Religious pluralism is not a tolerated condition but a constitutive promise

At Girnar in modern Gujarat, an Ashokan rock inscription from the third century BCE warns: ‘Whoever honours his own sect while disparaging another’s, thinking he is exalting his own, does great injury to his own.’ Rock Edict XII is the oldest constitutional text on Indian pluralism, predating most other political documents on the subject. When the 42nd Amendment in 1976 inserted ‘secular’ into the Preamble, it was not introducing a foreign concept; it was articulating, in modern legal vocabulary, a civilisational practice that had been twenty-three centuries in the making. Religious pluralism in India is not a temporary tolerance to be revoked when politically convenient, or a polite indulgence the majority extends to minorities at its discretion. It is the constitutive promise of the republic — the precondition without which India ceases to be India. The republic was not founded as a Hindu state or a secular one in the French sense; it was founded as the long Indian civilisational settlement, codified.

The constitutional architecture is layered and intentional. Articles 25 to 28 guarantee freedom of conscience, propagation of religion, religious institution management, and freedom from compelled religious taxation or instruction in state-funded schools. The Supreme Court in S R Bommai v Union of India (11 March 1994) elevated secularism to a basic feature of the Constitution, beyond the amending power of Parliament under Article 368, and used the doctrine to scrutinise Article 356 proclamations against state governments. The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act of 1991 froze the religious character of all places of worship as they stood on 15 August 1947, with the sole exception of the Ayodhya site — an attempt to draw a temporal line under historical grievance and prevent the courts from being drawn into adjudicating thirteenth-century claims. The doctrine of Sarva Dharma Sambhava — equal respect for all religions, not equidistance from them as in laicité — was the founders’ Indian variation on Western secularism, articulated by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in his 1956 lectures and adopted as working principle.

The civilisational reality is older and richer than the Constitution. The Sufi-Bhakti synthesis — Kabir of fifteenth-century Kashi refusing to be claimed by either Hindu or Muslim, Mirabai walking from Mewar to Vrindavan, Nizamuddin Auliya of fourteenth-century Delhi welcoming all who came to his hospice, Guru Nanak founding a tradition that drew from both vocabularies — was a centuries-long democratic experiment in religious mixing. Akbar’s Din-i-Ilahi of 1582 was imperfect and short-lived but bold; the Mughal court’s patronage of Sanskrit translations of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Atharva Veda was political theology of a generous kind. Ahmedabad’s fourteenth-century jali patterns interweave Hindu lotus motifs and Islamic geometry within a single stone screen; Lucknow’s Imambaras host Sikh pilgrims; Velankanni’s Marian shrine draws Hindu and Christian devotees in equal numbers. The village fair, the Sufi shrine and the temple festival have shared crowds for as long as records exist; the boundary between communities at street level has historically been more porous than at sectarian-leadership level.

The contemporary pressure is real and must be honestly acknowledged. The cow-vigilante murders documented by major news organisations between 2014 and 2019, the ‘love jihad’ legislation enacted in eight states under different names beginning with Uttar Pradesh in 2020, the UAPA arrests of journalists from minority communities and prolonged pre-trial detentions, the Hindu-Muslim communal disturbances surrounding religious processions in multiple cities, and episodes around the Gyanvapi and Krishna Janmabhoomi mosques all suggest fault lines that did not run quite as deep a generation ago. Yet the same period has also produced significant counter-movements: the Iftar at Tirumala for Muslim staff in 2024, the Supreme Court’s September 2018 verdict in Indian Young Lawyers Association v State of Kerala opening Sabarimala to women of all ages, the Gauhati High Court’s 2024 ruling reaffirming the right to inter-religious marriage and ordering police protection for such couples, and the consistent participation of Hindu and Muslim families at each other’s weddings and funerals in tens of thousands of mixed villages. The pendulum has not stopped swinging; the question for the present generation is whether the swing is widening or narrowing.

An honest counter-position must be heard. Pluralism without candid reckoning of historical grievances becomes evasion, and a secularism that asks one community alone to bear the burden of accommodation is unstable. Some communities feel their concerns have been suppressed under the rubric of secularism — the Shah Bano episode of 1985-86, when Parliament reversed a Supreme Court verdict on Muslim women’s maintenance through the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, and the Triple Talaq Act of 2019 mark two ends of that long argument. The Sabarimala backlash, the controversy over Vande Mataram in schools, and the recurring debate over personal-law codification are all instances where pluralism has had to be re-negotiated rather than assumed. True pluralism is not silence but civility; it includes the right to disagree seriously, to litigate honestly and to legislate openly, with all sides willing to lose particular battles within the larger constitutional consensus.

A comparative reading is instructive. France’s strict laicité bans religious symbols in state schools; the United States’ First Amendment establishes a high wall between church and state but allows vigorous religious expression in public life; Indonesia’s Pancasila recognises six official religions while remaining constitutionally secular. India’s sarva dharma sambhava is closer to the Indonesian model than to either French or American practice. The model has costs — perpetual negotiation, occasional flare-ups, the difficulty of treating religion as a fully private affair — but also strengths, including the capacity to honour difference without forcing assimilation.

Tagore wrote in Crisis in Civilization (1941), in the year before his death and as Europe burned, that he had not lost faith in humanity even as the Enlightenment’s home countries betrayed their best traditions. His Gitanjali prayer — ‘where the mind is without fear and the head is held high … into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake’ — was a prayer for a republic that did not yet exist. To dilute pluralism today is to unmake India; to deepen it is to honour her oldest civilisational signature. The Constitution did not invent religious pluralism in 1950. It received it from twenty-five centuries of practice, codified it for an industrial democracy, and entrusted it to the conscience of each citizen in each generation. The promise is constitutive, not contingent. To break it is not to amend the Constitution; it is to exit the civilisation that produced both Ashoka and Akbar, Kabir and Tagore, the Constituent Assembly and the temple-mosque town festivals.