What is secularism and what does it mean to describe any country as secular? Does it mean that the country has no presence of religion? Or that the general populace does not wish to identify with any religion? Does it mean the religion present in the country is dying? Or that the state, the government, of the country does not acknowledge the existence of the religion? These are very generic and general queries. But it is through these very queries that we will get a proper view of the contemporary administration and politics in a secular country like India where almost the whole of the population believes in one or the other form of religion. 

Secularism, in popular culture, is often seen as the very opposite of religion or the absence of it. Yet India, a constitutionally secular nation, is home to many religions like Hinduism, whose followers are roughly 80% of the total population, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism apart from being home to the world’s second-largest Muslim population and to a significant Christian population. Indian society is not merely religious, it is very deeply and diversely religious. So what does a secular Indian state ruling over a highly religious Indian society mean? 

It is the same great diversity of religions in India, that made the founding fathers of this Republic choose secularism as the way forward. India had undergone a brutal partition of its territory based on religion i.e. Muslims were given a separate Pakistan and Hindus were meant to stay with India. But inspite of the partition, the makers of the Indian constitution chose to follow a secular path. They viewed secularism as a method of equal treatment, stressing that the only way to rule many religious groups is to be indifferent to them. Meaning that the Indian state was to officially never discriminate between two separate religions, at least not in theory. So what turned out, in the end, was unique, and as some might argue, a totally different form of the original western secularism. 

How? For that, we first need to understand what the original secularism of the West was and how it evolved over the decades.

Origin and Expansion of Secularism

Christianity in the contemporary Western world is seen, by sociologists and historians alike, as undergoing a long and massive decline. There are two major markers of this decline. First: the decline of the institution of the Church. It is argued that the relevance and authority of the institutions in Christianity are in decline. The number of those attending Church for rituals, festivals, or for membership is down. Second: a popular notion in the public forums is mostly atheistic i.e. religion is increasingly seen as a private affair and religious warrants are not sought by the majority of sociological, economical, or political voices that predominate. 

The reason for this continuous decline is attributed to the Enlightenment era. During this era, rationalism, atheism, and anti-clericalism emerged as a force and pushed religion from the public forums into the private realms. The general consensus is that one of these rational enlightenment ideas was secularism. 

But the Western world is still, to date, a majority Christian world where most believe in their God. Atheism is still a marginal force. Sure, the earlier existing doctrines and authority of the Church have declined exponentially and lesser people believe in the ritual sets in the modern world, but they still haven’t abandoned their god. Enlightenment ideas like secularism would have, by modern consensus, termed their god as a supernatural irrationality. But despite the success of these ideas, the belief in god is persistent. 

The answer to this query is in the study of the idea of secularism itself. Secularism was never an idea which was in conflict with the Christian religion as it is generally held these days. Rather it was a continuation of the doctrines and theologies of Christianity, albeit without its doctrinal sets or exteriors. As Graeme Smith has argued in his A Short History of Secularism: “The Enlightenment began a process of change through which Christian notions were gradually separated from their theological origins to the point whereby they should no longer be called Christian.” It was a gradual shift in which primary notions, ethics, and beliefs of Christianity with respect to the society were preserved but its theological origins were forgotten. 

It is apparently clear that there is a certain distinction between what is religious and what is secular. And this distinction was created in the course of the expansion of Western Christianity; where this internal distinction between the two spheres of Christianity and secularism was drawn in relation to a third, the sphere of false religion and idolatry (Jakob De Roover: Secular Law and the Realm of False Religion). 

Idolatry or false religion is a notion that some beliefs or ideas which are long-held as religious are actually not religious at all. For example, a practice that is long followed in society with the belief that it is religious, but the authority (in this case the Church) scrutinizes the religious texts and consults the clerics to arrive at the conclusion that the said practice does not enjoy the backing of the religious laws; then the said practice becomes idolatry or false religion for the Church. 

Turning to the era of early modern Europe, one of the archetypal characterizations of idolatry was that it imposed things of human invention and choice as though these were necessary to religion. False religion introduced human fabrication as a divine injunction. This was primary, in the early period, based on the Church’s desperation to look different from the Pagan society. They wanted to clearly distinguish what is religious and what is false or idolatrous. And some things which didn’t fall into either category (i.e. things which were neither religious nor were irrelevant enough to be shunned as idolatry) formed the third category: secular. 

As De Roover noted: In medieval Europe, the Libri Poenitentiales, or manuals of penance, addressed similar issues. By identifying certain practices (for example, performing incantations, attending festivals, lacerating the face with a sword or with the fingernails after the death of a relative) as problematic and ignoring others as indifferent to religion, penitential law drew the boundary of the realm of false religion.

