of minorities. The Constitution-makers did not deem it necessary or prudent, to mention secularism in the document. In fact, Shri. M.C. Setalvad in his Patel Memorials Lecture (1965) on secularism points out that the proceedings of the Constitution Assembly show that "two attempts made to introduce the word 'secular' in the Constitution had failed." He also quotes Dr. Radhakrishnan who said that "the religious impartiality of the Indian State is not to be confused with secularism or atheism". At the same time he asserted that '….nevertheless, it could not be said that the Indian State did not possess some important characteristics of a secular State'. He then stated that the idea of a secular State in the sense of a State which treats all religions alike and displays benevolence towards them was in a way more suited to the Indian environment and climate than that of truly secular State by which he meant a State which creates complete separation between religion and the State. It is also observed that a secular State is not easy to define. According to the liberal democratic tradition of the West, the secular State is not hostile to religion but holds itself neutral in matters of religion. Our constitution undoubtedly lacks a complete separation between the Church and the State as in the United States and at the same time we have no established Church as in Great Britain or some other countries. In our country all religions are placed on the basis of equality and it would, therefore, seem that it is erroneous to describe our country as a secular State.

With this clear understanding of secularism, the Founding fathers did not hesitate to provide for abolition of untouchability by Article 17, and to preserve the legislative power of the State for providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus by Article 25(2)(b) with Explanation II to the same Article which explains that reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion and the reference to Hindu religious Institutions shall be construed accordingly.

However, the dominant sections of the political class, viz. the Congress and its progeny and the stridently vocal section, viz. the leftists of various hues continued with their own version of the political idiom of secularism, minorities, communalism, Fundamentalism, Majority (Hindu) communalism and even created a straight jacket of political ideology of secularism, socialism, democracy and non-alignment. This was in the nature of ideological terrorism and found expression in Constitutional Amendments and legislations. It is par of recent history, that even though the Constituent Assembly had consciously avoided the expression 'secularism', it was introduced by the fraudulent 42nd Constitutional Amendment in the Preamble of the Constitution, in 1976, during the infamous Emergency, with the entire opposition in jail, to make us a secular and socialist republic. Even the Representation of People Act, 1951was amended to make it obligatory on every registered political party to swear by socialism and secularism.

However, through the history of 50 years of Independent India, the process of Deconstruction also commenced. I am using the term Deconstruction with apologies to the late M. Tacques Derrida distinguished French writer and philosopher who used it as a philosophical method. This deconstruction means not destroying ideas, but pushing them to the point where they come apart and expose their latent contradictions. It means reading against the grain of supposedly self-evident, socialism, Hindutva, National Unity, Dharma, Religion, Social History and Nationalism.

It is interesting to note here that during the lucid period of 1977-79, after the people had overthrown the authoritarian regime and installed the Janata Rule, the defiling of the Constitution was sought to be mended and the regime of the 42nd Amendment was sought to be dismantled. For the purpose Constitutional Amendments were proposed. The Constitution (Forty-fifth Amendment) Bill, 1978 was introduced in the Lok Sabha and was duly passed. Clause 44 of this Bill sought to amend Article 366 (which is the Definition Clause) to introduce the definitions of secularism and socialism. The proposed amendment was as follows:

1. the expression 'REPUBLIC', as qualified by the expression 'SECULAR' means a republic in which there is equal respect for all religions; and
2. the expression 'Republic', as qualified by the expression 'SOCIALIST', means a republic in which there is freedom from all forms of exploitation, social, political and economic".

This clause of the Amendment was voted down in Rajya Sabha, where the Congress enjoyed a majority. The terms thus remain undefined in law. And we have the observations of a Judge of the Supreme Court (A.M. Ahmadi, J. in S.R. Bommai) to the effect that:

"The term secular has advisedly not been defined presumably because it is a very elastic term not capable of a precise definition and perhaps best left undefined."

In these circumstances, it fell upon the Supreme Court to propound the real meaning of these various concepts and while doing this the Judges of the Apex Court did not hesitate to underline the ethos of this notion. As and when the occasion arose, the Judges ruled on the various concepts of secularism, national unity, Dharma and Hindu/Hinduism.

This process began almost with the establishment of the Republic on 26th January, 1950.

The Bombay Prevention of Excommunication Act, 1949, was successfully challenged by the religious head of the Bohra Community, in the case of Sardar Taheruddin Sayedna Saheb vs. State of Bombay (A.I.R. 1962 S.C. 853, 871), wherein Ayyangar, J. explained:

"Articles 25 and 26 embody the principle of religious tolerance that has been the characteristic feature of Indian Civilisation from the start of History. The instances and periods when this feature was absent being merely temporary aberrations. Besides they serve to emphasise the secular nature of the Indian democracy which the founding fathers considered to be the very basis of the constitution."

In the S.R. Bommai case, even while upholding the supersession and take over of the B.J.P. ruled States under Article 356 of the Constitution, after the demolition of the Babri structure at Ayodhya on 6th December, 1992, on the specious, untenable, intangible and vague ground of secularism, the Judges of the Supreme Court recognized that the secularism of the Indian Constitution is not of the Western variety, but is based on the tradition and ethos of this country. They (particularly Sawant, J.) extensively quoted Dr. Radhakrishnan, Swami Vivekananda, and Mahatma Gandhi, all of whom view secularism, in the light of the Hindu view of life, religion and man. While tracing the history of secularism of Prof. Holyoake, describing him as the father of modern secularism, and his associate charles Bradlaugh who wanted Morality to be understood by excluding all considerations drawn from the belief in God, K. Ramaswami, J., in the same case (S.R. Bommai) concludes:

"If any group of people are subjected to hardship or sufferings, secularism always requires that one should never remain insensitive and aloof to the feelings and sufferings of the victims. At moments of testing times, people rose above religion and protected the victims. This cultural heritage in India shaped that people of all religious faiths, living in different parts of the country are to tolerate each other's religious faith or beliefs and each religion made its contribution to enrich the composite Indian culture as a happy blend or synthesis. Our religious tolerance received reflections in our Constitutional creed."

Jeevan Reddy, J. notes a little grudgingly:
'This (i.e. secularism) may be a concept evolved by western liberal thought or it may be as some say, an abiding faith with the Indian people, at all points of times'.

After the demolition of the Babri structure on 6th December, 1992, the Central Government took over the entire area by enacting the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act, 1993. The constitutional validity of this enactment was challenged in the Supreme Court by Dr. M. Ismail Qureshi and certain other parties.

The main ground of challenge was secularism and the attendant rights of freedom of religion and equality. Justice J.S. Varma, who wrote the majority view of holding the Act valid traced the meaning of secularism and for that purpose he relied on an Address by Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma, President of India. Dr. Sharma stresses the difference between our understanding and that in the west and says that for us secularism denotes Sarva Dharma Sama Bhav, an approach of tolerance and understanding of the equality of all religions. He further says that this philosophical approach of understanding, co-existence and tolerance is the very sprit of our ancient thought. In support of this assertion he quotes Yajurveda, Prithvi Sukta of Atharva Veda and Rigveda. He then concludes that this enlightenment (of developing Sarva Dharma Samabhav or secular thought and outlook) is the true nucleus of what is now known as Hinduism.

Even in his dissenting judgment Bharucha, J. observes that Hinduism is a tolerant faith. It is that tolerance that has enabled Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrainism, Judaism, Budhism, Jainism and Sikhism to find shelter and support upon this land.

In another case the Court was dealing with the constitutionality of the U.P. Shri Kashivishwanatha Temple Act, 1983, and right to religious freedom under Articles 25 and 26. Talking of secularism and of India as a land of multi-religious faiths, the Court observed that majority is of Hindus, Hinduism being their way of life, belief and faith. Unfortunately they are disintegrated on the ground of caste, sub-caste, sect, sub-sect. Unity among them is the clarion call of the constitution. Unity in diversity is the Indian culture and ethos. The tolerance of all religious faiths, respect for each other's religion are our ethos.

It has already been held that cow-slaughter is not an essential aspect of the religion of Muslims and yet the same was sought to be justified on the ground of secularism. The contention was rejected by the Supreme Court in the case of State of West Bengal & Ors. vs. Ashutosh Lahiri & Ors.

The introduction of Jyotir Vidnyan as a subject of study was challenged on the ground of secularism. In the case of P.M. Bhagara vs. U.G.C. the Supreme Court rejected the challenge, while observing that ancient India studied Astronomy.

In the case of Santosh Kumar vs Secretary, the Court expressed deep concern for Culture in the context of need to study Sanskrit, and rejected the secular equation of Sanskrit with Arabic and Persisan.

The reigning ideology of pseudo-secularism always ignored the phenomenon of religious conversions induced by force or fraud. They needed to be reminded that the freedom of conscience guaranteed by Art. 25, is to profess, practice and propagate one's own religion. It does not include right to convert. If a person purposely undertakes the conversion of another person to his religion, that would impinge on the freedom of conscience guaranteed to all the citizens of the country alike. Without getting itself burdened by the secularist bogey the constitution Bench of the Supreme Court so held in the case of Rev. Stainistaus vs. - state of M.P. while upholding the anti-conversion laws of the states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.

National Unity
The decision of Bhagwati, J. in the Pradeep Jain case is sometimes criticized for 'nationalising' medical seats. But while talking about National Unity he expresses the true character of our nationhood which is hitherto ignored. The learned Judge notes that for centuries India was never a single political unit and yet India was forged into a nation on account of a common culture evolved over centuries. It is cultural unity which has welded this country into a nation.

In the case of Sastri Yagnapurushadri, while tracing the philosophy of Hinduism, the Court pinpointed the subtle indescribable unity of this society while appreciating that Hinduism is a way of life.

In the case of Bramchari Sidheswar Shai, the Court was dealing with the Ramakrishna Mission's claim to be a minority. While rejecting the contention the Court Quoted Vivekananda who said ours is a universal religion, and then observed that for us Hindus this truth has been the very backbone of our National existence.

In several other cases the Court is eloquent about the culture, the eternal values and the antiquity of this ancient land.

Dharma
Modern India commits the mistake of translating religion as Dharma (However, it is gratifying that the Hindi version of secularism in the constitution is Sarva Pantha Samabhav). In two recent cases the Court has made the distinction between religion and Dharma.

In the case of Narayana Deekshitulu the Court upheld the abolition of hereditary right of Archakas under the A.P. Charitable and Hindu Religious Institutions and Endowments Act, 1987. The judgment of both the Judges, viz. K. Ramaswami & B.L. Hansaria, JJ. Are erudite thesis on religion as spiritual attainment and Dharma as righteous foundation of Social Order.

Again in the case of Aruna Roy vs Union (the NCERT case), Dharmadhikari, j., in his concurring judgment elaborates on the Indian concept of Religion and Dharma, and notes that Sanatana Dharma is elemental to all Nations, while M.B. Shah, J., notes that Dharma is akin to Rule of Law.

Now a paradigm based on the concept of Dharma can change the points of reference in Human Rights jurisprudence. A lead has already been taken.

Hindutva - A Way of Life:
In the case of Sastri Yagnapurushadji, P.B. Gajendragadkar, C.J. dwelt on the meaning of Hindu. He concluded that it is difficult, if not impossible, to define Hindu Religion. It does not satisfy the narrow traditional features of any religion or creed, because the Hindus do not have (i) one God, (ii) one prophet, (iii) one dogma, (iv) one philosophical concept or (v) one set of rites. He, therefore, says that it may broadly be described as a way of life, and nothing more. It is the reflection of the composite character of Hindus. It is based on the idea of universal receptivity. Saints and religious reformers attempted to remove from the Hindu thought and practices elements of corruption and superstition. And yet a subtle indescribable unity pervades.

In the case of Commissioner of Income Tax vs. R. Sridhavan, Jaswant Singh, J. quotes both Webster and Encyclopaedia Britannica and says that Hinduism is then both a civilisation and a conglomerate of religions.

In the case of Dr. Ramesh Prabhu and Manohar Joshi the Supreme Court held that they had not committed any corrupt practice under the Election laws when they spoke of Hindutva or Hindu Rashtra. The Court held that Hinduism or Hindutva are indicative more of a way of life of the Indian people.

Thus these judgments help us to reach the true meaning of secularism, Dharma, Hindutva and National unity. In a way they indicate the stand and position of Hindu Nationalists. The Nation needs to take a hard look at the reality of life and relinquish secular dogmas that are badly affecting the health of the polity. The relevant portions of these judgments are complied here along with certain relevant articles and reports to present a coherent picture for the benefit of the layman.

These judgments indicate the freedom found by the modern intellectual from the western oriented dogmas. Today the judicial talent is brooding over the reach of Dharma, Dharmashastras and Mimansa. They are the reflection of the contemporary Indian entering the mould of a paradigm shift. The intellectual community is gradually being liberated from Marxist obscurantism, the antics of the Arjun Singh Brigade notwithstanding.

The indications are clear: When a Parliamentary Standing Committee on value-based education identified the core universal values to be Satya, Dharma, Prem, Ahimsa and Shanti; when the UNESCO idea of spiritual convergence is appreciated; when the internationally accepted idea of spiritual Quotient is recognised to be important facet of human personality as relevant as the intelligence quotient and emotional quotient.

Anybody who sees duties and rights as the two sides of the same coin goes nearer to the basic concept of Dharma. When women's empowerment is based on the tenet of 'family being the basic unit of the society' it is Indian in essence.

The more we recognise the importance and efficacy of the Panchayat Raj Institutions as instruments for reaching the goal of participatory democracy the more we will shift to an Indian or Bharatiya Paradigm consistent with our ethos. The earlier we appreciate the place of tribals in forests as the rightful habitants of the forest with their right to the land and produce, the more we will help them improve their lots without uprooting them.

Human Rights in the Indian context can never be irresponsibly absolute. Vikramjit Banerjee in his article has made out a forceful case for civilisational understanding. He speaks of a paradigm shift in the human rights discourse. Then he talks about - dharmic jurisprudence. Then comes the profound statement - dharma itself is neither a norm nor a duty but an eternal order of things.

One tends to agree with the author when he says that it is imperative to formulate alternative models of social welfare in terms of Bharatiya Culture such as the ones of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Thus, now, as the world civilisational discourse is moving from the anticipated clashes to the more basic search for one's rots, the Indian intellectual owes it to himself and his society to recognise his ethos and build a just society consistent with it, liberating the thought and action from dogmas of the Euro-centric world view, Marxist or otherwise. In this process of deconstruction the dogmatic definitions of secularism, Hindutva will give way to their real meaning.

The Supreme Court judgments could be seen as the first rays of Truth that will enlighten the entire intellectual discourse.

--Bal Apte

Introduction

This volume presents a collection of some important rulings of the Supreme Court of India on the concepts, thoughts and institutions linked to ancient India and Indian civilisation. These rulings bring out the endeavours of constitutionalism in India to acknowledge, understand and recognise the legitimate, yet hidden and unexpressed, urges of 'traditional' India. And that is precisely the reason why these rulings of the highest judiciary have been compiled, critiqued and presented as a compendium for demonstrating the strenuous endeavours of Constitutional India to find its roots in traditional India.

The 'modern' 'secular' Constitution, on which the Constitutional India functions, is based on the Anglo-Saxon experiences. This Anglo-Saxon constitutional instrumentality that free India had adopted to institute a modern nation-state to govern this ancient nation contained seeds of ideological tensions and conflicts between 'traditional' India and the 'modern' India -- here 'modern' means what is essentially Western. The India that is repeatedly and alternately referred to here as 'modern' and 'secular' commonly shares embarrassment and allergy for Indian traditions and traditional Indians.

Free India's leadership was a mix of those indigenously nurtured and those overawed by the West -- with the latter holding the reigns of power within and outside the State apparatus. In the euphoria generated by freedom, the leadership could not fully realise the dangerous potentialities the Anglo-Saxon modernism drafted into the Constitution exposed the nation to, unless handled sensitively. The seeds of discord between the 'secular' 'modern' constitution and the traditional India soon germinated and gradually sprouted as subterranean tensions between the 'modern' India and the traditional. These tensions turned into conflicts that intensified post freedom, and resulted in the virtual de-legitimisation of the traditional India in polity and public life.

