Short essay: Secularism in practice — protection, not preference

Secularism is the most contested word in the Indian constitutional vocabulary, and much of the contest comes from confusion about what the word is supposed to do. The Indian Constitution does not declare a wall between religion and state; it does not require the state to be blind to faith; and it does not prohibit religious life from spilling into public space. What it does require is something more precise and more demanding: the state must protect every faith equally, and it must prefer none. Secularism in the Indian sense is therefore not a doctrine of absence but a discipline of practice — the practice of even-handed protection rather than selective favour.

The constitutional architecture makes this disposition concrete. Articles 25 to 28 protect the freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion. Articles 29 and 30 protect the cultural and educational rights of minorities. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law without regard to religion. Article 15 prohibits discrimination by the state on religious grounds. None of these provisions exclude religion from the public sphere; what they exclude is the state's preference for one faith over another. The architecture, in other words, is plural rather than secular in the European sense, and the better description of the Indian disposition is 'protection without preference'.

This framing matters for current debates. When the state funds the maintenance of religious sites of multiple traditions, it is acting consistently with the Constitution if the funding is even-handed; it is acting unconstitutionally if the funding favours one tradition over others. When the state regulates personal law, it must do so in a way that respects the distinctness of each community while extending the same protections to women, minors and weaker members across all of them. The Sabarimala judgment, the Triple Talaq judgment, the Sec. 377 judgment — each in different ways applied the same constitutional principle: protect the individual within every community, and prefer none over the others.

The strongest counter-view is that protection without preference is impossible in practice. A state that funds Haj subsidies but not pilgrimages of other faiths exhibits preference; a state that recognises personal law for some communities but enforces a uniform code on others exhibits preference; a state that publicly observes one set of festivals while privatising others exhibits preference. The objection has force, but it also identifies the test rather than refuting it. The constitutional question is whether the inevitable rough edges of state practice are being smoothed towards even-handedness over time, or whether they are being hardened into structural favour. The first is reform within the framework; the second is the abandonment of it.

India's practical secularism has, on the whole, leaned towards reform — slowly, incompletely, and with frequent regressions, but in a recognisable direction. The Haj subsidy was ended in 2018, and equivalent subsidies for other pilgrimages have been reduced or rationalised. Personal-law reform has proceeded by community-specific judicial intervention rather than by a single uniform code that no community would have accepted. Anti-conversion laws, where they exist, have been tested against the constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. None of these moves is final, but each illustrates the discipline that the Constitution requires: protection extended to each, preference shown to none.

The conclusion follows. Secularism in India is not a wall but a balance — actively maintained, periodically tested, and never finished. The country's diversity will keep generating cases that test the principle, and the answer to each case must be the same: even-handed protection. The risk is twofold. The first risk is that protection itself becomes patchy, with some communities receiving less than others. The second is that preference creeps back under the language of cultural restoration. Both risks are real, but both are also recognisable, and a Constitution that has lasted seventy-five years has shown that it can correct them. Indian secularism is, in this reading, practical and provisional. It is also, on present evidence, durable.