With the turn of the century and the dominance of Protestant-Catholic schism in Christian theology, drawing boundaries between true and false Christian became even more eminent. Just this time the role of earlier Pagan society was played by the Catholics. Donning costumes, including folk costumes, playing music, playing cards, holding banquets, dancing, and celebrating festivals; all such Catholic customs were condemned as idolatry. It went so far ahead that the Lutheran jurisdictions like Teufelbuch went on to declare all kinds of emotions, actions, and attitudes as indirect worship of the devil. Church and its clerical order put it very clearly that “All worshipping, honoring, or service invented by the brain of man in the religion of God, without his own express commandment is idolatry”. 

Any interpretation or invention in Christian theology and philosophy was highly discouraged because of the notion that the human brain was incapable of deciphering god’s ways. And so the distinction between the true god, his true way, and the false god, and the false way of worship became apparent. This is today known to many of us as the “Mosaic distinction”. 

Protestants built a huge wall between things that would help in salvation and things that would harm it and consequently between believers in one true god and non-believers. Although it was very far-encompassing, there were a lot of things left out of the scope of true and false religion’s dichotomy. Those were the things that were perceived as being indifferent to salvation, that it would neither help nor harm the salvation. This was the secular realm of Christianity. 

The secular realm was constituted out of the Christian notion of idolatry or false religion. Secular, in other words, was the external boundary of Christianity. It was a limit borne out of the other two different limits. It was a category strictly for the believers of “one true god”; not for the whole world, especially not for those who were believers of the “false god”. 

The secular world was a world created by Christianity through filtering out of idolatry for its own purpose. It was not a world created by those who didn’t believe in religion or by those who were equally respectful to all religions. In other words, Jakob De Roover says: “the secular realm is not the world that lies outside the Christian religious world and that has nothing to do with religion, but a sanitized realm of social practice cleansed from “false worship.” The religious-secular distinction is made by and within a particular form of the Christian religion, in opposition to idolatry.” 

Born out of Abrahamic religious exclusivism, the secular world was a world created by the Christians, for the Christians. 

After the Reformation, more and more practices were identified as indifferent or secular, arguing that these were actually human inventions falsely imposed on God’s will. And this process of secularisation casted off a lot of core Christian religious practices from the religion and brought them into the secular realm. 

Secular Law and its Adoption in India

When the Western authority got hold of power in India, they encountered a completely different religion and society. A religion that was to them a false religion and a society that was idolatrous. Yet the earlier rule of the British didn’t openly seem to establish the three Christian realms of true religion, false religion, and the secular world with respect to administration in India. Although in private they still believed Hindus to be idolatrous and their missionaries were actively involved in conversion and eradication of this “false religion”, still the British chose to govern native society with the respective native laws.

But the inherent realms of true and false religions & the secular ultimately kicked in when the British took it upon themselves to “reform” Hindu society. In order to remove a practice, it had to be proved that the said practice was not part of the “true” Hindu religion. Sacred texts like Dharmashastras were consulted along with traditional pundits to see if a particular practice had the sanction of the Shastras. And if the result was negative, the practice in question was relegated to the secular realm, where it became subject to criminal law and could be banned. 

Hence even though the British initially started as careful in their dealings with Hinduism, ultimately their inherent nature of distinction made them employ the Christian tool of true, false, and secular realms with respect to Hinduism and India. With time the colonial legal system implanted the Christian structure of distinctions of true, false, and secular into the Indian systems of approach. Consequently, with the inheritance of the colonial legal system after independence, India inherited the trifold Christian structure into the Indian legal system i.e. the Parliament and Judiciary. 

Although the founding fathers of the present Indian republic thought of the method of secularism as a method indifferent to all religions and a method employing tools of equality while dealing with a multi-religious India; the deep-rooted notion of Christian distinction in the Indian legal system inherited from the British dented this thought process in a systematic manner. In a way, the Christian structure camouflaged itself into the Indian legal methods and deeply altered the very basic method with which religious matters are approached in India. 

Indian society, as stated earlier, is a multi-religious, extremely diverse, and sophisticated society with a history unique to itself. Western society developed quite differently from how Indian society developed. India’s history is a unique fusion of its own whose model or structure can not be compared to any other region. The same is the case with Hinduism. It was not a Christianity-like institution-centric clerical order. There exists no such method by which Hinduism can be divided into true, false, or secular like the secular model in the West intended to. 

Indian courts today are actively employing a method, created by the Christians and for the Christians, in matters related to Hinduism.