The contradictions between an Anglo Saxon modelled 'secular' Constitution and an India largely driven by traditions could have been de-risked to the minimum -- though not fully eliminated -- by wise and sensitive leadership and empathetic intellectualism with sympathy for Indian traditions. The contradiction between the modern India and the traditional one was never unhandlable then, nor is it now. For, the Indian tradition was never a frozen institution like its cousins in different parts of the world. It was and is even now an open-minded, debate-friendly thought which contained within itself seeds of change dictated by the march of time. The Indian civilisation had always demonstrated unbelievable capacity for change in tune with times even while maintaining its traditions and being proud of its continuity. Thus it has always been a 'changing India' and equally a 'changeless India'. But it required mature political leadership, empathetic intellectualism and fair polity to handle the contradiction between the 'modern' Constitution and traditional India and to effect changes without offending continuity. On the contrary, the real polity practised in free India fertilised and fomented, instead of minimising, the discord, by vote-bank politics that virtually invented, instead of assimilating, and promoted, rather than subsuming, the majority and minority divide for political gain. It also discriminated against traditional India largely represented by Hindu civilisational moorings and even trivialised it. 'Secular' intellectualism controlled by the Left and the agnostic and atheistic lot only abetted this divisive polity and added fuel to the fire. Whenever traditional India found an isolated spokesman to speak on its behalf and voice its grievances against the wholesale deligitimisation of ancient India, the 'secular' India converged against and set upon such rare voice in defence of the traditional India and charged it with dividing the nation! With the result the greatest unifying idea of India came to be ridiculed as divisive.

This resulted in further and deeper isolation and disconnection of the 'modern', 'secular' State from the traditional society in India. The emotional disengagement between the traditional and 'modern' India peaked in mid 1980s when the nation underwent tumultuous times marked by terrorism and insurgencies which raised far-reaching questions on the scope and content of secularism even in the mind of many of its adherents. This brought hidden hostility of 'secular', 'modern' India to the traditional India out into the open. The accumulated hostility of the 'modern' India to the traditional compelled the traditional India to lodge an uproarious protest at being ignored and discriminated by the 'modern' India. This shocked the 'modern' India into realising that it could no more ignore the traditional India. How did conflicts arise between traditional India and the 'modern' and how did such conflicts force the traditional India to lodge open protest to make its point to the 'modern', constitutional India need to be analysed in some detail.

The judgements by the highest Court of the land collated in this volume should be understood in the historical context in they were pronounced. These pronouncements constitute post-constitutional conflict resolution efforts undertaken by Indian constitutionalism consistent with the increasing sensitivity of Indian political system to traditional India's aspirations. And they set out the judicially devised formulae to handle the tensions and conflicts that had marked the relations between the traditional India and the 'modern' India in free India which had intensified as 'modern' India's efforts to marginalise the traditional India too became pronounced. The judicial efforts illustrated in this volume also have had the effect of softening the partly hidden and partly open hostility of 'secular', modern India to ancient India and its culture and civilisation.

India: the 'Modern' and the 'Traditional'
The traditional India is the very origin and source of the India of today. It is a living reality, even now. At the existential level it is still the backbone of India. In the philosophic plane it is verily its soul. It does not call for any meticulous search or research to uncover this. It is visible to the naked eye, unless the 'modern' Indian, blinded by aggressive modernity, dismisses all traditions as backward and therefore and thereby misses their impact. India's philosophic and spiritual quests manifest explicitly and involve and bring the ordinary people of India together in millions time and again and connect them to their geography as a sacred idea in a manner unknown to any other civilisation. In fact the capacity of this ancient nation to bring together the people and link them to their geography, in which their faith was physically and spiritually rooted, constituted the very basis of Indian nationhood. Therefore the geography-linked faith of the Indian people constituted their identity as a nation. That is why Dr S. Radhakrishnan recalled that "originally the word 'Hindu' was territorial", that is geographic, "rather than creedal in its significance" [1].

But the undeniable fact is that the Indian creed -- being limited to India and not thrust on other territories or peoples -- too was geographic or geography-specific. Thus Hinduism too was historically identified with the geography of India as the exclusive creed of the ancient geography. Therefore the confluence of the people, creed and geography of India constituted and defined this ancient nation and its personality and identity as Hindu nation. The Indian civilisation never attempted to extend or impose, by war or force, its faith, that was rooted in its geography, to peoples or nations outside its borders. So its faith never diffused into other territories or peoples or mixed with their identities. It thus came to be almost exclusively identified the geography of India, besides the myths and history of India. Even when its religious influence spilled beyond its borders, the Indian religions fertilised the faiths and culture of host geographies, and not extend the Indian rule or dominance to the host territory. Thus, India did not attempt to impose Buddhism on China. Actually China volunteered to accept Buddhism. Even when China accepted Buddhism the Indian religion did not attempt to rule or dominate the host nation or peoples. Not a single Indian soldier crossed into China. Not a single Indian King visited China. It was a case of Fahiens and Huang Tsangs coming to India to know about India and its spirituality more than Indians going to China to preach about Indian spirituality! Identical was the case of Hindu influence in Indonesia and other Eastern countries. The reason was that the India never used spirituality to promote Indian politics, inside or outside India. Nor did India use politics to prop up its spirituality. Stated differently, the Indian spirituality was really divorced not only from politics but also from geo-politics. In contrast the Abrahamic religions, for instance, were driven by politics. No nation which drew inspiration from Indian spirituality lost in politics to India. No nation which accepted Indian spiritual influence lost its freedom to any Indian ruler. Nor was any local culture or faith undermined or annihilated by the influence of Indian spirituality. On the contrary, the Indian spiritual influence became the tonic for the local customs, not an anti-dote.

Since the Indian faiths -- that is, the faiths that originated in India - even though they influenced other nations and peoples, their identity never diffused away from physical India. So their Indian geography-specific identity never melted. They never got compromised or mixed with the identity of any other nation. Thus the Indian religions never diffused into the world of other or Abrahamic, religions that set about to dominate the world as part of their theological disposition. The other religions, given their global agenda, ceased to be geography-specific in their identity. That was how Christianity, though born in Bethlehem, became more identified with Rome, the seat of power, than Bethlehem, the place of its origin. So did Islam born in Mecca diffused as a trans-geography-specific faith, in a different way of course. The identity of these two religions transcended geographic limitations and therefore their original geography-specific identities. But because they never diffused or disconnected from the geography of India, Indian religions have both geography-specific as well as religious identities. That is, despite the fact that the Indian religions could and did influence other geographies than just India, their identity was exclusive to the geography of India. And equally the geography India was exclusive to them.

Thus, the nation in India is a sacred confluence of mass faith of the Indian people with geography of India. This is what Mahatma Gandhi too perceived, in his dialogue in Hind Swaraj, faith as the basis of India as one living organic entity, that is, in the modern idiom, one nation [2]. It needs no social scientist or demographer to offer proof for this explicit phenomenon in this country. A mere look at the mass power of a 'Maha Kumbh' or a Pushkar' in the North of India or their equivalent, a 'Mahamakam' or a 'Pushkaram' in the South of India and how these and other festivals and mass rituals in hundreds unite the people of India and link them to their geography will bring out the importance of tradition in the national life of India and also in integrating it as a nation. It is traditions like these in thousands, at the national, regional and local levels, that unite the people of India and integrate India more than all that the social contract based polity enforced by constitution and law, and penalised by courts and police for breach of contract and law, can accomplish. In fact traditional India has effectively and emotionally twined the people of this ancient nation into one rainbow like unified society with linked diversities like the colours of the rainbow. This bond has survived the over-bearing and hostile attitude of modernity that had at the start questioned the very relevance of ancient and traditional India.

The unique significance of this faith -- which is the collective of the commonwealth of Hindu civilisational faiths -- linked to geography of India is its non-conflicting nature. That is, being doctrinally tolerant of other faiths, it never had conflict with any other faith. On the contrary it integrated all other faiths as part of its own ever accommodating creed. Since it is non-conflicting, it turned out to be non-aggressive and consequently also non-invasive. This uniqueness made it possible for this faith linked to the Indian geography to respect all other faiths, wherever they hailed from and even if they disapproved of itself, on the principle of 'Sarva Panth Samabhava' [equal respect for all faiths] and also to respect the geographies of other peoples on the principle of respect for 'Desachara' [the local traditions safeguarded by the local State]. That was how the indigenous faiths originating in India could easily and without persuasion accept the faiths of other peoples as valid as themselves and this was how the idea of 'Rajdharma' [ethical principles of statecraft] in India, which drew its sustenance from the non-conflicting and non-aggressive faith, accepted the sovereignty of other States as inviolable. That is why when the Indian faiths gained influence outside of India they never carried Indian politics with them. Since they accommodated and celebrated other faiths - 'strange Gods' and 'divergent doctrines' - they never conflicted with or annihilated the faiths of the nations that invited the Indian spirituality. So the Indian faiths that gained influence outside of India actually integrated with the native faiths of the host land. We shall see the practical impact of the creeds that made it possible for Indian spirituality to guide the Indian politics to forbear from dominating a little later.

Even now, the traditional India so completely and comprehensively integrates the ordinary people of the India that the durable unity it secures otherwise than through the instrument of polity makes the political India and the State of India feel at ease and function in peace. These multitudes of manifestations of traditional India demonstrate the mass power and eternality of the tradition that binds and brings together the people and make them own and identify with everything about the country from common myths to common heroes and to common history and consciously make them belong to a common and shared ancestry. These traditions have sustained this ancient nation and preserved its soul even in the absence of a protective government for centuries and even in spite of hostile governments seeking to undermine and destroy its soul, all in the none-too-distant past. No 'modern' government can survive and sustain in this ancient nation without the continued support of this undated and un-dateable antiquity and traditions. Finally this traditional India is also integral to spiritual India and is inseverable from it.

But despite traditional India's manifest importance in shaping the personality of India as a unified nation, free India's constitutionalism and political establishment have successfully packaged and marketed 'modern' India as the real one. And equally successfully 'modern', constitutional India trivialised the traditional India as a regrettable fall out of the forgettable past, even an unmitigated evil and, in any event, not a matter of pride for recall. The reality is that the growth and development of 'modern' state and society India which is orthogonal and hostile to the traditional Indian society, that is largely religious, is at the root of most tensions in the Indian public life post freedom. On the contrary the 'modern' India has succeeded in projecting even small convulsions, which take place in the traditional India that the 'modern' Indian State is distanced from, as disrupting the 'modern' India and delaying the completion of modernity in India. But the truth is that the disagreements and disturbances which take place in traditional India are like issues within large and complex families. If the 'modern' India understands this element in the traditional India and handles them with sensitivity and without over-bearing, adversarial or condescending approach, then the disengagement between the two will get minimised. By projecting the traditional India as quarrelsome and difficult, and therefore backward and out of date, modern India tended to dismiss the traditional India as a burden. In the process, and presuming its assumptions about the traditional India were correct, the modern India also disconnected itself from the spiritual values that lie deep inside the heart of traditional India. Like the proverbial 'throwing the baby with the bathwater'. This disconnect with the 'traditional' India eroded the spiritual foundation of this ancient nation and deprived the 'modern' India of thousands of years of spiritual and cultural heritage that the antiquity of this nation represented. This disconnect also marked the beginning of free India's journey towards modernity mostly divorced from its tradition. This disconnect soon deepened to become a divide as modernity began defining itself as the converse of traditional India turning the traditional India into an exotic curio for tourist attraction!

In the background of the divide between the traditional and 'modern' India, the judicial rulings compiled in this volume indicate a rethink by Indian constitutionalism about the 'traditional' India and the attempt to over come the divide and reconnect the modern India to the traditional. These rulings seem to acknowledge, in the constitutional realm, the 'traditional' India as a reality. They also impliedly acknowledge 'traditional' India's continuing, perhaps even increasing, relevance and recognise its legitimacy -- even implicitly accept that it is also a matter of pride. But these rulings, as we shall see later, emerged in the constitutional domain only after the traditional India lodged a resounding protest in the political field at being marginalised by the 'modern' India. These protests which commenced from around the mid 1980s and intensified through the Ayodhya movement in 1990s in the public domain and on streets changed the political landscape of India in a manner unthinkable before. Even as these rulings do recognise the 'traditional' India hidden masked by the 'modern' as very much a reality, they also impliedly underscore 'modern' India's definitional and functional deficiencies in grasping the essence of ancient Indian tradition and culture internalised in traditional India. The 'modern' and 'secular' India's over emphasis and blind preoccupation with modernising and secularising India on the Anglo-Saxon experiences that are culturally and spiritually unsuitable to India, have caused this cultural and civilisational dent and deficit in the national psyche. This will need some further, acute analysis.

The concept of 'modern' India is philosophically rooted in the Anglo-Saxon model and is institutionally shaped and structured on the experiments and experiences of Christendom with individualism, secularism and liberalism as symbols of modernity. In short modern India is an exotic and glamorous laboratory strenuously trying to experiment the Anglo-Saxon experiences on this ancient nation by a cut-and-paste model largely ignoring all native and indigenous ideas. This alien philosophy and exogenous institutions which collectively represented the cut and paste modernity in India have over the years disturbed traditional India's internal harmony and constitutionally de-legitimised it. In addition, and to make this de-legitimisation more pronounced and explicit, practical and acceptable, even compelling and inevitable, the vote-bank shaped electoral India's political interpretation of the key provisions of the Indian Constitution -- and its repeated judicial endorsement -- placed undue emphasis on the institution of secularism transplanted into India on 'as-is-where-is' basis from Christendom. This constitutionally approved transplant of the intra-Christian doctrine of secularism that evolved in a mono-religious setup in the West into India, a multi-religous fabric, was contrived without being conscious of indigenous India's aspirations. This transplanted secularism could not effectively handle a multi-religious terrain like India and it has, on the contrary, dangerously distorted, even perverted, the national mind and confused the national identity of this ancient nation. Now this transplant is, by the calibrating process of recovery known to this ancient civilisation, getting de-legitimised and is being heavily questioned because of its undeniable incompatibility with the body and soul of traditional India. This process of questioning began manifesting from mid 1980s through very route that distorted secularism infiltrated this ancient nation, namely, constitutional and agitational politics represented, as recalled earlier, by the Ayodhya movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the consequence political changes it brought about. This we shall see a little later.

The main reason for the incompatibility of the currently celebrated modernity to traditional societies is its geo-Christian origin. Consequently it has internalised in the 'secular' domain all the defects of geo-Christian theological approach to the world of other religions including self-righteousness which is a necessary ingredient of Christianity. The modernity of the present defines itself as universal and as the reference point and delegitimises every other life model other than itself. Just as Christianity had made itself the sole reference point of God and the True Faith as it named them and delegitimised every other God and Faith that did not accept its centrality and universality. The result was that it became legitimate for it, even its duty, to seek to destroy all faiths and culture other than its own. That was how the exploration and decimation of the Americas and Africa and their peoples and their faith were philosophised and executed with Christian establishment patronage. Even with the transformation of the western model from faith-driven thrust to politics and economics driven thrust, the West refused to discard this approach. The original self-righteous geo-Christian religious mindset continued to inspire and drive the modern western attitude things, ideas and people non-western.

The principal drive of the western religions and philosophies - and generally the western mind - is that all that is Western constitute the sole and universal reference point. This equally applies to the western notions of modernity. If someone does not think, eat, dress, worship or do things like what the West regards as the acceptable way, then that is not only un-modern, but mediaeval. Had the West limited itself to thinking that way that might not be an issue at all. But it began by its power and influence acquired by the first mover status in history -- which actually testified to the aggressive element in the West -- to position itself as the universal model and make the people of the Rest also to think that way and encouraged them to disregard and delegitimise their own soul. This Western universalism which is the basis for modernity cut at the very root of the diversity of life and living models. This undermined the gradually enlarging and contiguous circles of native faiths, cultures, lifestyles and collectives and collective consciousness to national and then global levels to connect the individuals at the micro level through families to proximate neighbourhood communities and to national societies and to the abstract global society ultimately.

The current modernity has made external uniformity as the fundamental norm for the world. Anything externally different from the west was to be regarded as abnormal and unacceptable. Thus, even highly evolved civilisations that did not conform to the external orderliness and overt disciplines of the West were branded as un-modern, fit only to be dismembered and discarded. That was how the geo-Christian approach originally rationalised the elimination of like the Mayan and Native American faiths, cultures and civilisations which externally looked incompatible with the Western ideas and institutions, but internally more evolved than the Western in several aspects of life on this earth and beyond. This approach of the West was based on externals of a civilisation, not its internal worth or values. This externals-moulded approach continued when 'secular' geo-Christianity took birth as modernity in the post colonial period. This is what made the Western mind assess a Mahatma Gandhi by his externals as a 'half-naked fakir' without regard to the highly evolved mind that resided inside the deceptive frame of 'half naked fakir'. This description of the Mahatma was not just accidental or anecdotal. It was the expression of an instituted mindset that has not changed much since. This externals-influenced and appearances-based modernity has become obsessed with external looks rather than the internal worth of the ideas and institutions behind the appearances. Thus, modernism in India is, in substance, merely a pseudonym for ideas, life style and institutions essentially Western, particularly Anglo-Saxon.

