The genesis of ‘Indian Secularism’: Constituent Assembly Debates

The Secular nature of India has always been a controversial and highly debatable issue and has been one of the deeply problematic issues in contemporary Indian political discourse. That the Constitution of India aimed to create a secular state in the country has not really been in doubt.  But the notion of secularism that developed in India has been vastly different from its original western notion. The traditional western vision of secularism has been the negation of all things religious in political functioning. However the Indian concept of secularism is completely different, stemming from Sarva Dharma Sambhava: it is not that the state has nothing to do with religion and religion has nothing to do with the state, but the concept of secular state has been understood as one in which all religions have an equal status in the eyes of the state.

Pursuing secularism in India has always been a challenge because basic social fabric and structure of the society and the country has always been inextricably entwined with religion to an extent that even basic reforms have been impossible to bring in without the direct intervention of the State in the otherwise private ‘religious’ realm of the society. Given this fact, the Parliament, political parties, journalists, academics, the Judiciary, and the Constitution have all been active participants in the discourse on secularism. In the background of this complex matrix, the understanding of the concept of secularism in India has always fascinated me, and in part I of this post I will outline the genesis of this concept in the Indian Constitution and the Constituent Assembly Debates.

The Constituent Assembly Debates and the limited readings on them make for fascinating reading (Shefali Jha’s briiliant piece “Secularism in the Constituent Assembly Debates”, 37 (30) EPW (2002) is a good beginning, apart from the original texts). The CA had to discuss the issue of secularism in the bloody aftermath of the partition, if a young India had to survive, the CA had to ensure that something like the partition would never be repeated. Therefore, for a democratic India, secularism was considered to be necessary fait accompli. However, when the preamble to the Constitution was discussed in the Assembly in October 1949, disagreement and acrimonious debate over the inclusion of the principle of secularism took up most of the assembly’s time. The first debate that ensued was when H.V. Kamath moved an amendment to begin the preamble by the phrase, “In the name of god.” Rajendra Prasad argued that this amendment would be against the spirit of religious freedom of the Constitution and that religion was a matter of Individual choice and in this matter the collective will should not be imposed. Kamath’s motion was defeated by a narrow margin of 68 to 41. Strangely enough,  Bajeshwar Prasad’s motion to include the word secular in the Constitution was not even debated properly.  ( The word was later to be included in the Preamble by the 42^nd Amendment in 1976.)

The meaning of a ‘secular India’ was also a cause of immense debate. The CA had to decide whether a state was secular only when it stayed strictly away from religion or did a state that equally respected all religions best capture the meaning of secularism in the Indian context. Supporters of the first notion saw a definite line of separation between the individual and the state. It was solely up to the individual to decide whether he was a believer or not and to chose to adhere to a religion or not. Therefore the preamble could not contain any references to God nor could the Constitution establish links between the State and any religion. The second position also began with a theory of religious liberty, but went on to say that in a society like India where religion was a very important part of everyday life of the masses, the state should not stay away from all religions equally but that it must respect all religion alike. Instead of distancing itself from all religion or considering religion to be a private sphere, such a secular state based its dealings with religion on the basis of an equal respect to all religions (Shefali Jha, supra).

These two point of views clashed constantly in the Constituent Assembly debates as the question of secularism cropped up in the discussions around innumerable articles. . One such debate was the choice between the words “Religious Practice” or the words “Religious Worship”. The initial definition of the right to freedom of religion as defined by the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights used the words “Right to freedom of religious worship”. However this was rephrased by the Minorities Sub-Committee to read “…Right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion.” The first view preferred a narrow definition of religion akin to the western notion of secularism, while the second view sought to define religion broadly. Finally the Constituent assembly decided in favour of “Religious Practice”, thus indicating that the assembly was tilting in favour of the second definition of secularism.

On the vexed question of the Uniform Civil Code, Ambedkar’s and Munshi’s draft articles of March 1947 on justiciable rights contained clauses referring to a UCC. However the Fundamental Rights Sub- Committee had decided to make the UCC a Directive Principle. This decision of the Committee was opposed by many, foremost amongst them being Rajkumari Amrit Kaur who believed that one of the main causes of India’s backwardness were personal laws that governed many aspects of life. There were others however who were against the idea of a Uniform Civil Code and some members advocated the right to one’s personal law as a part of the right to freedom. An intermediate position suggested was that the establishment of the Uniform Civil Code must be done slowly, with the consent of all communities.  This of course proved to be pipe dream, the UCC is today an impossibility to achieve.

Therefore,  the Constituent Assembly did agree unanimously on the establishment of a secular state, but ended up defining a secular state as one wherein the state has an equal respect for all religions rather than the state completely disassociating itself from all religion. Thus what emerged from these constitutional endeavors was an accommodating secular compromise at a time when, in the aftermath of partition, such a compromise seemed improbable. In fact, I believe that if India were to start a new Constitution making process afresh today, it is doubtful that a common text would emerge. Given the situation and the circumstances in which we had to draft our Constitution, and given the cultural diversity of India, perhaps there really was no other option for a united India to take other than secularism, but nonetheless the secular character of the Constitution was a remarkable achievement.

In my subsequent posts, I will discuss the understanding of this sort of ‘secularism’ by our Courts.