What can France learn from the Indian Constitution’s approach to secularism?

French laïcité, rooted in the 1905 Law of Separation, walls religion out of the public sphere: the state neither funds nor engages faith, and visible religiosity is restricted. Indian secularism instead practises what Rajeev Bhargava calls “principled distance” — equal respect for all religions combined with calibrated engagement.

What France could learn from the Indian approach

• Accommodation over erasure: India permits religious dress and symbols in public institutions, while French bans on conspicuous symbols in schools (2004) and the face veil (2010) have deepened alienation among western Europe's largest Muslim minority.
• Community rights alongside individual rights: Articles 26–30 protect denominational autonomy and minority educational institutions, giving religious communities a stake in the secular state rather than a grievance against it.
• Reform through engagement: Article 25(2) empowers the state to act against religiously sanctioned social evils — untouchability, exclusion from temple entry — reforming religion from within rather than merely privatising it.
• Secularism as inclusion: S.R. Bommai (1994) treats secularism as part of the basic structure, understood as equal treatment of all faiths rather than hostility to faith — a framing better suited to plural societies.

The lesson is calibrated, not wholesale: India's model suffers its own strains of politicisation and uneven application. But a laïcité tempered by Indian-style positive accommodation could convert French secularism from a source of minority estrangement into an instrument of integration.