This takes us to the question how 'modern' is India in this sense today despite over half a century of efforts to modernise it. It is no secret that even now the idea of modernity in India is more a superficial veneer that masks the real India, fakes the true one which is basically traditional in nature and psyche. The privately lived India is, utterly and by conviction, traditional in varying degrees. While, in contrast, the publicly projected India is feigning to appear 'modern' -read Western-- by driving underground and to obscurity all privately held traditions. The modern India is catchy and glamorous in appearance but within itself suffers alienation, and is confused and disturbed, its heart being neither here nor there. As a consequence it is utterly superficial in thinking and is influenced by exogamous drives and not by endogamous self-evaluation. Consequently, it lacks depth and understanding of traditional India's inner soul which is inextricably mixed with India's ancient traditions and religion.

With the result the 'modern' India is virtually cut off from its roots connecting it to the ancient Indian civilisational moorings. To make matters worse, 'modern' India, by compulsion of its definition, has had to openly abandon the ancient and traditional Indian tastes, lifestyle and appearances in the public domain only to be regarded and get certified as 'modern'. In fact it has not only to abandon, it has also to trivialise, the ancient and traditional India as un-modern and even as anti-modern. More, to propagate modernity, an informal, normative open air university, which has monopolised the right to certify who is 'modern' and progressive and who is backward and un-modern, was institutionalised by elite and Left Indian intellectualism. It is being successfully operated by the English speaking elites who have been apologetic about the traditional India and are shy of owing it and by Left thinkers most of whom negate the traditions of India as anti-progressive. Both of them, who otherwise disagree on almost everything else, converge on this. This superficially defined and even more superficially presented modernity represent the veneer that masks the real India which is intimately linked to traditions. Both English speaking elites and the Left thinkers have been intellectually and academically endeavouring for nearly a century to re-image India as turning back on its traditional past and disconnecting from it to qualify as 'modern'. That is to say, according to them, unless the new Indian distances and disconnects from his past he cannot qualify as 'modern' Indian. With the result, under the pressure of unsympathetic modernity, the traditional India had gone underground to save itself from the physically harassing and psychologically persecuting modernity till it regrouped and started asserting from the mid 1980s.

Despite all efforts of aggressive modernity, the Indian gene and Indian beliefs, Indian psyche and behavioural models, are firmly rooted in the ancient Indian, traditional idea of 'Dharma', which legitimises and binds all traditional Indian collectives, whether based on religion or language or social groups or otherwise without the intervention of the State. This ancient concept of Dharma, which is as old as India itself, is common to all faiths, the Indian Religions - Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and all their variations-- that originated in India. In contrast, the 'modern' 'secular' constitution which free India adopted was almost entirely based on the experiences and assumptions born out of the social and philosophic, and religious and political experiments, of Christendom. With the result the constitutionalism in India that has been endeavouring, unsuccessfully, for decades to institute a modern India based on Anglo-Saxon individualism in India is thus a carbon copy model of the West to re-image of India. The rationale behind this strange carbon copy intellectualism in India was the desire of the elite apologists and Left negationists of India to disconnect ancient India from the present and from the future, modern India. This effort almost totally derecognised the traditional India and its soul in polity and public domain, and that was the basis of the disharmony between the traditional India and the 'modern'.

Experiences of Christendom, Indian constitutionalism and 'traditional' India
Let us now analyse how far the experiences of Christendom and Anglo-Saxon institutions on which free India's constitutionalism are based are compatible with the traditional India. The experience which the Christian West had to under go to realise the need for granting religious freedom to individuals from the organised Christian Church and shape its brand of secularism to philosophise that grant was the outcome of tens of centuries of struggles within Christendom which evolved in three stages. The first stage was the struggle within the global Church which transformed into a battle between the global Church and nation-States which yielded the seed idea of modern nation state. Then it evolved into struggle between the nation-State and the national Church and later that manifested in the concept of secularism that brought about the separation of the Christian state and the Christian church. The third phase of it was the struggle between the national State and the individual that shaped the modern democratic polity with the individual as the centre. This actually started with the theological evolution through Protestant Christianity which made the individual and the State the only legitimate entities and the social organisation of the Church as the dispensable idea. It is at the third stage, the concept of secularism began shaping a godless society, namely the secular society, in Christendom and till then it was purely an intra-Christian arrangement between the two Christian faithfuls, the Christian King and the Christian Church. So what started off as movement for religious freedom turned into a movement for freedom from religion itself! These struggles, more often violent than peaceful, were rooted in protesting, agitating and revolting religious and political individualism against organised religious and political collectivisation of the people.

The philosophy of modernity rationalised the erosion of all collectives, be it the neighbourhood, community, caste or religious collectives. The philosophy propounded and supported the creation of faceless societies based on contract-based interface as the modern alternative for relation-based societies. The model for faceless societies began by contracting people out of their tradition and community and turning them into individuals beyond the normative and non-formal discipline of the collective. Thus contracting people individually out of their tradition and community collective so as to atomise them became the very foundation of modernity which rested on the pillars of individualism and secularism that negated the very idea of non-formal and normative idea of society. This is because a society -- which related non-formally within, and without the intermediation of the state -- itself could emerge as a symbol of sacredness and thus undo the individualistic 'secular' model. So all collectives which disciplined the individual whether on cultural, religious or other foundations are to be eroded by contracting out the individual from the collective and forming a collection of individuals interfacing each other by contact and rule of law intermediated by the State. Thus the normative collective, namely, the interrelated society is replaced by collection of unrelated individuals formally disciplined by the State. Thus the desperate need to dismember the organised Christian Church resulted in the dismemberment of all collectives and in the creation of new polity, the contract-based nation state, which later turned into democracies when the ruling political class and individualism clashed to dismember the very nation State it had instituted to replace the Church. Now, this individualist model of polity is entering economics in a big way through the mechanism of market in every dimension of economics.

At phase one, this new faith followed by the new polity was utterly destructive of - why, it actually destroyed -- all local cultures, faiths, aspirations and peoples. With the result there is no trace of Mayan or Native Indian culture left in the Americas. No original African culture left in Africa. No Australian culture left in Australia. Why, no trace of native European cultures left in Europe! In any event in the Euro-centric geo-Christian model, no legitimacy is left for those small numbers who cling to the remnants of the native cultures in non-Western parts of the world. Those who still cling to the non-Christian faiths are reduced to being demonstrative and exhibitive objects of exotic curiosity for the 'modern'. To sum up, not even traces of native, indigenous culture survived wherever Christian faith penetrated and even where some traces of nativity escaped and survived the remaining adherents of the surviving nativity conceded supremacy to the Western culture over their own. These efforts inevitably manifested in a new polity and statecraft based on the same philosophy and model as the new faith, namely building a global brand and endeavouring for global domination through colonisation. This we shall see in some detail.

Now, in phase two, the West is in post-modern mode. In this post modern phase, struggle of individual versus the individual, is taking shape as assertive institutions of human rights, gender rights, children's rights and elders' rights thus atomising whatever little normative collective cultural discipline was left in the societies and families. Modernity is highly apprehensive of and sensitive to the danger of tradition defying it. Near at home, just as the traditional India is mortally scared of modernity, in the same way modern India is utterly worried about tradition. The modern India knows that traditional disciplines will exist and defy it so long as traditional collectives that need no sanction from the State for their existence survive. So modernity in the interest of its own supremacy targets all collectives including the family in the name of the institutions of individual liberty and human rights and other segmented rights, including gender rights and children's rights. The expansion of the domain of individualism by emphasising the institutions of human rights and segmented human rights like gender rights and children's rights atomises even families which are the basic cultural units. Not only do these 'modern' concepts atomise the families but they also to abridge the idea of God in so far as Godliness or divinity manifests through family and other normative collectives. The concept of ever expanding and atomising rights is destructive of all traditions and traditional disciplines.

The consciousness based on rights has been used as a cloak by modernity to destroy all traditional collectives elsewhere and is keen to repeat it here in India too. It is explicit that without tradition and traditional collectives there can be no culture or cultural social capital. The concept of social capital celebrated by some socio-economic thinkers in the West now as unburdening the State and regulating the ruthless market animal is a product of culture. Even in the assessment of scholars of the West, which is not given to deep traditional cultural consciousness, there is a 20% missing element in economics and that is culture [3]. As there can be no culture without a collective and as there can be no social capital without culturally formed collective, there is a contradiction between Western individualism and formation and sustenance of culturally defined collectives which constitute social capital. The result of granting total legitimacy to modernity in this sense is to free the individual from all normative collectives and make the State and the market, which represent the contract-based collection of the people, supreme, with no initiative left in any human collective other than the collection of people bound by a State driven by power. So modernity has the potential to destroy all social capital based on culture.

But even as we understand the effect of these processes, we must bear in mind that the struggles between individuals and organised collectives represented by Church and later by the State were endogamous to Christendom and to the problem-specific curative evolutions within the tight Christian model. These struggles were masterminded and led over centuries by the main players -- statesmen, diplomats, philosophers, explorers and traders -- to overcome the organised and forced centralisation of religious, political and social power within Christendom. The efforts within the West to free the Christian people from the organised Christian institutions released huge kinetic energies that had remained throttled till then and kept bottled up in Christendom. This exploded into the geo-Christian global thrust later and this transformed itself in to a huge global mission to plant the 'Cross' across the continents by co-opting and converting the non-Christian peoples, nations and societies into the same organised Christian institutions at the national and global level.

This constituted the geo-Christian efforts for domination of the world and it evolved in to a comprehensive but calibrated process of subordinating the non-Western world to the West. This domination which began as religious thrust turned political with expedition and exploration and changed form as economic domination through colonisation and finally has now manifested in what is known as globalisation, a combination and convergence of all forms of the earlier thrusts. The main driving force of these global Tsunami tides is the geo-Christian lust for domination of the world. This idea, being contagious in nature, is now catching up with non-Christian societies and nations too in the mad race for survival through competition and seeking domination through competitiveness achieved by globally promoted religious, military, political and economic ideas, alliances, and institutions. With the result the whole world is today a contest between different nations seeking space alone or in alliance for domination over others thanks to the contagion competition for domination of the world.

The destruction of all ancient cultures and life-models and road-rolling the rubble of the destroyed cultures and values and faiths into the unified cloak of westernisation constituted the essence of modernity and secularism which the modern West has presented as the role model for the Rest to follow. The only change in this process of destruction in recent times is the new mode of destruction now adopted. In the past it was by violence and war. In modern times it is achieved, without physical violence and by peaceful and accepted means- that is acceptable to the West. This is now accomplished by assuming the West as the bench mark for the Rest, and by asserting psychological superiority of the West over the Rest and by deriding and trivialising all approaches to life other than the Western as un-modern so as to destroy their legitimacy in the mind of the co-opted native adherents. The 'humanist' West would at best tolerate the 'inferior' Rest in the interest of avoiding the clash of civilisations should Samuel Huntington's theory of handling the West vs the Rest situation gives any clue to the enigmatic Western attitude to the Rest of the world.

In sum, even though the West does not explicitly says so, it means that what is 'modern' is actually 'western' and what is 'western' is actually 'geo-Christian'. The origins and assumptions of 'secular' India's constitution and its later political construction constituted an attempt to own uncritically and experiment blindly this alien and exogenous experience with geo-Christian roots as the model for modern India and as the justification for de-legitimisation of traditional India.

Brooding Indian consciousness and the Hindu civilisational protest movement in 1990s: the judicial response.
This process of 'modernisation' of India clearly and effectively sidelined, marginalised and distanced the establishment of India from the soul of India rooted in 'Sanatana Dharma'. The brooding ancient Indian consciousness thus marginalised and sidelined by the rising tide of unbridled individualism, Euro-centric modernity and inappropriate secularity began reasserting through a gradual process. This process began long after we attained freedom, and was marked by a calibrated, as distinct from a revolutionary or violent, process which is part of the Indian genius. It brought out 'secular' India's growing conflict with the traditional and ancient India. This process was silent and muted to start with but soon acquired high decibel and increasingly and inevitably impacted on different aspects of the national life including mainly national polity. In this reassertion, the ordinary and believing Hindu took the lead and the leaders actually followed. Soon this turned into a socio-religious-political tornado, a high pitched Hindu civilisational reassertion in the 1990s through the Ram Temple movement which had had multidimensional effect on the nation's polity and psyche.

This reassertion of the Indian civilisation was also marked by a debate on the content and definition of what 'secularism' means. This debate impacted on the judicial process also. Civilisational issues came up for judicial determination on the touchstone of 'secular' Constitution. The judiciary in India had never been static, particularly after the late 1960s and had time and again dynamically reacted, and positively, to the expressed consciousness of the Indian people. This is evident from the way judiciary first delegitimised all amendments to the fundamental rights listed in the Constitution. But later, when the explicit mandate of the people turned inconsistent with such view, the judiciary modulated its position to approve of amendments to accommodate the expressed concerns of the people. Later, during the Internal emergency declared by the government in the mid 1970s the judiciary virtually legitimised the dictatorial regime instituted as a result. But, after the people of India resoundingly disapproved of the emergency and declared themselves against any kind of constitutional dictatorship, the judiciary too forthwith factored the mandate of the people in its rulings on fundamental freedoms of the people and even expanded their meaning and content. From then on the judiciary became acutely sensitive to issues concerning the freedom of the people of India, and even extended the domain of constitutional protection by evolving the concept of Public Interest Litigations. So the judiciary in India has time again addressed, and responded positively to, the expressed concerns of the people of India. Similarly, as a result of the civilisational assertion on the ground, the brooding Indian consciousness soon began to manifest in the reorientation of the national mind in other areas of national life including the judicial field. Consistent with the national sentiments, the judiciary too began to take note of the civilisational aspirations and concerns expressed by the traditional India which had remained dormant and stood explicitly and implicitly delegitimised by the constitutional establishment of India. The Court rulings catalogued in this volume echo the ongoing debate India and factor the expressed civilisational urges of the people since about twenty years particularly about the meaning and content of the idea of secularism which is synonymous with the attempts to recapture and reinvent the identity of the Indian cultural nationalism as part of the ruling establishment in the judicial field.

The State and Society in India, the traditional arrangement and the later conflict
The State-Society divide in India has at least thousand year history. The ancient Indian experience was that State was a less dependable mechanism as compared to the Society. This is because the society rested and functioned on auto-drive, powered by the eternal principles enshrined in the concept of Dharma which this ancient nation had evolved over thousands of years of continuity of experience handed down from generation to generation. In India, oral and institutionalised traditions followed by the people at large in day to day life, not records made by a few, were the medium of directing the course of civilisational continuity. Consciously, the ancient India had placed the Society, the Samaj, above the State, namely the King. In fact, in Indian tradition, the State was considered to be merely an instrument of the society, and so less dependable as compared to the society. This was aptly vindicated by global experience to the contrary. The rise of different civilisations which rested on the power and the authority of the State to sustain themselves, like the Greek and the Roman, Egyptian and the Babylonian, Assyrian and the Persian, and their fall which coincided with the fall of the respective States as did their rise with the rise of those States provided the vindication for Indian rationale for not vesting their total trust in the State. In contrast the Indian civilisation sustained for thousands of years by having a State that was protective of 'Dharma' but, not intrusive. This miracle of a State as an instrument of the Society and as integral to it was achieved by the unfailing adherence to the institution of 'Dharma' held supreme by all. This miracle was the exceptional work of the Saints and Rishis of India.

The concept of 'Dharma' - faintly equivalent to duty consciousness -- as institutionalised in the Indian tradition is the very opposite of the concept of rights enshrined in the Christendom's modern civilisational consciousness and in their political constitutions. Nevertheless the concept of 'Dharma' achieves the same result as the institution of rights does, but, by protecting the rights of the people by better means. In the Indian civilisational perspective, one's right is another's duty. For example, the right of a citizen constitutes the duty of the State. While the Indian tradition would insist that the State fulfil its Dharma, as part of the 'Rajdharma', to the people, modern West would insist that the State honour the rights of citizens. So the institution of Dharma is a comprehensive and participatory discipline which binds all to honour their duty [that is approximately, Dharma] to others, be it the State or the individual, or the individual to his or her parents, other elders, or children or brothers or sisters. In contrast, the Western discipline, which is based on the concept of rights enforceable against one another or against the State, is adversarial and therefore productive of conflict. So while the West emphasised the rights of all the Indian tradition emphasised the duty [Dharma] of all.

How Dharma has nourished India as a self-sustaining and self-policing model
Just a couple of illustrations would explicitly demonstrate that the institution of Dharma is not merely a theoretical concept nor dead idea but a living reality and a performing institution and actually a socio-economic delivery mechanism.

First, it is the ancient Indian consciousness inherent in the concept of Dharma internalised by thousands of years of sustained work by Rishis and Saints of India that has resulted in the evolution of a self-sustaining, self-governing and self-policing society in India. That is why even now for over 700000 villages and over a thousand cities and towns we have just a little over 12600 police stations. [4] Is it possible to police over one billion Indian people located in over 700 thousand locations with just about 12600 police stations? Never ever. The State in India remains at peace because it is not the police which have absolute monopoly duty or capacity to deliver the law and order in India, but, the indwelling consciousness, the Dharma which directs and restrains the people from within.

In Christian theology and experience, faith has to be driven by the Church and it has to be spread by evangelism which is the duty of the Church. Christendom could not conceive of a faith which sustains on its own without an external trigger of an organisation for safeguarding and spreading the faith. In Christendom's perspective, only a faith which is organised through a sacred Book and under a prophet is true faith, others are not faiths at all, and the Gods worshipped by the faithfuls belonging to those false faiths are false Gods. They are pagans. Likewise political Christendom could not conceive of a society that sustains on its own without being directed by a Christian state. Anglo Saxon model which is drawn from the experiences of Christendom cannot even conceive of a largely self-sustaining and self-managing society.

Now one can rationalise why some Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, uninitiated to the traditional India, regard India as 'a functioning anarchy'. It is because in their view anything un-policed by State can only be anarchic. They are not familiar with organic societies which self manage and self police. But what is organic will never be anarchic. Atomisation of organic societies, whose self-policing and self-managing functions organised states cannot fulfil, will bring about anarchy, which is what Christendom experienced when it undermined and decimated all pre-Christian organic religious and cultural entities and substituted the Church in their place. Later when Protestantism challenged the Churches, the State substituted for the latter. But that could not revive the organic formations and actually defaced them even more as the State and later democratic polity in Christendom functioned on the same principles as did the Church in relation to traditions and traditional societies. Consequently, the more the West insisted on individualism the more it required organised State and other apparatus to maintain social and public order. So without the organised Church and later the powerful and policing State, the atomised individualism was bound to risk anarchy. So in the mind of the West, in default of highly organised State, there would be only anarchy. That is the State is the only safeguard against anarchy when organic, normative collectives have been substituted by collection of individuals bound only by rule of law and the State. That is why western intellectualism would see anarchy wherever the State and law are seen to be inadequately organised or have less reach. Therefore while some Anglo-Saxon thinkers badly informed about the inner-direction that India gets would call India 'as a functioning anarchy', the even more badly informed indigenous intellectuals in this country would quote them approvingly.

So in the dictionary of Christendom, a faith which is not directed by an all powerful Church is a 'religious anarchy', that is, pagan, and a society which is not directed by all powerful State is a 'political anarchy'. A functioning India was shock to the Western intellectuals. They were surprised that the 'anarchy', that is, India was functional and was functioning. This perverse interpretation of Indian society by the scholars of Christendom is the result of the absence of an in-dwelling collective and individual consciousness in Christendom and in the Anglo-Saxon States equivalent to the institution 'Dharma'. But the elite English speaking Indian mind, despite its Western orientation, can still understand the difference between a religion driven by an organised Church like Christianity and inner-directed faiths like the Hindu commonwealth of faiths. It can also understand the differences between a society driven by the State and a society self-governed and self-managed by the institution of Dharma. Yet having been colonised over a hundred years, it is not decolonised enough to understand that what the Anglo-Saxon thinkers view as 'functioning anarchy' is actually a self-sustaining model and its functionality is nourished by the concept of Dharma.

Next, it is only the idea of Dharma as practised by the Indian families irrespective of their religious affiliations that has institutionalised a privatised social security system in India entirely provided by families and communities. This concept and practice of Dharma has saved the State of India from the burden of providing publicly administered social security by preventing atomisation of the families and by almost unfailingly preserving to-date the noble ideas of 'Gruhastha Dharma' [duty of a householder] and 'Pithr Dharma' [duty to ancestors] which mandate and bind a person to provide for the elders and also look after the younger ones as part of his Dharma. Thus the idea of Dharma is not an antiquated phenomenon frozen in epigraphic and literary information unrelated to current practices, but a living ideal and functioning institution. This is woven into the ideas of karma and birth and rebirth and also on the concept of ancestry and obligations to ancestors, which survives even death, and the survivor's responsibility is part of 'Pithr Dharma'. So there is link between faith in rebirth and 'Pithr Dharma', namely the duty to the ancestor which continues even after his death. That is why some times Hinduism is described also as 'a contract between the living and the dead'. This contract is inviolable in Hindu view of life.

This central feature of Hinduism, the idea of Dharma, is common to all Indian Religions. At the micro level, that is, at the individual level, the idea of Dharma as part of the rules of life was instituted in what is known as the fourfold discipline captured by the concept of 'Purushartha', namely, 'Dharma', 'Artha', 'Kama', and 'Moksha'. The meaning is that 'Artha', that is, wealth, and 'Kama', that is pleasure, in human life, should be governed by the rules of 'Dharma' and a human life lived by handling 'wealth' and 'pleasure' according to the rules of 'Dharma' will qualify 'Moksha', namely merger into and with God. At the macro level the idea of Dharma was based on four pillars, namely 'Vyakti' Dharma, that is, the duty of the individual based on the four fold Purushartha, 'Pithr Dharma', that is, duty to ancestors, 'Samaja Dharma', that is duty to the society, and Rashtra Dharma, that is duty to the nation. Thus the human life at the individual and collective levels was defined in terms of the institution of Dharma. This comprehensive edifice founded on the consciousness of Dharma has preserved the integrity and personality of the Indian society for thousands of years. Therefore it was regarded the foremost duty of all to protect Dharma at all levels so that Dharma in turn protects all. This is captured in the ancient Indian concept "Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitaha", meaning, Dharma should be protected so that it protects all.

The decline from 'Dharma Rakshana' to 'Dharma Nirapekshata'
Not just the undated traditions of India, but the historically known Indian States of the past from Chandragupta to Chola were thus founded on the ideals captured in the macro concept of 'Dharma' and on the duty of the State to protect dharma enshrined in the concept of 'Dharma Rakshana'. Thus, in the Indian perspective, protecting, but not interfering with, Dharma was the principal duty of the State. Thus when these Indian States rose and fell from time to time as States were bound to, the Indian civilisation did not wane or fall, but continued almost unaffected as before. Thus it demonstrated a durability which nature and destiny seem to have denied to other civilisations.

This thread Dharma as the arbiter transcending the times and rulers constituted the astounding continuity demonstrated by the Hindu race. This continuity of Dharma, particularly at the macro level, was partly disrupted first by Islamic invasion which was described by Will Durant as the bloodiest in history. Later it was geopolitically overawed and intellectually rationalised as unsuitable for modern times during the British rule and by British education which fostered Left and Right intellectualism, both being directed against ancient India. Post freedom, the Indian genius could not muster the intellectual resources or the courage to protest against the experimental, tentative and thoughtless imposition of the Anglo-Saxon Christendom's experiences on India. This is despite strenuous attempts by Mahatma Gandhi to revitalise and repackage the ancient Indian idea of Dharma for rediscovering India and for making it a respectable place in the newer world that was recovering after centuries of war and violence unleashed by religious, political and economic colonialism of mediaeval Islamic and Christian theologies and by the later versions of political ideologies and missions rooted in them. But almost the rest of the intellectual leadership that came up during the freedom movement generally failed to sufficiently indigenise the post freedom establishment in India. Thus the ruling establishment of India, which the freedom movement ultimately resulted in, just continued almost on 'as-is-where-is' basis from where the British left and so, perhaps rightly, the British establishment described - why, dismissed -- the 'freedom' of India as a mere 'transfer or power'.

With the result post freedom the Indian constitution was founded, in the main, on the assumptions based on the experiences of Christendom. So it inevitably defined the philosophy of the state of India explicitly as 'Dharmanirapakshata' that is, the Indian State as neutral to Dharma, meaning Dharma as religion, not as a normative institution of thought and behaviour common to all religions. Therefore the Indian state being neutral to Dharma was not protective of Dharma. In fact protection of Dharma is not even remotely the agenda of the 'secular' State. So from being the continuity of an ancient nation governed by different Indian States abiding by and protective of the age old idea of Dharma before we lost freedom centuries ago, we had, in the interregnum, States led by aliens ruling contrary to and even destructive to that idea of Dharma, and post freedom, we have now descended to be ruled by a State that is explicitly neutral to Dharma. Thus, in the place of our ancient Indian States committed to 'Dharma Rakshana' we have today, post freedom, instituted a State committed to 'Dharmanirapekshata'. So we have descended from 'Dharma Rakshana' to 'Dharmanrapekshata' as the guiding philosophy of constitution and governance.

A profound debate, though delayed, is on:
In this background, the ongoing debate, which commenced about mid 1980s, about the meaning and content of secularism as practised in this country is indeed the profoundest development in Indian polity post freedom. This debate has bought to the surface the systematically silenced and therefore unexpressed dimensions of the national mind. This unarticulated dimension Indian nationalism was laid deep-frozen by forces that had claimed to modernise India and were, therefore, determined to distract and distance the Indian mind from its ancient civilisational moorings. The core issue of the cultural and civilisational identity of India and the Indian people is involved in this debate. Post freedom, for partisan political reasons, the 'secular' India began to differentiate between the constitutionally defined and largely superficial majority and the minorities and appease the minorities at the expense of the majority. This reduced the 'secular' India to merely pseudo 'secular' India and this had had the effect of approximating the traditional India to ancient India, that is, the Hindu India in the religious sense. Since the traditions of minorities escaped the attempts of 'secular' India to modernise India, only the traditions largely identified with Hindus became the target of the 'secular' India. The distortion of the concept of secularism -- as expounded by the experiences of Christendom which were already seen as inappropriate to India-- by Indian vote bank polity has in the past successfully prevented this debate. Even now the distorted and distorting polity continues to impede, distort and derail this debate. Unstructured, unfocussed, listless and even not-so-honest the debate may seem, it is extremely important that no more this subject is in deep freeze as it had remained for decades after we became free and is now penetrable by open debate. This debate is de-freezing the Indian mind and removed the masks that have prevented the people of India from looking at and within their self. So though not as sharp and as focussed as one would like or the subject deserves, the debate is on about what our national identity is and what constitutes secularism in the Indian context. Let us look how did this debate, which is even now regarded by those who oppose it as politically incorrect and not in the national interest, evolve.

'Being free' does not amount to 'being independent'
As a further background to the current debate a short reference to the freedom movement and how free India's political landscaping evolved unevenly becomes necessary. Such an effort may also explain how the debate was effectively suppressed and therefore delayed and why even today it is defocused and defused and even attempted to be suppressed by those who had deep-frozen it for decades after we attained freedom. Those who prevented this debate have actually prevented India and its people from realising purpose of their attaining freedom which is to be and become independent. That is, transit from being just free to effectively become independent. To understand this issue further we need some conceptual clarity about what freedom in the political sense meant and how did the leadership of free India interpret the political freedom we attained in 1947.

In his message on August 15, 1947, one of the greatest saints who lived through almost the whole of the twentieth century, the Sankaracharya of Kancheepuram, Sri Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi, counselled the Indian leadership that 'having become free, we must translate that freedom into independence'[5]. What the sage implied was that becoming free and being free would not amount to becoming and being independent. Implicit in his message was that being free was a precondition to becoming independent and it did not ipso facto mean being independent. But unfortunately, free India's leadership failed to distinguish between becoming free and being independent and concluded, wrongly, that being free amounted to being independent.

Why did we lose freedom? We had no creedal enemy or enmity.
This leads us to the question why this ancient nation with all its virtues and valour lost its freedom. Some think that it lacked unity, particularly political unity, and that led to loss of freedom and dominance by foreigners. This is only partly true. The main reason why medieval Indian States failed to prevent foreign incursions into India was that in philosophic and religious terms India and the Indian people had no enemy. That is we had no creedal enemy, nor did we have creedal enmity. Therefore we had no concept of an alien enemy who was any worse than the indigenous one. India could understand enmity as part of human life, but it could never conceive of an external enemy or enmity in terms of faith or creed. The Indian mind could never conceive or perceive that there could be religious beliefs which believed in destroying other religions as part of its creed. In this country the ruling ethics in state craft, the Rajdharma, went as far as to say that the victorious king in a war should first worship in the temple where the defeated king used to worship, regardless of whether he believed in that worship or not [6]. These ethical rules also compelled the victorious king not to appoint his nominee to rule the defeated state, but offer the rule back to the defeated king or choose the one who would preserve the 'Desachara', that is, the beliefs and lifestyle of the people of the defeated geography. The wars in the ancient Indian tradition were only between kings and never interfered with the faith or lives of the people which were held inviolable by rules which the Kings could not frame or amend. That is, the king could not effect changes in the 'Desachara' and has in fact an affirmative duty to protect it. This was how the native Indian kings viewed the defeated foreign invaders and treated them.

This was not a mythological model as the modern Indian scholarship may tend to dismiss, but a historic one too as the belief in the so called mythology guided and even now continue to guide the course conduct of Indians. Prithviraj Chauhan applied this ethical model and treated Mohammed Ghori every time he was defeated in the same way a defeated local king would be treated in the Indian tradition. This he did because he would not even conceive and therefore did not know that when it came to his turn the other way round, Ghori would not do the same as Ghori's ethical rules were defined by his belief system that compelled him to eliminate, not excuse, his adversaries. In fact Ghori's adversaries were not just his personal or political adversaries, for his to excuse, but adversaries of his creed and God. In fact even if he wanted his faith would not have allowed him to pardon the enemies of his creed. Even Jayachand would not have realised at the start that he was collaborating with a belief system that had as its core the destruction of other belief systems, and would only have equated his alliance to a political pact with just another king, like a Hindu king, to defeat Prithviraj Chauhan. Compare how Prithviraj Chauhan handled Ghori with how Chatrapathi Shivaji handled Afsal Khan. A complete contrast emerges. Shivaji knew that the rules that Afsal Khan followed were not the rules that Shivaji was, by tradition, accustomed to. So he had to apply different, and alien, rules to handle him. Had Shivaji followed the rules that Prithviraj Chauhan followed in dealing with his enemies he would never have emerged victorious. Shivaji followed what Tsun Tsu had prescribed in his Art of War. In that perspective wars were not based on the rules of Dharma as in India, but on deception. This contrast demonstrates the initial ignorance of the Indian civilisation about the nature of the enemy driven by faith and the rules by which he would operate. So lack of knowledge and understanding that exclusive faiths drove the invasion models that had nothing to do with the accepted ethical models of state craft in ancient India was the singular reason why the Hindu kings never united to fight the invasion. They only thought that the invading king was like any one among them. This is partly because the kings or the state in ancient India were bound to protect the faith of the people whether it was in consonance with the personal faith of the king or not.

Again, it was never uncommon that the native king would belong to a particular faith and his own queen-wife would belong to another faith. The Tamil history is full of such instances. No Indian king ever declared a state faith save Emperor Ashoka. Even in that Indian State, the Magad Empire, which alone had a declared state religion, Emperor Ashoka had explicitly declared that the Empire would protect all religious beliefs and worship models. This kind of polity being the universal model in India, the Indian kings were not sensitised to a State model that would compel the people to follow the creed of the king. So the ancient Indian State model had only one approach to faith, and that is, the faith of the people, whatever the faith, should be respected and protected. This would have been impossible for any king to do, had the different faiths in India not respected one another as part of their theological belief itself. In practice too the different faiths would and did respect one another. India never knew, and could never conceive, of a faith which did not respect or accept other faiths. So the Indian mind and therefore the Indian statecraft was modelled on the Indian understanding and experience of what one faith meant to another. With faith-neutral polity as the core of our gene, we could never realise that faith-driven polity could enslave the people and destroy cultures.

Consequently, we could not also realise the high potency violence and power driven by such violence that the State in a faith-driven geo-polity wielded over the people belonging the exclusive creeds and, through the creeds, on dominated people. Initially confused between the faith-neutral indigenous polity and the faith-driven external one, the people of India could not even understand that, when the faith driven polity substituted for the faith neutral indigenous rule by invasion, that was not a mere change of governance, but something far more invasive and far more comprehensive. So when the faith-driven foreign forces came to India, the Indian mind merely perceived them through its own localised experience and could not decipher its militant and aggressive character which had, as its core, the elimination of all faiths other than their own with the State as an instrument to accomplish the sacred task. Thus this lack of trans-Hindu experience and lack of understanding that there could be beliefs which believed in the destruction of other faiths was the main reason why we lost political and therefore religious freedom.

So the character of the Indian states was based on the concept of dharma which is religion-neutral and respected all faiths. This was freedom in the truest sense. This is what ancient Indian statecraft enjoined on the Rulers. But this very noble rule that we respect all creeds as we respected our own was very the reason why we lost freedom for our own faith in this very nation for centuries! And we had to fight to get that freedom back from rulers whose faith denied to other creeds the right even to be regarded as a faith and their adherents the right to follow their faiths. Thus, we lost our freedom because we could not comprehend the nature of faith driven geo-politics and statecraft and how it dominates the affairs of the State committed to such faith and through the state mechanism, the lives of the people. Such a theocratic State was outside Hindu experience, beyond even their imagination! This is what led to military defeat first and, later, to political domination. The fatal error was in assumption. We had assumed that our invaders, our enemies, were like any of us. So we initially equated our defeat in the hands of the foreigners to getting defeated at the hands of indigenous forces. Only later, when it was very late, that we realised that it was a very different religious paradigm in operation and we could not practice our system of ethics to take it on. This lack of realisation cost us our freedom for centuries.

Why did we fail to regain our independence despite regaining our freedom?
Thus we lost our independence for reasons other than politics and statecraft. Our experience clearly proved that a faith which accepted all other faiths was at a disadvantage as compared to faiths which denied validity to other faiths and even denied them the right to exist. This is particularly so when such aggressive and doctrinally intolerant faiths drive geo-politics at the global level and national politics as part of their geo-political agenda and programme. We could not comprehend the true character and nature of the faith driven geopolitical armies and Rulers. This came first in the form of Islamic invasion. Then it came in the form of colonisation. But during the Islamic domination of India, we lost our freedom. Not our independence. Even as Islam dominated the Indian State with statecraft hostile to Hindus, we steadfastly upheld the legitimacy of our faiths, ideas and institutions and stood against the Islamic rule, dismissing it as the rule of the 'Mlecha' and denying them legitimacy. Neither the Islamic rule nor its institutions could ever acquire legitimacy in India. Indeed the aggressive and exclusive thrust of Islam and the passive inclusiveness of Hindutva could never twine or meet. This is despite the efforts of the likes of Akbar to synthesise the Islamic faith with the national faith and ethos of India. So Islam and the indigenous national faiths could never engage or interface. Despite centuries of being in the neighbourhood of Hindus for centuries in each town and village, Islam could never come to terms with Hindu faith ever. This made it impossible for even the inclusively disposed Hindus to come to terms with the Islamic faith however accommodating the Hindu creeds are. Either they ignored each other at the minimum or disliked or each other at the maximum at the individual level. This has marked the relation between Hinduism and Islam from then till now. But the mutual disengagement, which might even be regarded as mutual hostility, did not weaken the mind of India, but actually helped to preserve the independence of the Indian mind and the legitimacy of the Hindu intellectualism despite the loss of freedom. So when Islam ruled India and even though its rule was aggressive, violent and bloody, the national faiths still retained their independence and legitimacy. So here was a strange case of dominated people still retaining their legitimacy and independence, not acquiescing in to validate the rule of 'Mlecha' over them. Thus despite the loss of freedom, the people of indigenous faiths could and did retain their independence. Thus the Islamic rule, however violent it was in India, could never achieve domination over the mind of Indians.

The Indian society remained largely undisturbed and the Indian economy continued to remain dominant at the global level even as the Islamic rule politically dominated India. Even when the Islamic domination over the body politic of India was ending and the British had begun conquering India the Indian economy was the second largest in the world, with only China being ahead of India. China's share of global production then was 26% and its trade of global trade was 25%, while India's share of global production was 25% and India's share of global trade was 24% [7]. This was after centuries of loss of freedom and large disturbance to the local society! At that time the share of Britain was less than a sixth of India's and the US was not even recognised for statistical purposes. So during the Islamic period only the body and polity of India had weakened. It was only with the advent and deepening of the British rule in India that, partially, the mind of Bharat, especially at the leadership level, yielded to domination by the colonial power.

Thus despite centuries of Islamic rule the mind of India remained unconquered in spite of the damage to the body India by Islam. Only the British rule could and did break the confidence of India and the pride of Indians about India. This they did by befriending and co-opting the people of India, rather than confronting them as their Islamist predecessors did. The Islamists, essentially and primarily faithfuls, were driven by almost exclusive lust to spread their creed. But the English, essentially business-minded and primarily traders, were keen to expand their rule for expanding their trade. Theirs was essentially a trade-led conquest while the Islamic thrust was primarily a faith-led invasion. The English did have a global vision where the superiority the White race was a matter of conviction for them and that superiority manifested in diplomacy that had factored economic and political dimensions of geo-Christian thrust as much as the religious bias. So religion became one of the factors of the English thrust, while Islamic thrust had almost exclusively concentrated on faith as the core of their rule. So what Islam could not achieve by confronting the people of India, the British achieved by co-opting them. When they divided the Hindus and Islamists also, that was for establishing their rule firmly, not to spread their faith. The British model of co-option -- which was based on exploiting the colonial power of the English to change the thinking of Indians by English education and make Indians internally concede superiority to the Western ideas, models, and institutions - had confused many Indians, including many intellectuals, into believing that the British rule was indeed a blessing in disguise. Also for the Hindus who were oppressed by Islamic rule, the British intervention was also seen as a relief and release from violence and oppression. At different stages many of our own thinkers were confused as to whether the British were our enemies or friends. Even after the British left India some elite Indians continued to hold the British as the unifiers of India and shapers of 'modern' India! In the euphoria generated by globalisation in 1990s a finance minister of India almost regretted our asking the White men to quit India during the freedom movement and welcomed them to India to make investments and make more money than they did when they ruled India. If this were the spill over confusion almost half a century after we attained freedom, one could imagine the confusion that would have dogged the Indian mind when the British were ruling us!

'Destruction of ancient India is painful but inevitable'
This confusion perhaps delayed even the advent of the movement for freedom and the congress movement itself decided on complete freedom only in the year 1930. From then on, the freedom movement was not so much a fight for political freedom as it was a battle for total independence -- total independence from not just the foreign rule but also ideas and institutions that are foreign to India and therefore not suited to the Indian genius to contribute its share to global advancement. But gradually but effectively the British rule had colonised a segment, an influential segment, of the Indian mind. So the first thing that the free India's leadership should have done was to decolonise the Indian mind fully. But ironically it thought of and therefore brought about no changes which would decolonise the mind of India and Indians. In fact it moved forward as if there was no colonial effect on India. In fact free India's political and intellectual leadership were under the influence of those who actually felt that there was no need to change much and it would be better to begin and continue from where the British had left as we could not do much to change or better what they had done. As a result we proceeded as if as a nation we had accepted colonial rule as some kind of a historic necessity to make India kinetic on the Western model. Many of us were in fact persuaded to accept that colonialism was an inevitable part of the modernising process of an ancient nation and its peoples. This was how Karl Marx perceived the destructive colonial rule as an inevitable necessity to modernise India to prepare the Indians for revolution -- India being revolt-proof otherwise -- even though the destruction itself was painful [9] and for all of the Indian Left what Marx said was like Bible and Koran, not to be deviated from.

'Ancient India has nothing to offer to build modern India. So a new India disconnected to the past'.
So we almost did nothing except to continue from where the British left us when we formalised the free Indian polity and instituted the Indian state post freedom, other than to make cosmetic changes to repackage the very spirit and module of the alien rulers who had ruled the country as the indigenous dispensation. The indigenous rulers merely presented India to Indians in the way the British themselves had perceived India and wanted to shape it under their rule. In fact the indigenous rule began to carry on as it were the unfinished agenda of the British rule in India. The indigenous dispensation merely ritually and superficially recognised the fact of India becoming free like symbolically renaming the Viceroy as Rashtrapathi and Vice-regal Mansion as Rashtrapathi Bhavan and by redrafting the Government of India Act 1935 instituted for subjugated India into the Constitution' of free 'India'. Otherwise, the indigenous dispensation did nothing substantial to make the people of India recall or revitalise their civilisational, spiritual or cultural moorings or reconstruct their polity on the lines that would have been consistent with a living civilisation of thousands of years standing. Instead we dated the un-dateable India as a new country as born on August 15, 1947, as if this ancient nation was dead and gone and a new nation was born.

So our freedom got marked more as continuity of the British colonial rule. Not as a change from the colonial regime. Not as calling back the Indian ethos and civilisational personality. Just not in substance, even in form, there was no change, and in fact the intent was that there should be no change whatsoever, except the colour of the rulers. Take for instance the ICS system which the Congress movement had vowed to destroy on India becoming free. Instead of being eliminated as the head of the administration that became the core and even the master of the indigenous governance post freedom. With IAS and IFS substituting for ICS, which merely amounted to the word 'Imperial' being substituted by 'Indian', with no change in the character or attitude of the civil service to India and the Indian people or in its understanding of the traditional Indians and Indian traditions. In judiciary too the same adversarial principle of jurisprudence continued to reign as the core delivery mechanism.

With the result most of what the British conceptualised and institutionalised during the colonial regime to rule the Indian people only continued uninterrupted. Additionally all that the British did also came to be regarded as inevitable and even good. More importantly the left thinkers emerged as the legitimate guides of the emerging 'modern' and progressive India. Consequently even in framing the Constitution for free India the framers looked at every corner of the world except Indian sources for structuring and shaping the future India. The documents laid before the Constituent Assembly clearly indicated that there was no Indigenous input in shaping and making the constitution for the Indian people. When many members of the constituent assembly of India were deeply hurt that the constitution did not even allude to the ancient Panchayat model of governance, their concern, which could not be ignored, was consigned to the unenforceable Directive Principles of State Policy in the constitution. Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution clearly stated the philosophy which informed the constitution making in the context of the demand for ancient Indian Panchayat model thus:

"…Another criticism against the draft constitution is that no part of it represents the ancient polity of India. It is said that the new constitution should have been drafted on the ancient Hindu model of a state and instead of incorporating western theories the new constitution should have been raised upon village panchayats and district panchayats…… I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. I am therefore surprised that those who condemn provincialism and parochialism should have come forward as champions of this cause. What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the draft constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit" [9]

It is therefore evident that the fundamental philosophy that shaped the constitution of India was almost exclusively alien, and it completely discarded all native methods and models on which this civilisation had functioned underground for thousands of years. And this also demonstrated the consideration shown to the convictions of Mahatama Gandhi for whom 'Gram Swaraj' was as important as 'Swaraj' itself

Contact-based western nations Vs Relation-based Indian model.
The unexpressed conviction of many free India's leaders given to Western way of thinking was that there was nothing worthwhile to look for with in or to be drawn from ancient India for shaping the future India. Some modern Indian leaders were explicit that ancient India, unless jettisoned and discarded, would be a burden on future, 'modern' India. Clearly all this meant that, in 'modern' India's opinion, ancient India could not make any worthwhile contribution to building a 'modern' India or through the 'modern' India to the world. It implicitly admitted that 'modern' India could only be the donee of what the world, or more correctly, the West, offers. In the field of constitutionalism this amounted to blind acceptance and adoption of the western notions of State based on social contract theory to philosophise and found the Indian state. The idea and evolution of the social contract in the West was caused by the collapse of society of relations. The nation state based on constitutional and legal contract, rather than on relation, in the West was a product of intense and bitter struggles. These struggles accentuated and turned out to be continuous wars and revolutions, including economic revolutions, within the Christian societies that eroded the natural and neighbourhood communities and atomised the people.

The repeated revolutions took the shape of Catholic and Protestant schism within Christianity first. Later this process was furthered by the birth of nation states by struggle between the global church and the local church through the idea of 'raison detat' -- meaning national interest above the moral Christian state. Subsequently, the church and the state clashed over what was 'secular' and what was sacred within the Christian faith. The final phase of the struggle was between the people and the state through the intermediation of democracy. The underlying drive that forced the revolutionary shift from the frozen church to the modern democracy was assertive individual rights in the Christian faith through secularism and polity through democracy. The net effect of the revolutionary progress was the subordination and elimination of organically evolved collectives of people. Now the individualistic orientation has eroded even the concept of families and has reduced the humans into genders, that is, independent man and independent woman. Thus the supreme drive of the changes in the West was the preference for individualism over all normative collectives, including even the family now.

Free India's leaders never realised that the historical developments which led to the evolution of the exclusively contract based nation state in the West could not match with the experiences of India of the past or of the present India. Bereft of revolutions of the kind that rocked Christendom, and being almost revolution-proof as Karl Marx lamented as early as in 1854, the Indian community base remained almost in tact through all vicissitudes of invasions and loss of freedom occasioned by alien rule over India. So the Indian social, political, and economic model continued to be shaped by traditional collectives, including the neighbourhood communities, panchayats and castes and sampradayas. These collectives had played a major role in preserving India's cultural and tradition in the absence of a protective state and in spite of an aggressive and hostile alien state that ruled them for centuries. This is precisely what the invaders too missed out in their assessment and appraisal India.

Free India's political, intellectual and bureaucratic leadership -- most of them were and continue to be the victims of alien and alienated education that concealed the core of India from Indians -- also completely overlooked this fact. They could never understand that, in contrast to the West which underwent series of revolutions that overawed the organic societies, the Indian social life model remained largely undisturbed. It was and even continued to be based on a rainbow of collectives, starting with the families as the immediate collective, and expanding through different layers of consciousness like the immediate neighbourhood, the village and caste panchayats, the caste and communities, and the Sampradayas and religious institutions, as the intermediate layers of consciousness between the individual and the distant and remote state mechanism. The largeness of India as a nation and the massiveness of Indian population and the unbelievable diversities that marked out India and the Indian people should have dissuaded any one from daring to experiment the unrepresentative and smaller samples of human experiences that obtained in Christendom on this ancient nation. Thus despite all the disturbing experiences which the Indian people underwent in political and even religious aspects of their life, their relation based life model almost remained undisturbed. They were not and could never be atomised like the Western people and societies were atomised by the events in their history. So the concepts of Emile Durkheim, who emphasised a society governed by relations in the main rather than a society based purely on contract [10] as the main foundation of a nation were nearer to the Indian conditions than Rousseau's social contract model. As late as the second half of the 19th century, Emile Durkheim favoured even for the West a relation based society coalescing with a contract based State. But the way the organic collectives in the West devastated by the religious, political and economic developments in the West would not allow such coalition work or workable in the West. But this could have worked in India and even now can, if only free India's political, and intellectual leadership had thought out solutions from the Indian perspectives to handle the institution of modernity. But it did not. The ideal form of organising the State and the society in India is to allow the relation based organic communities share social space with the contract based individualism. And, on the contrary, the Indian polity adopted without modification the British Parliamentary system based entirely on social contract uncritically, despite the fact that the Indian society was largely based on relations and functions even today more on relations than on contracts. This was never factored into Indian constitutionalism even though the State of India could have made use of this relation based functionality of India to make the contract-based Constitution and rule of law work better. This proved to be the most serious lacunae in the handling of modernity in India. But this intellectual deficit in our constitution-making process soon manifested in perverse ways like caste-based political formations which first brought out the suppressed realities in 'modern' India. But the surprise is that the Indian electoral polity quickly came to terms with caste based politics and harmonised it with the individual adult franchise-based electoral formulae. So today under the Anglo-Saxon political Constitution founded on individualism, we have a functioning caste-based electoral politics and even governments! Besides caste-based reservations which have become legitimate political agenda. This phenomenon is a subject by itself for discussion.

Secular polity and ancient India -- the Nehruvian approach vs the Gandhian
Just as it had accepted much of what the British had left behind, the Constitutional India adopted, without much debate or contemplation, the Western idea of 'secular' polity shaped by intra Christian religious developments, in India despite the fact that this country had not experienced Christian faith or the Church. This nation was supremely happy that it had become free after centuries and becoming free itself would solve all problems. But, as almost nothing was debated then, whether it was economic policy, or social or religious relations, the suitability of the idea of secularism that evolved within Christendom to the conditions in India too was not debated. This is despite the un-bargained and un-provided development of Islamic Pakistan, which was the product of bitter religious politics, as the neighbour with hostile intentions, connected to global powers and playing international politics on border issues with India.

And this critical and inevitable debate, which should have commenced forthwith on India becoming free, began long after, almost four decades late. But during this period the Anglo-Saxon institution of secularism had been perverted as pseudo secularism in Indian polity. Pseudo secularism was a product of vote bank politics. So instead of thought moulding votes, it was the other way round, vote perverting thoughts. The perversion of Anglo-Saxon secularism into pseudo secularism seriously confused and compromised the Indian identity beyond recognition. Not just that this perverse secularism was equated to minority protection! Despite the disastrous consequences of this perversion, this issue could not even be debated as any debate on it was held as politically incorrect. This ban on debate actually amounted to freezing the national mind. This frozen element forced the polity into a state of cold war with the soul of India. Yet this un-debated and confused 'secular' identity became the central idea of Indian democracy post freedom thanks almost exclusively due to competitive vote-bank politics. In essence the concept of secularism as practised in Indian politics was the un-debated personal thoughts and convictions of Pandit Nehru.

But slowly over the years, particularly after Pandit Nehru passed away, these personal thoughts of Pandit Nehru came to be celebrated and institutionalised in polity as the Nehruvian 'secular' values again without any debate whatsoever. Not many who were peers of Pandit Nehru shared the basic thoughts of Nehru on Indian identity or secularism. Yet Pandit Nehru who outlived all his peers in the freedom movement and also got many tall leaders in the Congress Party marginalised, ensured that his thoughts came to be owned as the thoughts of the congress and later as the thoughts of the country itself. Again by staying in power for long enough, he also paved way for his own family to become the exclusive leadership source for the congress and congress became the monopoly power house of the country. This was how the initiative of the people of India was undermined and the congress -- and through the congress the nation itself -- was placed in the hands of a single family, which, to make the matters worse, is now headed by a foreign-born lady.

In fact, the debate which Mahatma Gandhi wanted as early as 1928 and again as late as in 1945 about the direction in which the country should move included all dimensions of Indian nationalism and national life. Mahatma Gandhi believed in 'Village Republics' which represented the social reality of India and 'Ramarajya' which represented the cultural nationalism of this ancient nation. But Nehru desired neither and instead wanted India to emerge as the Indian replica of the West. Let us make a quick comparison of Gandhiji and his disciple Pandit Nehru. To emphasise the Hindu character of himself and also the leadership of India, Gandhiji repeatedly declared himself as 'Sanatani Hindu'. But Pandit Nehru was the very opposite of all that Gandhiji was and wanted to be seen as. Actually in the year 1928 Pandit Nehru angrily wrote to the Mahatma almost accusing him of keeping the Congress deceived in the name of 'charka' and 'khadi'. He also said that he did not believe that Ramarajya was great even at the time of Sri Ramachandra nor did he want it back in free India. He also cautioned, even criticised the Mahatma against trivialising the Western civilisation and prophesied that the western civilisation was bound to over take India whether India liked it or not [11]. The visible anger in Jawaharlal Nehru's reaction to Gandhian thought actually shook the Mahatma. Gandhiji responded to Pandit Nehru by suggesting that he have an open debate with the Mahatma or allow him to publish Pandit Nehru's letter to Gandhiji with a small response from Gandhiji [12]. But Jawaharlal Nehru was not for an open debate with the Mahatma. This happened in the year 1928. This almost got re-enacted in the year 1945 as freedom was nearing [13]. Here again when Gandhiji wanted a debate, Pundit Nehru declined on the ground that as the freedom of the country was at hand the people should see no differences at the top. Pandit Nehru assured him that the elected representatives of free India would decide the course the nation would adopt.

So despite the fact that Nehru had made a promise to Gandhi that the elected representatives of free India would decide all the issues, the debate he promised never took place in free India. The refusal to engage the nation in debate constituted the greatest betrayal, the betrayal of the Mahatma Gandhi, by the Congress. The agenda for the Gandhi-Nehru debate which was seemingly on economic issues was a comprehensive one touching the civilisational, religious, political and economic aspects of our national live. That debate would have decided not just the economic structure of India but also the national character and national identity of India. But unfortunately Nehru avoided the debate with Gandhi by promising a debate post freedom which never took place. Had that debate taken place, it would have fully encompassed religious and civilisational issues. So the debate which was delayed by Pandit Nehru was denied to the nation.

The Gandhian approach of mutual and equal respect between different faiths is trans-political, without state intervention - a totally Hindu concept.
Never in his discourse did Gandhiji ever utter the word 'secular'. This is significant as Mahatma Gandhi was known for using the most appropriate words to express his ideas and make them clearly understandable to the people of the country. Instead he had repeatedly spoken about the acceptance of all faiths as equally valid which is essentially and exclusively a Hindu approach. As no other faith particularly neither Islam nor Christianity would accept other faiths as valid, since both of them consider their respective creeds and texts in inerrant, a feature of Abrahamic faiths. Not only do they believe in the infallibility of their creed and text, as a corollary, their respective theologies invalidate and outlaw all other faiths including each other's. They, therefore, are compelled by their theology not to regard other faiths as being equal to them. Accordingly, there is a contradiction between the Hindu view of life and the Christian and Islamic view of life. So the Gandhian view of equal validity for all faiths is actually contrary to the tenets of Islam and Christianity. It was, and could only be, based on the Hindu religious view held for thousands of years.

It therefore needs no religious scholar to confirm that the Gandhian concept of equal validity of all religions as the rule of relation between different and differing faiths and their approach to one another was based, in the main, on the Hindu faith. Gandhiji emphasised the need for harmony among religions not through the medium of the State. He wanted theological harmony among religions. In Gandhijis scheme of things the State was not to broker between religions. He worked for different religions to relate to one another without the intervention of the State. Gandhi's emphasis on validity of all faiths from Hindu perspective imposed a counter obligation on not just the followers of other faiths, but on the other faiths themselves, to reciprocate this idea of equal validity and legitimacy for other faiths as a matter of faith, not as a matter of law or as part of state policy. In this perspective the State itself would be an instrument of dharma, and would be governed by the principles of 'Rajadharma', which, in Indian conditions, would give equal respect for all religions which respected all other religions. The rule of 'Dharmanirapekshata', that is a State devoid of or neutral to Dharma would be alien to the idea of Rajdharma as part of the idea and institution of Dharma where all religions were to look upon one another as equally valid. That is different religions would accept and legitimise each other not because the State wants it by policy or law, but by their harmonised theological foundations. It means that each faith must as part of the faith itself respect and hold as valid the other faiths. Not that the followers condescendingly agree to tolerate the other faiths as valid, in derogation of the fundamental commandments of their creed which brand all other faiths as 'Satanic' or 'Devilish' and the followers of such faiths as 'Kafirs' and 'Heathens'.

But unfortunately this concept of equal legitimacy and validity of all faiths as the core creed was never part of, and is even now not acceptable to, the theological foundations and institutional impulses of the Abrahamic faiths. That is how the Abrahamic faiths which claimed exclusive wisdom and the divine sanction to convert and even destroy other faiths clashed and conflicted with the non-conflicting Hindu view. It is undeniable that the Christian theology mandates conversion of non-Christians into Christianity. This created a mismatch between the Hindu faith which did not, as part of its creed, believe in conversion, and the Christian faith which made conversion as its essential ingredient. Mahatma Gandhi was fully aware of the mismatch between these two paradigms of faith and knew well that the Christian command to convert was based on disrespect, not respect, for other religions. That was why he wanted the State to intervene -- despite such intervention being contrary to the tenets of Christianity -- so that the Christian religion in India amended by law becomes, at least partially, compatible with the Hindu view of equal respect for all religions. This discussion brings to the fore the theological incompatibility between the inclusive and non-conflicting Hinduism and the exclusive and conflict-prone Abrahamic religions. This creedal imbalance between the conflicting Abrahamic faiths and the non-conflicting Hindu faith necessitated the intervention -- not the neutrality -- of the state to protect the Hindu faith which accepted all faiths as valid from Abrahamic faiths which, as part of their creed, denied validity to other faiths and denied even their right to exist by organised action. In Christendom where the idea of secularism originated, it evolved as a rule of separation of the Christian state and the Christian church. It was not a rule mandating inter-creedal acceptance of the theological validity of all faiths, including non-Christian faiths by Christians. In the Christian perspective as modulated by 'secular' modernity, non-Christian faiths, even though they espouse false Gods, could at best be tolerated on basis of the right of individuals to follow their conscience.

Secularism of Christendom is the rule of neutrality between organised Christianity and individual rights. In Christendom secularism merely attempted to convert religious faith from being a collective virtue and institutional concept, which it had become through the Church, into an individual right. The idea being that the organised Church as an institution is restrained from undermining the right of the individual not to be part of it. The idea was not to permit de-Christianisation of Christians. The idea behind the 'secular' evolution in Christendom is to grant the right to a Christian not to be part of any religious collective which Christianity mandated. He had also the right not to believe. Thus the Christian faith, which was structurally a collective affair, was turned into an individual issue. This was necessary to de-institutionalise Christianity which was controlled by the Church. Thus in Christendom the idea of secularism is an issue between the organised religion and the individual unwilling to submit himself to the organised religion and therefore the State, the Christian state, had to intervene as the arbiter between the two, namely the organised religion and the individual citizen. So under the principle of secularism which evolved within the Christendom the Christian state actually intervened to protect the individual against the institutionalised form of Christianity.

In Islamic societies since there was no Church the idea of secularism could never be understood from the perspective of individual freedom. Since Islam is a global commune [the Umma] transcending the idea of nation states itself, the consciousness of the individual religious rights has no place in Islam. So 'secular' urges to protect the individual are absent in Islamic societies and nations. Nor Protestant movement, and no tussle between the individual and the State occurred in Islamic Umma for them to internalise the experiences that Christendom underwent. The Islamic theology would not have allowed a Martin Luther, not a movement for democratisation of Islamic polity. The idea of nation being subordinated to the ideal of Umma, the concept of nation state in Islam itself is a theologically untenable one.

Secularism of Christendom leaves Hinduism unprotected against organised and aggressive faiths driven by the idea of textual inerrancy and the mission of expansion and domination.
But the Abrahamic faiths being sure of their textual inerrancy and theological infallibility and being organised actually pose a threat to Hinduism which accepts all texts including the texts of the Abrahamic faiths. Most Hindus in fact do not know that the Abrahamic faiths invalidate all other faiths other than themselves. Taking religion as a market, Hinduism which is no-aggressive and non-conflicting is also non-competitive as it accepts all other faiths. A faith that accepts others can never compete with them. In the contest between faiths, Hinduism lacks competitive mindset while the Abrahamic faiths, which claim superiority over all other faiths, are in eternal competition with other faiths. In contrast theologically Hinduism is disabled from competing with other faiths in local or global religious markets. This incapacity to compete because of its theological foundations poses a great threat to survival the non-conflicting and non-competing Hindu faith from the Abrahamic faiths. So the unequal threat that the Abrahamic faiths pose to Hinduism actually necessitates that the State intervene to protect the Hindu faith. So, where Abrahamic faiths are substantial in demography and are demographically growing further, Hinduism actually needs State protection. In such circumstances, State neutrality between a non-conflicting faith and aggressive and proselytising faiths will implicitly amount to State backing for the aggressive ones. Not just because it theologically accepts other faiths but they in turn do not. But it is also because, while the Abrahamic faiths which are organised to promote themselves and destroy other faiths as their enmity. In contrast Hinduism, which never considered other faiths as enemies, never understood the art of organisation for self-preservation or aggressive promotion of itself.

Thus while the state in India should have actually protected Hinduism from being targeted by the Abrahamic faiths, it actually was instituted to function the other way round, namely, protected the Abrahamic faiths which really dominated the space for minorities and leave Hinduism undefended. In other words, it meant protecting the conflicting aggressive Abrahamic faiths and exposing the Hindus and their non-conflicting faith to the danger of head count and head hunt and other forms of risks from the Abrahamic faiths with massive global support and extensive global links. This unaddressed lacuna in 'secular' constitutionalism began manifesting in Indian polity post freedom and began to distort it through the emergence of pseudo-secularist trends. Already secularism as an idea and institution evolved in the Christian West has denied protection to Hinduism which was an un-protected by an aggressive theology. But pseudo-secularism which evolved in Indian polity post freedom courtesy vote bank politics made it worse. Pseudo-secularism protected and encouraged the faiths which conflicted with the Hindu faith and exposed the non-conflicting Hinduism to the aggressive designs and plans of the conflicting faiths.

The secular State having disowned Hinduism, which is not an organised religion, the Hindu faith, culture and civilisation have been orphaned by the State which had abandoned the core of Rajdharma. How this has orphaned Hinduism is demonstrable. The testimony to this may be found in the statement of Samuel Huntington in the preface to his best selling book 'The Clash of Civilisation' which is regarded as the most strategic thought from the Western perspective, in recent times. Huntington says that he visited and interacted with all major civilisations, 'except Hinduism'! [14]. Why 'except Hinduism'? It does not need a seer to find out the reasons. In China the communist China proudly owns its past and sets up and sustains institutions which will study and project the Chinese and Confusion civilisation. A 'secular' Japan would officially sponsor Shinto studies and promote and present 'Shintoism' to the world. But the socialist and 'secular' India would, as part of its secularity, disown and disinherit itself of Hinduism and anything Hindu in its past. The perverted secularism in practice has compelled the Indian State to orphan Hinduism. Consequently, the 'secular' Indian State, fearing breach of secularity, would not promote any national or global level Hindu institution to call the attention of a seeker of information and knowledge, like Huntington, about this ancient religion.

While the State denied protection to Hinduism on grounds of secularity, it had also by economic controls and state monopoly prevented private wealth to grow in the hands of the people of India, most of them Hindus. This effectively made the Hindu Civilisation State dependent. The Hindus were thus deprived of the capacity to build wealth needed to set up charities and foundations by deadly state controls, nationalisation without compensation of private wealth and expropriatory tax policies -- at one time the personal Income Tax was 97.5% and the corporate tax was over 70% with an additional Wealth Tax 15% on wealth, besides tax on gifts and death duties as high as 60%. As all wealth of the nation came under the control of the State under the socialist policies, it enured for the benefit of the secularism which deprived the Indian religions of any patronage and extended patronage to Abrahamic religions. Consequently, the deprived Hindus, who essentially constituted the private sector, could not fund the development of a Hindu civilisational institution worth the name to call or to attract the attention of Samuel Huntington to have a dialogue on Hinduism. Even the Benaras Hindu University, set up to hold aloft the Hindu civilisation is now secularised by the State, unlike the Aligarh Muslims University which was given state protection to preserve the minority - read 'Islamic' - character for which a special Act was passed by the Parliament!

It is thus and, by like approaches, that the Hindu civilisation was deprived of a representative intellectual institution or work to call the attention of a Huntington at the global level or of even the Supreme Court in Bharat when the Court had to cite authorities to capture the essence of Hinduism. With the result even to understand and explain Hinduism, a secondary geo-Christian source like the Encyclopaedia of Britannica had to be relied and referred to even in India. This demonstrates how intellectual India has deserted Hinduism, and taken to secular intellectualism, under the sheer pressure of the secular and socialist State which controlled all funds and wealth and extended patronage only to minority religions. So the state in India has impoverished and orphaned the unorganised Hinduism. Here again the need for a State initiative or the State protection to Hindu Dharma is clearly emphasised. Other faiths being organised faiths and faiths based on assemblies and recorded membership or community [Umma] were able to build organised institutions. Thus while on the one hand the socialist India deprived the Hindus of their financial freedom, the 'secular' India deprived the Hindus of state protection. The Hindus were thus denied the protection and benefaction of the State on the one hand and were also deprived of the right and the opportunity to generate their own resources to promote Hinduism. On top of it was the unprecedented minority appeasement to the extent of subsidising the Haj pilgrimage of the Muslims at the cost of hundreds of crores of rupees to the national exchequer. The contrast is obvious and needs examination. The theologically and organisationally unprotected Hinduism which actually needs State protection is not only left unprotected, but the Abrahamic faiths which are theologically and organisationally protected by the very rules and practices of their creeds are further patronised to the detriment of the unprotected Hinduism.

While scholars who compiled the Encyclopaedia of Britannica were accurate in their description of Hinduism, the question why 'secular' India could not produce a standard work on Hinduism which could be referred to without being subject to criticism by the seculars is consistent with only one answer. That is Hinduism, being not organised, actually needs protection by the state and as the State protection and support has been denied to it and as the 'secular' State also became a socialist State, the economic strength monopolised by the State also worked to the detriment of Hinduism.

Tremors in national politics in 1980s and the beginnings of the debate on secularism, though truncated and incomplete:
It is in this background that we must examine the triggers which caused the tremors in national polity based on pseudo-secularism in the mid-1980s. The famous triggers for the cold-war between 'secular' polity which was the other name for promotion of conflicting faiths and discounting and demeaning the non-conflicting Hindu faith were two, namely the Shahbano case and the Ayodhya movement. The Shahbano ruling by the Supreme Court on Muslims women's basic guarantees and the infamous response of the 'secular' polity which undid the ruling led to the debate on secularism. The Ayodhya movement which evolved as a corrective to the distortions of the 'secular' polity intensified it. The Ayodhya movement, which explosively manifested through the Somnath-Ayodhya Rath yatra in the year 1990 that completely changed the political landscape in India and almost totally delegitimised the concept and meaning of secularism of Christendom so far held official. As a result the nation is accepting in a calibrated manner a new orientation - which is Hindu view in substance - to defining the relation between different faiths. The Ayodhya movement has clearly demonstrated and proved the inapplicability of the idea of secularism evolved in Christendom to this country.

One may be tempted to ask: why the qualification 'to this country'? Does the meaning and content of secularism vary from country to country? Yes. It does. For an India which has evolved on a religious matrix which accepts all faiths as true, the Anglo-Saxon secularism is a juvenile idea, amateurish to experiment on this ancient nation. But unfortunately even the current debate on secularism, which questions the decadence of secularism into pseudo secularism, does not take into account this critical point. That is why the debate that is on at present is a truncated and incomplete debate. There is as yet no complete Indian or indigenous perspective to the debate. The debate is based on the Western view of what is religion as the bench mark. But there is no religion in India in the sense in which the Abrahamic religions are and understood as. While the fundamentals of Abrahamic religions being based on the concept of textual inerrancy, an idea alien to the religions of the East [which being basically the Hindu family of religions] the latter do not claim exclusive wisdom for salvation. No Eastern religion claims its text as inerrant nor does it question the texts of other religions. But the Abrahamic religions do both, claim their texts as inerrant and others as erroneous. On this basis, the Fundamentalism Project of the Chicago University has conceded that the idea of religious fundamentalism as understood in modern times is a feature of the Abrahamic religions rather than to their Eastern cousins [15].

With such wide and unbridgeable gap between what religions and religious fundamentals meant in the Abrahamic perspective and in the Eastern-Hindu perspective, how could the concept of secularism evolved to handle the problems specific to the Abrahamic societies be applied ipso facto to a terrain fertilised by Hindu civilisation. The Hindu intellectuals missed out that in the whole scheme of things in Abrahamic faiths and their structure, the idea of Dharma as the common platform for all faiths was absent. The intellectual bankruptcy of 'secular' intellectuals is demonstrated by the fact that they identified the concept of Dharma with the Indian religions with the result the non-Indian religions could practice Adharma in India. Faiths not disciplined by Dharma could turn violent. In the Indian perspective Dharma was a norm higher than faith. That was why all Indian faiths owed allegiance to Dharma. All faiths, on their own volition, had to conform to Dharma which was undeniably the common denominator for all faithfuls belonging to different faiths.

Despite these critical variables, there was and still there is no Hindu perspective to the debate to the concept of secularism practised in India. Not just that there is no Hindu perspective to the debate, but, thanks to the Anglo-Saxon and Marxian influence and domination of the intellectual establishments the indigenous, Hindu perspective is regarded as communal and anti-secular. So the debate that is on is truncated. Actually even this truncated debate was over due for nearly four decades after we became free and did not take place till around the mid 1980s. One of the reasons -- a historically inevitable and compelling one -- for this delayed debate is the partition of India. This needs a special mention and a brief discussion.

The Partition of India and the leaders of India Post Freedom: the moral dilemma
The partition of India and Pakistan imposed political compulsions on those who opposed partition to maintain consistency of approach. That is they had to approach the issue of national identity after the partition consistent with their opposition, before freedom, to partition. While the advocates of partition, exclusively Muslims, had claimed the Hindus and Muslims were two nations, those who opposed partition, almost exclusively Hindus, fell into that trap. They opposed the partition on the basis that India was not a Hindu nation and so the view that Muslims constituted an independent nation was a fallacy. For asserting that India was not Hindu in character, they had to distance themselves from all symbols of Hindu identity so as to appear neutral to Hindus and Muslims. With every effort of the Muslims League to emphasise Muslims as a nation, the Hindu leadership, that is, the Congress leadership, had to disown the Hindu civilisational bearings of the nation ever more. While the Congress claimed it represented both Hindus and Muslims, the Muslim League asserted that the Congress represented only Hindus. It trivialised Abul Kalam Azad and his like as a mere 'show boys' of the Congress. In fact the entire effort of the Muslims League was to project Mahatma Gandhi as merely a Hindu leader. Despite his sincere efforts to be the common factor between the Hindus and Muslims Gandhiji was only perceived as a Hindu leader by the Muslims. When what later became West Pakistan went up in flames and leaders had to appeal for peace, the British government persuaded Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah to issue a joint appeal. The moment both of them made joint appeal asking the people to be calm 'The Dawn' newspaper claimed that it was an admission by the Congress that Mahatma Gandhi represented the Hindus and Jinnah, Muslims. While this was almost true on the ground, the Congress could not accept this truth as that would have punctured its case that, not just Gandhiji, but the congress too represented both Hindus and Muslims. With the result the Congress had to maintain the position that it represented both communities, while the real question -- skirted by the Muslims League -- was whether the Congress represented the majority of Indians or not.

The Congress itself got into answering the wrong question based on not who -- Muslim League or the Congress -- represents the majority of the Indian people, but who represented which section of the religious India. The congress entered into debate on the communal plank of the Muslims League instead of forcing the debate on the common, nationalist, that is religion-neutral, plank. This was because the Congress got misdirected during and after the Khilafat movement as to the relation of Indian Muslims to India. The Congress, by wrongly taking up a communal Islamic issue of Caliphate in Turkey, pan-Islamised the Indian Muslims mind, which was already confused about its relation with the mother Hindu society. So thanks to the Khilafat fiasco, the Congress too did not nurture a philosophy to assimilate the Muslims in free India, but, had only an ideological approach shade different from the Muslim League in relating the Hindus and Muslims. While the Congress had accepted the Hindus and the Muslims to be different communities without insisting them to be part of the common ancestry, the Muslim League insisted that the two belonged to different religions and therefore two different nations. This completely sidestepped the fact that both Hindus and Muslims in India had common ancestry transcending their religious beliefs. While the Congress did not insist on the truth of common ancestry, the League masked it.

Eventually, against all its arguments, the Congress had to agree to partition of India on religious lines, the West and East Pakistan as an Islamic majority nation and the rest of India as a Hindu majority nation. This made the situation unenviable for the Congress leaders. While Muslim League defined Pakistan as a Muslim nation, the Congress could not say what the identity of India was. This totally unexpected situation was not and could not be factored into defining the identity of the de-merged India after the separation of Muslim-majority areas from India. Even when the tussle for partition was on, while the separatists had clearly defined the identity of Pakistan as an Islamic State, all that those who opposed the partition did was to oppose the partition, and not define what the undivided nation would be. They could well have taken the position that Hindus and Muslims were born of the same Hindu forefathers and insisted on diluting the demand for religious division by forcing that Hindu identity was not a religious one, but a cultural and civilisational one. Had the Congress taken the position that the forefathers of Indian Muslims also were Hindus and that the Muslims had merely changed their religion and nothing else, and that by blood all were Hindus, then the united India would have been regarded as Hindu in culture and ancestry. This would have made the Hindu identity common to all religions in India, rather than a religious identity. In that event, after partition they could still have defined the identity of India as a Hindu nation and the Muslims who opted to be with India would have integrated with the mother society based on the fact that both of them had common forefathers and common culture. In the absence of such clarity, there was no proper intellectual understanding of the identity of the united India after freedom had partition not taken place. That is while the separatists were clear about what Pakistan meant to them, the unifiers were not clear about what the identity of united India, without partition, was, according to them. In the process, the unifiers had to take extreme positions diluting the Hindu consciousness that formed the core of the Indian nation to appease the Muslims pre-partition. Yet, eventually partition did take place and took place almost inevitably.

But the position, though prejudicial to Hindus, taken by the national leadership in the pre partition days to appease the Muslims in desperate bid to prevent partition had caught the leadership in a bind. This appeasement prior to partition forthwith defined the contents of secularism after partition. Later this became the historic burden on free India. Consequently, burdened by the non-assimilative position taken during the pre-partition days, free India's intellectual and political leadership could not give up the skewed position taken to counter logic of those who argued for the religious partition of India into Hindustan and Pakistan. They had to live by it almost as part of the national logic post freedom. This was the biggest tragedy of the unsuccessful resistance of the unifiers to the demand for partition by the Muslim League.

The theoretical resistance to partition, not based on conviction about what the identity of undivided India would be, imposed high ideological costs on India post freedom by imposing a moral dilemma. Thus, unfortunately the position taken by the unifiers in the debate between the separatists, who were exclusive Muslims and unifiers, who were mostly Hindus, continued to govern India after the partition and freedom. To make the matters worse left intellectuals and secularists who actually supported the partition and the creation of Pakistan began articulating the identity of India post partition. In fact they became the arbiters of the identity of India. So there was no scope for debate, and so no debate. The Indian leadership was too identified with the logic to prevent the partition to modulate and modify it to the new situation arising out of the partition. So the debate which should have taken place immediately after we became free, could not take place unless the leadership which opposed partition reconsidered its logic for opposing the partition. They could not reconsider their logic as that would have made the demand for partition legitimate. This was the moral dilemma of the unifiers who constituted the free India's leadership. This moral dilemma permanently afflicted the Indian political and intellectual leadership the post freedom.

Questions arising in the debate and how to find answers for them
This debate did not begin till about the mid 1980s. That was because even though we became free, we never became independent forthwith, and even now we are yet to be and become completely independent of the effects of the alien rule. This debate raises few, neat questions like:

'Who are we Indians and did we have or have not a collective antiquity that relates us from time immemorial"

'Or did we begin as a new and modern nation and became common boarders and lodgers within internationally defined borders constituting India only on and from August 15, 1947?'

'Are we just a collective forced by geography or do we have a legendary and historic cultural bond transcending the accident of geographic contiguity'?

'Do we as a nation recognise that this enduring antiquity, which can alone among the antiquities of the world handle modern world, was interfered with by violent invasions?

'Or do we regard such violent incursions of India by alien ideologies or as tributaries and contributories of this ancient nation's reassertion?'

'How did the assimilating commonality that has unified us from times immemorial and also enabled even aliens like Sakas and Hunas to become inseverable part of the indigenous populace became weak?

'How did this assimilation process get interfered with in 'modern' India?'

'How is it that the all inclusive Sanatana dharma get marginalised by the political process post freedom?'

'What is the role of this ancient civilisation which has demonstrated a capacity to survive and adjust to the demands of the times and yet remain rooted to its antiquity in the emerging world of intolerance and terror?'

'Is its re-assertion to be regarded as contributing to the rise of different Abrahamic fundamentalism or as an evolution to counter it?

'Will this reasserting civilisational India protect India and the Indian identity and the idea of dharma or even its pale version called secularism? Or the re-imaging of India as a modern nation alone will protect all these?'

'Why is modern India insensitive to the aspirations and feelings of traditional India? Why does modern India feel shy of traditional India?'

'Why are the 'secular' thinkers scared of a reasoned debate with the traditional India, without demeaning it and labelling it as this or that?'

These questions are indicative of the tensions in the relationship between the modern India and the traditional India. They are not exhaustive of the issues or questions which arise between the two.

These questions cannot be answered unless that one question is answered. That is: Why is that the post freedom India did not really become independent in mind and spirit so as to provide relief to its soul from the impact of a thousand years' wound and what are the forces that prevented India from emerging independent in spite of being free? Unless we find answers to this fundamental question for which the answer is written on the wall waiting to be read and unless we handle and overcome the alien ideological forces and those who co-habit with them and rationalise them here, the different questions illustrated here and other questions of similar nature will remain unanswered and the debate which has started will never attain fruition in action.

The judgements show the emerging reconciliation between the traditional and 'secular' India. The rule of reconciliation: secularism is compatible with Hindutva.
The different judgements pronounced by the Supreme Court are consistent with the increasing effectiveness of the traditional India in challenging the secular India's approach to the traditional India. Take the most obvious case of Samskrit language which was the source of all ancient Indian literature and how it was virtually condemned to oblivion by 'secular' India and how the judiciary handled secular India's objections to the ancient language. The 'secular' India had virtually declared the Samskrit language as a dead language and had even exclusively equated it with Hindu faith and imaged it as a religious language rather than a national, cultural asset. It had even implicitly contended that promoting Samskrit, which is the civilisational, cultural and intellectual treasure trove of India, would amount to promoting Hindu faith and would breach the discipline of secularism as part of the majoritarian aggression. And why, the 'secular' India would even regard it as anti-minority measure! In contrast, promotion of Urdu was considered by 'secular' India to be part of the affirmative constitutional obligation of the State to the minorities, and it was defended as part of the celebrated idea of secularism enshrined in the constitution. The judiciary eventually softened the anti-traditional Indian position adopted by secular India and created appropriate space for Samskrit, the main linguistic source of all Indian thought.

Even though the Hindu civilisational movement heralded the change in the attitude of the judiciary, even as early as 1977, a constitution bench of the Supreme Court had occasion to consider the meaning and content of the concept of Hinduism under civil law. This was long before civilisational issues about the meaning and content of secularism and whether the idea of Hinduism or Hindutva conflicted with the idea of secularism cropped up in the mid 1980s and turned political forthwith and later became judicial issues in 1990s. The Supreme Court had then approvingly quoted from the description of Hinduism from the Encyclopaedia of Britannica to hold that the concept of Hinduism did not connote a religion. This was not in a case relating to a political or civilisational issue, but in a private, actually wealth tax, case which raised the issue of the status of a joint family headed by the son born of wedlock between a Brahmin-Hindu [husband] and a German Christian [wife] family in Hindu law. The issue was whether the family headed by the son born of the wedlock was a Hindu undivided family in civil law so that for tax purposes it is so regarded. The court held that the son was a Hindu despite the mother being a Christian lady and under the civil law the family headed by him was a Hindu undivided family. So considering the macro idea of what constitutes Hinduism to determine the micro status of whether a family is a Hindu undivided family or not, the Supreme Court decided in the affirmative stating that the family in issue was a Hindu undivided family on the macro idea of Hinduism. In capturing what constitutes the idea of Hinduism at the macro level and the institution of a Hindu family at the micro level, the Supreme Court referred to the Encyclopaedia of Britannica. The quote from the Encyclopaedia extracted in the judgement of the Supreme Court is reproduced here for immediate reference.

"The sole question which, however falls for our consideration in these appeals is whether Nicholas Sundaram is a Hindu governed by Hindu law. It is a matter of common knowledge that Hinduism embraces within itself so many diverse forms of beliefs, faiths, practices and worship that it is difficult to define the term 'Hindu' with precision.

In Encyclopaedia of Britannica (15th edition) the term 'Hinduism' has been defined as meaning the civilisation of Hindus (originally the inhabitants of the land of the Indus river).

As a religion, Hinduism is an utterly diverse conglomerate of doctrines, cults and ways of life……

In principle Hinduism incorporates all forms of belief and worship without necessitating the selection or elimination of any. The Hindus is inclined to revere the divine in all its manifestation, whatever it may be, and doctrinally tolerant, leaving others -including both Hindus and non-Hindus - to whatever creed and worship practices suit them the best. A Hindu may embrace a non-Hindu religion without ceasing to be a Hindu, and since the Hindu is disposed to think synthetically and to regard other forms of worship, strange Gods and divergent doctrines as inadequate rather than wrong or objectionable, he tends to believe that the highest divine powers compliment each other for the well being of the world and the mankind.

Few religious ideas are considered to be finally irreconcilable. The core of the religion does not even depend on the existence or non-existence of God or whether there is one God or many. Since religious truth is said to transcend all verbal definition it is not conceived in dogmatic terms.

Hinduism is, then, both a civilisation and a conglomerate of religions, with neither a beginning, a founder, nor a central authority, or hierarchy, or organisation. Every attempt at a specific definition of Hinduism has proved unsatisfactory one way or another, more so because the finest Indian scholars of Hinduism, including Hindus themselves, have emphasised different aspects of the whole.

This being the scope and nature of the religion, it is not strange that that it holds within its fold men of divergent views and traditions who have very little in common except a vague faith in what may be called the fundamentals of the Hindu religion" [16]

There could not be a more apt or acceptable description of Hinduism. Nevertheless the authority quoted by the Supreme Court to hold that the idea and concept of Hinduism was not an exclusive religious concept but more an inclusive cultural and civilisational idea, was not an Indian source, but a foreign, that too geo-Christian source. In fact the Indian mind would perceive this to be more legitimate to accept a foreign source certifying what Hinduism is or is not than an Indian source. This is the intrinsic problem with Indian intellectualism. The Indian intellectualism would regard the rationale of the Supreme Court more acceptable with a foreign source backing that logic than with an Indian one.

This speaks volumes about the bankruptcy of the intellectual work in free India on Hinduism. Because of the perverse political construction of the concept of secularism, the work of any Hindu scholar or saint, on Hinduism and the description of Hinduism contained in his work would be first regarded as a communal literature. In any event it would be regarded as less reliable or even less acceptable, nor respected as an unbiased view on Hinduism as a Hindu scholar cannot be trusted to write reliably about Hinduism. But the same intellectuals would insist that only a Muslim scholar could be cited on Islam and only a Christian scholar on Christianity. A critique of Islamic tenets by a Hindu scholar would be regarded as unacceptable and this logic has led to the political positioning that the reforms if any in Islamic ways in India would have to come by evolutions intra-Islamists, without others, including the secular scholarship or secular polity and government interfering.

The settled intellectual position in India is that Hindu scholars or saints cannot be relied on to affirm the truth about Hinduism -- whether it was a Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who realised the truth about all religions and confirmed all of them to be true, or was it a Ramana Maharishi, whom many inquiring minds from the West had accepted as a realised soul or be it Swami Vivekananda, who asserted the noble concept of universal brotherhood as the core of the Hindu faith and philosophy, or it is a Maharishi Aurobindo, who held Sanatana Dharma as the ultimate truth. Actually if the truth about Hindu religion is to be ascertained, the geo-Christian or the Western and Islamic sources are the least reliable, the reason being that both Islam and Christianity believe that theirs is the only true faith and so they cannot be trusted to evaluate Hinduism, even though Hinduism accepts all faiths as equally valid unlike the Abrahamic faiths, fairly. So the last thing that should be referred to understand what Hinduism means is the Islamic or the Christian source. On the contrary a Hindu source could be easily cited to understand Islam or Christianity because the Hindu scholars and saints by conviction accept all faiths as valid, as valid as their own faith.

But despite this comfortable and congenial intellectual landscape provided by Hinduism 'secular' India virtually and effectively orphaned the Hindu faith and considered that positive scholarly approach to Hinduism itself is unsecular. On the contrary, all intellectual work that negated Hinduism as a matter of national identity easily passed the test of the 'secular' India.

So there was very little 'secular' intellectual work of a positive nature on Hinduism and its tenets, except abuse and unfair criticism of Hindu faith, concepts, history and civilisation and culture. But thanks to the fact that that the Encyclopaedia of Britannica was from geo-Christian source, the seculars in India could not question the authenticity of the source. Had it been for any Indian source, the seculars would have questioned the basis on which Hinduism was construed in such comprehensive and noble terms. Had any Indian source been cited by the judiciary to arrive at similar conclusion, the secular scholarship would have questioned not just the reliability of the source but the view of the Supreme Court itself! This also shows how colonised the secular Indian mind is, in that it would readily accept a foreign authority on Hinduism but not the noblest and evolved indigenous scholars and saints on Hinduism. This shows how endogamous 'secular' intellectualism particularly fair 'secular' scholarship on the ancient India or Hinduism like the one we surprisingly see in the Encyclopaedia is almost absent in India in as much as secularism itself is alien to India. The secular scholarship in India is exogenous, inspired by foreign scholarship which considers anything ancient about India inferior or secondary to the Greek-Roman and Hellenistic civilisations. Since Anglo-Saxon influence dominates the secular Indian scholarship, whether it is of the Right or of the Left thinking, there is no 'secular' Indian scholarship with Indian perspective.

In fact most Indian 'secular' scholarship is almost unanimous that there is nothing Indian about India. India in their view was ever and continuously a colonised land. First by the Aryans, next by other nomadic groups, later by Islam, further by the West and so the original society in India long lost its identity and whatever identity India has today is a non-identity. So in short there is no traditional or ancient India which could mean continuity to the modern India. In fact there is no India except by the courtesy of the British rule! All that India represents today is the seamless collection of those who invaded India and decided to remain here. So there is nothing original about India. The original Indians are now in jungles driven by all invaders starting with the Aryans. So it is better we do not talk about anything about the past of India which belongs to no one. So the present India is not continuity from the past. It is modern India which is independent of the ancient India. Its date of birth is August 15, 1947. It is a young, not an ancient, nation. Its architect is the British. It has no history which is its own. It is just a geographic construct and not a historic continuity. It is this 'secular' view of India which the civilisational assertion of Hindutva challenged in the late 1980s and 1990s. This challenge and the debate consequent on that challenge which led to the people of India expressing themselves on the issue did impact on the Supreme Court and the different decisions which have been analysed in this volume are the result of the impact of the Hindu civilisational movement on the need to harmonise the traditional India with the 'modern'.

In this judicial assessment of the Hindu civilisational reassertion on constitutional India the most important judgement of the Supreme Court is the one on what constituted Hindutva and whether the idea of Hindutva was consistent with the meaning and content of secularism in the constitution of India. This judgement was delivered in the year 1996. The issue before the Supreme Court in this case was whether Hindutva constituted a religious appeal to the electorate and therefore a forbidden under the election laws. After examining the meaning and content of Hinduism by citing the earlier rulings of the Supreme Court and also national and foreign scholars on Hinduism [at p 1127 to 1131 of the report] Supreme Court concluded [at p. 1131] as under:

"Thus it cannot be doubted, particularly in view of the Constitution Bench decisions of this Court that the words 'Hinduism' or 'Hindutva' are not necessarily to be understood and construed narrowly, confined only to the strict Hindu religious practices unrelated to the culture and ethos of the people of India, depicting the way of life of the Indian people. Unless the context of a speech indicates a contrary meaning or use, in the abstract, these terms are indicative more a way of life of the Indian people and are not confined merely to describe persons practising the Hindu religion as a faith.

Considering the term 'Hinduism' or 'Hindutva' per se as depicting hostility, enmity or intolerance towards other religious faiths, of professing communalism, proceeds from an improper appreciation and perception of the true meaning of these expressions emerging from the detailed discussions in earlier authorities of this Court. Misuse of these expressions to promote communalism cannot alter the true meaning of these terms. Mischief resulting from the misuse of these terms by any one in his speech has to be checked and not its permissible use. It is indeed unfortunate, if, in spite of the liberal and tolerant features of 'Hinduism' recognised in judicial decisions, these terms are misused by any one during elections to gain any unfair advantage. Fundamentalism of any colour or kind must be curbed with a heavy hand to preserve and promote the secular creed of the nation. Any misuse of these terms must therefore be dealt with strictly.

It is therefore a fallacy and an error of law to proceed on the assumption that any reference to Hindutva or Hinduism in speeches makes automatically a speech based on the Hindu religion as opposed to other religions or that the use of the words 'Hindutva' or 'Hinduism' per se depict an attitude of hostility to all persons practising any religion other than Hindu religion. It is the kind of use these words and the meaning sought to be conveyed in a speech which has to be seen and unless such construction leads to the conclusion that these words were used to appeal for votes for a Hindu candidate on the ground he is a Hindu, or note to vote for a candidate because he is not a Hindu, the mere fact these words are used in a speech would not bring it within the prohibition of ………. It may well be that these words are used in a speech to promote secularism or to emphasise the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture or ethos, or to criticise the policy of any political party as discriminatory or intolerant". [17]

It is evident from the Supreme Court ruling on Hindutva that the idea of secularism which the Indian constitution as internalised in the constitution is basically a Hindu concept, not its cousin in Christendom, secularism, which is its Anglo Saxon equivalent. The reason cited by the highest Court is that Hinduism accepts all faith as valid as itself. Therefore the concept of secularism in India as has been accepted at the mass level is basically Hindu, not elitist or Anglo-Saxon, in perspective. The other judgements are collateral to this basic approach. This approach was not fully comprehended in the earlier judicial pronouncements.

The different judicial rulings compiled in this volume bring out the emerging judicial harmonisation of the civilisational assertion of the people of India with the 'secular' constitutionalism in India. The 'secular' Constitution in India is based on disciplines endogamous to Christendom made constitutional by the Anglo-Saxon Christian model and sold as Western constitutionalism to the non-Western world. This volume is invaluable contribution to the on going debate which has to be carried forward in the context of reinterpreting the Indian 'secular' constitutional concepts which do not fully connect to the Hindu civilisational moorings. These rulings modulate the constitutional concepts to fully connect them to Indian civilisational identity which is inseverable from the Hindu identity of India. This rule of harmonisation of the traditional India with the modern India is being promoted and powered by the ordinary people of India who have protested against the elitist and Left distortions of India.

The philosophy underlying this compilation of the Supreme Court judgements on Hindu civilisational and modern 'secular' issues and the emerging trends in the contents of the judgements themselves will have to be understood in this context. The ongoing debate on the meaning and content of secularism and on the identity of the Indian nation distorted by pseudo secularism has to promoted and sustained and also directed properly in vital national interests.

Part of the process of positioning India as the "Jagat Guru"
The compilation of the judicial rulings that explicitly demonstrate the efforts of Indian constitutionalism to harmonise the traditional India with the modern 'secular' India is a land mark in the dialogue and debate that is on to correct the post freedom distortions in Indian polity and constitutionalism. This process has global implications. In short these rulings are part of the manifestation of the brooding ancient Indian consciousness and making a free India into an independent one, decolonising its mind and freeing its spirit so that it could make its effective contribution to making the world devastated by centuries of Abrahamic and geo-Christian violence a peaceful place to live.

The constitutional India never conceived of a global role for India. It was more concerned with the immediate issues of post-partition India, the consequence of which was more political content in the Constitution which undermined the spiritual element in the Indian civilisation and in the Indian people. This affected the global mission of India and deprived the world of a spiritually enlightened leadership, with the result military might and financial monopoly became the supreme drives of the world.

Post September 11, 2001, the contribution of Sanatana Dharma which is the only genuine non-conflicting philosophy and Hindu civilisation which is the only conflict resolution mechanism and life model have become inevitable for the survival of the humans on this planet. For a world that is being dynamited and destroyed by Abrahamic exclusiveness and that is looking for a different mission and a model to rescue itself from hate and intolerance as the fundamentals of faiths the only hope is India and its message of Sanatana Dharma which embodies the idea of universal brotherhood. This is the message which Swami Vivekananda gave to the world and to the exclusive and aggressive religions and their adherents in the World Parliament of Religions on the same September 11, 1891, exactly 110 years earlier to attack on the World Trade Centre by Islamic terrorism on the same September 11, of 2001. The US and the Western world had completely undermined the profoundness of the message delivered by the Hindu Monk at that time and refused to heed to it afterwards. This is precisely the same message which Maharishi Aurobindo sitting in the quiet corner along the seas of Pondicherry in the southern part of India kept reminding the Indian nation about. The Maharishi even declared that Sanatana constituted the very idea of Indian nationhood and without Sanatana Dharma there is no India and without India there is no Sanatana Dharma. This message was the implicit drive of the freedom movement of India and was incorporated in the national voice of 'Vandemataram' which bonded the people and geography of India into the mission of Sanatana Dharma.

This spirit of India is rooted in traditional India which, post freedom, the modern India, as demonstrated earlier, had always shied away from understanding and legitimising. In fact the modern India has done and continues to do everything to delegitimise it. What the 'secular' Indian leadership did not, and even now does not realise is that the soul of India delegitimised at home could not position India for its role as the nation with the mission and model to save the world from destruction. If Sanatana Dharma, whose external manifestation is Hindutva -- which alone has the potentiality to save world that seemed to have resolved to destroy itself through exclusive philosophies -- were viewed and portrayed as politically incorrect and constitutionally unacceptable in India, how could India emerge as the global reference point for peaceful co-existence. The message of Sanatana Dharma which the 'secular' India delegitimised was portrayed by the political India as an idea that divides, not integrates India! How can that which divides India unite and harmonise the world is the question which the Indian constitutionalism never contemplated and therefore could not answer. Consequently the Indian constitutionalism could not position India for global leadership for peace. It was merely influenced by the pre-Constitutional compulsions and political expediencies to institute a document which in a way undermined the soul of India. Its working did the rest and virtually delegitimised all that constituted the soul of India. How did that affect harmony within India and Indian potential to ensure a peaceful world?

Peace cannot emerge by pacts and agreements. Historically every peace agreement has become the reason for a new war, a bigger and more violent one in future. Peace can manifest only by an inclusive philosophy established in a life model which legitimises all philosophies and thereby delegitimises all ideas and faiths that are exclusive and therefore potentially violent. So Hindutva which incorporates the idea of Sanatana Dharma is the only inclusive philosophy with a continuity which seems to have been denied to other philosophies that is capable of being the global conflict resolution mechanism. This global mission is precisely what the post freedom constitutionalism in words and practice has ignored.

So the harmonisation of Indian constitutionalism which was purged of the Hindu civilisational input at birth and the Hindutva philosophy is a necessary concomitant to prepare the State and the establishment India to work with the people of India for the gigantic task of re-energising and repositioning India consistent with the mission and destiny of India as a nation. This process will release the dormant spiritual energies latent in Indian consciousness which will transform India from being a mere survivor struggling to live into a life-vest for the world which is struggling for survival because of Abrahamic intolerance. The world cannot source a non-conflicting thought outside of India. An active and resurgent India is inevitable for the survival of the world. So the conflict resolution mechanism being devised by the judiciary to harmonise the Modern India with the traditional India, which is evident from the judgements compiled in this volume, is a welcome step in the constitutional support to India to occupy the position ordained by Destiny for India, namely as the 'Jagat Guru', the preceptor of the World.

-S. Gurumurthy

References:

1. S.Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life, London, 1926. p.2
2. Hind Swaraj is reprinted in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 10, New Delhi, p.245-315.
3. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. Hamish Hamilton Ltd. London. p 13.
4. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs document Crime in India, Table 17.9. (http://ncrb.nic.in/crime2002/cii-2002/C-Table%2017.9.htm), the total number of police stations in India in 2002 was 12, 657.
5. Paramacharya's message on the eve of India's Independence may be found in S. Sambamurthi Sastri, The Sage of Kanchi, Eng. Tr. by P.G.Sundararajan, Kanchipuram, 1991, p.143-144.
6. See for instance, Manusmriti VII. 201-203.
7. India's share of world manufacturing output from 1750 to 1913 is estimated in P.Bairoch, "International Industrialization levels from 1750 to 1980", Journal of European Economic History, 11, 269-334, 1982. For India's share in World GDP in 1700 see, Angus Maddison, World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, OECD, Paris, 2001, p.263.
8. Karl Marx, New York Herald Tribune, June 25, 1853 (article written on June 10, 1853), reprinted in K.Marx and F.Engels, India's First War of Independence, Moscow, 1959, p.13-18
9. Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar's speech in the Constituent Assembly, November 4, 1949, reprinted in Dharampal, Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity: An Exploration into the Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, New Delhi, 1962, p. 24-26.
10. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, 1893; Reprinted New York, The Free Press, 1984.
11. Letter of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to Mahatma Gandhi, Jan. 11, 1928, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi, Vol. 41, p.487-491.
12. Letter of Mahatma Gandhi to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Jan. 17, 1928, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi, Vol. 41, p.120-2.
13. Letter of Mahatma Gandhi to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, October 5, 1945 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi, Vol. 88, p.118-120.
14. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster 1996, Penguin Books Reprint New Delhi, p.14.
15. Fundamentalism Project of Chicago University. Volume titled Fundamentalism Observed p 820
16. Judgement of the Supreme Court of India reported in (1976) Sup SCR 478.
17. 17. Judgement of the Supreme Court reported in AIR 1996 SC 1113 at 1127.